Danny @danny@fosstodon.org

I listen to just two radio stations at work but I used to have to keep both web sites open to flip between them. It was annoying. I found the m3u streams and figured out how to save them as network streams in VLC's media library. That's a lot more streamlined! Another two tabs bite the dust.

I’ve been backing up several terabytes from my main HDD to another encrypted one using Duplicity all day, in preparation to move the backup drive to a secondary location, accessible via a Pi. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as the sound of a hard drive happily chuntering away.

Emacs lovers: If you’re using Emacs 27.1 and it can’t find Pandoc, it isn’t you or your exec-path. It’s a bug. Just downgraded to 26.3 and now it works fine.

@mobian runs #emacs! I mean, it's a little funky in terms of screen real estate, on the Pinephone, but emacs! On a mobile phone! Applause. 👏

Web design crimes #1337: adding an about section at the end of the site and then adding more body content infinitely as you scroll so you can never see it.

Remedy 1: View source. Search 'About'. Copy and open link in new tab.

Remedy 2: Take web designer for coffee and do some gentle 'splaining.

Has anyone had bad experiences with battery life on the #Pinephone running UBPorts? I charged it t to full power at 11am and then did almost nothing with it. At 8pm it has 10% left. Are other OSs any better?

I've started streaming stuff while working at my desk. I'm currently working my way through #Hope2020. I'm really enjoying Cory Doctorow's keynote. Worth a watch if you haven't seen it already. https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200725_1600_Keynote_Cory_Doctorow.mp4

While Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google and other tech giants use the internet to flourish during the pandemic, Mozilla and Tor shed staff and Shadowserver scratches by on reduced funding. These are organizations that keep the net healthy by standing against homogenization, fighting malware, or protecting free speech. I feel a strong need to donate and support them, now more than ever.

OMG I just discovered nerdcore hip hop. How am I only finding out about this now? https://youtu.be/4nigRT2KmCE

We tried Beyond Meat burgers in an effort to reduce our meat intake and be more environmentally friendly. It tasted fake. It was like riding a cow through the uncanny valley. Also, each burger came packed in more plastic than some of the electronics I buy. Won’t be doing that again.

Dual booting with GRUB2? Go patch your system now. https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/174059

A snippet in a newsletter from Fortune today best sums up the reason for me trying to move away from the FANGs: The market capitalizations of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple constitute about 15% of the S&P 500.

That was scary. I pruned my docker volumes the other day. Today I couldn't access my containers. I thought I'd nuked my active volumes by mistake. Then I tried sshing to my home server and couldn't reach it.

I visited the server, (which is an old laptop under the TV). Turns out the TV guy who installed our set top box yesterday must have unplugged it.

So all is well, but I learned three lessons:

1) Back up all docker volumes
2) I need a proper server cabinet
3) HBO was worth the hassle

I've been playing around with Portainer.io, which is a Docker container management UI. It makes setting up and playing with containers a lot easier.

Aside from the general collegial atmosphere and the fact that I learn so much from people here, one of the reasons I like Fosstodon is that it practices what it preaches and helps develop the community: https://hub.fosstodon.org/donation-results-round-3. Props to you guys. You don't see this kind of thing on Twitter. If you didn't know about this yet and haven't donated to help keep the site operating, please do consider sending a few bucks their way: https://hub.fosstodon.org/support-us

Does anyone know whether you can integrate Activitypub somehow with a static website?

Turns out that creating custom right-click menu options for files in KDE isn't that hard. You need to create a servicemenu file and store it in the right directory. Now I have a right-click command to automatically convert .mkv files to .mp4 format using ffmpg. That makes it easier to convert phone interviews that my SIP software only records as .mkv. The biggest issue was fiddling with Bash vars and dealing with ffmpeg ideosyncracies. I"m a n00b at both.

Apparently you can now access the personal papers of Charles Bourne, who apparently invented one of the first search engines. https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-bourne-collection-online-search-is-older-than-you-think/

Today's achievement - set up git on my home server and used it as a remote repository to sync between my desktop and laptop. It wasn't that hard and I learned quite a bit about Git along the way from this online book: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2. Bye bye, github account.

I was worried yesterday that the GPU on my month-old PC build was dead. It kept power-cycling and taking the machine down. Turned out it just needed reseating. Now she's working just fine again. She's the most powerful machine I ever owned and I built her from the ground up. I am very proud. Just look at her in all her 16-core, 64Gb, 8Tb-of-SSD-only awesomeness. Ain't she swell?