Rose

Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy and Bookwyrm. They all seem to cover most of my social media needs which (in all other cases beside Lemmy) can be described as shouting in the void and being happy if someone else is there too.

For Mastodon, the people you follow will also need to switch. This is even harder than getting your friends to switch.

Well I switched from the birdsite to Mastodon because a) I like to shout in the void and b) see what other people are shouting into the void. Doesn’t really ultimately matter who’s doing the shouting. People who go to social media exclusively for news and updates are a bit strange when you really think about it. You’ve got to have the shout in you.

(I’m only being half facetious here)

Matrix. Seems to be the hottest thing for group chats. Also what a lot of open source projects that used IRC before are switching to (or, if not switching, are providing a bridge for).

I’m not really all that invested in trying out Friendica, because Facebook is basically the exact sort of social network service that I really don’t give a darn about. I wanted to check it anyway, but the only tangible information on what Friendica is about is the project/marketing page. I can’t browse the instances. If I go to your massive social platform, the last thing I want to see is just a brick wall of a login page. Then I looked at fedidb and… um, those aren’t huge user numbers.

So I guess I’ll keep posting on the services that seem more sensible to me, like Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy.

I’ve posted photos daily for 2 years now and I’m getting reasonable levels of likes/reposts. Judging from the stuff I’ve heard from other folks, these levels have fallen a lot from the site’s heyday, but there’s still a whole bunch of users. Just a hunch, but I guess the Twitter/Facebook shenanigans probably drove more people back to Tumblr, too.

Well that’s the neat part, you don’t! If you post on Pixelfed you’re already on Mastodon.

…I suppose you can reshare it if you want. Me, I just point people to my Pixelfed account on my Mastodon profile and vice versa.

From Explain XKCD:

This comic was released on Christmas Day of 2024, but makes no reference to Christmas. This year marks the first time in xkcd’s 20 year history (of releasing comics around Christmas), that there have been no Christmas comics released during those days. Also all nine times before this year, when a release day fell on Christmas Day, that comic has always been about Christmas.

…But when you really think about it, isn’t this comic about the true meaning of Christmas? That is to say, it is about avoiding the Sun. It’s still topical, I’d say!

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.

In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.

Scrivener!

The frustrating thing is that, at least for me, there are no perfect word processors geared for novels and other scenarios where you manage large text masses.

Scrivener is one of those cases where you have a pretty excellent software that doesn’t have a lot of problems OSS alternatives have. I have smooth time with it. But at the same time, the software always could be better.

Probably the best OSS novel writing software I’ve used is Org-Mode for Emacs. But, you know, it’s based on Emacs, so it squeaks around the edges and gives the impression that it’s a miracle it runs as brilliantly as it does.

converting an autotools build recipe

Oh yes!

to a bare makefile

Oh no!

Yeah, I just tried upgrading my Gitea Windows instance to Forgejo via Docker, and it actually works pretty much as easily as it did before. Fantastic! Might just leave it here instead of shoving it all in the VM - I can always do that later if it’s necessary. Having a full VM does have upsides, but in this particular instance this is definitely good enough.

Heh, your comment actually made me finally go and resolve a problem I’ve had since I got this laptop in 2020. I didn’t have SVM virtualisation acceleration enabled because that made Windows unable to boot somehow. A bit of twiddling after, it finally did! VirtualBox runs! Docker runs!

…but why would I use Docker for something like this. Might as well blow the dust off of my FreeBSD virtual machine and run Forgejo there!

What’s the latest on Forgejo’s Windows builds? Last I checked there was no Windows build due to no volunteers for build/test - Gitea’s old build stuff should still be good.

Which is a mild shame because Gitea’s Windows version was an insanely simple way to run it if you are a solo dev on Windows and need a private Git site. Drop the binary on an USB hard drive, run it on terminal, boom, done.

(Currently contemplating just setting up a Raspberry Pi server.)

(Webmail provider releases a bespoke desktop app)
(me, old fart, bumbles out from behind the cables and servers and muck)

You fools! Have any of you whippersnappers ever heard of IMAP? No? Thought so.

[I’m not that familiar with ProtonMail. Chances are they already support IMAP. In which case: … …why? Why this? Why in this day and age?]

I hope Firefox implements a great and robust tab grouping feature. Because they used to have one that worked beautifully.

Firefox used to have Panorama view, which was a way to group tabs with a nice visual interface. …and they removed it because not enough people were using it.

…Well if you stopped removing useful and perfectly functional features, maybe you wouldn’t need to rebuild them later when it turns out people do want that feature, huh, Mozilla?

There’s an extension that reimplements Panorama and it kinda sorta works like it used to.