- Finished Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3.0) by Brandon Sanderson (9780765326379)(https://b-ark.ca/ei6gK8)
- (https://b-ark.ca/gouiQW)
@JasonNixonAB and the @Alberta_UCP once again failing to be transparent with the constituents that elected them? Say it ain’t so!
- (https://b-ark.ca/O8I08i)
Reminder: it’s a zillion times easier to hack Twitter and take over accounts of Apple, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, and others than it would be to hack their separate websites.
Distributed systems are safer.
- (https://b-ark.ca/ycGQ0U)
Huge thanks to the @CanadaCraftClub for switching away from styrofoam to paper-based packaging! The foam packaging always troubled me and was the one thing that made me consider cancelling. Now I can have beer shipped to my door guilt-free(-er)!
- (https://b-ark.ca/c0eIeS)
Pancakes and home made, home grown Haskap compote (fancy!). I love summer!
- (https://b-ark.ca/MCgyOA)
This five part series by The Digital Antiquarian (aka @DigiAntiquarian) on the history of shareware is a really fantastic read, especially if you grew up in that era.
Taking Control of Chat
Documenting my absurd journey to bridging an IRC client to a bunch of messaging services. Totally nuts and totally worth it.
IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is unquestionably the progenitor of modern online chat systems. IRC preceded instant messaging platforms like ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger, and in doing so connected people in real-time in a way that would lay the groundwork, not for just those instant messaging platforms that would follow, but for modern social media platforms as we know them today. And today, while certainly diminished, IRC still plays an important role in connected communities of people, particularly in the IT space.
But IRC isn’t without its flaws, and those flaws created openings for many competitors:
- Chatting is ephemeral. If you’re not connected there’s no way to receive messages that were sent while you were away.
- Text-based. No images or giphy animations here, and file sharing is direct, client-to-client only.
- The mobile story in general, and notifications in particular, are weak.
Now, the IRC community has worked hard to address the first problem with bouncers and changes to the IRC protocol (I’ll dig into this later).
Issue two… well, bluntly, I actually view that as a benefit rather than a drawback, but obviously that’s a matter of personal taste.
As for issue three, it’s still true that the mobile story isn’t great, though there is slow steady progress (Android now boasts a few pretty decent mobile IRC clients).
But IRC also has some enormous benefits:
- It’s open and federated. Running a server yourself is trivial.
- Clients are heavily customizable for power users.
- It’s fast and lightweight.
And these various other products (like Slack, Signal, etc) have some mirror image drawbacks:
- Closed walled gardens.
- Zero ability to customize.
- Heavy, memory- and CPU-intensive clients.
And then there is the fragmentation. My god the fragmentation. Every app is its own beast, with its own UX quirks, performance issues, bugs, and so on. Even the way they issue notifications varies from product to product. And some (I’m looking at you, Whatsapp) don’t offer a desktop client product at all.
I spend every day working with these messaging products, and I wanted to find out: Is there some way I could use an IRC client of my choice to interact with these various walled gardens (recognizing that, yes, that would come with some loss of functionality)?
Well, with a lot of hacking and elbow grease, I can definitely say the answer is yes! Though… this is, as is the case with many of my projects these days, probably not for the faint of heart…
Continue reading...Running Debian Buster on an OLPC
Back in 2008 I got an OLPC XO-1 during the G1G1 program. Question: Can you successfully run Debian Buster on this modest hardware? Answer: Yes!
Way back in the before time, in the long long ago of 2008, I decided to participate in the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One program. The vision of the program was compelling: play a small part in enabling childhood education by providing children in the poorest parts of the world access to cheap, simple, rugged computers. Load them with electronic books and educational software. Add support for wifi and mesh networking to enable connectivity. Unlock creativity in kids the way computers unlocked creativity in me.
Things didn’t exactly pan out as everyone had hoped, but I still ended up with my very own OLPC XO-1, and it’s sat quietly in a closet ever since, a toy that I take out and play with occasionally.
Well, we recently did a top-to-bottom purge of our house, and in doing so I once again ran across my XO-1. So I decided to take it out and play with it again. In particular, I was curious: what would it take to run the very latest version of Debian on this modest little device?
Turns out not much! But where it got tricky, it got really tricky…
Continue reading...- Currently reading Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3.0) by Brandon Sanderson (9780765326379)(https://b-ark.ca/4QSWw2)
- Finished Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive #2.0) by Brandon Sanderson (9781429949620)(https://b-ark.ca/MOc_A6)
Review: Words of Radiance
Review of Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive #2.0) by Brandon Sanderson (9781429949620)★★★★
(https://b-ark.ca/Ug_CC_)Book two of a two part pentology, Words of Radiance follows directly from The Way of Kings, in plot, structure, and pacing, but provides a satisfying climax for the first major act of this epic series.
Expected by his enemies to die the miserable death of a military slave, Kaladin survived to be given command of the royal bodyguards, a controversial first for a low-status "darkeyes." Now he must protect the king and Dalinar from every common peril as well as the distinctly uncommon threat of the Assassin, all while secretly struggling to master remarkable new powers that are somehow linked to his honorspren, Syl.
The Assassin, Szeth, is active again, murdering rulers all over the world of Roshar, using his baffling powers to thwart every bodyguard and elude all pursuers. Among his prime targets is Highprince Dalinar, widely considered the power behind the Alethi throne. His leading role in the war would seem reason enough, but the Assassin's master has much deeper motives.
Brilliant but troubled Shallan strives along a parallel path. Despite being broken in ways she refuses to acknowledge, she bears a terrible burden: to somehow prevent the return of the legendary Voidbringers and the civilization-ending Desolation that will follow. The secrets she needs can be found at the Shattered Plains, but just arriving there proves more difficult than she could have imagined.
Meanwhile, at the heart of the Shattered Plains, the Parshendi are making an epochal decision. Hard pressed by years of Alethi attacks, their numbers ever shrinking, they are convinced by their war leader, Eshonai, to risk everything on a desperate gamble with the very supernatural forces they once fled. The possible consequences for Parshendi and humans alike, indeed, for Roshar itself, are as dangerous as they are incalculable.
This review is coming many days after I finished this book, and having already started Oathbringer, I have to admit the plot is already blurring in my mind. But, I’ll do my best!
And, of course, it’s already been nearly a week since I started this review, so the book is blurring even more in my mind… oh well.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/4ICegG)
One week into upgrading my 5th gen X1 Carbon from @ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 and it’s darn near flawless! Thank you so much to everyone involved. I was delighted when I was able to wipe Windows 10 from this machine and I’ve never looked back.
- (https://b-ark.ca/8Wog8U)
First crack at Peter Reinhart’s Italian bread from BBA, in pull apart roll form. Turned out great!
DIY eReader News with RSS
Did you know Calibre can turn an RSS feed into an eBook? I didnt! It turns out Calibre, tt-rss, and Wallabag make it possible to roll your own news that you can read right on your eReader!
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again: I’m a big fan of RSS. For the uninitiated, RSS is a way to subscribe to a feed of content from a website and consume it in a reader or other tool of your choice. And despite claims that it’s dying out, I still manage to have more content in my feed reader than I possibly have time to consume.
For a long time I used Feedly as my RSS reader of choice. But back in October I decided to switch to tt-rss, a self-hosted RSS feed reading service that works on both browsers and through a mobile app. Then, in a fit of boredom, I used some self-hosted home automation tools to incorporate email newsletters into my feed. Meanwhile, I also decided to stand up an instance of Wallabag, a self-hosted website bookmarking service.
But I ran across a problem: with all this content at my fingertips, I started to fall behind, particularly on all those long-form articles and newsletters I want to read.
And then I discovered Calibre’s news scraping features and a solution presented itself!
Continue reading...
