Daily Journal 📓

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.

Fedify:

…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”

Puter is an SPA that looks like a virtual desktop OS in the browser “Internet OS and Desktop Environment”

Reminds me of PhotoPea, but the front end is AGPL licensed. I’m still digging into how coupled the back end is.

Sign up with my referral link for +1GB

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

Landed in Denver. I’m here for the week attending EthDenver and the many community side events happening. Talking to people about Fission’s Everywhere Computer.

I think the word bridge is now at the level of trigger word for people.

What if I call Misskey a bridge to Mastodon?

It means something socially and technically to some group of people which is disconnected from how it works.

Networked communications are absolutely social discussions — not just tech.

But if you disregard how the tech actually works, you’re not going to get very far with social discussions either.