Tech

This strikes me as more wishful thinking than likely, but Nikki Usher over on NeimanLab is predicting " the year of the RSS reader" to replace Twitter and curb the deluge of newsletters in our inboxes.

I’ve been doing a lot of “set things up and tear them down again” lately, and the combination of Fedora 37, Cockpit and the Cockpit Machines application, plus an old Core i7 machine with 64GB of RAM is making that a piece of cake. The Cockpit Project is a fantastic project that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. It’s a web-based graphical interface for Linux systems, and it can shave a lot of time (and reading man pages…) off basic system administration tasks. ...

Spent the bulk of the day today doing a little product testing, which involved a lot of yak shaving. Setting up a few servers to test, creating users, etc. It’s been a little while since I spent a whole day at the console. It’s been simultaneously fun, humbling, and eye-opening. Fun, for obvious reasons. Humbling, because my admin skills are a bit rusty and outdated. And eye-opening because of the sheer number of things that actually do “just work” which … hasn’t always been the case. ...

Mastodon is an odd beast. This has been discussed a lot from the user’s point of view, but not so much from the organizational point of view. Specifically, should organizations provide users with branded/hosted instances, and what kind of policies apply for this new breed of social media? (Note: I’m going to use “Mastodon” here, but this really applies to any kind of federated social media over ActivityPub or similar where users are identified in the “@user@organization.tld” format.) ...

It’s been more than 15 years since I worked for Data393 ( which doesn’t actually exist anymore…) but I still miss one of the perks of that job: 2U of rack space and a network drop with an IP address. Data393 was a hosting company in Denver and I worked in the NOC and as advanced support in 2004-2005. I mostly worked weekends, during a lull in my freelance writing. It was a great job where I learned a ton in short time about system administration and troubleshooting, the business of running a data center, customer support… and I really enjoyed the team there, too. ...

My Mastodon network is picking up nicely. It’s not quite reached the same level or variety of activity from Twitter, but it’s getting there. I wonder if there’s a chance we can revive actual blogging as well? I’m giving it a shot with a 100 day blogging “challenge” for myself.

Installed Fedora 37 today and it was a pretty smooth experience. No surprises there. One of the recommended applications (Apostrophe) looked interesting so I installed that and found it wouldn’t start. Poking a bit at the terminal I got a Python error that I chased down on google and tracked back to a missing package (webkit2gtk4.0). Once I installed that it ran just fine. Went to file a bug and found that I can’t log in with my Fedora Account Services (FAS) account because it had been associated with my Red Hat email. Tried changing it but either it’s not syncing quickly or there’s a snafu elsewhere. ...

The surge of people joining Mastodon and the Fediverse the past few days has been inspiring. I’m optimistic about the potential for a better web, but experience keeps whispering in my ear. Right now, people are fired up and ready to try new things. They’re happy to sign up, post a few “toots” to Mastodon, and think about a better web where things are decentralized and users have more control of their destiny. You know, the standard “DIY is better” package. Like when everybody started baking their own bread at the start of the pandemic in 2020. ...

I’ve been putting the reMarkable 2 through its paces since I got it a few days ago. In this post I’m going to jot down some thoughts about its overall usability whether it might replace my trusty paper notebooks. Spoiler alert: quite possibly! Making marks on the reMarkable 2 First consideration: How’s the writing experience? The tablet could have all the whiz-bang features ever, but if the tactile experience of writing on it doesn’t live up to writing on paper, then what’s the point? ...

Is the reMarkable 2 a suitable replacement for pen and paper? Does it work well with Linux? I hope to find out! I’ll be writing about my experiences with the tablet over the next week and beyond. If you’ve been on the fence, feel free to follow along. (Assuming I don’t absolutely hate it and decide to send it back…) Linux, reMarkable and the elusive paper-free future I’ve been hoping to get to a point where tablets would match the experience and ease of writing on paper since the first iPad came out. The iPad with an Apple Pencil is good. The tactile experience still leaves something to be desired, however. It feels like writing on glass. ...