Notices by Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social)

@silverwizard it's going to be markdown files transferred over anonymous SSH via rsync

@vaurora by the way, I think I mentioned this a few years ago already, but I really, really appreciate your work writing about how filesystems work. In particular the featherstitch stuff and your other articles on @LWN helped me build a solid mental foundation on which I've built up quite a bit of professional expertise. Thank you.

Dear Gandi dot net slash Total Webhosting Solutions: one hundred and twenty six Canadian dollars for a dot social domain renewal?

Yeaaaaaah

Yeah no

No, no thank you. No. That is not going to happen. Best of luck, so long, see you never. Thanks for the smooth transfer out.

Helloooooooo, Porkbun! (Thank you for that recommendation, @packetcat . Big fan of them so far!)

I should really switch my domains from Gandi to Porkbun. Porkbun's API is not great but it's good enough for what I actually need.

I only have three so it's not really a cost thing - it's more about moving my expenses away from businesses that suck.

@GNUxeava @dalias @lanodan as does Debian, and even Termux. And you're bang on about the BSDs, they do terrific work there.

That there are distributions out there that fulfill the duty of package management with less diligence than I expect is definitely true, but I think this reflects more on their priorities (and, frankly, quality) than on the existence and value of the duty.

I was reading and thinking about a post discussing the Stallman Report¹ and a section leapt out and resonated for me:

"My biggest pet hate is the narrative that 'you, the user, will be free if you use Free Software'. No you won't, especially not if you are not technically inclined. We are freed together as a community, not as individuals."

And it crystallized a thought that has been knocking around my mind for months: …

1/2

¹: https://todon.eu/@carmenbianca/113324737736333160 / @carmenbianca , ht: @mos_8502

Build small, simple, inspectable programs.

Build them this way so others can understand them; so Future You can fix them, even when you're tired, when the duties of life rest heavily on your aching shoulders, when it would be easier to let the breakage lie.

Build simple things because fulfilling duty and taking responsibility is more important than automation.

@cks I don't think open source software will go away. The urge to tinker & share is too strong. FS/OSS might diverge from corporate/commercial interests again as the pendulum swings to & fro, but that might not even be a bad thing.

I believe that open source will continue to exist as long as there is one 16 year old kid who wants a database of video game widgets, one gardener who wants a seasonal shade calculator, one scholar who needs timezone conversion data.

The humanity will last.

Good morning get OUT of the FLOWERS

@silverwizard PREACH

@corbet hey, I wrote you a short thing: https://git.sr.ht/~gnomon/fetch-goo.gl-shortlink-dereferences

It turns out that the ~19,000 goo.gl shortlinks in that lore search you posted deduplicate down to about 360 unique shortlinks. The script in that repo can pull down about 285 of them. Stuffs 'em in a smol sqlite3 database with a simple index that makes lookups, even in a tight loop, close to instant.

It's only the very simplest proof of concept, but it _does_ work. The Lore picture is not as bad as I expected.

@vertigo look I'm not proud

(It's emacs. I think that qualifies as being able to run on Linux and being open source. The org-mode file I'm using as a shopping list and a shipping tracker lives in a git repo which I sync between my Android phone, the Debian household server, and my personal desktop machine.)

In addition to org-mode I also have the org-edna¹ package installed so that receiving a shipment can auto-close zero or more shopping list items in one step.

¹: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/org-edna-el/

If I never see another license server in my entire life it will be too damn soon. It's like finding a live coelacanth in your toilet, except you also find out that they're toothy and venomous and you make these discoveries when it clamps ten million needle teeth through both of your buttocks

@silverwizard WINNER

Pop quiz: how many cats are there in America?

There's a crow about twenty feet away from the deck I'm sitting on that appears to be amusing itself by taking a few steps away from a pile of dry leaves, then leaping into it (no wing flapping), rolling around a bit, then stepping away a little further to do it again.

(It seems to be totally fine because it has flown away and returned once or twice, it's just having fun.)

The New York Times should call on the convicted criminal to drop out of the presidential race, in every headline every morning until he does or until he's forced out. It should run stories above the fold every morning about the decisions a president makes that require moral character in the small, quiet parts of the job - insofar as there are any - that don't get press coverage or make the headlines. Next to each they should publish lists of every person Donald Trump has defrauded.

@Gargron @mousebot 🥳 THERE ARE LITERALLY DOZENS OF US 🎉

@Gargron how many emacs nerds..?

cc: @mousebot

@Gargron yooo, I was just there about five months ago!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/FXnHGvXowvJMhifEA