Tech

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....

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....

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....

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 unintentional theme of today’s Link-o-Rama is, apparently, tech nostalgia and why old tools are the best tools. The File Transfer Protocol is now 50 years old. 50. FTP has outlasted quite a few protocols in that time, evolved a great deal, and been used to transfer Heaven only knows how many files. I hope that Abhay Bhushan is basking a bit in the knowledge that his creation is still widely used half a century later....

A few of the posts I found interesting this week. 17 (ever so slightly) weird facts about the most popular dictionary format: " the dictionary format of Hunspell has a lot of peculiarities. Depending on your mindset, you might find the facts below curious, fascinating, ridiculous, or just plain boring. " ( zverok with ruby) Q&A with John Kozubik: Long-form Q&A with the CEO of rsync.net on console.dev. Interesting for his discussion of personal technology / tools....

Doom: Eternal is a pretty good name for a franchise that keeps getting ported, updated, and rebooted more than 25 years after it first launched. Though I don’t do much gaming these days, the siren song of Doom was just too much for me and I caved and bought a PS4 and a copy of Doom: Eternal a few weeks ago and have been playing it off and on for about a week....