Daily Journal 📓

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

Mar 20211:00am

  • Set up #Gitlab Service Desk for Moa Party, including forwarding email from Google Domains.

  • It’s really interesting to have a shared email inbox included in the service for free. Will be interesting to see how many people use it.

Mar 20211:00am
  • The presentation I gave to the #IPFS Local Offline Collab group is on Hackernews
Mar 202112:00am
  • I find most of the tension between the recently labeled content web vs app web.
  • The people who complain about unreadable pages bloated with JS to read a blog post are right.
  • The people who want to build local first, browser-centric apps are right.
  • From a discussion in the wikilinks Matrix channel with @karlicoss
Mar 202112:00am

  • 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.

Mar 202112:00am
  • 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.
Mar 202112:00am

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

Mar 202112:00am

  • 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

Mar 202112:00am

  • 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

Mar 202112:00am

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

Feb 202112:00am
  • 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?
Feb 202112:00am
  • 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.
Feb 202112:00am
  • 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.
Feb 202112:00am
  • 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.
Feb 202112:00am
  • 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.

Feb 202112:00am

  • 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.