Some terminal-focused links I’ve been working in Cool-Retro-Term again, and craving a real green-screen glass tty, so here are some terminal-related links.
jwz: export TERM=aaa-60 jwz tells a story about an interesting terminal and its even more interesting termcap file. The pictures and video in this article are what gave me terminal envy again this time.
WiFi232 - An Internet Hayes Modem for your Retro Computer Of course, once you have your glass TTY, you need to be able to connect it to your modern computer.
Haven’t linkblogged for months, and the little blogging I’ve done has mostly been about and on Gemini. Very busy summer. Here are a few recent links in no particular order, without much commentary.
How Many Books does Richland SC Library Recycle, and Where Do They Go? I love my library, and you have to get rid of some books somehow in order as new books come in. But it’s disheartening to hear that the old books that no one buys at the annual Friends of the Library book sale probably end up in the landfill.
Got quite a grab-bag of stuff this time. Been busy enough with life that what should be a simple evening habit one night a week has gone for…three weeks? I guess that’s not so bad. It’s long enough, though, that I can’t clearly remember all of the articles in my backlog. And there are too many topics to make a coherent theme. Let’s work through them, then.
Music for this linkblog: Twin Black Lodges, a generative soundscape from mynoise.
Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like to find time to help out with it.
Shizaru, an opinionated web server This is a web server written in golang that attempts to “serve no evil” by imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The default opinions focus strongly on a “fast, safe, simple, clean, respectful” web.
I had way too many links to share this week, and I had to cut it down a lot to be able to handle all of it. That said, here’s what’s left.
Social Media We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground The author argues that the state of social media, especially of Twitter, where harassment is baked into the platform, are a result of white cis men building a platform for themselves and not really thinking about other users.
Technology and adjacent politics Gadgets, Power, and the New Modes of Political Consciousness This article is a good antidote to the standard kind of moral panic article over mobile devices. It takes a Marxist perspective on devices, and how the dominant narrative about them treats people (device users) as isolated economic units.
Memex(browser) This is the main page for the Memex browser, a browser engine that is being developed. Here’s what the developer has to say about it:
Going to try to do this whole link blog entry from emacs. Normally I have a workflow that involves dragging links from Firefox into emacs, where, by a bit of emacs magic, they are automatically converted into Markdown links. But I’m trying to live in the terminal (with Cool Retro Term) this week, so I’m using pinboard-list.el to give me my list of links to share. Hopefully I’ll have a macro or something that is almost as easy as my drag-and-drop hack…
Web A JavaScript-Free Frontend This has some neat tricks that I hadn’t thought of for doing “live” front-end without JavaScript. The checkbox/label trick is really cool, though it’s a little over-complicated for my taste, and besides, doesn’t degrade well in browsers that don’t support CSS. The fact that you can use it to build a modal dialog is crash, though.
I’m using details/summary for subject/Content Warning in brutaldon. It degrades okay.
Mercifully short today.
A feminist’s guide to raising boys A lot of this rings true. The article mentions that little boys are different from little girls because even parents treat them differently, even when they don’t mean to. One thing it doesn’t mention is what they pick up from peers, even as toddlers and preschoolers.
Medical benefits of dental floss unproven I feel vindicated.
Nothing is a greater waste of time than the planned debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek This is bound to be entertaining, but debates don’t convince anyone, much less prove anything.
I didn’t accumulate as many links this week, because while I was sick with the flu, I felt too bad to read as much as usual.
AI won’t relieve the misery of Facebook’s human moderators - The Verge It might allow Facebook to pay less for moderators, though…
The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy - VICE There will be no new normal.
What “Knight Fight” Gets Dead Wrong about Medieval Men | The Public Medievalist I knew as soon as I saw the name “John Clements” attached that it would be a shitshow.
Strap in, it’s a little depressing this time.
Why US cities are becoming more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians Mostly the answer is a good thing — more people are biking and walking. Unfortunately, that brings more people into danger, given that our cities are designed for cars, and not for people.
Pee, not chlorine, causes red eyes from swimming pools: CDC | CBC News The article overstates it a little bit.
Architecture Over the last five years or so, maybe a little bit more, downtown Columbia has been sprouting these student apartments everywhere there’s space for them and a lot of places there isn’t (displacing existing local businesses). One thing about them is that they all look alike – basically they’re long boxes, four or five stories tall, with various superficial architectural features that don’t really do anything to hide the fact that they’re long boxes.
A properly short linkblog today!
Web development Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS - Signal v. Noise One of a couple of recent articles that talks about how web design has turned into front-end development, which has turned into JavaScript development. The conclusion is good:
Designing for the modern web in a way that pleases users with great, fast designs needn’t be this maze of impenetrable complexity.
Got behind again, and have to drop a lot of things I was going to note here. Fewer is better.
Web topics The Web is Made of Edge Cases by Taylor Hunt on CodePen Designers and front-end developers tend to treat web rendering as a pixel-perfect graphics runtime; it’s not.
How to design website layouts for screen readers – freeCodeCamp.org Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them | TechCrunch This is pretty extreme even by the standards of surveillance capitalism.
US Politics It’s Bernie, Bitch | Amber A’Lee Frost Amber from Chapo Trap House explains why Bernie is the only viable candidate for 2020, even if he dies on the campaign trail and his corpse has to be operated like a Muppet.
The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924 Even among law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol has always been notably racist.
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Allies Supplanted the Obama Generation | The New Yorker In brief: the Green New Deal completely changes the conversation.
Facebook Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch This could actually increase deaths as armed police are dispatched to “check in” on reportedly suicidal people. And that’s not counting the opportunities for algorithmic cruelty, like notifying someone’s domestic abuser that they’re suicidal.
Goodbye Facebook This was the last straw for the fediverse’s jjg, who reports on the previous techcrunch post in his goodbye letter to Facebook.
Computing, emacs dengste/org-caldav: Caldav sync for Emacs orgmode I’ve started to use this, to go along with my resolution to start using calendars more, and to-do lists less.
More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays) There were some useful hints in here for me. I tend not to use multiple-cursor-mode, because I have trouble remembering how it selects things, and it’s easier for me to use iedit-mode or just macros to do multiple similar edits.
Why Calendars are More Effective Than To Do Lists - Srinivas Rao - Pocket Thinking about the link on org-mode use I posted a little while ago that suggested giving every TODO headline a SCHEDULED property.
Pleroma, LitePub, ActivityPub and JSON-LD — kaniini’s blog! Gets at one of the reasons that ActivityPub is problematic — the LinkedData aspect is useful for Big Social (advertising targeting, business intelligence), but not for the actual use of sharing that we want to enable.
Merry Christmas Edition
Free Software and Adjacent Topics What does a private communicator look like? – Aral Balkan There’s a pretty wide potential space, both hardware and software, for what a personal communicator could look like.
Free software and the revolt against transactionality John Ohno (Modernist Microfiche Minotaur on the fediverse) writes (on Medium, unfortunately) an excellent article on saving the gift economy of Free Software from the way Big Software builds an industry on Open Source.
Facebook imploding What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace? - The New York Times Even after no one is really using Facebook, everyone’s residual data will still be valuable (and dangerous).
As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants - The New York Times Summary: Facebook gave complete access to its customer data, including “private” messages, and including not only reading them, but writing or deleting them, to its “partners”, including Apple, Spotify, Yahoo, Microsoft, and several others.
Newsy/politicky The Snowden Legacy, part one: What’s changed, really? | Ars Technica Article gives maybe too much credit to Snowden’s opponents, but does give a good overview of what the impacts have been.
Finally, some good news: the ERG has been aggressively made love to by an ass | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian Apparently, Brexit has gotten bad enough that mainstream newspaper columnists are invoking our Dread Lord Cthulhu.
I aten’t dead.
Stuff that I saw actually this month microformats2-experimental-properties · Microformats Wiki How to use microformats to tag your pronouns in your blog’s metadata
Web Design is 95% Typography: How to Use Type on the Web This is why my hate for JavaScript and the modern web does not extend, as some people’s does, to CSS. CSS is what lets us have reasonably good typography on the web.
I’m very behind on link blogging (over a month! And the last one was very minimal!), so I’m just going to dump some things.
Politics Threat Modeling For Activists: Tips For Secure Organizing & Activism An intro to protecting what you need to protect.
Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence - The New York Times Another case where the cruelty is the only point.
What duelling can teach us about taking offence | Aeon Essays The right is currently using a model of “offense as [emotional] hurt”, while the left is using a model of “offense as harm”.
Web The Web is still a DARPA weapon. – Giacomo Tesio – Medium
A good article on a few loosely connected points. How centralization of the web tends to promote US government/business interests, as against those of internet users and other countries. A lot of it is nothing you haven’t heard before, especially about DNS.
But the better part is the discussion of how JavaScript is fundamentally a weapon, aimed against users, because it is basically designed to execute untrusted code.
Links for the past few days, no unifying theme.
The continuing crisis This is fine.
Democrats break with left on ICE | TheHill
This is expected behavior for the Democrats right now — avoid doing something that is both right and popular, because it would be disruptive. Beto O’Rourke’s position (abolish ICE through a reorganization of DHS, and moving their responsibilities elsewhere) should be the base position of Democrats, allowing progressives to stake out more radical positions.
Links for the last couple of days, focusing on the US police state, and companies that are complicit with it.
Microsoft tldr; Microsoft is providing cloud services to ICE. They claim that this support is not going directly to supporting child detention, but services are fungible, and the ethical thing would be to refuse to accept the contract.
Microsoft needs to pick a side in the ICE debate. The world is watching
Here’s another long one, since I’ve been too busy/tired to collect my links for a few days. DRM, social media, indieweb, and, as usual, tons of bad news.
This one is pretty dark, sorry. Turn back if you need to protect yourself, I’ll understand. The basic theme: our institutions are not capable of dealing with the threats we are faced with today, and we don’t have any other solutions waiting in the wings. Let’s get started.
The Super Wealthy Oxycontin Family Supports School Privatization With Tactics Similar to Those That Fueled the Opioid Epidemic Reporting by Sara Darer Littman about the Sackler family, who allegedly have used ethically questionable tactics to push oxycontin through FDA approval and onto doctors and patients. They are using the same forms of aggressive advertising to push a pro-charter-school agenda.
IBM Type IBM releases a set of fonts (Serif, Sans, and Mono) in a variety of weights.
