Title photo
Think globally, microblog locally
Thu, 28 Feb 2019

This Old App is an interesting podcast about making apps, and it also has a very, very nice website that would be great for any podcast. My only question: Why the totally random, computer-generated filenames? https://thisoldapp.online/

Wed, 27 Feb 2019

Shared scooters don't last long https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long

1TB microSD cards are now a thing - Sam Byford/The Verge https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/25/18239433/1tb-microsd-card-sandisk-micron-price-release

Tue, 26 Feb 2019

How to start the ahavi and dbus (aka messagebus) daemons in OpenBSD with rcctl http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/Avahi-daemon-dbus-daemon-td280928.html

Mon, 25 Feb 2019

Xfce looks great on this laptop in OpenBSD, and it took very little effort on my part. Fonts display as good as Fedora, maybe better. And Xfce is very fast on this 2012-era HP laptop with a dual-core AMD CPU and 8 GB RAM.

I always think I can use Fvwm in OpenBSD, but it's not easy. Cwm is the new hotness, relatively speaking, but it's not for me right now, anyway. I did do some setup in Fvwm, adding my apps to the menu, and I do like having so many virtual desktops.

OpenBSD starts to get useful for me when I put Xfce on it. Now I have the fonts looking good, and it's easy to launch things. I used a couple of tutorials to get it done. None of them are complete. I will try to do one. I'm getting my .vimrc set up so I can do my work with it.

Krita and digiKam are very crashy in OpenBSD 6.4. I'm looking for an image-editing solution that allows editing of IPTC metadata (i.e. the captions in JPEGs). GIMP still won't do it. But gThumb will, and that's what I'm going to use.

How I ditched my phone and unbroke my brain - Kevin Roose/The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/business/cell-phone-addiction.html

Fri, 22 Feb 2019

These New Yorkers have been doing the same thing for 50, 60, 70 years — and love it too much to stop - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/jobs-love-decades.html

America’s professional elite: wealthy, successful and miserable - Charles Duhigg/The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/elite-professionals-jobs-happiness.html

My original post on the problems with Firefox, Windows 10, the Conexant audio driver and Flow. @HP finally updated the Conexant driver, but the behavior is the same. I'll probably use this solution again. https://passthejoe.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/i-had-to-switch-from-firefox-to-chrome-in-windows-10-and-im-not-happy-about-it/

I'm back with @firefox after a few weeks of @googlechrome in Windows 10. I had "reasons" for switching to Chrome, one of which was the Conexant audio driver, which makes Flow go nuts and eat CPU only when FF is running. Easiest fix: Kill flow in Task Manager.

How to learn EmberJS in a hurry – Jen Weber/Ember-ish https://medium.com/ember-ish/how-to-learn-emberjs-in-a-hurry-c6fdeae256a0

Thu, 21 Feb 2019

The Rise of the WeWorking Class - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/wework-coworking-office-space.html

COI - Chat Over IMAP is a universal chat protocol that is free, open, easy, safe and does not require developers to build or maintain a server https://www.coi-dev.org/

Wed, 20 Feb 2019

48 amazing JavaScript open source for the past year (2019) - Mybridge https://medium.mybridge.co/48-amazing-javascript-open-source-for-the-past-year-v-2019-ce51cdd10fb9

Should Twitter get rid of follower counts? – Lance Ulanoff/The Upgrade https://medium.com/s/the-upgrade/should-twitter-get-rid-of-follower-counts-6fa736fff3ae

More than 2,500 lecture slides on programming in C++ - Michael D. Adams/University of Victoria https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~frodo/cppbook/downloads/lecture_slides_for_programming_in_c++-2019-02-04.pdf

Seoul prepares to rip out its manufacturing heart, a neighborhood home to 10,000 shops and 50,000 tradespeople - Chris Michael/The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/20/end-of-an-era-seoul-prepares-to-rip-out-its-manufacturing-heart

Mon, 18 Feb 2019

Leading a meaningful life at older ages and its relationship with social engagement, prosperity, health, biology, and time use | PNAS https://www.pnas.org/content/116/4/1207

I’ve used Dvorak for 10 years, and I’m here to tell you it’s not all that - Jon Porter/The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/17/18223384/dvorak-qwerty-keyboard-layout-10-years-speed-ergonomics

My Windows 10 laptop pretty much died for three days -- the disk was at 100% solid. Then it miraculously returned to the living. I think it was choking on a software update.

I now have @syncthing running on two Windows PCs, an @OpenBSD PC and a @Raspberry_Pi Zero W

Wed, 13 Feb 2019

Google and IBM still trying desperately to move cloud market-share needle – Ron Miller/TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/google-and-ibm-still-trying-desperately-to-move-cloud-market-share-needle/

How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t do it. - Kurt Wagner/Recode https://www.recode.net/2019/2/12/18222558/kara-swisher-jack-dorsey-twitter-interview-conversation-karajack-livetweet

How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters) - Christie Lenneville/UX Collective https://uxdesign.cc/how-white-space-killed-an-enterprise-app-and-why-data-density-matters-b3afad6a5f2a

Mon, 11 Feb 2019

Using lftp to synchronize folders with a FTP account | Linux.com (I am going to try this) https://www.linux.com/blog/using-lftp-synchronize-folders-ftp-account

Quick reminder that Details/Summary is the easiest way ever to make an accordion | Chris Coyier/CSS-Tricks (and i want to try this ASAP) https://css-tricks.com/quick-reminder-that-details-summary-is-the-easiest-way-ever-to-make-an-accordion/

Help! None of my projects want to be SPAs | Jason Goldstein https://whatisjasongoldstein.com/writing/help-none-of-my-projects-want-to-be-spas/

What it’s like to work inside Apple’s ‘Black Site’ - Joshua Brustein/Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/apple-black-site-gives-contractors-few-perks-little-security

Sun, 10 Feb 2019

OpenBSD on a laptop - Cullum Smith: This is one of the best guides out there on how to get OpenBSD set up. I've done maybe half of the things he suggests. https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/

Sat, 09 Feb 2019

I'm leverging the fact that if a $35 @RaspberryPi works at all, a $5 to $10 @RaspberryPi can probably do ONE thing adequately

I am doing a project with a @Raspberry_Pi, and I didn't want to spend $ 35 on the Pi 3 B+, so I went for the Pi Zero W at $10. I would have gotten the non-WiFi version for $5, but I'm feeling just a little flush and don't want to bother with wired networking.

They were deported as kids. Now the Rubio sisters are California lawmakers – by @kevinmodesti for the @SGVTribune https://www.sgvtribune.com/2019/02/08/they-were-deported-as-kids-now-the-rubio-sisters-are-california-lawmakers/

Scripts to recursively chmod directories only and files only - Brian Zerangue/GitHub https://gist.github.com/bzerangue/3b210b009e8d934b4a68

I say this again, read @davewiner's http://scripting.com

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is much faster than Git Bash or Cygwin. I only wish it were even more baked in to the Windows desktop.

I vaguely remember that Facebook had/has a business-focused product that is basically just like Facebook, but without your friends/family and strictly for business. That could have competed with Slack, but the brand is too toxic. Google has Hangouts/Chat (or whatever they call it), but maybe Google Plus was a better solution. All of those products are languishing. So the morale of said story to startups is to find an original idea that's not easy, and you might just have the field to yourself. Even LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, could have played in the space. I really don't know why Slack pretty much stands alone, but it's sure good for them.

I know we all hate on Slack because it went from oddity to constant nag, but it's still way, way better than email for the real-time communication that genuinely improves how we do our jobs and actually saves time and effort. I'm surprised that Google/Microsoft don't want to compete in this space.

Fri, 08 Feb 2019

I remember building and applying patches to OpenBSD in the 5.x era. Now with syspatch, it's crazy easy to keep your base system up to date.

Thu, 07 Feb 2019

Not only is Syncthing available for OpenBSD, but you can install it with pkg_add https://syncthing.net

OMG, I'm already using Syncthing. I just downloaded and started running it. I didn't think it would be so easy. https://syncthing.net/

I'd love to get rid of Disqus. I just changed my ad "preferences" so only one ad is showing, not a ton of them. I don't begrudge Disqus making money, and I'd almost rather pay to make the ads go away, but I would prefer comments to be "native" to my blogging platform.

Wed, 06 Feb 2019

Does blogPoster work in OpenBSD? If you see this post, the answer is yes.

State of Clojure survey 2019 analysis – Daniel Compton https://danielcompton.net/2019/02/06/clojure-survey-2019

State of Clojure 2019 survey results - Alex Miller/Clojure.org https://clojure.org/news/2019/02/04/state-of-clojure-2019

The rise of the robot reporter - Jaclyn Peiser/The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html

Slack says it has filed to go public - but not with an IPO - Olivia Zaleski/Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/messaging-platform-provider-slack-says-it-s-filed-to-go-public

Patreon CEO: Business model is not sustainable, company seeing growth - Brandon Gomez/CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon-announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators-in-2019.html

From WordPress to Hugo, a mindset transition | Regis Philibert https://regisphilibert.com/blog/2019/01/from-wordpress-to-hugo-a-mindset-transition/

Tue, 05 Feb 2019

How do you turn around the culture of a 130,000-person company? Ask Microsoft's Satya Nadella — Simone Stolzoff/Quartz at Work https://qz.com/work/1539071/how-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-rebuilt-the-company-culture/

Mon, 04 Feb 2019

It's been years, but I forgot that OpenBSD doesn't support the Atheros 9485 WiFi chipset. They didn't then (circa 2012/14), they don't now (2019).

Sun, 03 Feb 2019

I didn't realize that merging git branches locally and on GitHub are two different things. The same is true for deleting branches. It's confusing, but I'm figuring it out. https://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster

While Twitter doesn't allow you to edit posts (and probably for good reason), I can fix hastily written posts on my personal microblog: http://updates.stevenrosenberg.net

Learning git by doing: I just figured out how to create a branch, merge my changes with the master and then change back to the master branch. Now I can work on features without breaking the master!

If you see a URL at the end of this post, blogPoster can now add them to a "raw" entry (one that doesn't originate with a live URL) http://updates.stevenrosenberg.net

He reconstructed Tom Brady’s knee. Now the Rams' doctor is rooting for L.A. - Dylan Hernandez/Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/sports/super-bowl/la-sp-super-bowl-elattrache-hernandez-20190130-story.html

Rams’ male cheerleaders make NFL history at the Super Bowl - Bill Plaschke/Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/sports/super-bowl/la-sp-super-bowl-rams-cheerleaders-20190130-story.html

Sat, 02 Feb 2019

I learned Vim through sheer will, using it all the time and seaching when I didn't know how to do something. I'm sure I could do the same with Emacs, but do I have that same will (especially now that I am so comfortable in Vim?