Boris Mann's Homepage — Journal

202506201024

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 17:24:29 GMT

Rolling up the ladder behind us, by Xe Iaso. "Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.": > I had a lot of respect for Anthropic before they released this feculent bile that is the Model Context Protocol…

202506181711

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:11:32 GMT

The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine > In this post I’ll expose my current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they’re given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence o…

202506181438

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 21:38:34 GMT

Slow Software for a Burning World as Bonfire heads to a v1.0 release: > "In a world of 'move fast and break things,' we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, ra…

202506171217

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 19:17:57 GMT

The Shape of What You Meant is a blog post about Index Network, a kind of ambient discovery that describes its contrast with performative social media and how things must be public in order to aid in discovery.

202506171119

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 18:19:36 GMT

Devine Lu Linvega wrote notes on Malleable Computing XXIIVV as a reflection on the Malleable Software Essay.

202506170820

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:20:23 GMT

Apps Are Avocado Slicers: "…because the avocado slicer is narrowly focused on one task, it’s useless at anything else. If you used a specialized gadget for every single task, you’d end up with a mountain of plastic." From Ink & Switch Malleable Software Essay.

202506170845

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 06:45:47 GMT

Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future is a response to Sam Altman's "gentle singularity", written by Alex Komoroske, founder of Common Tools > "between hyper-centralized systems that inevitably tend toward extraction and manipulation, versus distributed systems that enhance human agency an…

202506161634

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:34:21 GMT

I’ve been uneasy about Matrix for a long time. This post goes on to recommend where to look for a replacement: Polyproto, Delta Chat, Revolt

202506131249

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:49:32 GMT

Radicle, an open source p2p collaboration stack around git repos, has a new desktop app.

202506131236

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:36:21 GMT

Tonk released an explainer about their new release - "a CLI that helps you vibe code your second brain", "designed to simplify the process of building custom dashboards, tools, and AI agents using your own data." Explicitly mentions remixing your Obsidian content.

202506131222

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 10:22:10 GMT

As part of walking the startup showcase at Web Summit Vancouver, I saw Forestwalk Labs demo'ing Timberline, their agentic Mac app - building task management in an agent-first way.

202506121420

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:20:12 GMT

Justin Searls explains why to be excited about what Apple announced about LLMs at WWDC. One is that developers can do "free, unlimited invocation of Apple's on-device language models", so zero cost LLM features by using a user's own device. The rest is about native support in Swift for working with…

202506092112

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:12:42 GMT

Resilio Sync was introduced to me by Jonny at Z-Space for user friendly file sync across many platforms. It used to be called BitTorrent Sync (and now I'm down a wikipedia rabbit hole - oh god,comparison of file sync software)

Jun 9, 2025, 8:14 PM

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 03:14:58 GMT

RSS Dashboard is an Obsidian plugin that pulls in posts from RSS feeds, YouTube, podcasts, and other feed based media, created by Aditya Amatya.

June 3rd, 2025

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 14:24:48 GMT

Steve Klabnik is disappointed in the AI discourse "all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized…both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true" He recommends two good reads: The Software Engineering Identity Crisi…

March 9th, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 22:01:07 GMT

I've recently gone down the rabbit hole of looking at JMAP (aka JSON Meta Application Protocol) which Fastmail supports (I signed up). It's a modern http/json protocol being worked on at the IETF, supporting email today, then contacts, calendars, etc

March 9th, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:35:55 GMT

It was about a year ago that I posted about Puter. It's a web desktop and got me thinking about these types of interfaces so I put together a page about them.

March 9th, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:24:33 GMT

I used Cyd to migrate tweets to Bluesky on my @bmannconsulting.com account, self hosted on BringYourOwn.Computer. Feature request: support replies using bsky's facets to link to the Twitter original.

March 9th, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 16:53:17 GMT

Chris Joel aka cdata just posted an announce thread that he’s building Familiar, a “magical notebook”, bootstrapping a healthier web from today’s ailing one.

March 9th, 2025

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 16:44:44 GMT

Fideslang is “a proposed model for a human-readable taxonomy of privacy-related data types”, seen via Ted Han on bsky.

March 5th, 2025

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:31:01 GMT

Great Q&A with Robin Berjon about open social protocols wearing his Free Our Feeds hat in Columbia Journalism Review. Explains open social protocols as roads shared by all, and gently pushes journalists to inform themselves & get better at explaining it.

January 16th, 2025

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:09:46 GMT

Happy birthday Drupal! There’s a new Drupal CMS 1.0 release, which is a “distro” of configuration & plugins.

January 9th, 2025

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 01:03:44 GMT

Out of Your Element is a "modern Matrix-to-Discord appservice bridge". Seems simple and robust -- just a NodeJS server. Discovered via Muni Town.

January 9th, 2025

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 20:57:26 GMT

I’m a Weird Nerd -> weird.bmann.ca. The Muni Town team shipped paid subscriptions powered by Polar. Read their blog for background on where this personal page builder is going (including ATProtocol integration).

January 1st, 2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 22:07:29 GMT

User & Agents is a new community stewarded by Ankesh Bharti[^feynon]. Here's one line from the home page: "Our goal is to empower individuals with software that enables them to create their own agency". Go read the whole thing and come join! [^feynon]: aka Feynon in many online spaces.

January 1st, 2025

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 17:27:12 GMT

Tailscale has a new feature, Taildrive: shared folders over WebDAV accessible by other users and devices.

December 29th, 2024

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 21:47:23 GMT

Playing around with the Obsidian Web Clipper. It has variable template types and basically just triggers new pages in your app. Have to figure out an "archive" mode where I want to save the entire page, without republishing it.

December 28th, 2024

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 09:21:43 GMT

I have a whole bunch of notes to share on installing Ampache on my local Cloudron. This all started with getting music onto my new Tangara player. And new music, too!

December 6th, 2024

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 22:09:09 GMT

I bought Path of Exile today, it's at home downloading onto my Steam Deck, which is currently listed as unsupported. MacOS also not supported for Early Access. So of course I'm looking at Bazzite for the MiniPC PL63.

November 28th, 2024

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 17:33:12 GMT

Very inspired learning about UKAI, who are hosting some workshops at Z-Space: > "Our mission is 'culture for what’s coming'" > "…we seek and test out approaches to culture that make sense of the world we are creating and handing down to future generations. > > We call this work cultural research an…

November 24th, 2024

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 19:51:47 GMT

Doing some research on Public Mobile. Low cost cellphone plans in Canada. They’re a TELUS subsidiary. Anyone have personal experience?

November 22nd, 2024

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 18:01:20 GMT

Martin Fowler's 2024 thoughts on the state of social media: > If I find someone doing what I'm doing - posting on Twitter and on other sites - I prefer to follow them on a different site. As far as I'm concerned, Twitter is in decline, and although I'm not leaving it for the moment, I prefer to foll…

November 18th, 2024

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 16:53:35 GMT

Gordon Brander, Places to intervene in a system: > "If systems are fictions, maybe we can learn to hold them loosely, to trade between them, or even to let go and allow reality to speak back?"

October 29th, 2024

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 21:07:36 GMT

Ibis has just been announced as a federated Wikipedia alternative. It's based on ActivityPub and written by one of the Lemmy developers. "built on a stack of PostgreSQL and Rust, …with a frontend written in Rust Webassembly"

October 29th, 2024

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 20:42:02 GMT

I've been using Grist, an open source and self hostable Airtable replacement, and excitedly telling people about it. They're hosting a summit in Paris in early December, where I also found out about the French government's La Suite, a government collaboration platform.

October 28th, 2024

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:50:11 GMT

Had a catch up call with Tarun from Gitwallet. The platform has been iterating to serve developers doing open source consulting. A new thing they're experimenting with is Echo: an software ecosystem explorer. Very cool!

October 28th, 2024

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:42:51 GMT

The future is interfaces: @piratesoftware.live shared a short video of doing demos at a public conference with keyboard + mouse and with a game controller. The punchline of what kids gravitated towards is a good one.

October 17th, 2024

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:49:12 GMT

Subvert is launching today: you can become a co-op founding member for $100USD by buying the zine "Plan for the Artist-Owned Internet", or for free as a founding musician or label. I've joined, love to see more projects like this.

October 16th, 2024

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:40:20 GMT

Had an inspiring call with the ZKorum team this morning. They're trying on some new taglines, including "building citizen networks rather than social networks"

October 16th, 2024

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 05:52:53 GMT

End of an era. I futzed around and switched my blog publishing back to Github Pages, after 4 years publishing to IPFS via Fission, according to the Colophon. My next protocol adventures are going to have more ATProtocol.

October 16th, 2024

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 20:55:46 GMT

Frontpage is a link aggregator (think Hacker News) defined as a new Lexicon data type on ATProtocol. It’s out of invite only access, and you can use your existing account to login.

September 28th, 2024

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:31:52 GMT

iA Writer is cancelling their Android app because it seems impossible to comply with Google Drive connection rules. I see so clearly that we need a user-owned file sync protocol.

September 26th, 2024

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:58:04 GMT

Jesse Rodgers, who is helping run Startup Barn in Waterloo, makes a pitch for getting back to basics with the term Startup — just build: > "Startups, at their core, come from people creating something of value for others. They are born from the act of building, not from the rituals of the startup re…

September 24th, 2024

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 05:31:07 GMT

The Bluesky team put together a simple Hello World app to showcase ATProtocol called Statusphere. It showcases custom data types (Lexicons) as well as OAuth, and runs locally.

September 18th, 2024

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 05:46:19 GMT

Wired article on Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute: Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works

September 16th, 2024

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 02:27:26 GMT

Brad Neuburg on Y Combinator “YC model doesn’t work for (deep tech) startups, and is focused on the last tech war”. This is the same for all these accelerator programs. See When Tailwinds Vanish for more.

September 9th, 2024

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 18:01:12 GMT

John from Ascent is in Vancouver this week, holding office hours at Z-Space. If you're building a startup, especially company formation or raising, come through and meet with him.

September 9th, 2024

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:07:46 GMT

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drives. via alice

August 31st, 2024

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 22:55:19 GMT

Blaine told me he built Slocan Helps as a front end on top of Grist after my recommendation and it worked out well. I'm looking for other cool Grist projects -- got any to share?

August 30th, 2024

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 14:53:21 GMT

I use Obsidian as an editor for my website, and git for sync between devices & publishing. On my Daylight Computer which runs Android, I haven’t managed to get git setup. What Obsidian plugins should I look at to do my own sync?

August 28th, 2024

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 05:40:28 GMT

Automattic is planning to migrate 500M+ Tumblr blogs to WordPress, with the nuance that the front end shouldn’t change (and they’re looking to hire) > We’re talking about running Tumblr’s backend on WordPress. You won’t even notice a difference from the outside.

August 27th, 2024

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 13:57:40 GMT

I put together a new site ATProtocol Dev where I’m going to be hosting tech talks and resources about open social protocols. My first set of talks will look at emerging Proto Apps that go beyond microblogging.

August 20th, 2024

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 17:24:10 GMT

The FeathersJS team wrote up a trip report of their DWeb Camp experience, as well as David’s presentation at the Causal Islands Tiny Talks in SF.

August 18th, 2024

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 20:03:06 GMT

Signed up for Spaceship, a new domain registrar that is in fact Namecheap, but starting over with a new brand and new codebase.

August 18th, 2024

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 16:34:21 GMT

IndieSearch is a prototype of “decentralized and local-first compatible search”, powered by Pagefind. Seen via Alex Schroeder’s installation. I’ll see about adding it to my site.

August 18th, 2024

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 15:46:47 GMT

Deobald: Third Wave (Commercial) Open Source An attempted definition of three waves of (commercial) open source. It specifically sets aside ideology & peer production and focuses on licensing and business model. And then highlights Local First as the “new ideals”. I’d also highlight the DWeb Princip…

August 13th, 2024

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 18:11:47 GMT

I'm so stoked to be onboarding to USB Club. So many delightful touches, audio, words.

August 5th, 2024

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 17:17:08 GMT

I set up a QR code with my vCard info in it for DWeb Camp. Go QR is the generator I recommend.

August 5th, 2024

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 17:11:16 GMT

Friend Ellie is selling [14TB hard drives with a USB adapter], pre-loaded with TBs of LLM models.

August 4th, 2024

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 17:46:53 GMT

Heading to the airport to fly down to SFO. Start of my first DWeb Camp experience, including facilitating the unconference-style Emergent Day.

August 2nd, 2024

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 05:25:51 GMT

Paved over the Windows install on MiniPC PL63 and got Coolify running on it. The setup on the Z-Space network with a VLAN and DMZ probably needs more detail in the write up, but was the most interesting part.

July 30th, 2024

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:17:54 GMT

The largest ATProtocol PDS is Bridgy Fed. You can get a full list of the 235 independent PDS instances via Mackubu's Bluesky Stats

July 18th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 13:29:12 GMT

Nick Gerakines talks about why he chose ATProtocol for Smoke Signal, his event and RSVP management system. Includes closed platform issues covering Upcoming, Meetup, and Facebook. > “Platforms and ecosystems that prevent you from leaving have good marketing and bad intentions.”

July 17th, 2024

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 17:29:03 GMT

We have identity. From wallets to passkeys to DIDs. What we don’t have is re-usable accounts. Social, permissions, auth, and multiple identifiers. Directionally, capabilities underly agentic computing.

July 15th, 2024

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:12:48 GMT

I'm continuing to re-publish some templates as I get asked about them. The Consulting Agreement Template is up now -- good for both selling your own services or using to hire consulting services.

July 15th, 2024

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 23:21:12 GMT

Did a little Community Search Engine work today. This unstyled landing page is going to be the input list of links for the webring / search index crawl. First PR by Nicholas Tsang to add his personal website.

July 12th, 2024

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 15:28:02 GMT

I had a great intro call this week with Kyle Briggs. He's based in Ottawa and has a background as an academic researcher in biophysics and a founder of an acquired nanotechnology company. He writes at CanInnovate.

July 9th, 2024

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 22:56:23 GMT

The FAAI is a working group of the OWTA "aimed at promoting the integration of federation features into more applications and advancing existing federation features, protocols, and standards."

July 7th, 2024

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 05:37:42 GMT

Openvibe, a "Town square for open social media" that connects Nostr, Mastodon, + Bluesky & Threads coming soon. Shows you one timeline and lets you cross-post. Available on iOS and Android.

July 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 09:37:14 GMT

I'm totally energized from talking to Jesse Sugarman of Osito. Osito hosted Minimum Viable Demos and we'll be having the LOCALHOST Thursday social there. I toured Jesse around Z-Space and we talked about the art / tech / music scene locally, and how we can support it and work together. Good vibes!

July 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 09:21:26 GMT

I've put together a Polar open source funding page for 11ty Second Brain. The goal is to build a great Eleventy Second Brain experience, that pairs with Obsidian as a Markdown editor, and integrates with LLM usage.

July 1st, 2024

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 22:07:45 GMT

I was asked about Eternal September recently which reminded me about Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution. I’ve added both as notes.

June 30th, 2024

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 19:32:29 GMT

This is the first month of the Z-Space non-profit fully taking over the 3rd floor of 505 Hamilton. We have a private office available to rent for 3-4 people, as well as a few flex or permanent desks left.

June 28th, 2024

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:59:37 GMT

Just used Keynote HTML Export that is built in for the first time when publishing Open Source Beyond Licensing - The Evolution Ahead. Also found Keynote Extractor which has slightly cleaner HTML.

June 27th, 2024

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:46:19 GMT

Great read on Open Sourcing Kinopio: > I’ve long been thinking about how to share the amount of work that goes into Kinopio. The more you know how something is made, the more you appreciate it – even more so when it’s a quality product built to last a lifetime. (For license nerds, PolyForm Noncommer…

June 27th, 2024

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:06:58 GMT

I presented Open Source Beyond Licensing - The Evolution Ahead yesterday. I did a quick survey tour of some interesting licenses I like sharing, and in other ways promoted a kind of back to basics: open source is working together.

June 24th, 2024

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 05:31:42 GMT

Death of the Junior Developer by Steve Yegge "It's a bad year to be a junior anything…within a few years, the norm for source code will be that it is written and modified by LLMs via prompting"

June 23rd, 2024

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 19:32:27 GMT

Writing up notes as I work on Vancouver Hack Day stuff. Trying to get Lieu deployed, going to make a LOCALHOST / DWebYVR webring.

June 21st, 2024

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:53:42 GMT

Went ahead and setup Causal Islands Berlin as a LinkedIn event. We announced new dates and a selection committee today.

June 21st, 2024

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 16:51:56 GMT

We've got a new network at Z-Space so I found QiFi, a pure JS qrcode generator to make a code for people to scan and automatically connect to the visitor wifi.

June 19th, 2024

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:33:16 GMT

Anyone looking for their first ops hire / chief of staff / GSD special projects, I’ve got a great person for you. This is a great write up on the role by Posthog

June 17th, 2024

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 03:48:52 GMT

Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, is making native apps for iOS, MacOS, and iPadOS. I use Quine on iOS today, will be great to have across systems.

June 17th, 2024

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 02:33:51 GMT

I'm giving a talk next week here in Vancouver Open Source Beyond Licensing - The Evolution Ahead, followed by a panel discussion. Come join!

June 17th, 2024

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 21:20:00 GMT

Highline Beta is launching Highline Hub "a curated community & space that empowers pre-seed startups". 5000 sq ft in downtown Toronto.

June 15th, 2024

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 17:06:41 GMT

The IxDA non-profit is shutting down, seen via @jarango who comments: "how do we build a community of practice in a world where in-person conferences are no longer a viable means for funding community orgs?" I have many thoughts on this, and we'll be exploring this for Causal Islands.

June 14th, 2024

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:23:33 GMT

If you let a channel be used for self-promo, then people will just ignore / mute it. Celebrate a “promo” channel and nuke it in all other topics.

June 14th, 2024

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 19:00:53 GMT

I've published my Tech Event Budget Template. This is a very basic starting point for scoping the costs and ticket + sponsor revenue of an event that is mainly talks and networking.

June 11th, 2024

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 20:57:52 GMT

Caret beta is now available as a beta plugin for Obsidian: "a plugin that brings the power of LLMs into your Obsidian Vault…local-first, privacy preserving and stores all generated data as local files"

June 11th, 2024

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 20:46:51 GMT

Recommended by Ellie I'm trying out Pinokio: a browser that lets you locally install, run, and automate any AI on your computer.

June 5th, 2024

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 05:11:24 GMT

Mozilla is funding Local AI (aka “on device AI”) with their Mozilla Builders Accelerator. Application deadline August 1st, up to $100K in funding per team, 12 week program Sept to December.

June 5th, 2024

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 15:38:06 GMT

Dispatches from the media apocalypse by Ben Werdmuller: “The internet landscape has been largely static for well over a decade” And goes on to explain search and social crumbling and the rise of AI answer engines all impacting newsrooms.

June 5th, 2024

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:34:27 GMT

A write up about Local First Conf by Browsertech Digest Trip Report. Highlights covered: local-first vs offline first, sync engines, hybrid data queries, and app data interop.

June 5th, 2024

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:23:45 GMT

Ryan Hoover curates The Evolution of Software as another rebuttal to Chris Paik’s End of Software. This is a topic we should cover at Causal Islands.

June 3rd, 2024

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:40:01 GMT

Caught up with John Edgar, who is quietly launching Ascent: a founder-aligned suite of legal support and other services for Canadian venture scale startups. Excited to see this evolve!

June 2nd, 2024

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 05:38:22 GMT

Avoidance Machines, Part 1, by Kevin Baker: > “Writing is a task which forces one to confront ambiguity, uncertainty, and one’s own limits directly, so it’s not surprising that a coterie of avoidance entrepreneurs sprung up around it.”

June 2nd, 2024

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 17:27:51 GMT

The Disappearing World Wide Web covers the loss of web pages found in Common Crawl (38% of the 2013 pages are no longer accessible), as well as the general trend of info to exist in Dark Forest and Cozy Web spaces.

June 2nd, 2024

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 17:11:13 GMT

Good write up on Farcaster’s new decentralized channel system and the approach to moderation + algorithms, including comparisons with hashtags and Reddit.

June 2nd, 2024

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 16:48:49 GMT

Tren Griffin @trengriffin with a short thread on Software isn’t Ending > “There are zero significantly profitable software businesses with pricing power based on the expense of creating the software. Instead:” > > “1 Supply-Side Economies of Scale and Scope; 2 Network Effects); 3 Brand; 4 Regulatio…

June 1st, 2024

Sun, 02 Jun 2024 05:20:53 GMT

Chris Paik @cpaik wrote a short piece predicting The End of Software. The premise is that software will go the way of journalism, because of LLMs making it. Here are three quotes: “Software is expensive because developers are expensive.” “Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it wa…

June 1st, 2024

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 13:19:00 GMT

At Z-Space for an afternoon of tinkering. I should be doing some more LOCALHOST setup and writing, but ended up working with the MiniPC PL63 here. The Razor Core X Chroma stopped connecting, so I'm troubleshooting. Along the way, I installed Obsidian so I could type these notes, and Github Desktop…

May 30th, 2024

Fri, 31 May 2024 00:09:59 GMT

We registered Z-Space as a BC society today: > Z-Space Arts and Technology Society provides affordable, sustainable, community oriented office and creative space dedicated to supporting creative technologists, startups and innovative small businesses. We host a series of events and meetups supportin…

May 30th, 2024

Fri, 31 May 2024 00:01:21 GMT

Just bought my DWeb Camp tickets. I'm excited, it's my first time! It's Aug 7th - 11th, and I'll probably spend some of the next week in SF to catch up with some people, maybe do a meetup or two.

May 29th, 2024

Wed, 29 May 2024 07:30:05 GMT

I've used Wave for payroll in Canada forever (both SMB and small startup teams). Giving it another look for SMB basic accounting. Anything else I should be looking at in Canada?

May 28th, 2024

Wed, 29 May 2024 05:37:44 GMT

siftrss is a tool for filtering RSS feeds and outputting a new, filtered feed. I used it on my Github account feed to generate a feed of just starred items, which I'm now using EchoFeed to cross post.

May 28th, 2024

Tue, 28 May 2024 19:00:24 GMT

@levelsio points out that many are missing Telegram as a giant platform: > Telegram has 1 billion users > > It's the 1 or 2 chat app in most countries around the world > > Complete blindspot for most Americans > > And NOBODY uses it for its encryption (or lack of it), we use it because it has the…

May 27th, 2024

Tue, 28 May 2024 05:09:12 GMT

I think I finally found a good label for what my approach is, by @hermittoday: > a deep generalist is someone who discovers new niches by following their curiosity with extreme faith, and once the newly found niche is understood and its complexity exhausted, in a meta-systematic fashion, it’s time f…

May 27th, 2024

Mon, 27 May 2024 18:02:14 GMT

Spending more time with Ownr. Seems like a good choice for sole proprietorship. Not sure if I can do a "test" startup setup.

May 26th, 2024

Mon, 27 May 2024 05:59:13 GMT

Mattias Ljungman writes that seed stage investing is broken for investors and founders, and suggests a framework for redefining the pre-seed to A investment stages.

May 26th, 2024

Mon, 27 May 2024 05:39:49 GMT

I had an amazing catch up with Ami last week. He’s the founder of Creative Pulse, a community running in Vancouver for 10 years. The next event is about type designer Alanna Munro’s approach to Build in Public .

May 26th, 2024

Mon, 27 May 2024 04:39:05 GMT

EchoFeed is a service to send RSS posts to Mastodon, MicroBlog, Bluesky, GitHub, Discord, or LinkAce, as well as Webmentions and Webhooks. Free to start or $25/year.

May 26th, 2024

Mon, 27 May 2024 04:24:29 GMT

Jortage is a communal cloud whose first project uses Backblaze + Fastly to deduplicate media attachments, designed for fediverse instances. Seen via @jszym@cosocial.ca

May 24th, 2024

Fri, 24 May 2024 14:40:38 GMT

I put together a page gathering Open Social DAUs for the Open Social Protocols I'm interested in.

May 22nd, 2024

Thu, 23 May 2024 06:23:03 GMT

I love the Minimum Viable Demos website. If all you see is the boring vertical mobile version on your phone…turn it sideways! (and/or visit the glorious desktop version)

May 22nd, 2024

Thu, 23 May 2024 05:59:09 GMT

MLS aka Messaging Layer Security is all of: the right choice, early, and needed today. Battle-tested common libraries that work across web, mobile, and desktop would be a great common good.

May 22nd, 2024

Thu, 23 May 2024 05:52:02 GMT

Kye Fox writes: “ActivityPub might be a transitional technology” - I mostly agree with his predictions. But I think all the Open Social Protocols are toast unless we get multiple large orgs across multiple countries running instances. And also move beyond micro-blogging by building Proto Apps.

May 22nd, 2024

Thu, 23 May 2024 04:12:55 GMT

I got an email from Daylight Computer today telling me I’m getting a partial refund now that they have retail pricing announced on their e-ink tablet. Oh right! I bought into their founders round way back in 2022 and wrote a post about how they might run their developer ecosystem. Exciting!

May 22nd, 2024

Thu, 23 May 2024 03:35:20 GMT

My friends at 1RG in Toronto now have a public events calendar. Inspiring! I want to figure out what we can do at Z-Space.

May 22nd, 2024

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:37:07 GMT

I made a page here for my Budget Scenario Template -- a Google Sheet for budget scenario planning and cashflow forecasting.

May 20th, 2024

Mon, 20 May 2024 21:52:09 GMT

I’ve been using (and enjoying) Missive as my main company & personal email client, but it’s overkill for one person. Recommendations for an email client that you like on iOS? I’ll make some notes here: Email Clients

May 20th, 2024

Mon, 20 May 2024 19:49:09 GMT

New Public are running a remote Neighborhood Steward Fellowship, must be US based, $1000 honorarium, apply by May 20th: > “An eight-week program bringing together leaders of local-oriented online spaces to experiment with fun new practices and ideas”

May 18th, 2024

Sat, 18 May 2024 22:03:42 GMT

Dan Romero on “partnering” with Farcaster: > How can I partner with "Farcaster"? > > It's a permissionless protocol. Build something people can use. > > Feel free to send to me and if looks interesting, I'll recast it. > > That's it. Also: @adrienne’s talk on if Farcaster is a scenius

May 17th, 2024

Fri, 17 May 2024 23:56:04 GMT

From @vicvijayakumar on full stack: >”We’ve managed to convince new developers that JavaScript is the easiest language to build applications in, but also give them toolboxes that come almost empty.“

May 16th, 2024

Fri, 17 May 2024 05:09:38 GMT

Hearing from multiple people that we have to teach new Canadian founders about reverse vesting again. But also "fix" startup company formation so that it's cheaper / easier. Ownr is not the solution.

May 16th, 2024

Fri, 17 May 2024 05:02:45 GMT

I had three inspiring Causal Islands calls today. Marking the date here that I'm very inspired and energized by the people who want to get involved with Causal Islands Berlin …and beyond.

May 16th, 2024

Fri, 17 May 2024 04:59:06 GMT

Grist is an open source cloud spreadsheet. Not quite an Airtable clone, but similar capabilities. Some of the layout and linking makes it feel like Filemaker. The Grist Labs team behind it is also very inspiring.

May 16th, 2024

Thu, 16 May 2024 18:29:01 GMT

The Subconscious team is announcing that they're shutting down. The very short version from Gordon Brander "Today, if you want to amplify intelligence, you probably wouldn’t build a decentralized notes graph, you would go to work on personal AI." Having just gone through this with Fission, I feel fo…

May 13th, 2024

Mon, 13 May 2024 19:25:14 GMT

WebTransitions is a new non profit created by Dietrich Ayala: > “to enable experimentation and innovation on the web platform. It is a connector between those who want to see change on the web, and those who can help make it happen”

May 12th, 2024

Sun, 12 May 2024 21:35:08 GMT

OK, so I got AFFiNE running self hosted by pasting the compose file on Github into my test Portainer install. The team haven't figured out yet what they're going to charge or restrict for self hosting.

May 12th, 2024

Sun, 12 May 2024 17:41:13 GMT

Self-hosting Guide to Alternatives: Notion covers AFFiNE, Outline, SiYuan, and AnyType. I don’t think any of those listed are credible Notion alternatives.

May 12th, 2024

Sun, 12 May 2024 17:36:09 GMT

We Need A Policy Agenda for Rural AI by Jasmine McNealy, Mozilla Foundation. Feels US-centric to me, covers broadband access, agtech. Related to some of my thoughts on Local AI.

May 12th, 2024

Sun, 12 May 2024 16:24:50 GMT

Just spent a little bit of time with AFFiNE, a local first, open source all-in-one workspace with docs, canvas, and database aka “Notion replacement”. I’m looking for something like this to adopt and recommend.

May 12th, 2024

Sun, 12 May 2024 16:03:12 GMT

PeARS is “People's Agent for Reciprocated Search”, an open source search system written in Python. Federated server plus local version to run from your desktop.

May 11th, 2024

Sun, 12 May 2024 05:31:17 GMT

Turns out Teenage Engineering makes a mini-ITX computer case called the computer-1. Any other suggestions for cool or customizable mini cases?

May 11th, 2024

Sat, 11 May 2024 20:58:25 GMT

Jason Cohen @asmartbear > Pick advice that matches your goals. > > Lots of people recommend Peter Thiel's Zero to One. That’s wonderful if you're aiming to build the next Facebook. > > But if your focus is on creating a self-funded company prioritizing happiness and profits, that advice is incorre…

May 11th, 2024

Sat, 11 May 2024 17:04:05 GMT

I just recommended someone check out TinySeed. It’s a startup accelerator for B2B SaaS companies that are bootstrapping. Yes, this is me starting to rebuild Startup info here.

May 11th, 2024

Sat, 11 May 2024 16:51:23 GMT

Dokploy is another Docker + Traefik PaaS, most similar to Coolify. Written in TypeScript, Apache OSS, supports Nixpacks, Buildpacks, or plain Dockerfiles.

May 11th, 2024

Sat, 11 May 2024 16:43:27 GMT

I tinkered with a Portainer install yesterday. I’m working my way through various Bring Your Own Server stacks. This one’s a little to low level / enterprise for my single server management needs.

May 10th, 2024

Sat, 11 May 2024 05:46:43 GMT

Cap.so is an open source alternative to Loom — desktop screen recording and sharing. It uses Tauri for a desktop client.

May 10th, 2024

Fri, 10 May 2024 19:00:02 GMT

walkah tells me that deSEC is a very good no-charge DNS hosting service run out of Germany supported by NLnet. I still use Namecheap as my registrar, going to explore setting up a domain reseller somewhere.

May 10th, 2024

Fri, 10 May 2024 14:36:45 GMT

Simon Wardley on why Wardley Maps use evolution rather than maturity in Map evolution not maturity: “(maturity is) almost always championed by salespeople who are trying to sell outdated technology that may not be in your best interest”

May 8th, 2024

Thu, 09 May 2024 06:04:46 GMT

Hackathons are mostly bad. Hack days and gathering around demos are mostly good.

May 8th, 2024

Wed, 08 May 2024 16:56:59 GMT

My Rabbit Tech R1 arrived today. Haven’t even turned it on yet. Love the neon orange.

May 7th, 2024

Wed, 08 May 2024 03:57:09 GMT

@mathewchaim on how we get to keep building the Internet. This really resonated with me: > we’ve been given the opportunity to keep building the internet > > it’s not so much about building a new internet > > it’s more that we get to keep on building the internet > > because the internet essenti…

May 7th, 2024

Tue, 07 May 2024 19:28:19 GMT

I got an email from LinkedIn telling me my account is 21 years old. Regardless of what you think of the platform, an Internet service sticking around that long is amazing in our current era of software building. I was user 1746 and waves of "social networks" were being launched in 2003, and I tried…

May 7th, 2024

Tue, 07 May 2024 16:25:31 GMT

Had an awesome call with Yuni from MIWA Events this morning. I worked with her on lots of IPFS events over the past several years, and MIWA is her new independent event production company.

May 6th, 2024

Mon, 06 May 2024 16:39:42 GMT

Met @neilsonks dropping by Z-Space today (he's an OG member here). He's now part of Open Souls, which you can find out more about in founder Kevin Fischer's video at Betaworks.

April 27th, 2024

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 19:03:23 GMT

Discussing trade-offs between different protocols, the Matrix P2P work came up arewep2pyet.com/ Apparently they’re building on Yggdrasil instead of libp2p.

April 23rd, 2024

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 22:29:54 GMT

A 2021 thread by @heyellieday on “proof of fidelity” instead of proof of human: we want non-human actors like squads or communities to be able to act as agents.

April 23rd, 2024

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:45:42 GMT

Updating my profile on the Cal.com booking calendar I self host on Commons Computer and once again really impressed at the feature set. Next up: DailyCo as Zoom replacement (this powers Cal Video).

April 23rd, 2024

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 14:35:09 GMT

Long thread by @maegul@hachyderm.io on if posting Ghost and Wordpress blogs into ActivityPub microblogging makes sense from a UX perspective. If I were Ghost, I’d add a default “Ghost account”, as well as enable per site AP server — active sites would be more like Reddits. The Notes vs Article Acti…

April 22nd, 2024

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 05:19:38 GMT

Stephen Wolfram writes about the ChatGPT integration with Wolfram Alpha.. I have been wondering about this sort of “fact engine” integration. As LLMs get used for search, you’d prefer facts for the factual parts ;)

April 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 19:52:09 GMT

I added a few notes to Feedback on Federating Ghost on how this could be done using ATProtocol. One idea I think is novel that I wrote up in more detail: Bluesky Custom Feeds for Premium Content

April 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 17:24:06 GMT

Going through some open tabs and made a bunch of updates. Now took myself to the coffee shop to work on some blog coding. Custom Frames Support I added Farcaster Frames support to the site, using just default settings similar to what is already inserted into page headers for OpenGraph. Using the Gho…

April 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 15:04:04 GMT

Matthew Bogart writes up his thoughts on how Ghost might join the fediverse. The “new blog post” short note vs “full post” federation is an interesting one. I do think full post is the most interesting (there are many ways to cross post new blog post notifications already).

April 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 14:58:57 GMT

ActivityBadges extends Open Badges with ActivityPub support. Seen via @mapache@hacyderm.io

April 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 14:23:49 GMT

Just read David Phelps’ Proto-App Thesis aka “Protocol Apps”. It matches a lot of what I’m thinking, except I think apps will build on top of ActivityPub, ATProtocol, or Farcaster. I’ll collect some thoughts at Proto Apps.

April 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 13:55:40 GMT

Clew is an independent web search engine “focused on writing by independent creators”.

April 18th, 2024

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 05:40:09 GMT

Tailscale posts about fixing their pricing so that everyone can use OIDC-compliant SSO on any plan. This sentence about their mission stood out: > Our mission at Tailscale is to build the new internet, and we take a strong stance that the next internet has to be secure by default.

April 16th, 2024

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 22:49:17 GMT

I wrote up my notes on what I submitted to the Ghost survey: Feedback on Federating Ghost. I truly believe that any app that cares about user interaction should look to federate beyond a single install.

April 15th, 2024

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 04:35:43 GMT

John O’Nolan, founder of Ghost, makes a post asking for feedback on federating Ghost with ActivityPub. Please share what you write in the survey!

April 15th, 2024

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:36:13 GMT

Ben Pate has posted a demo video of a federated Bandcamp, built using his ActivityPub “Social web toolkit”, Emissary.

April 15th, 2024

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:33:44 GMT

Paul Frazee shares a few thoughts on paying for email to stop spam. This is of course purely in reference to email. Not to any other kinds of posts.

April 15th, 2024

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:43:59 GMT

Chris Riccomini PostgreSQL Extensions or Protocols: Architecture Roulette - I feel like a lot of early open source is now exploring the protocols vs platforms space. Including “de facto” protocol status.

April 14th, 2024

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 18:59:31 GMT

Gordon Brander writes Decentralizability: > “Immutable data, universal IDs, user-controlled keys… and just using HTTP. I think this is probably minimum viable decentralizability.” Pretty close match to my definition of Web3.

April 14th, 2024

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 15:40:43 GMT

Kneeling Bus’ Brazilianization of the Internet is an important read. I need to think about how my Community Search Engine exacerbate “enclave-gated internet” spaces.

April 14th, 2024

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 15:24:38 GMT

Ken Kantzer writes “GPT is the Heroku of AI”: > “a very, very expensive way to do ML features without needing an ML team. It’s actually not even that expensive compared to the value, but it is expensive compared to cheaper locally run LLMs and using a traditional ML model, once it’s been trained.”

April 12th, 2024

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 14:57:04 GMT

Ivo Velitchkov @kvistgaard talks about what he’s missing from the reMarkable: > 1. Export of highlights from PDF and EPUB > 2. Links between notes and related to that: > 3. Persistent IDs of every object (note, notebook, folder, tag) so that they can be referred to from other places and opened up in…

April 10th, 2024

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:02:26 GMT

“Computation is the medium of our lifetimes - it’s not just a technical medium but a cultural medium as well. We should explore the culture of computation” by Myron Krueger, as said by @zachlieberman

April 10th, 2024

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:18:44 GMT

Matt Roberts writes “Who killed Canadian Venture?” digging into the history of Canadian pension funds and RRSP investment rules. TLDR In the 90s, 80% had to be Canadian. In 2003, this was changed to 70%. And then, in 2005 — no Canadian investment minimum.

April 8th, 2024

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 23:20:32 GMT

One of the things I did during Vancouver Hack Day was set up a Polis poll around DWebYVR / Vancouver tech topics. It's a way to gather feedback while also mapping consensus or differing opinions.

April 8th, 2024

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 19:25:57 GMT

More setting up my Z-Space desk. Using my RK71 keyboard, configured using Karabiner Elements and downloaded bbeerr's RK61 scripts to have an escape key as well as backtick and tilde keys.

April 6th, 2024

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 04:01:47 GMT

I bought a few things for my desk at Z-Space, including this j5create docking stand and mini dock.

April 6th, 2024

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 15:04:40 GMT

Ubicloud is “an open, free, and portable cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers”. Open source AGPL that you install on bare metal servers to run your own cloud.

April 6th, 2024

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 14:54:12 GMT

Chad Whitacre: Open source is not a grocery store (pay first), not a soup kitchen (not charity). Open source is a restaurant (eat your meal with others, then split the check).

March 31st, 2024

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 15:55:59 GMT

Glyph writes Software Needs To Be More Expensive, mostly suggesting that low barrier “let engineers expense $50 per month to any open source project” could help. The underlying intent is what I’d like to promote: pay to support software you care about. From end users to developers, this can be prom…

March 30th, 2024

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 05:38:25 GMT

Ian Vanagas writes Smart Young BC. He's starting to write some screenshot essays with great Vancouver Tech content, like this one on crushing silos.

March 30th, 2024

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 05:30:12 GMT

OK, went ahead and figured out a date with Orion: Next Tools for Thought Rocks will be Wed, April 17th at 8am PST.

March 30th, 2024

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 03:56:17 GMT

Jamming with Orion Reed. Going to host his Causal Islands LA talk at an upcoming Tools for Thought Rocks event so we get a recording. And I think it’s time to work on TiddlyWiki style drag and drop. I’ll post some background thoughts at Note Clips.

March 30th, 2024

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 16:42:20 GMT

Demo video of live setup of Co-op Cloud stack with single sign on with Keycloak and running Matrix, Hometown (Mastodon fork), and Nextcloud.

March 29th, 2024

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 22:38:59 GMT

I’m helping to organize a Vancouver Hack Day this coming Sunday, April 7th, 2024. Get a quick overview of some interesting tech, including ATProtocol, Everywhere Computer, Local First, and Enhance. Then spend the day learning and coding, or bring a project of your own. Demos end of day.

March 29th, 2024

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 07:28:15 GMT

Substack introduced a “Follow” feature that makes it more like a social network destination rather than a newsletter / blog platform. And they don’t share follower email addresses with authors. Yet-another-proprietary-social network. Yes, I told you so. Write up on The Wrap

March 26th, 2024

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 05:23:29 GMT

Chad Whitacre on the Redis re-licensing: > “For a relicensing to be a rug pull, there has to have been a true developer community around the project—not just users, developers.” Also has a graph showing Sentry (where he works) being almost completely company maintained.

March 24th, 2024

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 03:40:50 GMT

Did a quick test of the whtwnd ATProtocol blogging platform. Made by @knksm5.final-techblog.com: > “The body of blog articles is stored on your Personal Data Server (PDS) and is not saved on WhiteWind servers or the like, and viewers retrieve articles from your PDS.”

March 21st, 2024

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:38:28 GMT

Ana Hevesi from Uploop posts a fire article Stop wasting time on community: > "…today’s leaders can build followings at scales that were once the exclusive domain of religions and nations." Ana says: get serious about defining and serving your extended constituencies.

March 20th, 2024

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 16:48:14 GMT

Daniel from Bluesky goes through the evolution of the network to today’s federation.

March 18th, 2024

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 15:09:04 GMT

Old blog post by Moxie on the Signal blog on how open-ended protocols stall. Surfaced by Gordon Brander, “innovation by definition is not standardizable” — ecosystems move too quickly as they first emerge.

March 17th, 2024

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 21:46:17 GMT

I just signed up to rent a desk for 3 months in a shared space in Vancouver. I'm going to try getting out of the house regularly, it's a cool space I want to support, and it's got some event space that I'll use for some upcoming things.

March 17th, 2024

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 20:40:36 GMT

New note for Universal Blue: using containers as the basis for a desktop OS. "That's nerdspeak for the ultimate Linux client: the reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop"

March 17th, 2024

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 20:13:23 GMT

Bazzite is a Linux distro for gaming with Steam support out of the box.

March 17th, 2024

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 18:13:46 GMT

Web Recorder actually records websites so they are replayable rather than just a static archive.

March 16th, 2024

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 15:28:08 GMT

ParadeDB “a modern ElasticSearch alternative built on Postgres and Tantivy, in Rust”

March 14th, 2024

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 23:53:37 GMT

Radicle has reached v1.0. It's a "distributed code collaboration stack" -- local first nodes that connect p2p and stores everything in git, identities are DID-based Ed25519 keys.

March 14th, 2024

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:00:23 GMT

Uncut.wtf is "a free typeface catalogue, focusing on somewhat contemporary type. There are currently 152 typefaces featured" via Ryan Betts, we're using Overused Grotesk at Fission.

March 13th, 2024

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 16:28:50 GMT

Marker is “an open-source, user-friendly UI for writing & editing markdown files”. For MacOS desktop, built with Tauri.

March 11th, 2024

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 06:41:00 GMT

Doing Weeknotes), by Giles Turnbull: “Weeknotes are a format for regular communication about work in progress.” via Ben Werdmuller

March 11th, 2024

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 05:30:50 GMT

I kind of hate this Fast Company review of the 2024 MacBook Air called “Dawn of the AI laptop” — but it’s the label that’s selling laptops today. Without “touchscreen capability, fancy rotating hinges, folding screens, or other features” that PC manufacturers are attempting.

March 11th, 2024

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 21:28:35 GMT

I took some downtime this weekend and played many hours of Caves of Qud, an RPG / roguelike that has a vast world and many commands and abilities. Found myself searching a lot of basics, like "How do I fill a waterskin with liquid?", and deciding how many arms and legs I wanted my mutant character t…

March 9th, 2024

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 05:18:22 GMT

Fedify: > …is a Deno/TypeScript library for building federated server apps powered by ActivityPub and other standards Still in early development. Also using Deno’s new JSR packaging format.

March 8th, 2024

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 20:14:02 GMT

It's been 20 years, and I brought Zoe up in conversation again: a local IMAP server on your Mac that gave you an interface for exploring, searching, and working with your email. I've added a notes page for it.

March 8th, 2024

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 18:18:16 GMT

I recently installed Telegram desktop to my Mac. The disk image has this really cute illustration in it.

March 7th, 2024

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 07:07:36 GMT

Supernote is an e-ink tablet that is currently Android 11 powered but will have a customizable & open Linux release. $299USD per-order, plus you’ll need a $70 pen.

March 7th, 2024

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 23:40:55 GMT

Gitlab has a backlog item for enabling ActivityPub support. There isn't a lot of consistency in this stuff yet, don't know if they'll confirm to what ForgeFed is designing, or just aim for "can subscribe in Mastodon" (really, they should be supporting both).

March 7th, 2024

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 23:22:42 GMT

Talking about Ente, it turns out people are interested in solutions for Photo Sharing, so I wrote up a notes page about some apps that I know of, and what I currently use.

March 7th, 2024

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 22:20:51 GMT

ForgeFed is a project to work on federation for software forges, built on top of ActivityPub: > “imagine you could host your Git repos anywhere you want…but still be able to open issues and submit pull requests against repos hosted elsewhere”

March 7th, 2024

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 21:30:22 GMT

Puter is an SPA that looks like a virtual desktop OS in the browser “Internet OS and Desktop Environment” Reminds me of PhotoPea, but the front end is AGPL licensed. I’m still digging into how coupled the back end is. Sign up with my referral link for +1GB

March 7th, 2024

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 21:18:22 GMT

Threads is rolling out a beta of user accounts opting in to enabling federation. Evan Prodromou announces he is part of the beta @evanprodromou@threads.net

March 4th, 2024

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 19:02:12 GMT

Added a notes page for Stewart Brand's Pace Layering concept. "The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines with learning continuity"

March 4th, 2024

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 15:43:37 GMT

Ente just announced open sourcing their full backend. It’s an end-to-end encrypted “alternative to Google or Apple photos”, licensed as AGPL. Their client code had always been open source, this completes making the entire service available.

March 2nd, 2024

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 19:28:46 GMT

Apple released a game porting toolkit that has been improved by Whisky: > app that wraps both Wine, the tool that translates Windows API calls to their Unix-like equivalents, and Apple’s game porting toolkit into one very friendly interface. That removes pretty much all of the work out of the proces…

March 2nd, 2024

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:46:42 GMT

@alex@social.alexschroeder.ch made a theme for his site that makes it look like chat threads. It’s powered by his very interesting Oddmu wiki / memex.

March 2nd, 2024

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:20:15 GMT

Ben Werdmuller is adding asides posts which are pretty similar to how how I think about my journal post types.

March 1st, 2024

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:09:05 GMT

This is the longest time I haven't posted journal updates in a while! Still at EthDenver until Sunday, maybe I'll put some notes on that EthDenver page. I've got lots of tabs open from the people and projects I've met. And lots of progress in inviting people to Causal Islands

February 25th, 2024

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 20:46:47 GMT

Landed in Denver. I’m here for the week attending EthDenver and the many community side events happening. Talking to people about Fission’s Everywhere Computer.

February 25th, 2024

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 20:45:07 GMT

I think the word bridge is now at the level of trigger word for people. What if I call Misskey a bridge to Mastodon? It means something socially and technically to some group of people which is disconnected from how it works. Networked communications are absolutely social discussions — not just te…

February 24th, 2024

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 04:30:06 GMT

Steve Klabnik writes up his own take on How does Bluesky work > I think the separation of concerns between atproto and BlueSky are very meaningful, as having a “killer app” for the network gives a reason to use it. It also is a form of dogfooding, making sure that atproto is good enough to be able t…

February 24th, 2024

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 17:13:18 GMT

Rui Carmo writes up his experiences with LLMs etc in Living with our machine sidekicks. Here’s his comment on trying to import his 20 year old digital garden: > In my experience, summaries for personal notes either miss the point or are hilariously off, suggestions for related pages prioritise match…

February 23rd, 2024

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:45:09 GMT

Congrats to the Bluesky team on opening up federation yesterday! Read the blog post announcement I almost got a PDS up and running yesterday for my birthday. I’ve been talking to Nathan Schneider and Robin Berjon about running a co-op PDS, Sky Coop.

February 23rd, 2024

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:38:03 GMT

Manton from Micro.blog intends to enable the service as an ATProtocol PDS: > The long-term plan for Micro.blog is to fully support AT’s PDS — Personal Data Servers. Any blog hosted on Micro.blog would plug into Bluesky seamlessly, with data portable to other AT Protocol hosting providers. Micro.blo…

February 22nd, 2024

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:30:14 GMT

Following on Paying people to work on open source is good actually, Chad Whitacre proposes Software Commons as the big tent definition of open source in his post Towards Software Commons. From the Wikipedia definition: > The software commons consists of all computer software which is available at li…

February 22nd, 2024

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 23:09:02 GMT

Blog tinkering on my birthday ✅ The aliases field in notes are now used to generate the lines of the IPFS redirects file. View source on Github

February 21st, 2024

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 16:48:49 GMT

There are 14 JavaScript runtimes, via @wesbos. This was a glitch post that I didn't end up publishing, but the link made it through my RSS pipes and got posted. So I'm retconning the link that got posted. Let's make a JavaScript Runtimes notes page for this info to live.

February 21st, 2024

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:37:03 GMT

Rosano writes an encryption rant as he attempts to backup and transfer data from a handful of apps: > there's no feigning moral superiority in using 'alternative tech' until it includes a real foundation to stand on for people without this domain expertise.

February 20th, 2024

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 01:13:12 GMT

Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer, Moore's Scofflaws: > software costs can potentially absorb the entire gain from a next-generation CPU…software vendors never would have been allowed to get away with charging by the gigahertz; we should not allow them to feel so emboldened to charge by core co…

February 20th, 2024

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 21:09:56 GMT

Signal is adding usernames to protect visibility of phone numbers. Usernames are effectively a privacy work around, not a social feature: > Signal usernames are not logins or handles that you’ll be known by on the app – they’re simply a quick way to connect without sharing a phone number. They also…

February 18th, 2024

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:01:13 GMT

“We have lost the ability to do RAD (Rapid Application Development) due to the prevalence of web applications” says Rui Carmo. He has a page collecting his research on Native Development

February 17th, 2024

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 05:54:33 GMT

Apple detects Mastodon with a link tag — but then still uses OpenGraph to load the preview for iMessage. Any app that has a Mastodon shaped link tag can thus get rich previews.

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 06:36:51 GMT

Deltachat blog post about updated webxdc docs and sample apps Like FarcasterFrames, webxdc “messenger apps” are interesting to me as it combines distribution with new app functionality.

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 04:55:01 GMT

Tom Critchlow writes up notes on his Remarkable Tablet. I have a reMarkable tablet myself and think Tom’s suggestions are pretty great. > I’d also love a more formal diary / daily entry system. Kind of like Obsidian’s daily notes. Some kind of date-based notebook inside the Remarkable would be rad…

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 04:42:26 GMT

The Polkadot ecosystem has defined salaries and grades for fellowships. Via Dietrich, who put together background context on Parity/Polkadot decentralization. Fits my open source as a job thinking, and is roughly what I suggested when I was working in the Ethereum core ecosystem: $10KUSD per month i…

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 04:15:36 GMT

I spent way too much time this past week being annoyed and disappointed at the hate thrown at Bridgy Fed developer Ryan Barrett, connecting ActivityPub to Bluesky’s ATProtocol. Sean Tilley has a great opinion piece on We Distribute that does a good job of summarizing.

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 04:02:22 GMT

OWA on Apple killing web apps in the EU This feels … complicated. There are new browser engines allowed in the EU. You can still have a Home Screen “bookmark” & it will open in the browser of your choice. Any of the new browsers — including Chrome or Firefox — could be a great host for PWAs on iOS…

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 01:50:34 GMT

Jacob Kaplan-Moss writes Paying people to work on open source is good actually which very much matches my thoughts so I’m clipping it to my local notes. I’ll share a handful of quotes: > “Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong.” > “Open source is good for humanity…I wan…

February 16th, 2024

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 01:45:38 GMT

Great read about the recent Mastodon CVE (which could allow taking over and forging content for remote accounts). I’m quoting a bit here about open source: > how people seem to only care for the 'gratis' of free software, and seldom the 'libre', and millions of users leaning on the work of primaril…

February 13th, 2024

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:48:48 GMT

Ink & Switch lab notebook for new Patchwork project. First post, Universal Version Control: > “We believe that simple, powerful, universal version control tools could help all kinds of creators produce better work. Perhaps this is even built into the storage layer of your OS! That’s the vision for t…

February 12th, 2024

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:13:52 GMT

Oh look at this! Just found out that Ton Zijlstra is involved in PKM Summit 2024 (aka Personal Knowledge Management, aka Digital Garden / Second Brain). Late March in Utrecht, NL, around the same time I’m planning Causal Islands LA.

February 11th, 2024

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 16:22:12 GMT

Dare Obasanjo says paid subscriptions to websites creates a global divide vs ad supported: > “Online advertising is a progressive form of taxation as the rich, mostly US-based consumers who buy goods & services from ads subsidized the internet for everyone else.” @carnage4life@mas.to

February 10th, 2024

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 06:20:43 GMT

90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google, via ahrefs 59 blogging statistics for 2023

February 10th, 2024

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 19:37:14 GMT

I’ve been reading lots of Apple Vision Pro reviews and chatter. I spent several years working in AR/VR/XR and tinkered with hand input + interfaces. We knew that mobile OS powered headset was coming from Apple. Then I watched Apple evolve their UI on Mac and iOS for years, that pointed without a dou…

February 10th, 2024

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 18:29:51 GMT

I added 2022-01-15-networked-orgs-and-tooling as my first retroactive blog post. It didn't feel enough like a note, so I formatted and integrated a few things and published it as a blog post.

February 9th, 2024

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 04:38:42 GMT

Stract, an open source search engine: > ”where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results. It's a search engine made for hackers and tinkerers just like ourselves.” 404 Media, This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as…

February 9th, 2024

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 04:03:51 GMT

Collective Governance Directory: > A collection of links to publicly available governance documents, published by the collectives that use them. Launched by Doug, who is looking for other collectives to contribute their docs.

February 9th, 2024

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 04:01:02 GMT

Bluesky handles directory lists a breakdown of custom domain names used as account names on Bluesky.

February 9th, 2024

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 03:49:56 GMT

> “Just enough leadership injected, when it is needed, where it is needed.” vgr writes a post on a Management trend he’s seeing, that he calls BDFx-ing. BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) is a common governance model for many open source projects.

February 8th, 2024

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 22:29:59 GMT

I have a Twitter archive powered by Tweetback. There are apparently 68 Tweetback Canonical archives registered, which will link to the “canonical” URLs of each others archives. I think Mastodon or Bluesky import is a more likely path for people who really want their archive online. Bluesky, which w…

February 8th, 2024

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:44:15 GMT

Peter Kaminski, Books and NeoBooks > The idea of NeoBooks was never to be about one particular kind of object. It’s about how to use the techniques that we have, social techniques and informational techniques, to help people publish.

February 7th, 2024

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 07:34:29 GMT

I’m getting all nostalgic reading my own blog posts from 20 years ago. (1) because it was the beginning of being part of the growing Vancouver tech scene; and, (2) I have 20 year old blog posts still online! Here’s the IPFS index of my posts from 2004, which probably means they’ll stick around for…

February 7th, 2024

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:56:03 GMT

20 years of Flickr. And I just happened to tell the story today of the tech meetup I organized in Vancouver 20 years ago. 6 people came, including Roland Tanglao, who got us all early access to Flickr. I still have the blog post from the Vancouver Geek Dinner. And some notes on that early full scree…

February 7th, 2024

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 20:47:34 GMT

Just heard of another Canadian founder switching to EQ Bank because of their direct partnership with Wise. Never mind International business, transfers in Canada of more than $10K are way too hard with the big banks!

February 5th, 2024

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 07:53:00 GMT

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement, Anil Dash: > “being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement. Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by a…

February 5th, 2024

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 07:35:15 GMT

Next in the tiny hardware series: I bought an ASUS MiniPC PL63. It was on sale, and I wanted a machine that sits at my desk with modern ports.

February 5th, 2024

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 05:28:16 GMT

Brett Cannon, Python core dev: > “When you say or ask for something regarding open source, add "for me" to the end of the sentence. If that makes it sound rude, then consider rephrasing.

February 5th, 2024

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 05:25:50 GMT

Had a great morning at DWebYVR coworking. We ended up on the top floor of the VPL Central Library and had a bunch of interesting discussions that you can find on the notes page.

February 5th, 2024

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:21:45 GMT

The developer of the Graysky client for Bluesky has written up how to embed replies from Bluesky as comments on your blog. 2024-01-161536, not going to enable this on my site.

February 4th, 2024

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 05:52:00 GMT

Craig Mod writes "Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters" (2019), which is a delightful piece of writing with many links that you should read in full, but I will quote a few snippets: > "I fear we’re entering an era of newsletter fatigue…" > "the state of newsletters and email, in 2019: Things are unexpec…

February 4th, 2024

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 04:29:59 GMT

Changed the Fedica settings to crosspost to my main Bluesky account @bmann.ca rather than the @bmannconsulting.com account I made. I think I liked the concept of mapping my domain to it's own username (and the FoodWiki has an account too), but it really just is "me". The three Mastodon accounts are…

February 3rd, 2024

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:44:24 GMT

The late majority needs nothing to change. Early adopters move on to systems where the “new stuff” is available.

February 3rd, 2024

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 17:49:06 GMT

I created the /management channel on Warpcast, goaded on by Venkatesh Rao.

February 3rd, 2024

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 17:37:00 GMT

Right now, I pay for two open social protocols. For ActivityPub, I pay for my own servers (hosting) and clients (Ivory). For Farcaster, I pay for invites and channels. ATProtocol, I need Bluesky to get off your butts and launch federation to enable various people to start charging for things.

February 2nd, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 19:18:06 GMT

As of iOS 17.4, iPhone users in the EU can choose a default browser, details from MacRumors: > Apple said iPhone users in the EU will be presented with a list of the 12 most popular web browsers from their country's local App Store at the time Take away: a lot of browsers will be competing for App S…

February 2nd, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 08:13:05 GMT

DREAM - Distribution Rules Everything Around Me Distribution is the product of next gen social protocols, and why app devs are building in support as search and platform social crumbles.

February 1st, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 07:30:52 GMT

Three quotes from “The Internets Meaning Crisis”, by Kneeling Bus: > The average human living today sees more things they don’t care about in one week than a medieval peasant did in their entire lifetime. Parasocial media as antidote to AI content: > As AI normalizes the idea of human-free content c…

February 1st, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 07:21:51 GMT

We’re in the middle of a perfect storm for rollback of the ‘open web’ and burgeoning online surveillance” — that’s just the title of Alec Muffet’s post. He details a long list of issues, with everything from politics to lack of digital literacy by both activists and regulators. > We are in for a rou…

February 1st, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 07:17:00 GMT

I post about 2024-01-300842, and then sbc64 follows the links and comes back with wgautomesh, a tool by the same team: > “A simple utility to help connect wireguard nodes together in a full mesh topology” Excellent! May be useful for some work at Fission.

February 1st, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 07:12:08 GMT

This FOSDEM talk on Domain: a modular Rust DNS toolkit looks interesting: > The "domain" crate is a Rust library that aims to provide a wide range of building blocks that are necessary or useful when building specialised DNS applications. > > In this talk we will look at the history, current state,…

February 1st, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 07:05:40 GMT

Chad Kohalyk writes about fun: > Basically, the most important thing for peak performance is energy. And the way to generate energy is to make sure there is enough FUN in your life. Then you will have the fuel to lean into whatever the problem of the moment is. Chad works with me at Fission. I’ve be…

February 1st, 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 01:35:12 GMT

The Tangara Music Player campaign opened on Crowd Supply today. Yep, I ordered.

February 1st, 2024

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 20:15:34 GMT

I care more about apps, protocols, and files than operating systems. But plumbing and sewers are important.

January 31st, 2024

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 07:01:27 GMT

Got Coolify installed by first installing UTM on my MacBook Air, and then installing Debian. I needed to turn on bridged networking so that the VM could have its own IP address. And curl wasn’t installed, but after that the Coolify install just worked.

January 31st, 2024

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 01:53:51 GMT

It’s the first anniversary of CoSocial. This is the first co-op I’ve been part of, although I’ve been involved in a number of other non-profits, foundations, and other structures. I’m gathering, learning, and sharing more info on my co-op notes.

January 31st, 2024

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 23:15:51 GMT

Matthew Ingram writes a post mortem on The Messenger news startup: > The saddest part of this whole saga, as Simon Owens noted, is that the $50 million Finkelstein and his team chewed through could have funded a hundred local news startups that people might actually want or need. I’m a big fan of th…

January 30th, 2024

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 17:19:38 GMT

Oxide Computer has released Helios, a distribution of illumos that powers their Oxide Rack computer.

January 30th, 2024

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 16:42:30 GMT

Garage “An open-source distributed object storage service tailored for self-hosting”. S3-compatible API, single Rust binary that is installable everywhere.

January 28th, 2024

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 18:16:13 GMT

Steven Sinofsky writes about Apple and the DMA in “Building Under Regulation”: > As I read the over 60 pages of the DMA when it was passed…my heart sank over the complexity of a regulation so poorly constructed yet so clearly aimed at specific (American) companies and products. It’s a long post and…

January 28th, 2024

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 18:11:17 GMT

The Open Web Advocacy group has posted a statement on how Apple is complying with the DMA “Apple’s plan to allow browser competition dubbed unworkable” Bruce Lawson makes a personal post on “malicious compliance”.

January 28th, 2024

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 18:03:17 GMT

This article “The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop” feels like the reverse of what we would have seen 10 years ago, complaining about designs that don’t work on mobile. The article states that 55% of web traffic comes from mobile. I bet if we measured “human time spent reading c…

January 28th, 2024

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 15:53:36 GMT

We need more tiny knowledge projects > “I used to think of “knowledge projects” as involving a big mission, a big community, and a complex piece of software: the stuff of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, or Genius (where I worked for several years). But the web is just as good for collaborations in the sm…

January 27th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 18:04:02 GMT

Law of VC writes about Simplifying the SAFE (posted in 2021), with his suggestion being “Remove the Valuation Cap and Discount. Replace it with a Conversion Percentage”.

January 27th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:53:20 GMT

Will Crichton proposes a portable EPUB format to replace PDFs. If you click through the link, you’ll see that the article is a portable EPUB.

January 27th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 17:20:14 GMT

PieFed written in Python and Flask, AGPL-licensed, first class moderation tools. Project goal: > To build a federated discussion and link aggregation platform, similar to Reddit, Lemmy, Mbin.

January 27th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 08:09:49 GMT

Delta Chat blogged about their release of chatmail services -- email services optimized for powering end-to-end encrypted chat like DeltaChat. > With some knowledge of DNS, SSH and a spare VPS (get the cheapest you can find), you can setup and offer chatmail services yourself pretty quickly. A frien…

January 26th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 07:56:40 GMT

webxdc is a specification for embedding apps in chat created by Delta Chat. Shared with me by @fabrice@fosstodon.org.

January 26th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 07:55:21 GMT

Awesome to see Farcaster continuing to experiment with the launch of Frames. Matches my thoughts on mobile form and social as distribution / discovery. Farcaster has less usage than my other two protocol recommendations — ATProtocol and ActivityPub — but ability to align login / growth directly with…

January 26th, 2024

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 05:39:26 GMT

Thanks @christina@social.coop for finding and sharing the term Knowmad, similar to Wildcard. Read Moravec's article and definition "Who are knowmads?".

January 24th, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:33:22 GMT

Antikythera is "a think tank reorienting planetary computation as a technological, philosophical, and geopolitical force". They have a new working group starting up on Futures of Multipolar Computation. Multidisciplinary researchers are invited to apply.

January 24th, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 17:40:46 GMT

Brought to my attention by @django@cosocial.ca's post linking to Michael Geist's article on Bill S-210, and that it may apply to the fediverse as well: > the unlimited scope of the Canadian law to sites such as Twitter, Snap, Instagram, Twitch and many others is no accident. If the lead lobby group…

January 24th, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 15:30:22 GMT

Ton Zijlstra blogs about Europe’s AI act being ready and points out that a lot of new acts got passed: > In 2020 there was no Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, AI Regulation, Data Governance Act, Data Act, nor an Open Data Directive/High Value Data implementing regulation.

January 23rd, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 06:10:46 GMT

Aaron Boodman @aboodman has a thread on fenced communities which I very much agree with and replied to him with a link. Fenced community is my own term, from Open Source Licensing: restrict access to the scarce resources aka Common Goods of support, maintenance, discussion etc, but keep the code ope…

January 23rd, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 06:05:41 GMT

Luis Villa is writing [Open(ish) Machine Learning News]https://www.openml.fyi/2024-01-24/) and gives an update on what he’s going to cover: > less news, a turn more for the personal and the polemical: what should I do? What should our organizations and movements do? I am also going to be watching op…

January 23rd, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 05:14:20 GMT

Great write up by Paul Frazee of “Why isn’t Bluesky a peer-to-peer network?”, going back to his own roots and the “2014 generation of p2p”.[^distsys] Bluesky is a sort-of-federated model. Here’s a succinct description: > It might be even more accurate to call this a Cryptographic Data Web. Every use…

January 23rd, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 04:39:58 GMT

An excellent long read by Rudolf Winestock, “The Eternal Mainframe”. It describes the cloud as a return to shared mainframes, the death of standalone “offline” personal computers. > True standalone personal computers may return to their roots: toys for hobbyists. Fits my death of the professional d…

January 23rd, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 04:32:36 GMT

Tom Szilagyi writes “Ditching GitHub” — moving to self host his git repos, and welcoming email based git patches. This is not the last of these articles we’re going to read.

January 23rd, 2024

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 04:07:37 GMT

Ben Follington on the Subconscious team blogs on his personal site about “using Subconscious to design Subconscious” > So, how do you design feeling-first? Yes. How does both user and maker take the digital tool into their hands. A great read while also being highly personal about what Ben is aiming…

January 23rd, 2024

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:14:41 GMT

The Perplexity AI summary of 'what is OpenStreetMap?' is pretty good. Cites sources and summarizes and synthesizes. I didn't add this to my notes entry for OpenStreetMap directly, but did link the source web pages and quote text from the sources.

January 23rd, 2024

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:58:08 GMT

Capturing a link to Obsidian Map View Plugin, since it came up in discussion. Open source, uses OpenStreetMap and open map tiles for search and display. My exploration on Boris Map is mostly for FoodWiki purposes. I use basic tagging for notes pages if I want to capture e.g. that a person entry is i…

January 22nd, 2024

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:15:01 GMT

The rebooting of social networks, blogs, and newsletters continues. > Spyglass is a link blog, a column, and a newsletter, all written by me, M.G. Siegler.

January 22nd, 2024

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 22:47:28 GMT

Brian Wisti @randomgeek@hackers.town documents using Obsidian + Hugo and a few other things in “Rebuilding My Public Brain” We’ve been hanging out reading each others’ stuff on the blogosphere for a long time, nice to see what the neighbours are up to.

January 21st, 2024

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 04:35:27 GMT

Beluga is an iOS app that lets you post microblogs. What’s unique is that it posts to S3-compatible storage, using your own credentials. Bring your own storage!

January 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 17:28:21 GMT

The Fediverse Report, created and maintained by Laurens Hof @laurenshof@indieweb.social, is doing a great job of sharing news, and also explainers like “How Bluesky works — the network components”.

January 21st, 2024

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 17:18:51 GMT

Viverse, HTC’s metaverse open worlds platform, is going to be ActivityPub-enabled. Their blog post “The Fediverse Explained: Social Media’s Next Form” is a good overview of fediverse history and apps.

January 20th, 2024

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:55:21 GMT

Flaming Hydra is a collective of writers and artists. I’ve just subscribed to support them for the year. > a collective of 60 celebrated writers and artists joining to bring you an ingenious brief cooperatively-owned newsletter with short articles, essays, comics, commentary, and happenings

January 20th, 2024

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:03:05 GMT

obsidian-export , “a CLI program and a Rust library to export an Obsidian vault to regular Markdown” via @randomgeek@hackers.town

January 19th, 2024

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 21:06:41 GMT

The Lenovo M900 Tiny arrived. It came in a big, long box, which turned out to also contain a full keyboard and mouse, plus lots of packaging around the machine, which is metal, sturdy, and heavy. But very small! One annoying thing right away is that the specs are different than what I ordered: 8GB R…

January 18th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 23:45:18 GMT

Gibberish is now on testflight: > Gibberish is a blogging app that looks and feels like a messaging app. It’s a bit weird, but that’s the point. This UI tricks my brain into writing mode, just like when I write long messages to my friends. Here’s what it looks like: This is very similar to my thoug…

January 18th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 23:09:27 GMT

Just got a $200 credit for Perplexity.ai as an early buyer of Rabbit Tech R1.

January 18th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 17:18:36 GMT

From Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey, “Matrix is the 1 chat tool by current users' satisfaction” This is of course a popularity contest, but it’s still useful. Matches my expectations, eg lots of awareness of Microsoft Teams, people that use it hate it. Discord is desired and loved. As you go d…

January 17th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 05:29:20 GMT

What's IPFS and how it compares to BitTorrent is an article by Daniel Norman correcting and explaining many of the details about IPFS as a response to a blog comparing the two. It’s really well written. I should quote pieces of it on my IPFS notes page.

January 17th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 05:26:40 GMT

localfirst.fm is a new podcast about local first software development. LoFi as we like to call it.

January 17th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 05:19:14 GMT

Individual initiative, corporate inertia and good bad advice > I did my job with love and belief. This was always obviously risky. I had no illusions that the love was returned, or that it is even possible for a public corporation of non-trivial scale to behave in human ways at all. I’m quoting the…

January 17th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 05:09:08 GMT

New Public made a directory of “digital social platforms”: > The Directory is a list of spaces that have taken at least some notable steps to build a public-spirited user experience, embody at least one of NewPublic’s Civic Signals, and/or implement creative new design patterns. I love the words on…

January 17th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 05:04:59 GMT

Paul Frazee from the Bluesky team writing on his personal blog about the design of RichText facets that are used to include mentions and links in posts. And, other custom things that can be defined and read by different clients and servers.

January 17th, 2024

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 04:56:15 GMT

Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL? The TLDR; is treating the GPL as an issue of contract law rather than copyright, and because of contract law, a third party can sue instead of just the author. Vizio makes smart TVs that use GPL code and they haven’t shared the…

January 17th, 2024

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 17:16:34 GMT

I get a lot of unsolicited business emails as the founder of a company. Yes, this is spam, but it’s the sort of cold outreach where it’s just a “regular” email wanting to sell me consulting or some SaaS service. There are some that get sent from unbranded Gmail accounts (why???). I’m considering an…

January 17th, 2024

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 16:23:13 GMT

HatTip, a set of JavaScript packages for building HTTP server applications. The cheeky tagline is “like Express.js, but for the future”. From the README, “Server code that can be deployed anywhere: AWS, Cloudflare Workers, Fastly, Vercel, VPS”

January 16th, 2024

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 07:28:52 GMT

I came across a thread by @vkc about doing an experiment of not using big search engines. She in turn linked to Neil’s blog A week of not using a search engine. There’s a general rebirth of curated directory sites, and I’m personally interested in community or commons search. I’d much rather get a s…

January 16th, 2024

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 07:18:37 GMT

Flohmarkt, which means “flea market” in German, is a “federated decentral classified ad software using activitypub” aka Facebook Marketplace clone. Had this pointed out to me via @blaine, as we were chatting about serving real local / regional needs with Fediverse tools. Many area have Buy Local and…

January 16th, 2024

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 07:13:09 GMT

Bluesky posted their 2023 moderation report. Their moderation system is codenamed Ozone and they plan to open source it, as well as make the moderation backend self hostable.

January 16th, 2024

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 23:36:35 GMT

Do I want to add Mastodon powered comments to my site? I don't think so. I cross-post to have discussions over on those other systems.

January 16th, 2024

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 16:29:12 GMT

Orbstack for MacOS: > a fast, light, and simple way to run containers and Linux machines on macOS. It's a supercharged alternative to Docker Desktop and WSL, all in one easy-to-use app. Free for non-commercial usage, $96/year per business user.

January 16th, 2024

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 16:24:42 GMT

The Future is not Docker > The future is not Docker, but containers are. > > We started building Depot back in January 2022 to solve our own pain of living with slow Docker image builds in generic CI providers like GitHub Actions, Circle, etc. We were annoyed by having to save/load layer cache over…

January 15th, 2024

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 06:27:33 GMT

Fedica has an updated page describing how they handle cross posting RSS feed items. With many more networks at play, teams like Fedica are going to be updating how cross-posting and other aspects work. It's hard to normalize across all these systems!

January 15th, 2024

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 16:05:58 GMT

> the web starts to feel a bit like one giant website, that’s so fast it’s just… part of your computer. @duncanlock@cosocial.ca talking about the Dillo Plus browser with user stylesheets.

January 14th, 2024

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 06:14:05 GMT

Polar.sh is like a Patreon optimized for software creators that use GitHub. Newsletters, subscriptions, and issue-based funding. The platform itself is open source. Business model is 5% of funds transacted.

January 14th, 2024

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 17:44:50 GMT

CasaOS is a home lab management app. Storing & syncing between commercial data clouds — GDrive, Dropbox, etc — is the starting point, also installs apps via Docker containers.

January 14th, 2024

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:57:28 GMT

depp, a static page generator for git repositories. via @aw@merveilles.town, who has an instance running from a home lab.

January 13th, 2024

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 22:52:17 GMT

Write up by Molly White of her migration from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. She moved to a Digital Ocean droplet and spent the most time configuring DNS and email / Mailgun settings. I added some notes to my Ghost note.

January 12th, 2024

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 15:56:59 GMT

Check my Facilmap for storing bookmarked places. I'm taking notes on building Boris Map using Facilmap: a privacy-friendly, open-source versatile online map that combines different services based on OpenStreetMap You can self host it. This feels like another good option for Cloudron.

January 11th, 2024

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 17:54:43 GMT

Go read Kharis O'Connell's article, The Glimmer > All this Spatial Computing hype about to start (again!)...I can feel the frenzied frothing-at-the-mouth-need-for-a-gold-rush building in the tech industry. It's probably a good time to repost my Spatial Computing article from last June SpatialComputi…

January 11th, 2024

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 17:23:33 GMT

Just saw that Meetup was acquired by Bending Spoons. This is the same company that acquired Evernote. For me, Meetup is the epitome of platform capture. I won't use it for anything I organize. Luma is what I use, but just for RSVP / attendance, and I can export email as needed.

January 10th, 2024

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 17:32:16 GMT

Stats from Appfigures show Flutter as 2 SDK on Android / Google Play, and 4 on Apple App Store.

January 9th, 2024

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 05:42:10 GMT

Welcome to the year of tiny hardware experiments. Just bought a refurb Lenovo M900 Tiny for $179CAD.

January 9th, 2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 22:39:38 GMT

Rally is open source, self-hostable "pick a date or time to meet" software. I've created a note page for it locally with some more details, like their suggested social obligation to pay the equivalent of one year managed hosting if you host it yourself. CloudronApp selfhosting CommonsFunding AGPL

January 9th, 2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:59:48 GMT

Just launched at CES, the Rabbit Tech r1, "your pocket companion". A $199USD hardware device with screen, camera, analog scroll, push-to-talk mic, usb-c, sim card. I pre-ordered and put together a Rabbit Tech notes page.

January 9th, 2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:05:53 GMT

> I'd like to see web hosting look much more like installing an app on an iPhone. This is at the end of Ben Werdmuller’s response to Giles Turnbull’s Let’s make the IndieWeb easier. I couldn’t agree more. This is part of the deep dive I’ve been doing on Cloudron and similar Bring Your Own Server man…

January 8th, 2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 05:54:30 GMT

tally is a funky looking modern commercial SaaS form builder. I’ve been experimenting with NocoDB, an open source Airtable alternative that supports forms, and is installable on Cloudron.

January 8th, 2024

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 05:48:39 GMT

Papermark is an open source Docsend alternative. Hadn’t realized Docsend is now part of Dropbox. GitHub optimized for deploying on Vercel is here

January 8th, 2024

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 22:41:33 GMT

Linear App: Settings are not a design failure > thinking goes that as designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustments by the user. Consequently, offering customization options is interpreted as a failure to make firm product decisions. > … > First of all, remi…

January 8th, 2024

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 18:19:18 GMT

I have continued my Jekyll Liquid crimes by using replace to make all the images and notes full links. Journal RSS feed code on Github

January 8th, 2024

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:53:03 GMT

Andy Wingo, Missing the point of WebAssembly and offers his own starting point: > WebAssembly is a new fundamental abstraction boundary. WebAssembly is a new way of dividing computing systems into pieces and of composing systems from parts. Wingo is a compiler engineer working at Igalia, on Mastodon…

January 7th, 2024

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 06:06:04 GMT

BackYourStack is a project started by Open Collective which can scan your code dependencies and show which of them have Open Collective accounts. All of the code of both projects are open source.

January 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 18:29:21 GMT

Coolify is another self-hosting server management system (via @depatchedmode). They offer cloud hosting of the admin panel starting at $5/month, which then manages your other servers for deployment to.

January 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 18:18:51 GMT

Linux Desktop on your Android Device at Android Authority covers Debian NoRoot and UserLAnd (Ubuntu and other distros possible).

January 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 17:59:34 GMT

> The average estimated date for when AI could beat humans at every possible task shifted dramatically, moving from 2060 to 2047—a decrease of 13 years—in just the past year alone! Ethan Mollick, Signs and Portents

January 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 17:37:21 GMT

As I think about what subscribing / following / integrating other people’s notes looks like, I found this example from Rui Carmo’s Tao of Mac. It says “This wiki page is a stub”. It’s also integrated into his main feed.

January 7th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 17:01:23 GMT

I use Littlefoot to make inline footnotes[^demo]. Turns out NetNewsWire includes similar functionality. [^demo]: Footnote demo

January 6th, 2024

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 07:44:45 GMT

ZEISS is launching smart glass at CES and talks about holographic displays and switches. And apparently a transparent camera aka “holocam”

January 6th, 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 21:22:20 GMT

With so many different networks and accounts and crossposting, I find myself thinking about rebooting Moa Party. I’d actively run it as a collective of some kind.

January 6th, 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 16:42:50 GMT

I’m going to be talking more about Noosphere, so I better get its note page here setup. I’m an early beta user of the Subconscious iOS app that uses Noosphere as its backend.

January 5th, 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 05:17:48 GMT

> Your online persona federated > Have your domain name be followable by anyone on the Fediverse, be it Mastodon, Firefish, Akkoma, or any other federated social media platform. Get Federated is new thing by Sal Rahman @manlycoffee@techhub.social - sign up to get notified!

January 5th, 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 05:14:07 GMT

> There are no ushers on Mastodon. There's no one paid to show you to your seat, no one whose job it is to ease you into comfort and remove friction. There are no ushers on Mastodon by Les Orchard from back in November 2022.

January 5th, 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 04:39:39 GMT

I’ve been recommending UniFi routers for a while. Turns out there’s a new UniFi Dream Router that’s $266CAD and is the replacement for the $400CAD UniFi Dream Machine . Recommended!

January 5th, 2024

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:21:51 GMT

Everyone loves a notes graph! Shout out to the Digital Garden Jekyll Template once more. It turns out that I had previously done an experimental import of LogSeq into this site template. I probably even have some notes somewhere.

January 5th, 2024

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:32:53 GMT

TLDraw has changed its license to non-commercial. The founder Steve Ruizok dropped a note in the Cloudron forums saying that Cloudron may not be in compliance. I left a comment, as there are a number of apps with different licenses, and e.g. me running TLDraw on Commons Computer is not running it co…

January 5th, 2024

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 15:40:26 GMT

Jake Lazaroff argues that “website vs. web app dichotomy doesn’t exist”. It’s a good article, develops a framework for thinking about different types of web properties. Mentions Local First, CRDT. But to me, it does show a clear split of document web vs app web.

January 5th, 2024

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 08:42:53 GMT

OK, one more quick hack to the Journal feed. Relative paths for images are a problem. Maybe they actually aren't for many modern feed readers. But they ARE if I want Micro.blog to crosspost correctly. Found this hack to use the Liquid replace filter to look for src tags and then add in the full path…

January 4th, 2024

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 07:01:46 GMT

Added the journal feed in the link header of all pages so it can be auto-discovered. Pleasantly surprised to be digging into the IPFS redirects spec. I guess I can just point to my old archive! /archive/ https://2023.bmannconsulting.com/archive/ 301 Made a BMC page where some TO DO stuff will live.…

January 4th, 2024

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 21:27:41 GMT

Building SLCs - Simple, Lovable, Complete - features, rather than MVPs. Pronounced “Slick”. Your customers hate MVPs. Make a SLC instead

January 4th, 2024

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 20:57:44 GMT

Trimming NetNewsWire RSS subscriptions and ironically found RSS Parrot - “Turn Mastodon into your feed reader”. Reminds me of Darius’ RSS to ActivityPub Converter, which I want to look into deploying as a CoSocial service.

January 3rd, 2024

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 06:40:03 GMT

One more journal post! Micro.blog lets you add multiple feeds, and you can set custom cross posting for each feed. This means I have connected the Journal feed up to my @boris@toolsforthought.social account.

January 3rd, 2024

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 02:59:22 GMT

Ok, final post of the day now that I’ve learned about Obsidian nuances with Daily notes vs Unique note creator. I do want to open up a Daily note when I open. But, I want to just use the same format as the Unique note creator so all the files have the same format. As it turns out, because I made u…

202401031709

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 01:09:32 GMT

Hosting capacity as a measure of agency > I drew this diagram to illustrate a lot of related insights about agency, hosting, community-building, collaborative leadership & social change > you can use this map to self-evaluate your level of agency: where are you currently? what group experiences do y…

202401031451

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 22:51:12 GMT

Oh right. Obsidian uses moment.js formatting, and Liquid's date filter' uses strftime. And strftime isn't going to give me pretty 1st days as far as I can see.

202401031441

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 22:41:48 GMT

Co-op Cloud came up in discussion at CoSocial today. I'm porting in their Co-op Cloud Alternatives too.

January 2nd, 2024

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 22:20:19 GMT

I set up Working Copy so I can use Obsidian on my phone with git syncing / publishing. I always forget the order of steps. 1. Make Obsidian vault on mobile 2. In Working Copy, clone the git repo 3. Looking at the repo in Working Copy, click on Repository / Status and Configuration 4. Click on the di…

202401021435

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:35:45 GMT

I seem to keep having trouble finding Boris Anthony’s libra.re web eBook project. Now I have it.

202401031434

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:34:53 GMT

I point people at Robert Merki’s Wildcard definition often enough I should have an entry here.

December 29th, 2023

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 11:11:00 GMT

Using Obsidian to edit my Jekyll-based site. I want to add journals back in, and maybe move to Eleventy, and maybe add IndieKit. What are the latest Micropub Client apps?