Notices by Jonathan Frederickson (jfred@jawns.club)

@aeva If you're not already subscribed, @mlemweb and @cwebber's podcast is a good time :) https://fossandcrafts.org/

@dthompson Yeah, we mostly only got the audio on the stream and so mostly only heard Christine. I was wondering if Jessica had a part that I couldn't see!

@cwebber @tsyesika @spritely

@cwebber I use it across all my non-server computers and love it. Same base config across all of them with a few tweaks for e.g. work-only/sensitive configs

I haven't really worked out secrets management very well beyond using Bitwarden for web stuff. Outside that I've just got authinfo files on each machine so far, and use things like remotepasseval in offlineimap. But secrets management has been a perennial frustration with Guix for me and I feel like Guix really needs a common answer for it

@cwebber For state I use Syncthing via the home-syncthing-service-type. Works pretty well for syncing my org files between machines and my phone, as well as some larger things like my music library

@cwebber Oh, one painful thing about it though is that when a package in your home config fails to build (which is still frustratingly common IME) it blocks you from reconfiguring until you remove it from the config. Better than it getting silently removed I suppose but it can be a pain. I know Guix lets you have multiple profiles which could help mitigate this but that doesn't seem to jibe that well with the way Guix Home expects you to do things

@cwebber @mntmn Oh whoa that was fast! You'll have it for FOSDEM then :D

@cwebber Okay that is very cool. I think the main things that would stop me from trying it out myself are the aesthetic (which seems like it could be tweaked, you got into that a bit) and the keyboard mounting likely making it inconvenient to sit down (this one feels more difficult to address)

Just published my last #DecemberAdventure post of the year - a bit late, but the work was mostly done in December, and it took me a while to get this one put together: https://www.terracrypt.net/posts/gobs-of-machines.html

It's a prototype of an infra provisioning system built with #spritely #goblins. I plan on continuing work on this myself, but if you're interested in building stuff with Goblins maybe this could give you some inspiration :)

@killyourfm Oh absolutely! Though I'll be the first one to admit that I have too many project ideas to follow through with all of them in practice 😅 this is one I'd like to try and get to though

@killyourfm This makes community outreach and education just that much more important. A lot of people can't afford to buy new computers for a software upgrade, and it'll generate tons of unnecessary e-waste if we don't repurpose those old devices

I've been thinking about running a class at my local makerspace on fixing old laptops and installing Linux on them. The area we're in is pretty low-income, so especially if we can find a good way to reach local folks I think it could be pretty good

The next run of my custom Pocket Reform backplates arrived and this time they actually fit! :D

@khinsen Oh this is very cool! Do you know if the talk was recorded? It's one I'd love to forward to some friends in academia. (And thank you for putting a transcript up!)

@cwebber @mntmn It's a vegan slider in a world that for some reason only seems to want to make beef double cheeseburgers

@notjustbikes Finally getting around to listening to your previous podcast episode with Reece about Toronto drivers. The bit about driving above the speed limit and aggressive weaving in traffic being normalized in Ontario was really interesting because the northeast US where I live is the same way

Do you know if it's the same further west in Canada as well? I wonder if it's a geographical thing

(It's very unpleasant to be around in any case)

@civodul @bugaevc @janneke This now got me thinking... I found a Hurd post talking about how it adds POSIX compatibility to Mach: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/community/weblogs/ArneBab/technical-advantages-of-the-hurd.html

And it says it still provides access to the capability-based permissions underneath, which sounds nice. But it also got me thinking: there's likely to be a lot more software targeting WASI soon, which is natively capability-based. Could it be possible for Hurd to have WASI compatibility too?

@jimgoodall @vwbusguy @saramg
> Try being in Canada and measuring distances in hours driven.

We do that one in the US too

@evan Bounced between qualified yes and qualified no because the answer depends on whether "powered by" is interpreted as "completely powered by". I feel like in this context "partially" is a useful answer

In my case: a nontrivial part of NJ's power mix seems to come from nuclear, though it's still majority gas-powered. Plan to look into ways of improving this for my own usage soon but I've only just moved so don't know the local options here yet

@aeva @technomancy @cwebber In my mind, user freedom (or user empowerment) has to involve also making that freedom more accessible to people who wouldn't consider themselves programmers. Think HyperCard, Dynamicland, Siri Shortcuts, etc

In other words, it's not just free software. Source code access alone isn't enough