Skip to main content



I don't know what in god's name possessed me to burn a stick of incense when the air outside is still off-the-charts with wildfire smoke, but I did it! Like a clever person! 🤦🏻


My parents' home might burn to the ground in the fires. I've been thinking this all week and I'm still not ready for it.
in reply to Spencer

It still sounds like it'd be tough to lose. I hope it survives.


The solution to the control of hosted software over our infrastructure is quite simple: we have to decentralize the power. Just like freedom of press can be achieved by giving people the tools to print and distribute underground pamphlets, we can give people their freedom of software back by teaching them to control their own server.




Surveillance capitalism is the same as climate change, but for data:

- Some people have been warning about its consequences for years
- Most people don't care because they don't feel concerned, they can't see it affecting them
- A few companies are making a lot of damage with the help of governments
- When we will face the consequences it will be too late
- We can still do something about it, and the sooner the better





We learned yesterday of the death of fellow worker, activist, and anthropologist @davidgraeber. Graeber has written numerous books on direct action and anti-capitalist theory. He also coined the phrase, “We are the 99%” during OWS. Rest in power, fellow worker.




Fuckin' hell, Google.


Chromium, aka Google, just keeps proposing new standards to make the web less private and secure for users. We need to find a way to stop this.

Allow JavaScript to make direct TCP and UDP connections? Sure!
theregister.com/2020/08/22/chr…

Packaging up an entire website into a file so individual ads can't be blocked? Also sure!
brave.com/webbundles-harmful-t…



Good morning, friends.

This is a check-in post. How are you doing? What do you need that others might have to share?



It's Monday!

What in your life has been magical or meaningful lately?

in reply to Spencer

Not far in Brooklyn because we're staying within walking distance of my kid's school for, erhm, when he'll eventually go back to it. Same rationale for my commute, it's right next to the subway if I ever go back to the office I used to go.






oh my god check this out

this just might be the coolest thing i have seen in my entire life




Now that I've set up a music-streaming app on my home server, I now have an opportunity to do one of my favorite menial tasks: tagging, organizing, and standardizing a music library.

I'm not kidding. I actually really enjoy this. 🤓

in reply to Spencer

The last time I underwent a significant music library organization effort was the very end of 2012/beginning of 2013. My now-wife and I were down in Tuscon so she could do thesis research on the border. I didn't have any such task to occupy myself, so I decided to clean up my music library.

My personal library has stayed pretty clean over the years since, but now that I have a home music server, I'm integrating my wife's library as well, and she... is not nearly as fastidious as me.



California doesn't have enough prisoners to fight wildfires for submimimum wage because too many are sick of or dying to COVID-19.

🇺🇲🦅🎆🙃



The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them. At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these "cloaked" photos as you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends, printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would any other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, "cloaked" images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable by humans or machines and will not cause errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you by presenting an unaltered, "uncloaked" image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public) to the model, the model will fail to recognize you.




TFW you realize that there reason you hate Disney and Apple are because both companies took ideas that were freely given to them, reworked them, and then proceeded to threaten and sue everyone who dared try the same thing.


I've successfully set up my own #selfhosted Navidrome server (thanks to @YunoHost@mastodon.social, @deluan@twitter.com, and Éric Gaspar on Github), and it's awesome.

I love having my own music streaming server. As Google prepares to kill Google Play Music (and shuttle users to YouTube Music), and in an era when we're seeing the idea of "ownership" in tech degrade more and more, it's nice to have my stuff and know it's mine.

Hypolite Petovan reshared this.



I'm doing some custodial work on my ebook library, and it really grinds my gears that it's nigh-on impossible to get decent, clean images of book (and album) covers anymore. Fuck.
in reply to Spencer

I'm not sure how much image quality you're looking for, but have you tried OpenLibrary?
in reply to Tyler

I'm familiar, but I hadn't thought to look there; thanks for the recommendation!






Today, I was trying to find (using commercial search engines) information about a topic. Maybe 9 out of 10 or more "relevant" results was about purchasing items related to the topic. Not ads placed in the result page, no, the actual results.

I remember how, when I was younger, I used to marvel at all the information out there on the web. How it was like a giant library.

I scarcely recognize the place now. If you want to search information about a topic you don't go into a mall. But that's what it feels like I'm forced to do.

I remember going to the library and pulling out drawers of index cards to locate the relevant non-fiction shelves with good content on topics I wanted to learn about. Imagine if those index cards had been mixed with cards with advertisements on them. Increasingly diluting the content with junk. That is the web of today.



Thirsty Thursday


[heads-up: alc mention]

Happy Thursday, everyone!

What have you enjoyed drinking lately? Any particularly good mixed drinks? Tea blends? What are your libations of choice lately, whether alcoholic or not?

...alternatively, let's commiserate about dating during a pandemic. Either. Both.

This entry was edited (5 years ago)

Zron reshared this.

in reply to Spencer

I've recently started making white russians and have really been enjoying them. Adding some dark cocoa bitters from pdx bitters project has really made them a treat I look forward to.
Also, started making more bulk barley tea (mugi cha) which has been a very nice Japan nostalgia this week.
in reply to SmolScrappyHungry

SmolScrappyHungry wrote:

Adding some dark cocoa bitters from pdx bitters project

Ooooh. That's a heck of an idea. I'll have to try that.




I hate the way that

while /I/ have a personal server computer and can put up text files or gemini maps or html pages or whatever kind of simple or complex content,

any 'ordinary' computer user would put every one of those pages in a 'Google Doc'

for various reasons of storage space, no administration knowledge, no alternatives, etc, 'Google Docs' have replaced independent web pages for the average person.

why don't we have Google Completely Arbitrary JSless Page Hosting.
google are cowards

This website uses cookies to recognize revisiting and logged-in users. You accept the usage of these cookies by continuing to use this website.