Ordoviz @Ordoviz@fosstodon.org

We can do better than DuckDuckGo

https://drewdevault.com/2020/11/17/Better-than-DuckDuckGo.html

gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/11/17/Better-than-DuckDuckGo.gmi

Design goals for a FOSS search engine:

- FOSS but centralized, don't bother with distributed crawling or federation or anything, at least not until we can prove that we can do it the easy way. Apply the SourceHut model.

- Don't blithely crawl the whole WWW. Tier 1 sites opt-in to being crawled and are manually reviewed by a human to establish lack of shit. Backlinks from tier 1 sites are crawled to form a tier 2 graph. There is no tier 3. Searches prioritize tier 1 results. (De-emphasizes blogspam in favor of primary sources, entirely eliminates SEO gaming).

- Attempt to index any data source (HTML, Gemtext, man pages, a CSV file) and return any results that either (1) the User-Agent can present, or (2) we have some code to render in a format the U-A can present, or (3) the user explicitly asked for

Problem: who's going to pay for it? Answer: probably SourceHut if we ever get to, say, 10x our current revenue.

#Fennec #FDroid based on #Fenix alias the latest #Firefox for #Android has arrived! Trackers have been removed, "about:config" is available. The version has not been marked as recommended yet, so you have to download and install manually. Thanks to relan, @Bubu and all who have made this possible. 🥳
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/

uMatrix's repository has been archived and development has been discontinued:

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uMatrix-issues/issues/291

"Whoever is free to fork under a new name -- I may re-open and resume development in some future if ever I feel for it."

echo Үourbank.com | hexdump -c # Send suspected unicode text through hexdump -c to confirm it. A normal ASCII 'y' would show up as y in the output, but unicode would have multiple codes per character. This is called a Homoglyph Attack.

Oh, just learned about `wl-copy --paste-once`. That's pretty useful for copy and pasting senstitive data! #Wayland

Quick reminder (or clarification) about the workflow on SourceHut

GitHub has trained you to open issues for *everything*, including support requests, asking questions, feature requests, bug reports, and so on.

On SourceHut, you should not do this. We have mailing lists, and your first stop should be a project-discuss or project-users mailing list. Only when you have confirmed that you have a new bug or accepted feature request should you file a ticket on the bug tracker. This prevents clogging up the bug tracker with duplicate or poorly thought-out tickets, and usually gets you better support for your problem too.

Thinking about changing the default permissions for trackers to prohibit public posting to re-enforce this.

Google removed K-9 Mail from the Play store with zero notice because the description of the app included alternate spellings of the app name we'd included to work around how bad Play's search is.

I was notified that @tateisu's Mastodon app "Subway Tooter" has received a warning from the Google Play Store citing user-generated content that "incites discrimination".

A Mastodon app does not host or promote any content. The user types the address to connect to. The responsibility of moderating resides with that server. So unless Google is going to drop Chrome, Firefox and Opera from its platform, this is completely out of line.

Source in Japanese:

https://mastodon.juggler.jp/@tateisu/104761652569820793

Finally a homepage for my browser that makes sense. I now automatically render my #orgmode agenda every 20 minutes into an HTML page, that is used as the startup- and newtab page in the browser.

Embrace, extend, and finally extinguish - Microsoft plays their hand

https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/27/Microsoft-plays-their-hand.html

One of my favorite command line tools is `dict`---a dictionary and thesaurus. I use it multiple times a week. If you find yourself prefixing search queries with `define:`, this tool is for you.

If you install `dictd`, you also get the freedom and privacy of answering your own queries on a system you control, without the need for Internet access.

#thanksfreesw

I'm tired of social networks and want to read more through RSS.

So I suggest that we regularly share our favourite feeds with the tag #RSS. For each feed, we explain why we like it.

I start with https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=100 which provides every news on HackerNews with more than 100 votes.

I like this feed because it allows me to have a quick glance at what is trendy in the tech world. I also sometimes found interesting read I would not have found otherwise.

What a nice utility! Look at that, Boop helps you with a lot of the techie small things that can get in your way.

And there even is a Flatpak!

https://github.com/mrbenshef/Boop-GTK

After almost a month of faffing about, the Top 3 Linux distro post (and its twist) has *finally* been posted!

https://bnolet.me/posts/2020/07/top-3-go/

Skip to the bottom for the results, and read the whole thing if you want to learn about ranked-choice voting! I would love to hear your opinions once done reading :)

Boosts highly appreciated if you liked it, this post is 2700+ words...it took a while to research and write

Web browsers need to stop

https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop.html

I want to contribute to your project, how do I start?

https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/10/How-to-contribute-to-FOSS.html