Daily Journal 📓

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

8:00am

  • Am I reading the Internet and posting links on Christmas? collapsed:: true
    • I am! Christmas Eve is my traditional German celebration
  • Cory Doctorow What the fediverse (does/n’t) solve collapsed:: true
    • Links to Cat Valente Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

      • I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned.

      • Twitter is and was the home to so many small artists who clawed their way to an audience, who had the opportunity to be seen by the world without the intermediary of already-established success. It was precious and vital to making a living from art, and not just art but activism and craft industries and intellectual output that so many think should never make anyone’s living. And those people are going to lose so much because Elon Musk needed to drink from the attention fire hose. Those people are going to lose their audience and their opportunities, all for him. I’m going to lose so much. You have to be very famous to be safe from the effects of your biggest microphone being crammed up a rich white man’s ass and set to reverb. I am certainly not. Few of us are.

    • via nicoth
  • Chad says I swear by LogSeq in response to bengo asking for potential other #opensource options collapsed:: true
    • Obsidian is widely used but is not open source
    • Maybe I’ll fill out a Why I Like LogSeq page properly and in the meantime I replied
    • Obsidian never really clicked for me — including that it’s not open source
    • It’s not user programmable and is more like a fancy Markdown editor
    • This totally works for many people! I used #Jekyll and my code editor to maintain my public notes garden for many years, which is about the same but much harder to use and I ended up with lots of custom code
    • The real impact for all of these systems is only going to happen when they go #multiplayer - sharing, maintaining, and inter-linking bodies of content with multiple people
    • Arguably, Notion does this today — in a centralized, non-open source commercial business
    • Outline is a very interesting open source team knowledge base and wiki that I should go back to checking out again
  • neodrag, a JS library for implementing draggability on the web
    • I still want to see interop of drag and drop between #TiddlyWiki and other systems
  • DONE Central Station by Lavie Tidhar #reading
  • DONE Neom by Lavie Tidhar #reading

8:00am

  • A Tweet Before Dying by Paul Ford in Wired
  • Paul Miller new elliptic curve cryptography library, via @paulmillr on Twitter
    • Announcing noble-curves: the culmination of work on elliptic curve cryptography.
      • Pkg defines ed25519, ed448, secp256k1, P384, P521, bls12-381, bn254, pasta, stark curves.
      • Edwards, Weierstrass, Montgomery primitives, hash2curve & pairings are also in.
      • https://github.com/paulmillr/noble-curves
    • Pedro Gomez in the Twitter thread asks why the new library, some great background from Paul

      • Supply chain security: no dependencies, or minimal dependency on a package from 1 author. If you use something like elliptic, you’re exposing yourself to rogue dep updates

      • JS, not WASM: js can be audited easily, wasm cannot. You may be executing malware when using wasm lib

      • Auditability, readability: much easier to read code based on native bigints, instead of something like bn.js

      • Correctness: thorough testing with wycheproof, and others

  • Roland Tanglao asks How to publish LogSeq to GitHub Pages

8:00am

  • Pace layers in science and technology by Konrad Hinsen via Gordon Brander and Subconscious/Discord Discord thread link #pace layering
  • Had a catch up call with Rosano collapsed:: true
    • “Welcome to the show” edition
    • In #Berlin
    • Looking at a hack on the beach event
    • Some travel to Vietnam, Malaysia
    • Consolidating on Ghost for lots of things
      • Members -> Apps -> Updates, where Updates from apps are available to all users
      • Maybe take Ghost content and put it in GitHub so people can make updates, push back into Ghost?
      • Sort of Headless CMS
      • Fission site works this way, Ghost as editing interface, then Eleventy for pulling content via API and publishing static site
      • Working with Eleventy on the #Ghost site
    • Working on a new app for QR code generation
    • What is Rosano using for hosting these days?
      • No more Heroku
      • Talked a bit about beyond Docker / LAMP stack apps to 12 Factor App
      • Lots of n8n for automation
      • Cloudron
        • Pays for annual Cloudron license
        • Uses it for one click apps - Ghost installs, a URL redirect, etc
        • Not really using it for custom apps
      • CapRover
        • It isn’t really multi user at all
        • Single admin user / pass
        • Uses it for all his NodeJS apps
        • $10/month server
      • Render
        • Free static apps
        • Paying for one dyno
      • Boris’ phrase: self hosting is selfish
      • Boris is running PhotoPrism https://photos.bmannconsulting.com
        • like a self-hosted Google Photos
        • Runs on Digital Ocean but needs a pretty hefty server, like $20/month
        • Just barely getting multi users
        • I would like to share this with at least 4 people -> $5/month
        • Plus at least one other person with server access, knowing how to upgrade / maintain the software
      • Can we share Cloudron?
        • Saves money by sharing price of a subscription
        • Shared server costs - but will also need a slightly larger server
        • Sharing admin / updates
        • Comingling and interdependence: what if stuff Boris runs takes down the server? What if what Rosano runs takes it down?
    • Railway
    • Jank: general description of software and systems that work, mostly, but have a little, you know, jank associated
  • Go QR, a #QR code generator that is free to use. Supports #vCard
  • Thinking about importing or linking to things from the Fission Wiki collapsed:: true
    • basically adding a property to certain things that are a link to the Fission Discourse forum
  • Tao of Mac 2022 Year in Review collapsed:: true

    • So I’m still converting the content to Markdown, but with nearly 9000 posts and Wiki pages here, it may take a while yet. I’m not in a hurry.

    • Linking to 20 Years of Tao of Mac
  • I’m feeling the same way about chipping away at this #LogSeqConversion collapsed:: true
    • Well, not just the chipping away of conversion, but rather that the workflow and practice
    • Although the temporary subdomain of logseq.bmannconsulting.com is…temporary
    • The plan is to fully migrate to bmannconsulting.com
    • Blockers are figuring out how to do proper “blog post” style pages with LogSeq
    • Plus converting / migrating / adjusting the blog and archive
    • I don’t want to necessarily wreck what is there now, but maybe it just doesn’t matter
    • The Daily Journals here are “personal” in the sense that it’s just me writing, not necessarily for publication
      • But it’s not personal in the sense that I keep it to tech / business topics
      • My Micro.blog site https://blog.bmannconsulting.com has photos and food and stuff
      • But! Because I don’t have a good blogging workflow, it has some articles there that would make more sense here, like this one
      • Plus #foodwiki as the other space I have that is my personal log
  • OpenCollective Inc Strategy 2023-2024
  • Robin Rendle Moving Timelines #Mastodon #Twitter

    • To be honest, I don’t know what my relationship with the internet will look like after the heat death of the fowl place. For now I’m just gonna focus on this here website, but this new timeline feels like an okay place to lurk in the short term. https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/moving-timelines/

  • Punkt MP02 Voicephone
    • A 4G “light phone” with Signal Protocol support
    • I have no need of such a thing but I am fascinated by alternative hardware and OS options for mobile and tablets
    • via Vinay Vasanji on Farcaster
  • Launching our server & growing the Mammoth team

8:00am

8:00am

8:00am

  • Barnard’s Star and the ‘Wait Equation’ collapsed:: true
    • via Matt Webb Do not buy three decades of loo paper, nor depart today for Barnard’s Star
    • Current technology would allow us to reach Barnard’s Star in 12,000 years, setting off today.
    • Or: wait.

    • If technology growth is likely to double every 100 years the speed at which this journey could be made, then, using equation –1, it would seem that a voyager need only wait 690 years or so to make the journey in 100 years or less (i.e. at a speed of 6/100 speed of light). In other words, the star could be reached in well under a thousand years from now simply by waiting. Total time to destination is 690 years of wait + 100 years of travel = 790 years.

    • Wait Equation
    • I’ve observed this same wait equation applies to technology of all kinds. Thinking about this from a Wardley Maps perspective, technology becomes easier to use (as well as cheaper etc etc) as it moves Wardley Right — more commoditized collapsed:: true
      • I think of the early days of ML.
      • The first releases of #TensorFlow were incredibly hard to use and put into production. Early adopters spent 6 months just getting things working.
      • Then, Google dumped an update out in public and it now took weeks or days to get started
      • The people who spent 6 months struggling, expending effort vs all of the resources of Google wasted a lot of their effort — and would likely have been better off just waiting
      • b5 and the Qri team also paid this cost on the early days of the #IPFS protocol and network
  • Early stage funding is missing in Canada by Jesse Rodgers of Eigenspace
  • Mastodon Digest #Mastodon #Python
    • A Python script that aggregates recent popular posts from your Mastodon timeline

8:00am

  • Web app manifests
  • New to me feature of having #LogSeq notes as files on iOS — Spotlight indexes them!
    • If you do a regular search, the Files section of results will show matching content
    • Here’s an example search for “cloud”
    • 2022-12-19-21-14-26.jpeg
    • Clicking on them brings up the Markdown plain text file
    • Apps can use the Spotlight API to customize this directly in their app (and it would be useful for LogSeq to do this), but “just” having files on disk be part of the index automatically is pretty great — integration through the file system in action
  • I wrote about Indie Kit yesterday and it turns out creator Paul Robert Lloyd is formally launching it: Introducing Indiekit: The IndieWeb for Everyone
    • Seen via Robin Rendle IndieKit
    • This is still very much a run your own server sort of deal
    • What would a serverless version of this look like?
    • And yes, we should do a Fission Web3Storage UCAN endpoint to put media on IPFS
  • Stock and Flow is a piece that Robin Sloan wrote on Snarkmarket many years ago
    • ((d06815f1-2aaa-4ce7-88f4-168e6c114ad7))
    • ((63a141c2-6079-4c72-ad03-76bb5c751ab0))
    • Seen via @eliotpeper
    • I’m getting good personal flow with daily Journals, like this typing here
    • Little tidbits and fragments of orphaned page notes don’t quite add up to anything, so my stock builds slowly
  • Valve is paying a whole lot of developers to keep the Steam Deck’s open-source software going #opensource #Steam/Deck

    • in a recent chat with the Verge, Steam Deck designer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned that the company is paying over a hundred open-source devs to work on the various bits of software that keep the Steam Deck ticking. Valve has them working on stuff like Steam for ChromeOS and Linux, too

    • Griffais said Valve’s corralling of open-source devs is part of “a larger strategy to coordinate all these projects and set up kind of an overall architecture” for gaming on Linux. That is to say, Valve is using its technical and financial clout to herd the cats of open-source development in a single direction, in order to get Linux functioning as a viable alternative to Windows for PC gaming.

  • Yes, I have a Steam/Deck! It’s been great

8:00am

8:00am

8:00am

  • Flipped over to Github/Pages for testing publishing
    • Available at https://logseq.bmannconsulting.com
    • Key point: need to go into LogSeq (three dots top right) → Settings → Editor, and toggle “All pages public when publishing”
    • LATER Figure out what the tagging custom is for public vs private pages to potentially combine my notes
    • LATER Figure out #LogSeq custom commands or some other way to get unicode arrows → from ->
  • Posting about this new-but-temporary site
    • Can I post an image from mobile?
    • 2022-12-16-23-01-48.jpeg
    • Mobile #screenshot of my #LogSeq graph for this site
  • Alex MacCaw

8:00am

  • The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point

    • In 2022, game engines sit at the centre of a key ideological and economic battleground and the two most popular game engine companies face uncertain futures. What is the alternative?

  • Digital Life Collective Wardley Map 0.6
    • DL WARDLEY.pdf
    • Bottom of PDF says: Developed by Joachim Stroh
    • This has been sitting in my downloads folder for a while, and needs some annotation and looking for…where I got it from!

8:00am

  • Tom Macwright writes Playing with ActivityPub, on continuing to use his Jekyll static blog and adding federated photo sharing
  • Building at the Edges Podcast episode with Dan Romero from Farcaster #Dan Romero #Farcaster

    • Dan Romero is the co-founder of Farcaster, the decentralized social network that many in crypto are turning to as a Twitter alternative. Jess and Dan explore what it means to be a decentralized social network in 2022, the critical differences between stewarding an open protocol and a client, the transition from users to customers, and how to build for revealed preference vs. stated preference

8:00am

8:00am

  • Moved forward with CoSocial today
    • Met with Tim Bray
    • Explained what I know about and my experiences with Open Collective
    • Talked about potentially using ghost for membership management, using Stripe for collecting funds directly into the (future) co-op bank account

8:00am

  • collapsed:: true - [Take responsibility for Social Media](https://www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/take-responsibility-for-social-media), [Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS)](https://www.cwts.nl/) at [Leiden University](https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en) - > Perhaps the easiest to understand analogy is email: from a personal mail address like [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) you can reach anybody else, regardless of whether they have a Gmail address, a Hotmail address or another institutional mail address. - > We propose that institutions should step up and take responsibility and host their own servers. Institutions, like universities, research centres, newspapers, publishers, broadcast companies, ministries and NGOs, all have a role to play in shaping the discussion on social media, without any single institution being in control. - > Within the federated social media, accounts would be clearly associated with that domain name, for example [@[email protected]](https://social.cwts.nl/@vtraag), clearly establishing that these users belong to that institution. Institutions can limit users to staff members only and verify their identity, thus establishing a trusted presence. Users may benefit from the institutional connection, and as some have argued, this could establish an organisation as [a trustworthy brand](https://martinfowler.com/articles/your-org-run-mastodon.html), making Mastodon a more suitable platform for institutions than Twitter, [instead of less](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/11/10/academics-can-easily-leave-twitters-town-square-but-it-will-be-much-harder-for-their-institutions/). -
  • THINKCamp Demo Day 2022

8:00am

8:00am

8:00am

  • Switched over to a new branch for BMC/Garden to try a #LogSeqConversion
    • I think it will be to completely remove #Jekyll?
    • The #TiddlyWiki conversion was overly complicated, and I’ve stuck with LogSeq for my scratch notes for quite some time
    • I still love my #twgroceries, and want it to be able to be easily published

8:00am

  • Test of On This Day functionality
  • Either queries get cached, or there’s an off by one error in the script
  • Or maybe it just shows up for the current day?

8:00am

  • Subreply seems interesting. From the about page:

  • @subreply was created by @lucian from the desire of a having a simple to use, English-only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.

Features

  1. easy to reply to anyone
  2. save content posted by anyone
  3. 🧠💪 one or two emojis instead of avatars
  4. mentions, links and hashtags support
  5. reverse-chronological order for all feeds
  6. easy to find find and follow people
  7. light and dark themes based on OS preference

Limitations

  1. 480 characters per reply
  2. Unicode and emoji to ASCII transliteration to display everywhere
  3. unique global topics, replies per thread, content per account
  4. only one mention, link or hashtag per reply
  5. no support for paragraphs, keeps conversation tidy
  6. no popularity counters for replies or profiles