You can't keep politics out of it

Everything is political now Mike Masnick wrote an article on Techdirt recently about why he’s leaning in to “political” coverage on the site. To put it succinctly: When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. I get that there are people who might want to escape politics in the safe haven of technology.

New blog (platform), who dis?

New Year’s Resolution accomplished One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2025 was to move my blog away from WordPress.com. The reasons for that should be relatively obvious, but you can read my most recent article about it if you aren’t up on the latest shenanigans around Automattic and such. It’s a disappointing tale, to be sure. I had decided a few years ago that I was done futzing with new blogging platforms and was standardizing on WordPress.

A little aerc configuration tip

I’ve: been using aerc for a bit now to test it out as my default mail client. I have to say that I’m truly loving it. Today I was trying to clean up the view so that I wasn’t looking at two dozen old IMAP folders in the folders pane, and remapping a few folder names when I ran into what I thought was a snag but was actually a failure on my part to configure things properly at first.

OpenTofu project serves up stable release

August of last year, Hashicorp decided to move its products away from open source licenses to a source-available license with fuzzy parameters on its use in production. Shortly afterwards, the community forked Terraform as OpenTF and then it was endorsed and picked up by the Linux Foundation as OpenTofu. Now the project is ready to declare a stable release that it says is a production-ready “drop-in replacement for Terraform.” OpenTofu isn’t a direct clone of Terraform, however.

No, WordPress doesn't offer newsletters – not really

Switching away from Substack is a hot topic right now, for reasons I won’t belabor here (hint: it’s because of the Nazis) – which means that people are searching for alternatives. One that’s getting tossed around is WordPress. As much as I’d love that to be true, the WordPress Newsletter functionality is not what most folks think of when you think “newsletter.”

Catch me at Ohio LinuxFest (OLF)

Ohio LinuxFest (or OLF these days) is returning to Columbus, Ohio on September 8th and 9th. Happy to announce that I’m going to be doing the Friday keynote, " Open Source Can’t Win."

:w gnu_bram_moolenaar.md

Just learned this morning that Bram Moolenaar, creator and maintainer of Vim, passed away recently at 62. I’ve been a user of Vim since my 20s, so even though I’ve never met Bram his work has been an important part of my life. I’ve already written about how I got started with Vim a while back, so I won’t rehash that here. Suffice to say that I’ve spent a lot of time in Vim since 1999 when I got started with it.

Tab Overflow: Markdown for timelines, AI for 78s, the superpower of being glue, and maddog on Red Hat

Still working on the next installment of the Clone Wars, but in the meantime… some interesting things I’ve stumbled on the past few days. AI Audio Challenge: Audio Restoration of 78rpm Records — The Internet Archive is looking for “a program that can take all or many of the 400,000 unrestored records” in its 78rpm archive and clean them up. They have 1,600 examples of 78s that were cleaned up manually by humans, and are hoping that they can be used to train a program to do the work in an automated fashion.

Red Hat and the Clone Wars VI: Obfuscating Kernel Code for Fun and Profit

In our last episode we talked about the origins of Oracle Linux. This time around, we’ll look at one of Red Hat’s responses to the threat posed by Oracle Linux. Specifically, Red Hat’s decision to “obfuscate” the kernel source delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, and how it communicated (or didn’t) those decisions.

AlmaLinux makes its choice: The friendly fork

The AlmaLinux project, after taking some time to think it over, has decided to pursue RHEL compatibility but is no longer aiming to be 1:1 “bug-for-bug” compatible with RHEL. Be sure to read their announcement from Chair of the Board, benny Vasquez. Board minutes are also available.

Red Hat and the Clone Wars V: Oracle Linux Origins

Since Oracle has weighed in about Red Hat’s source changes, it’s time to take a look at the history of Oracle Linux. That takes us back to 2006, the world of enterprise computing, and into new markets. Specifically, Java and middleware.

Red Hat and the Clone Wars IV: Knives Out

Today SUSE announced its intent to do a “hard fork” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and yesterday Oracle came out with a press release aimed squarely at Red Hat and IBM, and trying to claim the high road in keeping Linux “open and free.” It’s fair to say that the knives are out. It’s not surprising but it is disappointing in a number of ways.

Red Hat and the Clone Wars III: The dawn of CentOS

Until the announcement that CentOS Linux 8 would be EOL at the end of 2021, CentOS users enjoyed a relatively drama-free period of stability that might suggest RHEL has always had a viable, dependable clone with predictable releases. That is, as you’re probably already guessing, very far from the truth.

Red Hat and the Clone Wars II: A history of the early 2000s Linux landscape

After Saturday’s post I wanted to take a step back and talk about some history that many have either forgotten or weren’t familiar with in the first place. Some may remember it quite well, but haven’t quite gotten the lessons right the first time around. Let’s talk about Red Hat Linux and the early days of Red Hat Enterprise Linux before it was even called that.

Red Hat sets the standard

My Linux journey started with Slackware Linux in 1996, completely by accident. By that I mean that I had never heard of Linux or sought it out, until I stumbled on a 4-CD set and decided I wanted to learn more. I was studying English lit and Communications/Journalism at a state school in the northeast corner of Missouri. Nobody I knew cared much about computers beyond games or running Word to write their papers. It was literally years before I met someone else who was an avid Linux user.

It was a surprise to learn, a bit later, that Slackware was a Linux and that many distributions existed. As I learned more and more about Linux, though, something became clear: Red Hat was the popular choice. Red Hat was the Coca-Cola of Linux, even before its IPO in mid-1999.

Red Hat and the Clone Wars

It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s announcement that CentOS Stream will be the sole repo for public RHEL-related source code releases has generated a lot of chatter and exposed a lot of misconceptions about what the GPL requires and doesn’t.

WordPress, poster child of the LAMP stack, turns 20

WordPress turned 20 over the weekend. Older than that, if you count the b2 codebase WordPress forked from. 20 years for a project is quite an accomplishment, but WordPress hasn’t merely survived for 20 years. The open source CMS powers a huge chunk of the Internet and has shown how commerce and community can coexist successfully for the long haul. It’s hard to convey how impressive WordPress was when it was launched, if you haven’t dabbled with the CMSes of the time.

Everything you need to know about Vim and text on Linux (Slides)

Last week I had the opportunity to present at Open Source Summit North America (2023) in the Open Source On-Ramp track. I promised to upload my slides by Monday of this week (oops) but didn’t factor in getting COVID. Apologies to anybody who came looking for the slides previously, I was pretty much under the weather all week. Better late than never, I hope. Here’s the deck in PDF form: Everything you need to know about Vim and text on Linux.

SOSSA and CRA Spell Trouble for Open Source Software

Even though I’m no longer writing full time, I do have a “bucket list” of publications I’d still like to write for, and Dark Reading has been one of those publications for many years. Happily for me, I get to cross that one off (though I’d do it again!) with this article, " SOSSA and CRA Spell Trouble for Open Source Software." Short version: Some ill-considered legislation that’s coming in the wake of Log4Shell poses a threat to open source software, particularly the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

Stop calling things "clickbait" already

My friends, I have a request. That request is, for all that’s Holy, stop calling things “clickbait.” It’s an old and busted term that has no place in the media landscape of 2023.

Copyright consistency

I keep thinking about the arguments around content being used for AI data sets and the arguments around content being archived/offered by sites like Internet Archive. They don’t seem consistent, on either side. Corporations are happy to use data sets scraped from copyrighted content, but they surely don’t want their copyrighted content slurped up into data sets without compensation. On the flip side, a lot of the folks who (IMO rightly) support Internet Archive don’t want corporations to flex copyright against IA on the basis of IA being a public good.

See you at Open Source Summit North America!

In just a few weeks I’m going to be dusting off the slide clicker and giving two talks at Open Source Summit North America. I’ll be giving one talk on databases and containers, and another talk about working with text on Linux using Vim and other tools. Kind of a 101 for people who might want to delve into some command line magic for working with text. Are Containers Ready for Production Databases?

Why would writing be any different?

Fair warning, I’m going to wade into the whole AI/ChatGPT discussion. It’s been discussed to death, but I’m going to jump in anyway. Feel free to click away if you’re already sick of the topic.  I’m going to use “ChatGPT” as a stand-in for ML/AI-driven writing tools, even though it’s not the only one on the market and there’s certainly more to come.

Anyway, it seems like ChatGPT is poised to automate away a lot of writing work, and we’re in for tools that are going to produce a whole lot of content of varying quality and accuracy whether we like that prospect or not.

What If Everybody Did It (WIEDI)?

Most people, I think, tend only to think about their actions and interactions as one-offs. That is, we think “what happens if I do this” and consider the impact from that perspective. But what if we considered the outcomes and impacts if everybody (or even a lot of people) do the same thing? We might act differently. And maybe we should think that way more often. Let’s talk about What If Everybody Did It (WIEDI)? (Don’t worry, there’s a tie-in to open source and community in here, too…)

Why your talk was rejected (or maybe accepted)

I had a few snarky opening lines for this post, but decided that was a bit unfair. Let’s just say that people get very impassioned about tech events and getting talks accepted. If you’re on the conference committee, it can be… intense, sometimes, managing the needs of an event versus people’s deep interest in being one of the speakers. I thought it’d be helpful to give some insights into why talks are and aren’t accepted.

That's 100...

Today is, if I don’t miss my count, 100 days since I started the 100 day blogging challenge. I’ve updated the site every day since November 21st last year. It’s been a good exercise. Some days I don’t have a lot left in the tank after work, some days I feel like I could do two or three posts. Focusing here has been great for breaking the Twitter habit. Question is whether I plan to keep going or take a break.

Mini PC review: Beelink SER5 Pro with AMD Ryzen 5 5600H

About a month ago I bought a Beelink SER5 Pro Mini PC and have been using it as a desktop and test machine. I thought I’d give a quick review in case anybody else is looking at one of these for their own use.

The SER5 was a bit shy of $400 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB NVMe drive. Its footprint is about 4.5 inches (almost) square, and not quite 2 inches tall. That’s 126mm wide, 113mm long, 42mm tall if you prefer metric.  It’s got 3 USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port, a 1GB Ethernet port, 2 HDMI ports, and a single USB-C port.

Gratuitous birthday post 2023 style

Chalk up one more orbit around the Sun for me. Another year older and maybe a little wiser. Certainly the stretch between the last birthday and this one has been full of life lessons. Not making much of a fuss about the birthday thing this year, just sort of quietly observing the occasion and spending time with the fam. A big slice of cake, some good food, perhaps just a sip or three of good Scotch, and a couple of presents to open.

What's the deal with night mode?

At the risk of sounding like a Jerry Seinfeld bit, what is the deal with night mode? I was in a meeting today where somebody touted night mode in a tool as a Really Good Thing™ and I’m perplexed. I’m not perplexed about what night mode (or dark mode) is. I might be a bit dense, but not quite that dense. I’ve experimented with tons of themes, etc., over the years on Linux desktop environments.

Happy Presidents' Day, President Carter

I was sad to learn over the weekend that former president Jimmy Carter has entered hospice care. But I’m not surprised that President Carter is facing the end of his life the same way he’s behaved his entire life – with dignity and grace. Carter was the first person I voted for for president, with an asterisk. The asterisk being that I was in middle school and I voted for Carter in a mock election.

Making things vs. making the best things

Nice post I discovered on the Orange site today, " I don’t like making the best things." Short summary, trying to make the “best” things gets in the way of doing things we enjoy. Specifically the author talks about blogging less often after they discovered they “only want to publish the best things, so I didn’t publish at all.” Not exactly a new concept, but one that we probably all need to hear or read on a regular basis.

Time to update your... cable?

Anybody else feel like the barrage of app and operating system updates is getting to be a bit much? Not only the pace of updates, which shows no signs of slowing, but also the continual expansion of devices that require updates. Keeping your computer updated was no big deal. Then gaming consoles, smartphones, tablets, e-readers, smart watches, smart TVs, routers… it’s easy to feel like you spend more time updating devices than using them.

My new favorite GNOME extension: quake-mode

Guake has long been a favorite application of mine. If you’re new to Guake, it’s a terminal application for Linux that stays out of site until it’s summoned with a hotkey, like the console in Id Software’s Quake games. Hit F12 or whatever combo you set up for it, and it slides into view over the top of other windows. When you’re done, bang the hotkey again and it slides back up out of sight.

Blacklight: A real-time website privacy inspector

Ever wondered what kind of trackers are on any given site? Check out Blacklight, a web-based tool to reveal specific user-tracking technologies on a site. I stumbled on this via The Markup and thought it might be interesting for privacy minded folks. (See: " How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector" from 2020.) I ran it on a few sites just to see what I got back. GNOME’s extensions website was clean.

In case your current keyboard is too practical... the Cube Keyboard

To follow up on yesterday’s post about word processors, here’s a new entry for keyboard enthusiasts: The Cube Keyboard. It’s a keyboard that’s… a cube. I don’t think he’s going to win any typing speed contests with this one. Hat tip to Lobste.rs for this one.

My first word processor

This week I took a little trip down memory lane when a friend posted a meme or something about Stephen King’s Wang word processor in the 1980s.

That was early for me, but sometime in 1993 or 1994 I bought my first word processor. Not a general purpose computer with a word processor, but a Brother Word Processor. It was substantially less profit-generating for me than King’s Wang. Then again, it wasn’t a five-figure investment, either. Maybe $250, certainly no more than $300. At 23 or 24, though, that was a major investment. I’ve owned cars that cost less.

Things they don't teach, but should: Content review

Writing and editing are taught widely in schools and professional programs, but content review is a neglected and unloved (and rare) skill that I’ve never seen taught or even acknowledged – but it’s widely required in jobs throughout the tech industry. If you’re a product manager, product marketer, comms professional, content writer, developer advocate, community manager – take your pick – you probably need to participate in content review as part (or most) of your job, but do you feel confident you’re doing it well and efficiently?

Real browser alternatives on iOS?

Ars and The Register (and probably others) are reporting that Google and Mozilla are working on “browsers that break current App Store rules.” You know, browsers that aren’t dependent on Apple’s rendering engine. Actual full-fledged browsers. For various reasons I use iOS as the least-bad option (for me) between Android and iOS. But this is a thing that’s bugged me a long time. To be honest, I don’t really understand Apple’s reasoning here.

No, Netflix isn't chopping down your family

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, and tend to agree with him on most things, but this screed about Netflix changing its “family” settings is not one of them.

Realities of the Fediverse: ActivityPub and Mastodon have room to improve

The fediverse is a grand improvement in many ways over walled gardens like Twitter, but there’s plenty of room to improve. For example, federation does little good for users on a site that unexpectedly shuts down without time for users to migrate.

Reconnecting with art

Art museums are a holy place for me, like good book stores and record stores. Little bubbles where we curate our attempts to communicate, to make others feel something. Or, simply, to create. Art museums are where yesterday and today meet, and the dead tongues and hands of our past selves live again for a moment. Stand here, look. Gaze into someone else’s heart and mind for a time. If humans have a purpose, surely art is a crucial part of it.

Can we get AIs to work the DMV?

While startups are busy trying to put (more) people out of work writing or doing artwork, how about turning some attention towards the DMV?

Poking at Distrobox

I’m probably late to the party, but Distrobox has to be one of the best open source projects to drop in the past few years.

Deep-dive into the "Dune" font, Davison Art Nouveau

Whether the Dune series is your cup of tea or not, anybody who’s spent more than a little time in the sci-fi section of a book store is likely familiar with the series’ book covers and the unusual typeface. I caught a link off the Orange site to a story on Fonts In Use about the history of the typeface that graces Frank Herbert’s series, and it’s right up my alley.

How have your social media habits changed since the Twitter takeover?

It’s been a few months now since the Twitter Takeover, and Musk’s gutting of the Twitter workforce and various antics. I haven’t deleted my account, but I set it to private and set up shop on Mastodon in mid-November. Curious about what others have done and how your habits have changed (if at all).

Creating slides with Markdown using Marp

Need to make a presentation, but don’t like using a GUI app? Take a look at Marp, the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem.

Something I should've done a long time ago: Installing Pi-hole

Spent some quality Sunday time today refurbishing some older mini PCs that had been gathering dust so I could run a few personal projects. One of the projects I’ve had on my to-do list an embarrassingly long time is to set up Pi-hole for ad blocking / filtering. If I’d known it’d be that easy I’d have done it a long time ago! I installed Pi-hole on an ancient Core i3 NUC with 8GB of RAM running Debian.

Absolute silliness: Hampster Invaders

You remember Space Invaders? You remember the Hampster Dance? Get ready for Hampster Invaders.

Lazyweb: Matching compatible mini-PCs with RAM / NVMe on hand?

I’ve recently upgraded a few laptops and have some NVMe drives and spare RAM on hand. Rather than letting them gather dust or try to sell them online, I’d like to match them with inexpensive mini PCs for use in my home lab.

Suggestions on the best way to backwards-match this?

Laws of technology and remote work

Some observations on a Friday evening about the realities of home offices and technology. Fa A laptop’s cabling will always be located on the maximally inconvenient side. Especially power cords with bulky connectors. Internet only fails before or during an important teleconference or the most suspenseful part of a movie or show. This is also true of power outages. Hotel internet is most reliable at mid-range hotels. Fleabag hotels and swank resorts have uniformly crappy internet.

USB-C is simple, right? Well...

One of the nice things about USB-C is its simplicity, right? No more figuring out which side is up to plug into a device. The connector is super-friendly. But… that’s where the simplicity stops.

The scorpion strikes: Still speaker-less after 11 votes

Clearly nobody taught Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the establishment GOP the lesson of the frog and the scorpion. It would be funny if it was a plot on a modern West Wing, but it just seems like a harbinger of more problems to come. After 11 tries, the U.S. House of Representatives has failed to appoint a speaker, due to in-fighting and extortion from the most extreme wing of an already extreme party.

MacBook Pro 2015 update: The winner is Pop!_OS

After a few tries to put Fedora on the MacBook Pro 2015, I auditioned a number of other Linux distros and wound up going with Pop!_OS.

I gave Chrome OS Flex a brief spin, but it wasn’t quite my jam. If you like Chrome OS and have an old PC or Mac you’d like to give a little more life to, I give it a thumbs up. I was able to install some regular Linux apps on it as well as the standard Chrome apps, but found Firefox to be sluggish and generally just didn’t click with Chrome OS.

Two observations about Mastodon in early 2023

Tonight, not for the first time, I learned about a “breaking news” item from Mastodon. That’s been happening more often over the past few weeks, whereas this time last year I’d have gotten this kind of thing via Twitter first. This seems significant to me because Mastodon is making the leap from “a small group of people talking about the service itself a lot” to “several of my friends are here and there’s some community” to “a news source” rather quickly.

Resolutions for 2023

Here it is, finally, the last day of 2022. None too soon. As the meme says, I’m going into 2023 real quiet-like and hoping for a better year. I’ve set aside the idea that a new year means a new me, or that I have the ability to embark on a massive self-improvement campaign just because the odometer has rolled over on another year. But I like to reflect on some things I’d like to have done come this time next year.

Friday night’s alright for cat pics…

Home from a great visit with my brothers. Enjoy some cat pics! Bubby looking dignified Willow giving side-eye

Lazyweb: Best Linux distro for a 2015 MacBook Pro?

Apple has decided that my 2015 MacBook Pro isn’t deserving of the latest macOS, so I’m looking to run Linux on it to get a few more years out of it. My first plan was to put Fedora on it, but Fedora 36 and 37 have failed to " set a new efi boot target." Chrome OS Flex installed just fine, but I don’t know if I want to stick with Chrome OS long-term.

Link-o-Rama: Desert of Social Media, a raccoon and snow, dissecting the LastPass communications

Long day, let’s hit the links. Great post from Cat Valente about the continual ruination of online social communities by corporations and malicious actors. (My words.) " Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media." From Cat, “It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you.

Why don't people just...?

Bit of a rant here, so be warned… Caught two threads today with the general gist of “why don’t people just…” –specifically, why haven’t people learned from Twitter or just sucked it up and started using 2FA, no matter what level of computer literacy they might be at. Why don’t open source projects just stand up Mattermost instead of Discord? Why haven’t users finally learned and started adopting 2FA? In the first instance, I think people just imagine standing up a service and don’t think about the long-term implications of offering a service like Mattermost for a project.

Year of the RSS reader?

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.

Space debris, normalcy bias, RSS as the foundation for social media

Too many tabs open in the browser today, even compared with my usual tab overload. Good piece on Ars about space debris. Pull quote by Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist from the University of Texas at Austin, “I also predict that we will see a loss of human life by (1) school-bus sized objects reentering and surviving reentry and hitting a populated area, or (2) people riding on this wave of civil and commercial astronauts basically having their vehicle getting scwhacked by an unpredicted piece of junk.

Careful when cloning: Editing machine IDs for fun and profit

Today I was setting up some VMs on Fedora in Cockpit and decided to clone an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS image, which immediately pulled the same IP as the original. I hadn’t had that issue with CentOS or Debian, not quite sure why, but the culprit is a duplicate machine ID. Here’s how to fix that.

Fedora 37 + Cockpit + Cockpit Machines = Joy

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.

The note-taking winner is... Joplin. For now

A few weeks ago I posed a question about a note-taking app to beat Vim, Markdown and Git. So far, that winner is Joplin.

I’d tried Joplin once or twice but bounced off of it for one reason or another. The UI is a little less compelling than other native apps, I’d like a bit more between-note linking features, but after a couple of weeks of sticking with it, it’s growing on me.

Yak-shaving day

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.

Where does Mastodon fit with social media policies?

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.

Link-o-Rama: Banning AI, thinking about failure, goblin mode

Today’s been a good, but busy, day. Too busy to finish off that post that’s been lurking, for months, in my drafts but a good day to drop a few links that might be interesting.

One of the best job perks I ever had...

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.

Hello Percona!

Happy to share that I started a new job this week as Head of Community at Percona! I know it’s traditional to talk about how excited you are for a new job, but it’s true, I’m really psyched about the opportunity, the team I’ll be working with and Percona as a company.

Percona’s philosophy and mission align really nicely with my personal values. Percona is committed to open source and helping its customers succeed with open source databases. Not open core, open source.

20 blogging and article prompts for tech bloggers

Stumped for ideas what to blog about? Not sure what people would want to read that would be worth writing about? Here’s 20 prompts to get you started (some tweaking may be required).

Yesterday I wrote about the 100 days of blogging challenge. A friend of mine asked if I had a good source of prompts for folks interested in doing something similar. Truth is, I hadn’t thought much about that.

100 day blogging challenge: Let's get those RSS feeds going again

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.

Extremely minimal blogging with WriteFreely

Loving the explosion of IndieWeb activity. For fun I decided to try out WriteFreely, a really minimal blog with ActivityPub features.

How I got started with Vim

Yesterday I made an offhand comment about the long story of how I got started with Vim, so I figured I’d follow up today with that. That story takes us all the way back to 1999.

Is there a note-taking app that beats Vim, Markdown, and Git?

Usually I avoid post titles / headlines in the form of a question, but I’m genuinely curious: Have you found a good note-taking app that’s ultimately better than just plain text files in Markdown with Vim (optionally synced with Git)?

Vivaldi jumps into social while Twitter burns

Looks like Vivaldi is the first to jump on Mastodon/the Twitter exodus as an opportunity to boost their other offerings. The company launched “Vivaldi Social” on November 15th, which is a Vivaldi-run instance of Mastodon tied in with their other offerings. From their post, “Vivaldi Social is a natural progression for us, given our existing reliable alternatives to Big Tech — a feature-rich and flexible browser with a built-in mail client, calendar, and feed reader.

Little bug in Apostrophe in Fedora 37 (or "oh, I can't log into bugzilla")

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.

Stop normalizing Musk (and why "work harder" isn't going to do it for Twitter)

One of the most disheartening things about the Musk takeover of Twitter is how his malignant narcissism is being treated as normal. Even sadder, celebrated, by a small but vocal contingent of people who are still inexplicably fans of a person who’d happily have them thrown into a wood chipper if it meant an extra profit - or just for fun.

In a better world, Twitter’s employees would’ve locked arms and simply refused to take his orders. If Musk wanted someone fired, let him figure out how to get access to the systems to do so. Let him take personal responsibility for the consequences. See how long he can keep the site up solo.

A plea to people making howto and informational videos: Give us a transcript!

Video content is here to stay. As a text-based person with a face for radio, I’ve come to grips with it. But that doesn’t mean video alone gets it done. If you’re producing video content, please also share a transcript of the video. I realize some people love video, and that’s fine - but it’s not that much harder to include a transcript and it’s much more inclusive and potentially more effective.

Taming Mastodons for a better web

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.

Give nothing, expect nothing: GitLab's the latest punching bag for entitled users

What do Docker, GitLab, and Red Hat have in common? Aside from various levels of participation in open source, they’ve all been punching bags over the past few years for non-paying users angry that they’ve taken some freebies off the table. When Docker had the temerity to introduce limits for free users pulling containers from DockerHub, or requiring a subscription for large business users, lots of people started complaining and/or looking for a free alternative.

So long, Shadowman

After nearly nine years, I’m no longer at Red Hat. Feels weird to type that, but it’s true. I joined in August 2013 to work in the Open Source and Standards office (now OSPO) when the company was fewer than 6,000 people, Jim Whitehurst was CEO and everybody thought OpenStack was going to be the Next Big Thing™ up against public cloud. Nobody asked me “where do you see yourself in five years?

Three sentences in a trench coat pretending to be a coherent thought

At least once a week when I’m reading, or editing, copy related to work I’ll skim over something and realize that what I just read makes no sense. Sure, the words are used properly. The paragraph is composed of sentences that seem grammatically correct. But if you stop to think about what the copy is saying, it’s just three sentences in a trench coat pretending to be a coherent thought.

3 ways to reduce technical debt in content: Avoid bare URLs, events and analyst content

Infrastructure and code aren’t the only things in your organization that incur technical debt. Content marketing on blogs is a major offender. Here’s just three things to cut down on technical debt in your content marketing on blogs. Content marketing practice to avoid: Bare URLs/URIs in content Be kind to your readers and to yourself: Stop putting bare URIs / URLs in your content. Bare URLs - that is, something like www.

reMarkable 2 and its unremarkable software: Substandard tools hobble excellent hardware

The reMarkable 2 is a nifty piece of engineering. It’s about the size of a thin college (U.S.) notebook, responsive and feels as close to writing on paper as a tablet is likely to get. The tools, on the other hand, leave a lot to be desired. reMarkable 2 and cloud services The reMarkable 2 is not the device to invest in if you’re avoiding cloud services. The reMarkable offers a desktop app and mobile app.

The reMarkable 2 needs reFinement: Writing, workflow and usability

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?

Test-driving the reMarkable 2 on Linux: paper-like or paper-weight?

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.

Link-o-Rama: FTP is 50, stick with email, FVWM(3) ...

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.

Make your sentences poorer, get out of the three comma club

There’s a running gag in the show Silicon Valley about a character obsessed with being in the “three comma” club. Being a billionaire, in other words. When he loses enough money to drop from $1.2 billion to “merely” $900 million, he’s “financially ruined” and despondent. Judging by the way some folks write sentences, they’re just as afraid to lose a comma. Me? I don’t want any billionaire sentences in my copy1.

Link-o-Rama: Hunspell dict format, curl is 23, response to flatkill.org

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.

Using the Display Posts plugin with WordPress and custom CSS

In case this helps anybody else, wanted to share how I created the Top 100 Albums page here on Dissociated Press. I wanted to be able to automagically create a page from all posts tagged with the “100 albums” tag, rather than manually laying things out.

The final result is using the Display Posts plugin that lets you utilize a WordPress shortcode (" display-posts") with some parameters to specify how the posts should be displayed and how many of them should be displayed.

Using the Wayback Machine Downloader to rebuild Dissociated Press

This domain has been online since January 2001. A homepage or, more often, some type of blog has been here almost as long. I’ve been, often, lackadaisical about continuity of content and posting. The kind folks at the Internet Archive, or rather their web scraping bots, have been far more attentive and consistent. I’ve lost track, but I’ve probably wiped the slate clean and started over seven or eight times since I first registered dissociatedpress.

Thoughts on Doom: Eternal

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.

"Animals" by Pink Floyd (No. 38)

Pink Floyd responded in part to the punk rock movement’s fast, short, and aggressive tunes by… putting out an LP with five complex and relatively languid songs, three of which are longer than 10 minutes. And it is awesome.

1977’s Animals is an album that’s best experienced as an album. I suppose you could play “Sheep” or “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” as stand-alones, but why would you? If you’ve never listened to this one, you need to clear an hour (actually about 45 minutes) and sit down and give it some attention.

More open source is good open source

A few days ago, Microsoft announced that it has released PowerShell under the MIT license for Linux (and Mac OS X). Perhaps surprisingly, this has brought a number of folks out of the woodwork to gripe about Microsoft… releasing something as open source. Microsoft isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but this is not Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. This isn’t Bill Gates’ Microsoft. The days when Microsoft and the open source community are mortal enemies are behind us.

"Bachelor No. 2 or, the Last Remains of the Dodo" by Aimee Mann (No. 54)

Bachelor No. 2 is the album that, if Interscope had its way, wouldn’t have been released at all. Instead, Aimee Mann bought the rights back and released it on her own through her website – a gutsy move in 2000, but it paid off for Mann and her fans.

Most of Mann’s albums make me unreasonably happy, but Bachelor No. 2 is wall-to-wall awesome. Let’s start with the opening track, “How am I Different?” It’s a perfect album opener, starting just with acoustic guitar, light drums, piano, and Mann’s voice. After a couple of verses, the music swells and carries you away. I love everything about this song, the melody, the bluesy guitar, Mann’s voice, and the lyrics. “Just one question before I pack, when you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?”

"I'm Your Man" by Leonard Cohen (No. 56)

There are two kinds of people: Those who appreciate Leonard Cohen, and those who are wrong. I present as evidence Cohen’s eighth studio album, I’m Your Man.

Released in 1988 with heavy use of synthesizers and drum machines/electronic drums, I’m Your Man should sound dated. Indeed, if you focus on the backing tracks for the songs on this album, you’ll notice the distinctive sound of cutting-edge mid-80s technology. But it’s the songs, the lyrics, and the voices that propel I’m Your Man – and Cohen’s voice, the lyrics, and his backing chorus are timeless.

Unisex bathrooms aren’t the answer

One of the popular responses to the outcry over HB2 has been to suggest that unisex or single bathrooms are the “answer” or a “middle road” (or “common sense”) to avoid conflict over transgender folks using the bathroom that best fits their gender identity. Really, it’s a dodge that doesn’t solve anything socially, and is logistically and fiscally unrealistic. First, I would love it if all public spaces had private, single-person bathrooms.

What good is open source nobody knows about?

Here’s a pet peeve of mine, because I see it time and time again: Folks work on software or projects, put in a ton of effort, and then do nothing to promote the project or release. (And, for bonus points, complain that they don’t understand why the project isn’t getting more attention!) This doesn’t mean developers have to do double-duty as marketeers and public relations folks. Well, not if they can pass the torch onto interested contributors who are happy to do it for them, anyway.

What every admin should know about email

Email is a fantastic tool, when used correctly. It almost never is. Rikki Endsley asked me if I’d like to write something for USENIX ;login; logout, and it happened to be right after processing a slew of terrible email: people sending two-line replies at the end of several hundred lines of text, inexcusable top-posting, HTML-ized email sent to lists that reject HTML email (rightly), etc. Practicing a little courtesy when doing email takes a little extra time, but it makes it so much easier for the people who have to read your email.

Apple’s “Pathological” Approach to Customers

I think Lawrence Lessig puts his finger on it pretty well with this post about the problems with Apple’s “communication” strategy about bugs/feature removal in upgrades: But the argument I want to advance here is different. It is that in the “hybrid economy” that the Internet is, there is an ethical obligation to treat users decently. “Decency” of course is complex, and multi-faceted. But the single dimension I want to talk about here is this: They must learn to talk to us.

Joining Red Hat

When you think of Linux, one of the first phrases that comes to mind is “Red Hat.” When people look to give examples of successful open source businesses, Red Hat is always (rightfully) at the top of the list. They are one of the few (if not only) companies of size that don’t hold back the good bits (e.g. “open core”) and invest heavily in many, many upstream open source projects.