Daily Journal 📓

Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.

  • Update: Open vs Hidden Maya Land
    • Where there’s material worth spending time on, it doesn’t feel right somehow to make one’s every thought and reaction public.

    • I like Maya Land’s writing. Very great turns of phrase, intensely link stuffed posts that has you open dozens of tabs
    • I might tag this #dark forest for this discussion about how much to put on the open internet today. A vague feeling of unease about being open.
    • Ok one more quote (which is right before the above quote), because I want to savour extralaboral time as a phrase:
      • The third part is that in the extralaboral time that I have been spending on this kind of thing, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the occult. “Occult” itself just means “hidden”, etymologically.

  • redo via Avi Bryant, a Make replacement
  • Shared re:Mix link on social today collapsed:: true
    • I have some scribbled notes about this, where basically a small business in Berlin doesn’t compete with one in Vancouver — or even Calgary or Toronto, just in Canada.
    • So: how might they work together? Pooling expertise, capital, promotion, etc, while focusing on regional production and sales.
    • Move the IP, rather than the product! #BuyLocal
    • activitypublink:: https://cosocial.ca/@boris/110883301643501234
    • Pointed out to me that consumer blenders already support glass jar threading. I took a picture of my existing Cuisinart one: collapsed:: true
    • Other related links and concepts that came up during this discussion:
      • Pantheon Design is a #3Dprinting #startup in #Vancouver a few blocks from my house that might 3D print composites
      • FabLab Vancouver is a “co-making makerspace” that Emily McGill mentioned to me
        • TODO Add FabLab to the #DWebYVR website
        • Could we do a “build your own blender” small scale class / course / movement locally?
  • Fabman is an all-in-one makerspace management solution #membership #makerspace
  • Making Sublime, a #tools for thought #Digital Garden startup Sublime, by Sari Azout
    • This is the story of what used to be called #Startupy
    • They rebooted it in Summer of 2022
    • A few years ago, I published one of those think pieces about finding “language market fit”. I still get emails from frustrated founders seeking help with positioning.

    • Kind of like a Github for ideas. Or Pinterest for knowledge. But also not quite like that. Concretely, Sublime is a tool to collect and connect anything interesting you find on the Internet. It’s the simplest way to build your own curated, self-organizing library with all the quotes, links, articles, thoughts, images, and anything else you find interesting. It’s part bookmarking, part note-taking, part social network. But it’s also none of those things.

    • I’m not curating my sublime library to build an audience. I’m quietly exposing parts of my library, in case it may resonate with others.

    • maybe that’s part of the problem, trying to be legible to everyone

  • Local-first Development with DXOS #video Jess Martin #LoFi
  • Working on putting together a summary of Hashicorp #opensource changes, and revamping my notes generally around #licensing id:: 64d92cc8-e594-44b2-bbd8-4a9ed538c5a3


  • Julia Evans Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server #Mastodon
    • I’ve found Mastodon quite a bit more confusing than Twitter because it’s a distributed system, so here are a few technical things I’ve learned about it over the last 10 months. I’ll mostly talk about what using a single-person server has been like for me, as well as a couple of notes about the API, DMs and ActivityPub.

  • Marginalia, an independent search engine, via Jacky Alciné on Mastodon
    • ((64d7abfc-e818-43d5-be23-8bd95429672a))
  • Open Source
    • The other angle really is that code costs nothing to copy, so I am in favour of highly permissive licenses. But that fencing a community and potentially signing something to that effect may be the right kind of signalling.

  • She’d picked the locale, and it really was a local locale, which meant either she had good googlefu or she was more local than she was pretending to be on the phone. Rose House

  • Completed #reading Rose House
    • Yep, that was a quick read! Spooky.
  • Started #reading Lords of Uncreation

  • “A version of a thing is a ~40 char string of hex noise”
    • Via Erlend #Subconscious/Discord, this is Graydon Hoare explaining how the affordance of hashes-as-versions became normalized. @[email protected]
    • And:
    • (IMO this is also why all the web3 stuff as well as secure p2p messaging like SSB and nostr had their moments when they did: elliptic curve crypto finally meant a public signing key could be “a ~32 char string of hex noise”, which is actually a psychologically tolerable threshold in UI we hadn’t previously identified, but is real. Dropping below the “full page of hex” RSA/DSA key-size mattered.)

  • re:Mix is an open source blender where you use your own glass jars https://www.openfunk.co/pages/re-mix
    • ((64d4f1d7-cb62-4770-b280-3fc531b1a3e7))
    • via forresto #Subconscious/Discord
  • LoFi software and inverting our relationship to The Cloud Chad Kohalyk #LoFi #Fission
  • Completed #reading Translation State
  • Started #reading Rose House

  • DWebYVR/Drop-In first event today collapsed:: true
    • Posted about the space with some photos https://cosocial.ca/@boris/110860822079172675
    • Wesley Finck and I immediately started talking about #tools for thought
      • demo of pdf upload and markup with #LogSeq
        • I drag and dropped this PDF, a brochure about a cool event space in #Istanbul called The Seed:
        • INT TECH CONF FISSION 16112023 The Seed.pdf
      • #LogSeq/Hierarchy is a thing I’m showing Wesley Finck
      • The DWebYVR/Website is built on an #Obsidian vault and then rendered and published by Quartz
    • Brooklyn Zelenka
    • Ian Vanagas
      • Oh damn, I just realized that Ian wrote Smart Young BC:
      • ((64d4595a-24bd-46f9-ae17-dda3dfcd4b60))
    • Sal Rahman came! He runs the Fediverse Meetup Group, I showed him the DWebYVR/Calendar, and we talked a bit about how to cross promote, and look for some evening event time in the fall
      • We also wandered up to look at the Internet Archive Canada servers, and how exactly this building came to be
      • We also ranted about #ActivityPub
    • David Luecke, who used to host Cowork & Coffee
      • ((64d3d3d4-c50c-4820-94ab-fae6ffd4c638))
      • Sounds like David could be interested in being a DWebYVR/Drop-In host in the future
    • Jai Djwa came, and we had an AMAZING jam session about #cohousing
      • I’d like to see cohousing be a theme that is part of the wider set of #DWebYVR interests
      • From my point of view, pooling capital and collaboration is the umbrella that could cover open source, Dweb, mesh networks, cohousing, and tech policy, as part of cross-disciplinary topics that we can bring people together around
      • Jai is working on East Van Cohousing and he gave me a tour of some of the architectural plans and talked about some of the things planned there, like a built in coworking space
      • We also talked Texada Island, buying low rise apartment buildings like the Rose Manor that I live in, and more
      • I’m going to intro Jacob Sayles and Katie Davis and Cascadia Design, at the very least to advise on mesh networking for the cohousing, but also the coworking!
  • I don’t want to host services (but I do) by Thib #selfhosting #privacy #surveillance #hosting collapsed:: true
    • id:: 64d46e0b-95bf-42c5-8dcb-497aa559f858

      As self-hosters we are not going to change the face of the world. ==The other 98% of the general public is going to use hegemonic services: self-hosting is a privilege for those who have the education, time and money to put into it.== We’re only deploying solutions that work for us, individually. ==Hosting services for our relatives puts them at risk of losing their data if something happened to us.== My recommendation to most people putting services online would be: either do it for yourself only, or do it as a team with proper structure and processes. What sounds like an initiative to emancipate people could actually alienate them to you, and that is a huge responsibility. I believe it’s important to be able to self-host, even if only to prove it’s possible to do without hegemonic services. But we need to figure out how to do decentralise services and data storage for individuals at scale. This is not just a technical problem, and while #E2EE is a good starting point it’s not a silver bullet. I will expand in a further post about the role of E2EE, where it falls short, and what I think we should do as a society to improve the situation.

    • Meta: experimenting with copying in the tags directly that the person uses
      • If I paste in their tags, they deep link into their site, which is a different slice of information.
      • This harkens back to #Agora concepts, and is something that has been discussed in the #Subconscious/Discord — follow mechanics for terms? subscribing to terms? Or namespacing, where bmcnotes/selfhosting might be my local version
  • I just edited the #LogSeq logseq/export.css to not include the #CSS that completely hides the BMC/Local LogSeq Property that I use, because it meant that critical stuff like the link attribute on a page isn’t included
    • .content .pre-block {display: none}
    • Oh look, I have at this point 310 pages with the #link attribute!
  • 23:41 quick capture: https://atuin.sh/docs/self-hosting
  • 23:42 quick capture: https://tabula.gg/
    • Instant web3 publications for writers, DAOs, and any Ethereum-based account.
  • Reminding myself about my Reading List
  • Downloaded Omnivore App

  • Maddy “Maddy Mail Server implements all functionality required to run a e-mail server”
    • ((64d2e45a-1695-4a81-8ba0-0bdf63f73a43))




  • Erin Kissane Notes from a Mastodon migration #Mastodon
    • Kissane migrated and found some rough edges
    • In practice, this means you’re trading being vulnerable to the whims of centralized corporate services and rich weirdos for…being vulnerable to the whims of whatever rando spins up a server, unlessmigration is speedy, comprehensive, and safe. That’s why it matters that migration is both clunky and surprisingly lossy.

    • I realized some of them too that I never considered — like you lose access to any Follower only posts, as well as DMs, because your new account ultimately does not have the same identity or authorization
  • Erin Kissane The affordance loop #Mastodon #Bluesky Jul 20th, 2023
    • This is the affordance loop: Communities shape tools that shape communities, surrounded by everything happening in the world around us.

  • delv is a dig replacement that understands #DNSSEC made by the BIND team #DNS #cli
    • delv checks the DNSSEC validation chain using the same code that is used by the BIND 9 DNS server itself. Compared to  dig +sigchasedelv is much closer to what really happens inside a DNS server.

  • Finished Witch King by Martha Wells #fantasy #completed
  • Starting Translation State by Ann Leckie #scifi #reading
  • Split out LogSeq into a separate repo
    • Let’s add that info here BMC/Logseq
    • Set DNS in #Cloudflare to point notes.bmannconsulting.com at Github
    • Working on getting Github Pages builds working with Github Actions
    • Maybe I need to make an empty gh-pages branch first #git
    • Maybe I need to give the workflow permission:
      • permissions:
          contents: write
      • Yep that did it
    • Completes ((64c5b66a-fb6b-4bf4-bde3-fa6bad04f0ec))
  • Now to work on BMC/Homepage

  • Textile is a markup language
    • This is your semi-regular reminder that TextTile is a superior to MarkDown in every way: https://textile-lang.com

    • Superior except in the only way that matters: adoption!
    • I don’t see the tyranny of #Markdown going away any time soon
    • Basic formatting in plain text contexts (bold, italic, lists, etc) seems fine to use Markdown because of its wide familiarity




  • Call with Rosano collapsed:: true
    • Rosano had sent me some questions
      • the bit i was trying to get at is the tendency to “structure/nodeify all the things” when using graph tools like logseq/roam—was wondering how much it pays off for the kind of notes you take
      • why it still seems to be hard on mobile
      • why publishing notes seems to keep turning into heavy js apps
      • not that those things are bad, but if the tools are meant to support your process then how might it do so sustainably/effortlessly without lapses.
    • References from our talk
    • We were on the Causal Islands/Discord to do the recording, using the Causal Islands/Podcast Discord “stage” feature
      • Becky setup the Craig Recording Bot, which is a really great and powerful multi track audio recording tool
  • Rosano posted the podcast recording Note-ifying all the things with great time stamps and put it up on YouTube

  • Left Rosano a rambling audio message about my practice of using this #LogSeq space id:: 64b30d5f-ef6e-4e0f-9ae0-f1401e1db90e collapsed:: true
    • I just spent a bunch of time updating the colophon with details on how this site works and its history
    • I lapsed using it in part because I’m frustrated with how it publishes to BMC/Garden
    • How to publish LogSeq to GitHub Pages works
      • As does Publish LogSeq from Mobile
      • But, it’s a single 40MB+ index.html file!
      • And, “article” publishing isn’t really great. Ideally I could throw a tag or property onto a page and get a better article version.
    • I’m waiting for Noosphere, where of course the Subconscious/Subtext text format may well cause it’s own issues
    • I was talking in the Subconscious/Discord and they did mention that for Noosphere, they’d love to have a LogSeq plugin as well
    • I also love my foodwiki, which is a similarily complicated #TiddlyWiki static publishing, which I maintain 100% using Quine
    • But on the question of “why is it important to take or publish notes”
      • I do it for me first, as I have always done for blogging, too
      • I have notes like this that I can come back to, and especially how to’s or install details, are very useful
      • I hope to get better at “asking questions of my notes”
      • If I’m going to write something up to share with someone, chances are its useful for other people, so why not publish it so it can be easily shared
      • My style for personal stuff is pretty documentarian heavy — so BMC/Microblog is adventures and food
      • Questions I ask of my foodwiki and microblog are along the lines of “where were we last year” or “what was that place that Rosano took us to on south Main”
      • Long ago and far away, I got excited by blogging and publishing because I connected with other people, a lot!
      • I think I owe a lot to blogging
      • I say I was one of the first 1000 bloggers — no idea if that was true; but that’s how “small” the people publishing in 2001 felt
        • We read each others’ blogs, and re-blogged, and commented, and wrote back and forth, with a cadence of days/weeks
      • Also: it was the beginning of SEO, and it was exciting that my Drupal blog ranked highly for a ton of things, so I had people stop by and comment from all over
      • Most of these feelings / interactions have been eaten by broadcast social media and cozy web spaces like Discord servers or Signal groups
      • But, it’s hard to use posts into social media as an archive even just for yourself when its on someone else’s platform
      • Using BMC/Microblog, I have it set to cross-publish to my #CoSocial Mastodon account and to #Bluesky
        • MicroBlog I have high confidence that I can export from
        • With CoSocial and Bluesky, I am leaning into them more also because I “trust” that that content will persist: both socially (CoSocial is a co-op I help run and I know it’s backed up) and technically (I own my username on Bluesky, and their AT Protocol/Personal Data Server model means I’ll eventually run my own)
        • But: the content isn’t here so it’s not searchable or cross-indexable to the rest of the #Second Brain here unless I link to it / copy it here
      • And chat is ephemeral. At best, you write stuff here and drop it into social media or chat — so you have a copy, and that at least has a chance of being discoverable by others
  • Did some tinkering with the Boris Mann/Home Lab setup collapsed:: true
    • Deleted the expandcontract.org #Discourse forum on Digital Ocean
    • Created a new Ubuntu 22.10 server 2GB RAM / 50GB in TOR1 Toronto #Digital Ocean data center
    • Went to #Cloudflare and set up gateway.bmann.ca to point to this machine
    • Some articles and setup
    • Apparently my #Mac Mini rebooted and didn’t fully restart at some point
      • Those Docker services including the Nextcloud AIO restarted and are connected to Tailscale again, but it skipped some sort of setup step and is now asking for an admin login, so I’ll need to delete / re-run those docker containers I guess
      • And, use gateway.bmann.ca as the domain? or nextcloud.bmann.ca or something
      • Which is the part I need to figure out with Tailscale
  • Had a shower thought that I posted to Bluesky
  • I set up the DWebYVR/Drop-In sessions
  • Found fossilizer, which turns your #Mastodon export into a static site
  • Nobody cares about your blog by Alex Molas
  • Updating CoSocial/Lemmy instance with lemmy-ansible which I have both a private git repo with our config checked in, and a remote linked to the maintained version
    • git pull lemmy 0.18.2 gets the tag that’s needed
    • Then git pull --rebase cosocial will merge your private stuff
    • I don’t really understand Ansible, but locally running one liners that connect to your server and just makes all the changes is nice
  • Found fossilizer, which turns your #Mastodon export into a static site

  • Back to some Boris Mann/Home Lab work
    • Yesterday I plugged in the VisionTek/VT2900 KVM switch and got things working again
    • I’m actually back in “new Mac setup” as well, because I updated to MacOS/Ventura collapsed:: true
      • Installed the Tailscale plugin for Docker/Desktop
      • Install Homebrew
      • Oh yeah, don’t even have shell aliases here 🤪
      • time passes as I have fun updating a bunch of old LogSeq notes and pages
    • Nextcloud AIO install notes collapsed:: true
      • Searched a bunch of #Tailscale stuff, which is mostly people saying “I’m not quite sure what I’m doing”
      • I searched for AIO in Docker Desktop hub
      • You can’t edit env vars in Docker Desktop? You just delete and try again?
      • Couldn’t get it running using the graphical interface, did get it running using this command
      • docker run --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 8080:8080 --env APACHE_PORT=11000 --env APACHE_IP_BINDING=0.0.0.0 --env NEXTCLOUD_MOUNT=/Users/bmann/Documents/Nextcloud --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock.raw:/var/run/docker.sock:ro nextcloud/all-in-one:latest
      • That includes the raw socket needed on MacOS
      • Can’t quite figure out what IP address to use / what Tailscale settings are needed to get to the right port
      • Can access it with https://127.0.0.1:8080 — but shows an error on localhost because it’s not using https
      • Various other Tailscale DNS and IP addresses do work, but stuck at figuring out a real domain name
      • There doesn’t seem to be any definitive guides that can be found by searching
    • Emailed everyone from TrainJam

  • My Mac Mini is now running MacOS/Ventura and I’ve officially given up on running Linux on it
    • Now to get it set up as Boris Mann/Home Lab
    • Need Docker/Desktop for a bunch of things
    • Once it was updated I sat on the couch with my laptop and did a bunch of things over screen sharing
    • I posted to CoSocial Mastodon and to Bluesky and got a bunch of responses with tips
      • mastodon:: https://cosocial.ca/@boris/110681788599605945
        • I have a Mac Mini running MacOS Ventura (the last Intel version).

          My plan is to run it as the main server for a home lab now that I have a 100Mbps uplink.

          I think I’m going to run Docker for some things that I currently host on Digital Ocean, and add a kind of Gateway Server on DO that has a static IP, does caching, and a few other things.

          Anyone else have ideas on what to run from a home lab, especially on #MacOS

      • Scott Nelson pointed to Headscale over Tailscale The Homelab Show https://thehomelab.show/2022/07/21/the-homelab-show-ep-64-tailscale-and-headscale/
      • FreedomBox
        • I took a look but it looks mostly out of date. Of the apps included, the blog and the wiki seem extremely basic compared to what I’m used to
      • Nextcloud was mentioned several times. I’ve been meaning to learn about administering this, especially in context of perhaps running it to support operations (and maybe members?) at #CoSocial
      • I don’t really feel the need to run Pihole
      • Jeff Henshaw says SyncThing
        • Longer discussion here, the majority of my files sync through iCloud and… it’s fine?
      • Various people pointed at Home Assistant. I live in an apartment and don’t really have anything home automation wise
      • Jason Cornick gave a whole list of stuff, the interesting ones of which I created local pages for here


  • This has been a long Easter weekend of doing lots of #CoSocial stuff
    • Tim Bray moved his account over Friday night and it went over without a hitch