njoseph

njoseph, 2 months ago to random

Went to a shopping mall today.

Several restaurants in the food court had arrays of 5 large LED displays to advertise what they were selling, basically playing slideshows. Each display looked like a 42 inch TV but mounted vertically.

Not everything needs to be digital. For mostly static content, mechanical slide rollers would work, maybe not as bright as LED. But they would use a lot less energy. :blobthink:

njoseph, 9 months ago to random

You will find me obsessed about CryptPad for a few days. I am at DebCamp trying to evaluate the feasibility of packaging CryptPad for Debian and bringing it into FreedomBox.

njoseph, 3 months ago to random

I found myself looking for a desktop wiki today. I used Zim several years ago. Currently using logseq just for its journals feature, but after a year of use I am still not used to "everything is a list item" paradigm.

I wanted a messy desktop wiki which I don't care too much about maintaining. Unfortunately, I cared too much about maintaining a clean logseq notebook.

I found that TiddlyWiki is the simplest solution. Started using TiddlyDesktop backed by a Syncthing folder.

#noteTaking #wiki

njoseph, 5 months ago to random

The CPU (Intel i7 from 2015) on my primary development laptop used for Debian and FreedomBox is too slow at loading web pages. It's taking too long to interpret JavaScript. :blobsob:

Pages that are mostly content, like those in Wikipedia load nearly instantly.

It can run Doom Emacs, do OS image builds and run FreedomBox in a container all at the same time, but can't load one modern website or web app like GitLab in under a minute.

It even has 16 GB memory. 🤷‍♂️

njoseph, 9 months ago to random

From @ratfactor 's blog post
https://ratfactor.com/leaving-github

> Independent FOSS developers do not owe anything to companies, including the slightest effort to "secure the software supply chain" for "consumers." As the licenses say, THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND …​

As somebody else on fedi once said, we ain't part of your corporation's supply chain because you didn't sign any agreement with us to that effect.

njoseph, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

I wonder what percentage of the population knows that servers exist.

Do people realize that when they send a message from WhatsApp, there is a server that the message is passing through? Or do most people just believe that the app (which is an interface to the service) is the service itself? Like, my message goes from my WhatsApp app to my friend's WhatsApp app directly. Everything in between is just the wires and routers of the Internet. (1/3)

#selfHosting

njoseph, 10 months ago to random

Generative AI has changed programming indeed.

My code is now "artisanal", "hand-crafted" and "untouched by machine". It should be classified as art. ✨

I am classified as a code chef now since I don't use Microsoft GitHub Copilot. I will produce tiny amounts of neat code in a large amount of time and charge you $1000 for each sample*.

• Extra if you need semicolons in JavaScript.
  ** Semicolons will be sprinkled from a height.

#LudditeArtist

njoseph, 13 days ago to random

This post by @baldur is very relatable, especially this part.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deskilling-of-web-dev-is-harming-us-all/

> No wonder we’re all fucked up emotionally and mentally.

Some of us got into this field because we love programming, not because it pays well. Seeing your work being thrown away every 2-4 years, your hard-won skills getting obsoleted by the latest trend and most of all, being forced to deploy your expertise to cause harm (in a profession that has nothing similar to a Hippocratic oath)

(1/4)

njoseph, 8 months ago to random

Filed an RFP with Debian for #Miniflux. It could be a light-weight alternative to Tiny Tiny RSS on #FreedomBox.

https://bugs.debian.org/1051912

njoseph, 1 month ago to random

The 4K TV I'm using as monitor only works reliably with Gnome on Xorg. Don't know what I'll do once Debian just drops this option in favor of Wayland.

On Wayland, if I jerk the mouse suddenly, the display shuts off with no way of recovering until reboot.

#Wayland

njoseph, 1 month ago to rust

Wrote a little app launcher for all of my manually installed applications using Tauri in about 2 hours and with less than 100 lines of code. The .deb package it generated is just 2.8 MB in size. I added this to my startup applications using Gnome Tweak Tool.

P.S. One hour was spent fighting the borrow checker. AppImage is 164 MB.

#Tauri #RustLang #GTK #Gnome

njoseph, 3 months ago to random

I suspect that there must be a million software engineers in the world who don't know that CGI exists.

njoseph, 8 months ago to random

Daniel Higginbotham, the author of Brave Clojure, wrote a book on #babashka

https://www.braveclojure.com/quests/babooka/

njoseph, 20 days ago to fdroid

About 10 years ago, before fitness trackers and smartwatches were a thing, there were apps that simply plotted the path that you traveled on a map (e.g. #Strava).

If you want to track an activity that involves moving around, such as walking, jogging, running or cycling there is an app on F-Droid called #OpenTracks. It tracks the distance, elevation and time for each activity. It can show the traveled path on an #OpenStreetMap app like #OrganicMaps and also plot graphs.

#FDroid #Android

njoseph, 8 months ago to random

Is anybody working on the equivalent of #LineageOS for Android TVs?

Google is cramming more and more ads, promoting DRM-ridden content from Google Play, making navigation harder on the home screen with each update etc.

You don't get updates unless you sign in to Google Play. TV Apps refuse to play their DRM-ridden content you paid for unless you update them. Every update makes the TV slower.

It feels almost as if the TV is a rental from Google, rather than purchased at full price.

njoseph, 4 months ago to random

Things I learnt about Android's JVM today.

Android doesn't actually run "the JVM". Android apps use either Dalvik or ART as their runtime.

The API-level supported by these VMs is equivalent to JDK 8. Since there were some features of JDK 8 used by Android which were removed in JDK 9, they didn't upgrade beyond it because of the amount of work involved.

There is neither a technical nor legal reason not to upgrade, since Google already won the lawsuit that Oracle filed against them (2021).

njoseph, 8 months ago to debian

Trying out #Debian External Repositories project, aka extrepo.

Installing Jellyfin on a Debian bookworm machine

sudo apt install extrepo
sudo extrepo enable jellyfin
sudo apt update
sudo apt install jellyfin

Jellyfin will be running on 0.0.0.0:8096

This basically avoids the manual process of installing Jellyfin from upstream Debian repo as mentioned here:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/linux#debian

Debian external repositories on Salsa: https://salsa.debian.org/extrepo-team

(1/2)

njoseph, 4 months ago to random

#Shaarli is a bookmarking service in #FreedomBox that stores each bookmark as a comment in a single PHP file.

This is actually appropriate design (in the sense of appropriate technology). A good example of #smallTech design. A big tech bookmarking service would have used some NoSQL database technology such as Cassandra, not a simple flat file.

Shaarli works great for thousands of bookmarks. Who cares if it scales to millions or not? :blobcatgooglyshrug:

njoseph, 7 months ago to random

This audiobook was read quite well. I didn't get distracted midway. Was able to listen through the whole 2 hours.

> Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com: The Lost Cause (excerpt)

Episode webpage: https://craphound.com/news/2023/10/12/the-lost-cause-excerpt/

Media file: https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_451/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_451_-_The_Lost_Cause.mp3

njoseph, 2 months ago to random

Taking 3 days to learn Rust to an intermediate level.

That's about the same amount of time it took me to learn Scala, another ML-family language.

I think I should also learn PyOxide to make integrate it with Python. The two of them together should make for more interesting programs. 🤔

njoseph, 9 months ago to guix

I learnt more about #Guix today by talking to a developer than I had by reading through the documentation for most of a day.

njoseph, 2 months ago to UX

How to design the most user-hostile password field, inspired by my router.

1. Do not allow pasting into the password field
2. Whenever a user presses backspace once clear the password field
3. Have your password requirements such that the password is not memorable. Goes without saying - don't allow passphrases.

Now your user will set a weak but memorable, highly reused password. From your user's perspective, your system is about as secure as some other system whose #passwords got leaked.

#UX

njoseph, 4 months ago to random

In a way, I am an OS developer who never formally took a CS course on Operating Systems.

Going through this free online book right now. Making good progress. Halfway through Virtualization already.

Operating Systems: Three Easy Steps
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

njoseph, 8 months ago to opensource

The Economics of Programming Languages, by the creator of Elm language
https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8

#openSource #programmingLanguages

njoseph, 1 month ago to random

Helix editor has no project file explorer yet (like nerdtree or neotree).

It's taking me some time to get used to browsing files using yazi and then hitting enter to open them with Helix.

#HelixEditor