Daily Journal 📓

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

8:00am

  • Just prepaid for a year of Beeper. This is letting me “jump the line” and get into the beta. Plus, I reserved my username as @boris there. It is supposed to connect all your messaging apps in one “app” — even iMessage on non-Apple systems, through a jail broken iPhone.

  • I really do have the need for a unified messaging app. I’m not super interested in a proprietary paid service to do it, but I’d like to try it out.

  • @acroll is posting on Substack. I don’t understand why he’s posting somewhere without mapping it to his own domain name.

  • His latest is Nothing in the middle, about the creator economy. Good read.

8:00am

  • I got invited to Simon Wardley’s every two week “interesting people” video chat. Lots of discussion around Wardley Maps, a bit of serverless thrown in. An interesting group of people. Some have tracked me down on either LinkedIn or Twitter.
  • For the next call, the suggested topic is to look at applying mapping to health / healthcare.
  • This connects directly to @tonzylstra’s recent post It’s more logical to host an event than attend one.
  • Someone day I will publish the extensive chat notes and article links between @hitsmachines and I, talking about NFTs and art.
  • The answer to some of your questions currently are xDai Chain and Nifty.Ink.
  • I posted the Back to IndieKit blog to Mastodon.
  • I’m thinking about automating posts from this journal to Mastodon. The people there are likely interested in the type of stuff I post about. I would need to build a JSON Feed and then I can use my existing Micro.blog subscription to cross post.
  • Hmmm. Since the Revue newsletter builder is part of Twitter now, and I looked at using it for Fission, maybe I’ll put the Journal feed into there, that could be interesting.

8:00am

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

8:00am

8:00am

  • More agora thoughts: what about pulling in openly licensed general purpose Git content?

  • For instance, terms.dev is a repository of software industry terms and definitions. It uses the Zola engine to build the live site, but the source is Markdown in git.

  • Well, this @ctbeiser Twitter thread will help point me towards lots of other notes to flesh out:

  • if you were making a syllabus on tools for thought what would be your key inclusions?

especially interested in ones beyond the “obvious list”:

Footnotes

8:00am

  • I keep looking at Microlink so I guess I should at least post a quick journal log before I write it up more:

  • From the home page:

  • Browser as API

Fast, scalable, and reliable browser automation built for businesses and developers. Proudly open source.

  • You can turn websites into structured data, take screenshots, turn pages into PDFs, and more. Power embeds, etc

  • The list of open source components is super interesting.

  • Brave Browser bought a search engine, “promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version”.

  • Good timing for clearing my tabs of other Brave related stuff. This PDF white paper describes the Brave Search Team’s plans — Goggles:

  • This paper proposes an open and collaborative system by which a community, or a single user, can create sets of rules and filters, called Goggles, to define the space which a search engine can pull results from. Instead of a single ranking algorithm, we could have as many as needed, overcoming the biases that a single actor (the search engine) embeds into the results.

  • via Daring Fireball

8:00am

8:00am

Nothing on fire that can’t just burn until morning.

8:00am

8:00am

  • Chatting with @flancian who was wondering if he should support the Simply Jekyll margin note syntax in Anagora.
  • Gurlic looks interesting:

  • Gurlic is an experiment in building a new/old kind of internet community. It is primarily a place for discovering and sharing technology, science, culture and the arts.

  • That’s from the about page, which continues with principles that make for an important and inspiring read. The one about domains stands out:

  • Every resource (user, community, publication etc.) must be mappable to custom user-owned domain names.

  • Basically: even though this is a shared platform, you can bring your own domain and truly own it.
  • Via @liaizon, whose post also links to a Show HN. And, Gurlic may be becoming federated via Matrix protocol to be called Hummingbird?

8:00am

  • I’m having one of those days. Reserved a car from Avis. Show up at 8am. I have a paper temporary driver’s license because I just renewed it. “Policy” is to have picture ID, even though I’m on file, I always rent from this location, and the desk clerk and manager both recognize me.
    • So: do I complete this rental and then never rent from Avis again, after 20 years? Probably. It’s policy after all.
  • via @kemitchell’s blog, Jerome Saltzer’s “The Origin of the MIT License” in the IEEE Annals of Computer History.
  • Catching up on @kemitchell’s Artless Devices forum where he linked to duallicensing.com. Yup, that’s a pretty fantastic resource for dual licensing.

8:00am

  • I have been sharing a number of @genmon’s posts from his blog. Mostly, I just say, you should go read this: Let’s invent new interfaces, not new products.
    • Yes I will read anything which links to Bret Victor and his Dynamicland project:

    • a physical environment of smart light, human writeable code, and a social interaction with the computer.

  • I can already tell that having this box be able to teleport into my journal log — without having to cross post it publicly — is going to make me both post more, and tweet less.
    • Maybe I’ll consider cross posting these Journal posts to Mastodon.
  • 7 hours of video calls is too many hours of video calls.
    • There were fun humans on the other side of a number of those hours, but it’s just a lot of screen time.

8:00am

  • Woo hoo! I am so stoked!
  • I now have this site auto-publishing using Github Actions for Jekyll, with a Fission/Publish Github Action at the end.
  • Main thing I need to do to complete the rollout of these new journal logs — other than pagination — is to truncate long posts and strip HTML from them.
    • For short posts, I should not truncate, and actually render markdown.
    • Probably something like, if the content is bigger than 500 characters, strip_html and show 250 chars with a read more link. If less than 500, display the content.
    • For reference, this post is about 480 characters without HTML tags.

8:00am

  • The metaphors around apps vs windows vs tabs — especially in a mobile context vs a desktop context — are becoming increasingly blurry.
  • Via Roland, Tom MacWright wonders if the future of programming is more common data types:

    • What if a simpler programming language had first-class representations of a lot more than strings and arrays?

    • But if the aim is ease of use and giving power to people who otherwise wouldn’t be doing programming, type-rich systems with lots of assumptions seem like a logical first step. And one that doesn’t need a visual editor or a new dialect of a rare programming language.

8:00am

  • Tinkering with the site, getting the logs section working. This page on group_by in Liquid is useful. Covers posts grouped by year and month, among other expressions.

  • It’s my birthday. I’m 46 today. Up late tinkering with my blog. And now I’m going to bed. Good night!

  • HuJSON

  • Like @vgr, I created a Clubhouse account so that I didn’t have to keep turning down invites.

  • Create a self-hosted chat service with your own Matrix server, Victoria Drake

    • Dendrite is a Matrix server written in GoLang. This article walks through setting up on an inexpensive VPS.

  • High Lotek - Gemini and the Small Internet

    • A good overview of Gemini by Andrew Roach.

    • It’s a protocol partway between gopher and the web, without tracking, with encryption by default, respectful of users above all else.

    • I like a lot of the principles, and I understand the push back against, shall we say, the “complicated web”. There’s probably some content web vs app web feelings going on here too.

  • Why I Still Use RSS — > However it wasn’t until I began working from home and everything in my life moved online that I really began to notice how beneficial RSS could be with relation to Digital Wellbeing. By selecting only the sites, blogs, creators etc. that I had a serious interest in, I could effectively remove the negative effects of social media and excessive online usage from my life.

    • via Robin Rendle who in turn has some very interesting thoughts in their post.

  • Major surgery on the site, nicely celebrated from almost 24 hours ago :) Yes, working on my blog on my birthday has got to be tradition by now. #BMC

  • What was Journals all got dumped into logs. Which is a collection in Jekyll but I’m going to call them all Journals: more granular daily notes and bookmark postings via IndieKit. The Journal page groups things by day.

  • Somewhere in there, implemented Littlefoot for footnotes, and will mostly remove the Simply Jekyll specific syntax for margin notes, except for design reasons like the home page.

8:00am

  • Another test of the Logs functionality. A small x should give us Unix timestamps. You can check the current timestamp.
    • And this. This is the note that will go forth and timestamp appropriately in the Logs directory.
    • A final note. To bid farewell. At night. When it is late. And the timestamps are flowing into a git repo.
  • I’m spending some time working on Moa Party today.
    • I created a new Mastodon account for the project to complete the setup of all of the social accounts for the project. We were thinking that we might run our own Mastodon server at some point, but accounts can be moved pretty easily within Mastodon, so I went ahead and chose the Fosstodon server to create an account on.
    • From the Fosstodon about page, “a community of like-minded people who enjoy Free & Open Source Software (FOSS)”, plus they have a sustainability model of passing donations on to other open source projects after costs are covered.
    • You can follow Moa Party at @[email protected].
  • Git Bug
    • I get excited when I have a chance to try new software and…it just works!1 That was the case with git-bug. It’s a bug tracker that is fully embedded in git. You use the same git repo that you are using for code development to track and update bugs and issues.
    • On MacOS, brew install git-bug and you’re up and running.
    • git bug user create will setup your local user. It will read from your local git settings for full name and email address. The only other thing you’ll need is a full link to an avatar image — the picture that represents you.
    • Next up is setting up bridges. git-bug supports GitLab, GitHub, JIRA, and minor support for Launchpad, as well as custom implementations.
    • The Moa Party project is what I’m going to experiment using git-bug on, which we host on GitLab. You run git bug bridge configure and walk through a terminal interface to fill out your GitLab server details (yes, you can use it with self-hosted GitLab instances), as well as your personal login and an access token.
    • When you create a personal access token, you’ll need to give it api access permission, which pretty much can do everything on your behalf. I initially created a token without that access, and had a heck of a time figuring out how to fix that. Turns out, go into your local ~/.gitconfig and delete the token and identity with the wrong permissions. And, git-bug bridge rm the original bridge you created with the wrong token, then you can git-bug bridge configure a new default.
    • And now, unfortunately, I nuked identities using the Makefile (and found @agentofuser in the issues from a couple of years ago) and am currently in a state where I can’t create a new identity.
    • OK, I got it working through the age old trick of … downloading a new copy of the repo and setting it up again.
    • There is a recent (7 days ago) issue thread that seems to indicate the GitLab API has been improved and this can be working again. git-bug itself works, and I managed to import the existing GitLab issues, but I can’t push changes to the GitLab issues.
    • Since the Agora itself works with git a lot, we may actually be able to link git-bugs with the Agora itself in some way, but that’s pretty deep git magic for me, since I don’t fully understand how git-bug works / where it stores stuff in git.
  • IDGAF Takeout Roulette

    • Can’t decide what to eat and you just don’t give a…? We’ll place a $20 takeout order and have it delivered to you!

    • Seen via @IanColdWater

Footnotes

  1. Of course, further down in this note, after a bunch of git surgery, things did not just work! But you can see the screenshots of things working in the git-bug page. ↩

8:00am

  • Well, everything is working, but need to figure a few things out. I used iA Writer to post to the site and it works! I’ve made Article post types into what I call Notes here, the main post type.
  • Posting from Quill as an Article isn’t going to work1, since it turns everything into HTML and escapes the square brackets in wikilinks.
  • For the (Micropub) Notes post type, I’ve created a new kind called Logs. They use the current date stamp as their filename, and I made a temporary logs page to display them.
  • So, I can post arbitarily long Notes posts with Markdown formatting and wikilinks. This could replace my manual Journal entries. Instead, I would auto-generate journal pages per day (not sure if this is possible), or maybe just show the last N days of logs on a main journal page.2
  • OpenFaaS
  • IndieKit
    • I decided that remote publishing of notes would be useful. So, back to setting up IndieKit. It has changed quite a bit since I last looked at it — for the better!
    • The actual server you deploy into Heroku is one index.js file. Here’s mine bmann/indiekit-bmcgarden, which in turn is really just a copy of paulrobertlloyd/paulrobertlloyd-indiekit.
    • I deleted everything except for Articles (which should turn into blog posts) and Notes (which will be notes, as long as notes don’t have an arbitrary character limit coming in). I need to figure out templating to do things like turn Bookmarks into notes with the link: front matter filled out.

Footnotes

  1. That is, the Micropub Article type, which is meant to be long form and HTML. ↩

  2. As of Feb 22nd, 2021, I’m calling this log type a journal, and in fact merging the journal posts I made before into the logs category. ↩

8:00am

  • As I was finishing up my Drop in Audio blog post, Jam, an open source Clubhouse-like system debuted on ProductHunt. I took a quick look at the code and it requires a few moving pieces and Docker, but it’s a great little starting point.
  • After a good discussion with @flancian, I added a section to the Git Siphon for Moa Party to focus on post-per-file. We discovered that we need to think about Moa Party as being standalone with multiple clients. Anagora is a client, people’s individual gardens are clients, eg. my Jekyll site.
  • This may mean that making Moa Party become a whole Micropub server that publishes to Git may make sense. IndieKit has a whole template system so that people can run a variety of git-based static site generators with it.

8:00am

  • Starting last night, I seriously started using my new reMarkable paper tablet.
  • I read @arcalinea’s Decentralized Social Ecosystem Review and highlighted sections and scribbled notes on it.
  • Then, this morning, as I posted, I wrote out 6 pages of a blog post at the breakfast table, my Drop in Audio post.
  • Lots of questions in the Twitter thread, which I’ll capture on the reMarkable notes page, also where I’ll add other things I find out about over time.
  • Did a bunch of Moa Party writing to capture some discussions happening in Matrix. I’m excited for the Git Siphon for Moa Party feature I wrote up.
  • I also bought moaparty.com. Nothing there right now, I guess I should at least do a redirect or something. It might be the root domain for running an experimental Mastodon / ActivityPub server of some kind for FedStoa experiments with @flancian and friends.

8:00am

  • Unfortunately, I have to tag this with February 10th, 2021, since it just rolled past midnight, but “today” is mainly February 9th, 2021 when I talk about it in this post!

  • Learned a very relatable term today: “報復性熬夜” (revenge bedtime procrastination), a phenomenon in which people who don’t have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours.

    Daphne K. Lee @daphnekylee https://twitter.com/daphnekylee/status/1277101831693275136

  • Not quite the case for me…but also some truth there.
  • Last night (morning?) was the final piece of the Mac Mini: memory install.
  • The whole office here is a mess of boxes and pulled out mess, as I now have to sort through various electronics and recycle them, and so on.
  • I also got two final deliveries that I had been waiting on for now. I decided to buy a reMarkable tablet. My paper notebooks ran out, and I really should have at least one device for quiet reading and note taking that isn’t a click away from Twitter. There is some retail therapy there, too.
  • The other delivery was Ubiquiti networking gear for my parents’ new Foxglove Terrace house. I’ve now got Ubiquiti here at home, at the Fission HQ on East 6th, and will install it at my parents.
  • Other notable events, I was part of a live show put on by Startup Vancouver. Here’s the video from Facebook. I start at around the 17 minute mark, talking about Fission, what we’re building, but a lot of focus on vision.
  • I’ll look to get the source video and cut down a clip to just my segment.
  • I was down on Clubhouse https://www.joinclubhouse.com/ at the beginning of the video show, but I ended up joining today. I’m thinking of BBB as a pretty good open source equivalent, and am supposed to be helping Social.Coop document it.
  • I joined Clubhouse because I started getting multiple people in the last day or two inviting me to it — or asking me if I should be invited or what I thought about it. For the record, @allbombs was the first person to invite me several months back when it was still super exclusive :)
  • I also have Soapbox https://soapbox.social/ on my phone that I haven’t used yet. How many social audio apps can I have before I use the first one???
  • Had a nice Twitter thread with @tombielecki, where he found my announce tweet for the Digital Garden version of this site, when I first put it on Fission. Wow, Sept 9th, 2020 is already 6 months ago!

  • Just saw this. Your site is so fast! There’s a Digital Garden telegram group sharing examples etc they might want to take a look at @FissionCodes? @Mappletons @houshuang

    Tom Bielecki https://twitter.com/tombielecki/status/1359257555462049793

  • The site was a bit slow because I am using Cloudflare/IPFS Gateway plus Fission hosting, which occasionally has some caching issues.
  • Cryptic notes for today: Claire screenshot, Courtney yay, Lance boo.