Daily Journal 📓

Blog tinkering on my birthday ✅

The aliases field in notes are now used to generate the lines of the IPFS _redirects file. View source on Github

There are 14 JavaScript runtimes, via @wesbos.

This was a glitch post that I didn’t end up publishing, but the link made it through my RSS pipes and got posted. So I’m retconning the link that got posted.

Let’s make a JavaScript Runtimes notes page for this info to live.

Rosano writes an encryption rant as he attempts to backup and transfer data from a handful of apps:

there’s no feigning moral superiority in using ‘alternative tech’ until it includes a real foundation to stand on for people without this domain expertise.

Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer, Moore’s Scofflaws:

software costs can potentially absorb the entire gain from a next-generation CPU…software vendors never would have been allowed to get away with charging by the gigahertz; we should not allow them to feel so emboldened to charge by core count now!

Signal is adding usernames to protect visibility of phone numbers. Usernames are effectively a privacy work around, not a social feature:

Signal usernames are not logins or handles that you’ll be known by on the app – they’re simply a quick way to connect without sharing a phone number.

They also go on to describe that they’re easily changeable/disposable to share with different groups over time.

The Signal Wiki documents the generation of nicknames and UUID-based links (links don’t publicly display your username)

“We have lost the ability to do RAD (Rapid Application Development) due to the prevalence of web applications” says Rui Carmo.

He has a page collecting his research on Native Development

Apple detects Mastodon with a link tag — but then still uses OpenGraph to load the preview for iMessage. Any app that has a Mastodon shaped link tag can thus get rich previews.

Deltachat blog post about updated webxdc docs and sample apps

Like Farcaster Frames, webxdc “messenger apps” are interesting to me as it combines distribution with new app functionality.

Tom Critchlow writes up notes on his Remarkable Tablet. I have a reMarkable tablet myself and think Tom’s suggestions are pretty great.

I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad

Notes, daily entry, and sync as core primitives are very powerful.

I pre-ordered a stealth tablet a couple of years back and then wrote a post about Kickstarting an app ecosystem which suggested similar things.

Apparently reMarkable is only getting more tied to mandatory, single source subscription services, which is not a great way to build an ecosystem around a device.

The Polkadot ecosystem has defined salaries and grades for fellowships. Via Dietrich, who put together background context on Parity/Polkadot decentralization.

Fits my open source as a job thinking, and is roughly what I suggested when I was working in the Ethereum core ecosystem: $10KUSD per month is a decent engineer salary.

I spent way too much time this past week being annoyed and disappointed at the hate thrown at Bridgy Fed developer Ryan Barrett, connecting ActivityPub to Bluesky’s ATProtocol.

Sean Tilley has a great opinion piece on We Distribute that does a good job of summarizing.

OWA on Apple killing web apps in the EU

This feels … complicated. There are new browser engines allowed in the EU.

You can still have a Home Screen “bookmark” & it will open in the browser of your choice.

Any of the new browsers — including Chrome or Firefox — could be a great host for PWAs on iOS now, decoupled from Safari versions.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes Paying people to work on open source is good actually which very much matches my thoughts so I’m clipping it to my local notes.

I’ll share a handful of quotes:

“Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.”

“Open source is good for humanity…I want people who want to work on open source to be able to do so, and should be able to live comfortable lives, with their basic needs met.

I’ll even use the terms “open source” and “free software” interchangeably just to hammer home how, in this context, the precise definitions of these terms don’t matter to me

One of the core things that I’m ready to fight for alongside Jacob is that “lower case” open source should be a bigger tent than OSI-approved Open Source™️ licenses, and it’s what I mean when I use the term.

if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while

Read the whole thing.

Great read about the recent Mastodon CVE (which could allow taking over and forging content for remote accounts).

I’m quoting a bit here about open source:

how people seem to only care for the ‘gratis’ of free software, and seldom the ‘libre’, and millions of users leaning on the work of primarily a couple developers, assuming they have the attentiveness to catch every mistake themselves alone

There aren’t enough funded people - both teams and individuals - working on Fediverse software, and both the users and the admins seem averse to paying for it.

Ink & Switch lab notebook for new Patchwork project. First post, Universal Version Control:

“We believe that simple, powerful, universal version control tools could help all kinds of creators produce better work. Perhaps this is even built into the storage layer of your OS! That’s the vision for this Ink & Switch research project, codenamed Patchwork.”

Oh look at this! Just found out that Ton Zijlstra is involved in PKM Summit 2024 (aka Personal Knowledge Management, aka Digital Garden / Second Brain).

Late March in Utrecht, NL, around the same time I’m planning Causal Islands LA.

Dare Obasanjo says paid subscriptions to websites creates a global divide vs ad supported:

“Online advertising is a progressive form of taxation as the rich, mostly US-based consumers who buy goods & services from ads subsidized the internet for everyone else.”

@[email protected]

90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google, via ahrefs 59 blogging statistics for 2023

I’ve been reading lots of Apple Vision Pro reviews and chatter.

I spent several years working in AR/VR/XR and tinkered with hand input + interfaces. We knew that mobile OS powered headset was coming from Apple.

Then I watched Apple evolve their UI on Mac and iOS for years, that pointed without a doubt to not being bounded by a screen.

“I say this carefully, because I don’t wish to offend. But if you haven’t used Vision Pro, you probably shouldn’t be writing about it.” – Joe Cieplinski

I’ll get one when they’re available in Canada. Or, uh, maybe on my next trip to the US 😅

I added Networked Orgs and Tooling as my first retroactive blog post. It didn’t feel enough like a note, so I formatted and integrated a few things and published it as a blog post.