Title photo
Think globally, microblog locally
Sat, 29 Feb 2020

NearlyFreeSpeech.net estimates that my two sites (one production, one non-production) will cost me $1.96 per month. Total. For both.

I went to the downtown LA area near City Hall and Little Tokyo at night for the first time in a long time. A LOT of homeless. Hundreds of tents.

In this @debian install, I didn't do encrypted LVM, or LVM at all. I went for straight partitions, one for swap, one for /. I'm changing my philosophy on partitioning. #KeepItSimple

I installed Debian Buster on a mid-2011 iMac. I went for a dual boot with MacOS, using the REFInd boot manager to make it slightly more civilized. I used the nonfree-firmware Debian installer but still had to add firmware to get the Radeon card to work. #FunWithRunLevel3

Fri, 28 Feb 2020

Unless I'm incorrect, @debian Live images used to all ship with nonfree firmware, but now they don't, though live images with nonfree firmware are available in the nonfree "area"

Unix as IDE - Tom Ryder: TONS of great tips here https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/

How to prepare for coronavirus in the United States - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/02/26/how-to-prepare-for-coronavirus/?arc404=true

I now have two sites on @nfsn. http://updates.passthejoe.net and http://passthejoe.net

Thu, 27 Feb 2020

Steven Rosenberg's microblog of short posts has moved to a new hosting provider and is now being actively updated by the blogPoster script via SFTP. http://updates.passthejoe.net/

Wed, 26 Feb 2020

I replaced ftp with sftp in my blogPoster Ruby script that posts to Twitter and a personal microblog

Tue, 25 Feb 2020

Getting the user and permissions right for files and directories where Perl CGI programs write to files via the Apache web server is a delicate operation.

Sun, 23 Feb 2020

Use Haven to turn your old Android phone into a monitoring device that detects motion, sound, vibration and light. https://github.com/guardianproject/haven

Fri, 21 Feb 2020

The most famous teen basketball players go to Sierra Canyon - Reeves Wiedeman/The Intelligencer https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/sierra-canyon-basketball-team.html

Thu, 20 Feb 2020

Could micro-credentials compete with traditional degrees? - Anisa Purbasari Horton/BBC Worklife https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200212-could-micro-credentials-compete-with-traditional-degrees

Date Formatter Ruby gem makes it easy to configure strftime formats. I remember Golang being this easy, so glad to see this for Ruby. https://github.com/feedreader/pluto/tree/master/date-formatter

Wed, 19 Feb 2020

Once again, @davidallen909 makes the Inland Empire look like a million bucks: Molly sells Molly’s Souper in Upland but stays on at homey restaurant https://www.dailybulletin.com/2020/02/18/molly-sells-mollys-souper-in-upland-but-stays-on-at-homey-restaurant/

Tue, 18 Feb 2020

Thank you, @twitter, for randomly refreshing my timeline while I'm in the middle of reading a tweet.

Sat, 15 Feb 2020

I went back to work on the effort to convert my blogPoster Ruby script to a class-based program

Debian has released a security update for the Evince document viewer https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4624

Thu, 13 Feb 2020

If you look at the Slackware Linux web site, the project appears to be frozen in time. But development continues, and the distro is up to date. If you want a Linux that doesn't use systemd, this is it. http://www.slackware.com/

Customizing mini 4WD racers for high speeds on a small scale - Ars Technica Video. (I did not know in any way that this was a thing. It's like 1960s slot car racing for the 2020s. https://arstechnica.com/video/watch/customizing-mini-4wd-racers-for-high-speeds-on-a-small-scale

The @debian project has released a @firefox ESR security update for Stable (aka Buster). https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4620

Mon, 10 Feb 2020

Windows 7 bug prevents users from shutting down or rebooting computers | Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-7-bug-prevents-users-from-shutting-down-or-rebooting-computers/

How your laptop ruined your life: Smartphones aren’t the only killers of work-life balance - Amanda Mull/The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/laptops-killed-work-life-balance/606334/

The age of decadence: Cut the drama. The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation. - Ross Douthat/The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/sunday/western-society-decadence.html

Sat, 08 Feb 2020

If you want to code in C/C++ in @netbeans, you can run @coolbeans instead http://openbeans.org/blog/2019/open-source.html

It's great to see @openbeans, the @netbeans distribution, going open source. thanks @emilianbold http://openbeans.org/

Thu, 06 Feb 2020

@debian is released approximately every two years. That means Debian 11 should go stable about mid-2021. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases

Uses This / Alice Maz is where I learned about @voidlinux https://usesthis.com/interviews/alice.maz/

Void Linux - the strangely overlooked distribution - Andrew Powell/The Linux Rain https://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/void-linux-the-strangely-overlooked-distribution

Void Linux review: It's a Linux and BSD hybrid - John Paul/It's FOSS https://itsfoss.com/void-linux/

Void Linux: built from scratch for full independence - Jack M. Germain/LinuxInsider https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/Void-Linux-Built-From-Scratch-for-Full-Independence-85703.html

DistroWatch review of Void Linux (2018) https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20181217#void

@Void Linux is a rolling distro that uses the runit init system (instead of systemd) and its own xpbs package manager. It is not a fork of anything, say developers. https://voidlinux.org/

Wed, 05 Feb 2020

Twitter, should tweets end with a period? Just wondering.

If your "job" is cold-calling people on the phone with the intent of selling them things they don't want or need, or outright scamming them, please quit now and do ANYTHING else.

Tue, 04 Feb 2020

You CAN get a Gibson ES-330-like guitar in the form of Heritage's H-530 https://heritageguitars.com/pages/h-530

If I were in the market for an ES-175, I'd seriously look at Heritage's H-575 https://heritageguitars.com/pages/h-575

Mini projects built with HTML5, CSS & JavaScript. No frameworks or libraries - Brad Traversy https://github.com/bradtraversy/vanillawebprojects

Sat, 01 Feb 2020

Scrappy start-up Iowa Starting Line is the 'it' read for political insiders - Michael M. Grynbaum/The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/media/iowa-caucus-media-starting-line.html