Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.
Glyph writes Software Needs To Be More Expensive, mostly suggesting that low barrier “let engineers expense $50 per month to any open source project” could help.
The underlying intent is what I’d like to promote: pay to support software you care about. From end users to developers, this can be promoted.
It can fit alongside current real world movements to “buy local”.
Ian Vanagas writes Smart Young BC. He’s starting to write some screenshot essays with great Vancouver Tech content, like this one on crushing silos.
OK, went ahead and figured out a date with Orion: Next Tools for Thought Rocks will be Wed, April 17th at 8am PST.
Jamming with Orion Reed. Going to host his Causal Islands LA talk at an upcoming Tools for Thought Rocks event so we get a recording.
And I think it’s time to work on TiddlyWiki style drag and drop. I’ll post some background thoughts at Note Clips.
Demo video of live setup of Co-op Cloud stack with single sign on with Keycloak and running Matrix, Hometown (Mastodon fork), and Nextcloud.
I’m helping to organize a Vancouver Hack Day this coming Sunday, April 7th, 2024.
Get a quick overview of some interesting tech, including atproto, Everywhere Computer, Local First, and Enhance. Then spend the day learning and coding, or bring a project of your own. Demos end of day.
Substack introduced a “Follow” feature that makes it more like a social network destination rather than a newsletter / blog platform.
And they don’t share follower email addresses with authors.
Yet-another-proprietary-social network. Yes, I told you so.
Write up on The Wrap
Chad Whitacre on the Redis re-licensing:
“For a relicensing to be a rug pull, there has to have been a true developer community around the project—not just users, developers.”
Also has a graph showing Sentry (where he works) being almost completely company maintained.
Did a quick test of the whtwnd ATProtocol blogging platform. Made by @knksm5.final-techblog.com:
“The body of blog articles is stored on your Personal Data Server (PDS) and is not saved on WhiteWind servers or the like, and viewers retrieve articles from your PDS.”
Ana Hevesi from Uploop posts a fire article Stop wasting time on community:
“…today’s leaders can build followings at scales that were once the exclusive domain of religions and nations.”
Ana says: get serious about defining and serving your extended constituencies.
Daniel from Bluesky goes through the evolution of the network to today’s federation.
Old blog post by Moxie on the Signal blog on how open-ended protocols stall.
Surfaced by Gordon Brander, “innovation by definition is not standardizable” — ecosystems move too quickly as they first emerge.
I just signed up to rent a desk for 3 months in a shared space in Vancouver. I’m going to try getting out of the house regularly, it’s a cool space I want to support, and it’s got some event space that I’ll use for some upcoming things.
New note for Universal Blue: using containers as the basis for a desktop OS. “That’s nerdspeak for the ultimate Linux client: the reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop”
Bazzite is a Linux distro for gaming with Steam support out of the box.
Web Recorder actually records websites so they are replayable rather than just a static archive.
ParadeDB “a modern ElasticSearch alternative built on Postgres and Tantivy, in Rust”
Radicle has reached v1.0. It’s a “distributed code collaboration stack” — local first nodes that connect p2p and stores everything in git, identities are DID-based Ed25519 keys.
Uncut.wtf is “a free typeface catalogue, focusing on somewhat contemporary type. There are currently 152 typefaces featured”
via @depatchedmode, we’re using Overused Grotesk at Fission.
Doing Weeknotes, by Giles Turnbull: “Weeknotes are a format for regular communication about work in progress.”
via Ben Werdmuller
I kind of hate this Fast Company review of the 2024 MacBook Air called “Dawn of the AI laptop” — but it’s the label that’s selling laptops today. Without “touchscreen capability, fancy rotating hinges, folding screens, or other features” that PC manufacturers are attempting.
I took some downtime this weekend and played many hours of Caves of Qud, an RPG / roguelike that has a vast world and many commands and abilities.
Found myself searching a lot of basics, like “How do I fill a waterskin with liquid?”, and deciding how many arms and legs I wanted my mutant character to have.
…is a Deno/TypeScript library for building federated server apps powered by ActivityPub and other standards
Still in early development. Also using Deno’s new JSR packaging format.
It’s been 20 years, and I brought Zoe up in conversation again: a local IMAP server on your Mac that gave you an interface for exploring, searching, and working with your email. I’ve added a notes page for it.
I recently installed Telegram desktop to my Mac. The disk image has this really cute illustration in it.
Supernote is an e-ink tablet that is currently Android 11 powered but will have a customizable & open Linux release. $299USD per-order, plus you’ll need a $~70 pen.
Gitlab has a backlog item for enabling ActivityPub support. There isn’t a lot of consistency in this stuff yet, don’t know if they’ll confirm to what ForgeFed is designing, or just aim for “can subscribe in Mastodon” (really, they should be supporting both).
Talking about Ente, it turns out people are interested in solutions for Photo Sharing, so I wrote up a notes page about some apps that I know of, and what I currently use.
ForgeFed is a project to work on federation for software forges, built on top of ActivityPub:
“imagine you could host your Git repos anywhere you want…but still be able to open issues and submit pull requests against repos hosted elsewhere”
Threads is rolling out a beta of user accounts opting in to enabling federation. Evan Prodromou announces he is part of the beta @[email protected]
Added a notes page for Stewart Brand’s Pace Layering concept. “The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines with learning continuity”
Ente just announced open sourcing their full backend.
It’s an end-to-end encrypted “alternative to Google or Apple photos”, licensed as AGPL.
Their client code had always been open source, this completes making the entire service available.
Apple released a game porting toolkit that has been improved by Whisky:
app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the process, to the point where all I had to do was download Whisky and drag it into my Applications folder.
Dan Moren writes at Six Colors that maybe Apple should make running PC games on MacOS great with this method.
@[email protected] made a theme for his site that makes it look like chat threads. It’s powered by his very interesting Oddmu wiki / memex.
Ben Werdmuller is adding asides posts which are pretty similar to how how I think about my journal post types.
This is the longest time I haven’t posted journal updates in a while! Still at EthDenver until Sunday, maybe I’ll put some notes on that EthDenver page. I’ve got lots of tabs open from the people and projects I’ve met.
And lots of progress in inviting people to Causal Islands