Alright! I'm listening to Neil Young and drinking the last of our christmas coldbrew.
I don't have to be at work for 1.5 more hours, and I've wasted more than a week thinking about and futzing with old computers.
I'm going to talk about priorities and goals for 2018 now. If you're not particularly interested in my goals and priorities for 2018, now might be a good time to mute me for 1.5 hours. :-D
I have four main themes occupying my mind in 2018. I'm using this tootstream to organize my thoughts and solidify them in to an action plan that will carry me through the next few months.
Themes:
- I'm buying a house and moving 600 miles and might need to find a job and AHHH! Stress! but also exciting and eventually good and relaxing.
- The modern web is a clusterfuck of bad choices. The modern internet is less safe with each passing day.
- Modern computing in general is kind of shitty, compared to even 10 years ago.
- DIY Media. We all gotta make stuff and support one another in making stuff. We gotta archive the stuff we make so that our movement, our history doesn't disappear.
I'm going to talk about DIY Media first, and then work my way backwards, and maybe pull some projects out of the aether.
DIY Media//Archive your shit//It's not just entertainment, it's a movement.
For a few months in 2015, I spent a lot of time trolling through scans of old punk zines and the noise-arch archive and various other sources talking about underground/independent music from the mid 70s up through the mid 90s.
You know what I found? Lots of really great music, and also many empty space.
When I say empty spaces, I mean I would read a review about a band, or an interview in a zine that would pique my interest. I'd start looking for more information about that band, or the members of that band, and build a little spiderweb of references that took me from scene to scene and show to show over a period of two or three years, almost invariably to end with
1) No Music still available through any sources I have access to
or more likely
2) No recordings ever made.
I can't tell you the number of times I'd see an interview with a band I respect the hell out of talking about how they took the majority of their inspiration from this other group.
And then I'd go dig for information on this other group and find 1) rave reviews 2) nothing else.
We owe it to ourselves, and to the future, to keep a physical record of the things that we do and to help one another in recording and archiving and documenting as much of each of our respective movements as possible.
It's not just music, either.
I'm talking about music because I was Close to music, and I watched these things play out in real time through lots of little decisions that seemed like the best idea at the time but that ultimately resulted in even our relatively recent scene being full of Empty Space where music should be.
But it's more than music. I've seen indie films at local festivals that, if you weren't in the room at one of those screenings, you'd never know existed. They're ghosts.
I have only my memories of them, and you don't even have that.
Or think about all the *Amazing* artists you knew on Tumblr who have completely disappeared, and taken their archives with them.
How many of those artists still even have copies of all of that work?
And, unlike in years past when, in order for something to stop existing it had to actually be destroyed, today things can just stop existing with the click of a button.
There aren't any physical artifacts tied to their existence.
This is not me railing against digital creation and distribution. Let me make that clear.
I love digital creation and distribution.
I honestly am growing to resent the oppressive size and weight of physical media. (Moving more than 1500 LPs from one building to another, to another, to another, to another 600 miles away, to another, and then back 600 miles again will do that to you.)
But we need to remember that the digital can be ephemeral, and make efforts to preserve our work.
Alright! So that was a rant about the preservation of DIY media. If this is a topic that you find interesting, I've written about it a lot (http://ajroach42.com/we-are-terrible-stewards-of-history/) and pretty much everything else I say is going to touch on this at least in passing.
But I'm moving on from archiving to creating for a minute.
In addition to all of these empty spaces caused by media which was no longer commercially available, there were also empty spaces caused by media which was never created.
Many bands never recorded even a single song.
Bands that everyone loved! Bands that packed houses! Bands that were called "the next thing" by the bands that actually went on to be the next thing!
In 1985 this was almost excusable, except that 4-tracks were affordable and cassette distribution was better than nothing.
Today, there is hardly an excuse.
If you do something creative, music, acting, writing, whatever take the time to preserve it.
The people like me in future generations will thank you.
If you keep waiting until you're "Ready" you might never release anything.
If the thing that is holding you back is financial, then (depending on your medium of choice) there are probably workarounds.
We set up a "recording studio" for $150 and released 6 or 7 albums out of it. Find some like minded folks, and create the scene.
Because in ten years, the only people that stand a chance of being remembered are the ones that we have proof existed.
If you don't write about your favorite local act, will anyone ever know about them?
If your favorite local act never releases a recording, will anyone ever care once they know about them?
What I'm saying here:
If you create things, release them in to the world. Archive them as quickly as you can. Make sure that those things will still exist in ten years.
If you consume things that other people create, Talk About Them in Public Places. Write those blog posts (and put your blog somewhere that it's archives will still be around in ten years.)
Write some damn Zines. Shamelessly promote the things your friends create.
This was 3 years ago! in 3 years, half the local music I listened to regularly disappeared.
And the people who made it, mostly, don't care anymore. They are parents with kids now, or they've moved on to other things.
3 years ago it was really important that no one heard their music that didn't pay for it. Now, you can't even pay for most of it.
So DIY media: Release the things and talk about the things and this is so important.
Print the zines. Release the CDs and the Cassettes, even though it's a pain in the ass. Archive that shit. Give it away. Ask people to pay for it, too, but focus on making something that will last first.
(Because for most artists the problem isn't piracy it's obscurity.)
Now, Keep that DIY media stuff in your head. It's going to come up again.
But first we gotta talk about computers.
Modern computers suck.
They do. They do too much, and they do it too fast, and there are so many layers between the user and the hardware that I can do things like boot up a chrome book, switch to a chroot, launch FreeDOS in qemu, launch VICE or PC64 in Freedos and have an emulated c64 running in an emulated x86 running in a guest OS on a real x86.
And it all mostly works! Except for some weird bugs that only exist because what I'm doing is ridiculous.
@ajroach42 you wouldn't like some of my ideas for my ideal, pie-in-the-sky os
@ajroach42 exokernel, transparent virtualisation, etc
@a_breakin_glass I don't actually dislike VMs and emulation and whatever.
I just ... Computers are too strong to be used how we use them.
Plus we've made so many computers, and written so much software for those computers.
What do I do on Mastodon that I couldn't do on usenet?
How is mastodon different in principal than an evolution of the ideas of usenet?
I love mastodon, don't get me wrong! I think it's a nice incremental evolution over some ideas that we had a long time ago and abandoned for bad reasons in favor of centralized services.
@miwilc yeah sure, but that was a problem with one specific cluster of usenet servers, not with usenet as a concept.
Sure, that particular cluster of servers was *the* cluster, but my point is that very little that Mastodon does is substantively different from older technologies, even in that it is federated.
But old software suffers from many of the same problems as other kinds of media but amplified by the fact that floppy disks and HDDs are less durable than the traditional methods through which we've distributed music.
And then there are compatibility issues. And then you get in to cryptography and... well, DOS was never meant to be used for more than 18 months, but I installed it in a VM on my chromebook 30+ years later.
There was a huge DIY software movement back in the 80s and early 90s that hardly exists anymore.
You could say that it has been supplanted by FOSS but you'd be partially right at best
Archive your software. Share your source code. Don't let things you've worked on die.
The internet is not the only way to archive things.
The internet is not the only way to distribute things.
The internet is not eternal. It may not last the rest of our lifetimes. It may be replaced. It may die.
Have a backup plan.
@ajroach42 @vfrmedia This is super important; but, of course, physical media aren't forever either. (Personally I tend to go for online plus paper, and I try to make sure I'm not the only person with a paper copy.)
@ajroach42 @vfrmedia (And, of course, digital media *are* physical, whether online or offline. It's just that digital copying is trivial and the physical media are tiny compared to human-readable analogue formats like sheet music or Braille).
@ajroach42 @vfrmedia (Though some would argue with me over whether Braille is truly analogue.)
@artsyhonker @vfrmedia Oh for sure.
Physical media doesn't last forever any more than digital media does.
But if you have both, and in multiple places, there's at least a good chance the thing will still exist in 10 years.
@ajroach42 @artsyhonker @vfrmedia Maybe it's because I'm a classically-trained musician who grew up playing things composed by dead guys but I'm kindof hoping for at least 100 years rather than 10.
@artsyhonker @vfrmedia Certainly! But my point is that so much of what we create today doesn't even make it to 10 years.
How is it going to reach 100 if it can't make it to 10?
@ajroach42 @artsyhonker magnetic tape can last 30-40 years but needs good storage conditions for best quality.
Dead tree format is good for a lot of things, even then you have to be careful about what ink you use (fading etc), and even traditional pens and ink intended for permanency (irongall ink) can become acid that eats through paper (I think there have been problems with ancient music scores and religious texts being eaten away due to this). But those did still last some centuries..
@vfrmedia @ajroach42 @artsyhonker ...you mean, the ones that still exist lasted centuries. ;-)
@vfrmedia @ajroach42 @artsyhonker Maybe a good long-game strategy is to figure out who is going to have the equivalent of a rich monastery's or private collector's library, and make sure those people have my scores.
@artsyhonker @ajroach42 indeed a lot of stuff didn't make it through poor storage, accidental and deliberate fires, politics and war, but its a lot easier to duplicate stuff today than in previous centuries (even if its still at risk from the same non-human species as below)
So, when I say computers suck, I don't actually mean that computers suck.
I mostly mean that they change too quickly.
I don't mean that modern software is bad, and old software is good as a rule.
I mean that some modern software is great, and some of it is horrible. And a lot of modern software is no better, or is actually worse, than some old software at the same tasks.
Lots of the software I use regularly was written 30 years ago and has hardly been touched since, except to keep it running on current OSs, or to repackage it with some kind of compatibility layer for modern computers.
Heck, there are a few scripts that I use literally every day that I wrote myself on a DOS machine when I was 12.
Some of them are still DOS batch files running in DOSEmu, but most of them were eventually ported over to bash or PHP or whatever.
I consider them the same, though, because they still do the same things.
Now, my software that I wrote for my own use isn't archived anywhere other than in nextcloud on my server and on some DVDs and flash drives stashed here and there.
That's Bad! I'm not eating my own dog food.
Some of that is because the software itself is trivial, or because it was never intended for distribution.
A lot of it is because I'm embarrassed to show the world code I wrote when I was 12 (or code that I wrote more recently that looks like it was written by a 12 year old)
@ajroach42 I used to feel like that, but I usually force myself to publish anything slightly interesting anyways because I remind myself that writing bad code is still better than writing no code in this case
So in the spirit of eating my own dog food, I'm going to start (slowly) releasing the software that I write for public consumption.
I'll self host a git repository somewhere, and put together some web pages about it all, and make sure that the binaries and the sources end up in the internet archive with good meta-data because that's the closest thing we have to a good future proof archival solution at the moment.
My blog is already public and archivable. I'll add it to the wayback machine, too.
The handful of computer games I started and never finished will get a final pass for QA and I'll put them up too.
I'm going to eat my own dogfood.
I'm going to upload PDFs of old issues of the AR magazine, too.
That's scary for me because there are lots of things in that that I wrote, or that @CaptainUnderpants wrote and, while they weren't particularly personal at the time, they are very personal in retrospect.
Lots of the people we talk about in those issues no longer talk to us for various silly reasons (and occasionally for some very good reasons.)
Those magazines are very much a product of the time that we wrote them, and largely no longer represent today.
That doesn't preclude them from being useful or valuable.
Most of the content in them is already archived in various places, but the magazines themselves should be (will be) as well.
That takes me through point 4 (DIY media) and point 3 (computers are bad) and touches point 2 (the internet isn't perfect.)
Let's focus on that for a minute.
The internet has problems!
The web also has problems!
The available replacements for the web (Gopher, DAT, IPFS) also have problems!
Let's talk about these things.
When I say the Web has problems, I mostly mean this: https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
That's a long article, I'll sum up:
- Centralization is bad!
- Everyone is spying on you!
- You are executing arbitrary code every time you load a URL (Even Mastodon//Especially mastodon, although in Mastodon's case that code is open source and publicly audited.)
I'll add to that: most web browsers now have DRM in them, and that makes it illegal to do certain kinds of security research on them in many countries.
When I say the internet has problems, I'm mostly talking about a lot of technical mubojumbo that boils down to a few points:
The people who give us access to the internet don't always have our best interests at heart,
Further, the internet is used by governments as a tool of surveillance, and centralized identities through platforms like Facebook exacerbate this.
Also! Wired infrastructure is almost always owned or operated under exclusive contract by a big 'ol nasty corporation.
Most of the problems with the internet are super technical, or straight up legal issues.
And the solutions to them will be super technical, and also legislative.
The upshot, though, is that the modern internet is less free than it should be, and we should recognize that it can be abused, and have a backup plan in place in the event that something goes wrong with the net.
For me, the backup plan for the internet is a return to the BBS model (I talk about this a lot: http://ajroach42.com/a-modern-bbs/)
Lots of people, especially in urban areas, have been talking about mesh-net ISPs, which are a good idea, with a whole mess of potential problems of their own. Not the least of which is that they will only really work in populus areas.
@ajroach42 I think there are rural towns rolling out municipal mesh stuff?
@ajroach42 nope, I've got municipal wifi confused with municipal fibre. as you were
Right now, as far as I can tell, there isn't a single solution to the problems presented by an unfree internet and a user hostile web.
But there are a bunch of partial solutions.
I cover a lot of these here: http://ajroach42.com/net-neutrality-the-consolidation-of-american-media-and-you/
But I'll sum up.
To fight Centralization:
- Own your data.
- Archive your data online and off.
- Use decentralized services like Mastodon and Matrix and whatever whenever possible.
- publish to places that aren't facebook or medium (and if you must, only use central services for syndication.)
To fight user hostility:
- Use ad blockers and privacy badger
- If you can get away with it, use no-script or similar when possible.
- Stop using, or reduce your use of, platforms that profit from treating you poorly.
To fight ISPs being shitty:
- Lobby congresspeople to actually do something about net noot.
- Talk to your local governments about municipal fibre
- Consider building networks that don't depend on the internet (Sneakernet! Mail those flash drives back and forth. Intranet! Set up that piratebox.)
I talk about some more of this here: http://ajroach42.com/steps-towards-a-web-without-the-internet/
I mentioned DAT and Gopher and IPFS.
Each one of these really deserves a longer deep dive than I'm going to give it right now.
Gopher was a service that existed before the modern web that used the internet to share files and articles and stuff. Read more here: http://ajroach42.com/gopher-remembering-the-web-that-wasn-t/
It's neat. I like it. It can't spy on you or execute arbitrary code on your machine. It'll work on a DOS machine from 1982.
DAT and IPFS are attempts to make the web way more peer-to-peer.
I don't know as much about IPFS, but I'm learning.
DAT forms the bones of the "web without the internet" project I've been working on (http://ajroach42.com/steps-towards-a-web-without-the-internet/)
Unfortunately, DAT currently only works on (relatively modern) desktops. Eventually, it should also work on mobile devices, but until then... it's not an ideal solution.
Neocities (one of my favorite free hosting companies!) uses IPFS.
When I start writing guides for taking back your digital life, I'm going to include Neocities among the options.
I know it seems weird for me to be promoting a centralized service, but they are free and open source, they make it easy to download your stuff, and they are honestly just a Lot of fun.
DAT isn't without issues. IPFS isn't without issues. Gopher isn't without issues.
Some of those issues are the same issues the web has. Some are unique.
This is a huge topic, that we're going to have to talk about a lot more in the coming months.
We've covered DIY media, Modern computers, the internet.
That leaves me with my personal life.
I'm moving. It's stressful and scary.
I might have to find another job when I get to where I'm going, and I won't know for sure for several more days.
This is pretty stressful. It's going to end up being about $2k more out of pocket than we expected, and there are all kinds of weird rules about where the money can come from and ... it's just a lot.
When everything is said and done, I'll have more freetime to focus on making media and writing code and helping the world be less shitty.
Until then, I have less time to do those things than I otherwise would, because I am planning the logistics of this move, and looking for a job, and making the move happen.
That was a quick rundown of my priorities right now, and a demonstration of why the things that are globally important are globally important.
I'm going to take a few minutes to go through my replies and gather some steam, and then I'm going to talk about my to-do list.
The projects that I want to cover in the next six months that relate back to those four overarching ideas, and the ways in which I need help.
Okay, let's recap:
1. We have to make media
1.5 we have to talk about the media other people make
2. We have to Archive the media we make
3. We have to make software
4. We have to archive the software that we make
5. We need viable alternatives to the web and the internet
6. We need to be smarter about the ways we use the internet
7. I may end up looking for work in the next 6 months, I will be moving 600ish miles. My ability to do The Work will be impacted by this.
@ajroach42 so... you're accepting a job at Internet Archive? :P
@wilbr I wish!
But I'm not a trained librarian or archivist, and I don't live in and will not be moving to CA.
Over the next six months, I want to tackle some of these things.
1. I'm working with @CaptainUnderpants and hopefully some others (any volunteers?) on some podcasts.
That is to say, I'm making media directly.
I'm also working to support (socially and/or financially) as many independent creators as I can.
This is a good start towards making media.
IMO it's not enough. I want to see more media. Do you want to make stuff? (Next several posts will be about the podcasts and other media.)
Podcasts that I am planning/actively working on:
1- Jupiter's Ghost: A sem-crowd sourced podcast about a bunch of folks living on a space ship in the future told through personal logs and official mission reports. (I've been working on this one for a long time! It's still in the works, but I want to get it right.)
2- Analog Revolution. This is a successor to the Zine that I used to publish (and will be publishing again.) Two or three people talking about News, DIY Media, Tech, etc.
We have a couple of episodes in the can, but I want to get some more finished before I start releasing (part of this is as a result of the not wonderfully consistent internet connection of my co-host.)
3 - DIYMedia: Needs a better title, but this is people sitting around in a rabbit room watching a piece of CC or PD media. Actual podcast is 5 minutes of historical context followed by a discussion of the thing we've just watched, both as a piece of media on it's own and within the context of the DIY media landscape.
4 - Space Nerds: A sitcom about sysadmins/sysops running BBSs/the internet in space.
I have literally dozens of pages of podcast episode ideas, and a little pocket notebook that's full of mostly ideas for shows and episode formats that I want to play with.
I'm going to need help.
Part of that is going to come from the crew that helped/helps with the magazine, but I'm going to need to recruit (a lot) of additional people to help out. If this sounds like your cup of tea and we haven't already talked about it, reach out.
Beyond podcasts, I'm currently working on layout for the next issue of the Analog Revolution magazine.
I'm pretty pumped about this one, because that was a project that I loved working on.
Making zines is fun! It's also pretty hard.
Again, I'm 100% on the hunt for people that want to help out. I'll come up with some kind of decent system for us to collaborate eventually.
1.5 talk about media.
I blog. I'm going to make DIY media a regular feature on my blog over the next six months. Ideally, with a DIY media spotlight at least once a week.
Beyond that, of course, is the zine.
The zine is the perfect place to talk about DIY media. The DIY Media podcast, if we can ever get it off the ground, is another great place to talk about the things people are making.
2. Archive media
I keep offline archives on DVDs or AVCHD DVDs even though I don't own a thing that can play either.
I also have multiple terabytes of storage at home.
My personal archive strategy will remain largely the same. Nextcloud + hardcopy.
But in addition to those things, I'm going to start putting as much as I can in to the internet archive.
@ajroach42 local storage is incredibly good
signed, somebody with ~24TB used storage
@tom @ajroach42 I mean the "used" here is redundant, since your storage needs automatically expand to meet and exceed your storage capabilities
@elomatreb @ajroach42 huh? I could have 50tb sitting around here unused though
@elomatreb @ajroach42 oh wait I misread
@tom I'm only sitting on ~20TB and about 1/2 of that is free.
Unfortunately, just archiving the stuff isn't going to be enough without also indexing it.
My plan on that front is to put together a very low resource static website that embeds and/or points to all of the things I have on the internet archive.
I'll probably host that through neocities, although I might put it up on it's own server. Either way, it'll have it's own URL. Gotta figure out what that is going to be.
No reason for that to just be My stuff, though.
(Both because most of the things I consider "mine" are actually communal efforts, and also because I want to highlight DIY media in general even if I wasn't involved with it)
Which means that whatever thing I put together to serve as the index of AR's DIY Media output will eventually grow to include references, links, and embedded files for many of the other lovely things you all are making.
3. We have to make our own software:
I'm working on this. I'm redesigning my workflow from the ground up in to something I actually want.
I am not, unfortunately, doing this: ajroach42.com/a-modern-office-with-vintage-hardware/ but I am taking my cues from that to work towards what I actually do want.
I'm also making an effort to know *Who* wrote the software that I'm using (Hi Gargamel!) when that who isn't me.
This will be a long journey.
4. Archiving software
I'll archive my software the same way I archive my media.
I'll talk about my software the same way I talk about my media.
This is going to be slow going, but if we can all do it, eventually software will become demystified.
5. Alternatives to the web and internet
I fully expected for this to be the things I spent the most time working on in the next six months, but buying the house is going way faster than I expected, so ....
Look, most of the tools are already out there. It's just a matter of putting them together.
One day in the next six months I'll put together two potential packages for how the mBBS system will work, and publish a preliminary spec, and we can all try to build one?
It really comes back to making our own software and documenting our own software.
If we do it right, the end result will be our own web.
6. Using the internet better
For me, this means not suing facebook or tumblr for content discovery, and pushing people to my RSS feed and newsletter when they want to keep up with the things I'm releasing.
I'm going to spend more time on Mastodon, on tildes, on neocities.
I'm going to spend more time with adblocker on and scripts off.
As I do that, I'll write about it. Hopefully we can talk some other people in to doing it too.
7. Moving far away
As a result of moving, I may be looking for work. I may not be looking for work.
I may suddenly not have free time, which means I may miss releases or planned goals.
I'm going to have to roll with things as they come.
For as long as I am able, I am going to release as much as I can as often as I can, and document the heck out of it.
8. (This is an 8th, hidden point)
I think that covers all the thoughts I had rattling around in my head, and gets them out in the world in a way that makes sense and is understandable.
My goal is to make as much cool shit as I can, and to help as many people as possible also release cool shit.
Do you also care about these things? Do you want to help me make media or publish zines?
Do you want to release your own zine? or your own media?
As I'm getting my house in order, and releasing my media and my software, I also want to document as much as I can about *how* to do these things.
I'm going to put that together along with the "Andrew Answers your Questions about software and project ops" thing that I'm tinkering with.
So in addition to all the other things I've committed to, I hope to have a basic DIY media school kicking around out there somewhere.
@ajroach42 I go on strike from Book of Face and the birbsite most Wednesdays, to make myself develop community elsewhere. Could easily add other sites/services to that list.
@ajroach42 Ideally, our own non-web.
The thing is, most of the web software is open source. We already own the bare bones. We just have to replace the corporate stuff with stuff that guarantees encryption, anonymity, and verified identity. And it has to be tacked on in a decentralized way because the corporations are not implementing this.
Like keybase. Don't know much about it actually but I just saw it and I'm checking it out. Looks like it's providing encryption and verified identity which is cool.
Any opinions on keybase? Anyone use it?
@ajroach42 I like the idea of all these things but they sound like mostly not my areas of expertise, and I need to limit side projects until I finish my PhD.
@ajroach42 I have thought *many* times about some kind of hymnody zine, though.
@ajroach42 (And most small churches -- who might use my hymns -- still have, and use, photocopiers.)
@ajroach42
I have this idea for a history of Rome type podcast, but it's about a civilization that lived in gas giants and died out hundreds of 1000s of years ago, and we only know by piecing together bits from the artifacts they left behind in the clouds of Jupiter and Saturn (and other gas giants from other solar systems...takes place in the future when we've spread out from our solar system).
@mwdowns That sounds like So Much Fun!
@ajroach42
I'd be interested. What sort of content?
@CaptainUnderpants
You wanna start with Fiction or non-fiction?
Depends on the angle really. I'm mostly a physical theater creator, but I can mangle words together here and there.
@RussSharek I'm not sure exactly what Physical theater Creator means, but it is a very specific phrase. I like that.
We're working on a lot of stuff, a couple of the podcasts I outlined in the followups on this thread, but there are more.
I can just run down some of the more important ones:
- Articles: Once a week we have a rotating cast member read an article from our magazine.
- Poetry and short stories: Once a month, we have 7 people record 5 poems, and one short story or chapter from a longer work (these are released daily/weekly)
- DIY Media Spotlight: weekly or monthly - updates on the world of DIY media
- sysadmins in space: Sitcom about people running the space internet in the far future
... hold on, I've written all of these descriptions before. Let me just grab that file rather than retyping them all from memory.
@RussSharek
“Do a thing with computers”
Each episode, I walk you through step by step instructions on how to do something interesting with a computer
"The hourly show" - 1 minute segments, 8 per day, 5 per week. We would record them all at once at the end of the week, and it's politics and jokes about the previous week.
“Learning to podcast with andrew”
“Hi, I’m Andrew. I don’t know how to do this podcast thing. We’ll learn together”
Draccast
“Late Night Bites” with your host Dracula. Basically, Dracula hosts a talk show. We’ll probably skew a little shorter on this one, say 20 minutes. There can be guests and an ongoing story, in addition to it being a good excuse to get Tom to tell jokes as Dracula.
@RussSharek
Jupiter’s ghost
Jupiter’s ghost is a narrative fiction podcast set on a non-military/civilian research vessel in deep space. It’s narrated by Ada Grayson, the ship’s record keeper. The tone is light, but not exactly comic. The episodes are start with narration from Ada as the ships official log, and then go to crowdsourced logs from various crewpeople
This section was called "bad ideas"
Election Coverage, 1932, Tales from the Abyss
Cover a vintage election like it was happening in real time, with audio clips
But from an alternate timeline where something small but unsettling is different
Vintage sports coverage
Ditto the above, but for a sport instead
Fictional sports coverage
Ditto the above, but for a sport that doesn’t exist
@RussSharek Okay, back to good ideas:
Review concert bootlegs that are available on the live music archive (or other places.)
Review old time radio shows, episode by episode.
Ditto above but for TV shows, especially public domain TV shows.
@RussSharek I don't think this is the current ideas file, because there are a lot of things left in here that I thought we had already axed.
But you get the idea.
We wanna do some podcasts.
If you wanna help out, we'd be glad to have you.
I watched a lot of bad comedy as a kid. I'm not sure I'm qualified to review it, but I'd be happy to comment on it.
I've always wanted to see a linux/foss podcast that focuses on creative people (professional or otherwise) working with the software to make cool things or run their weird little empires.
@RussSharek ooh, that sounds fun!
I think because of the way I'm wired I'm better suited to chime in on projects like these rather than run them. I'm still "recovering" from the last weekly project I worked on, which sort of ate my life (in the most wonderful way) for five years. :)
Maybe I can guest star in some episodes?
@RussSharek sounds like fun. I’ll add you to the list of potentials when it’s time to start recording.
@ajroach42
Sounds good.
Physical Theater seems to be a catch-all term in the performing world for things that are narrative in nature, but rely more on the body and movement than talking to tell the story. I use it often to help explain that what we do isn't just circus tricks or clown "bits" (ugh.)
@RussSharek ah. Gotcha.
In regards to both making a podcast and discussing other works to get them notability, I really need to find the time and space to record the podcast a friend and I have been discussing on and off over the past two years. The format would be that we read and discuss various fanfic (both well-written and comically bad, erotic and G-rated). It was inspired by the summer off 2012, where we sent each other lots of pony fanfic to read both for a joke and for good stories.
@ajroach42 Have you tried Beaker Browser?
I have. It's neat.
AFAIK that's the only implementation of DAT right now.
It'd be neater if it worked on mobile, but even without that, it solves a lot of problems I was struggling with (and introduces a bunch of new ones, but that's the way of these things.)
@ajroach42 I wouldn't call it an implementation of DAT since it builds on top of modules from the dat project, but, semantics I guess :)
You can use DAT directly either with their own desktop app (https://github.com/datproject/dat-desktop) or on command line with https://github.com/datproject/dat.
Also trivial to use https://github.com/datproject/dat-node in any node application
I'd like to learn more about IPFS, too.
I remember Gopher. I also remember not being sad about the demise of Gopher.
Does Gopher have privacy advantages that one couldn't obtain by browsing the web using a pared-down browser, a powerful ad-blocker, or both?
Gopher doesn't have any privacy or security advantages in that case, no.
The only advantage gopher has, really, is that no Gopherhole will stop working because you didn't see their ads or execute their arbitrary code, while a lot of internet services will just stop working under those circumstances.
It sounds more useful to encourage people to build websites that don't stop working if people use privacy-sensitive browsers. Persuading website creators to do that is probably easier than persuading hosts and content creators to adopt a technology very few people have used for the past twenty years.
@ejworthing Sure.
Nothing you said here is at all incorrect.
@ajroach42 - Noob question. What’s Matrix? (My searches keep coming with odd things as the term “Matrix” is very common.)
Decentralized chat app.
@ajroach42 - Perfect! Thanks!
@ajroach42 @tinker *protocol. Riot's the app.
Perhaps you mean the federated chat system that seems to be a spiritual successor to IRC?
Matrix.org
@ajroach42 It's too bad that the safest computers for casual use are currently from pretty bad actors. :(
@remotenemesis @ajroach42 Well besides the architecture issues (shame on AMD for cedeing the consumer AND low power market), I was referring to Chromebooks.
@Elucidating @remotenemesis I dunno that I'd call chromebooks "safe" or good for "casual use" but your millage may vary.
@ajroach42 @remotenemesis Everyone's been laid low by Spectre because everyone who makes fast low-power processors use speculative execution.
Isolating for that, Chromebooks are pretty amazingly durable compared to many other options. Doubly so given their general user friendliness.
@Elucidating @remotenemesis I really don't feel like getting in to the weaknesses of chromebooks right now.
They are cheap. That's the best thing they have going for them.
They are surveillance platforms, and IMO that makes them unsafe.
They actively restrict what activities are available to a user (or at least they did until recently with the addition of the play store on many devices) and that makes them user hostile, IMO.
They aren't the worst of the bunch, but I wouldn't recommend them for "casual use" and I certainly wouldn't call them "safe"
But that's because computers in general suck right now, and will continue to do so until we stop trying to make them faster and start focusing on making them better.
@ajroach42 @remotenemesis Well, if any Linux ever ends up making an experience that is not a parade of confusion, bad experience, and mediocre software.
Our other options are Apple and Microsoft's platforms. Both of which cheerfully put stat recording right into the core of the OS. Apple's been doing the cortana-watch-every-keypress longer than Cortana has been a thing.
I'm curious what you think is actually an alternative that's as safe?
@remotenemesis @ajroach42 It's like Gmail. It's actually a lot safer than a lot of other options even if there might be the possibility of a FISA warrant.
@Elucidating @remotenemesis As long as your definition of "safe" excludes gmail spying on you, then yes.
@ajroach42 @remotenemesis I just pay for it and then the data collection goes away. Seems legit to me.
Some folks charge you AND threaten to sell your data (cough proton) so...
Yep, paying for email is pretty much the only way you're going to get email that is actually safe.
I'm not sure why this is contentious.
Computers are bad. We have a lot of work to do to make them better. Some of that work is technical, some of it is legal. None of it is fun.
And when we're done, probably computers will still be bad.
@ajroach42 @remotenemesis Idk what to do to make computers better. I'm one of the few folks that writes programs with integral proofs of correctness but while I feel good about that, I'm not sure how it helps anyone else.
@Elucidating @remotenemesis I didn't say there was one.
My central thesis was that Computers are Bad.
Like, "casual computer use" is dangerous. We shouldn't pretend that it's not.
And we certainly shouldn't pretend that letting google or microsoft or apple spy on us is safe.
Before I can accept that statement, I gotta know what you mean by Safest and also Casual use. And Computer, while we're at it.
Because no computer is really safe right now, AFAIK. And "casual" can mean anything from basic web browsing to basic office work.
@ajroach42 Also use PrivacyPass for evading cloudflare's tracking when browsing tor, umatrix for experienced users makes a lot of ad blocking obsolete.
Actually confused about what all the hype is with privacy pass. Don't you still have to solve some challenge (i.e. a captcha) to get the pass? Also this seems easy to abuse for "malicious" web crawling*.
*Outsource solving challenges, get supply of privacy passes, put them on your bots, bam! (not that this is a bad thing)
I haven't tried this out, but the way I don't have to fill in a captcha *every single time* when going to certain sites is that some central site tracks me, and I need to enable third-party javascript and cookies to be allowed to log in. It would seem to me that this thing can remove that requirement.
@clacke @extebert @ajroach42 and with privacy pass you need to enable that only for a certain site and the cookie that is generated is a general pass regardless which site it is. See the paper for details. It's better than anything else and it does preserve your privacy.
Not as much as which sites you visit with passes but you get the passes anonymously and don't have to enable redirects and JS on random sites you visit.
@clacke @extebert @ajroach42 sorry I seem to be missing half the convo from freexepeach.xyz due to silent instance blocking it seems
#fedlife
I'll look at it all on pleroma.soykaf.com when I'm on a computer not on a VPN and proxy that breaks https.
#weblife
What I'm trying to say is, it's hard to disagree with the first line of this convo (*as I see it here on this instance*):
> The modern web is a clusterfuck of bad choices.
Except maybe s/web/world of computing/ .
Yeah, I think I make that point too, elsewhere in the thread. I'm pretty sure the way I phrased it was "modern computers suck" or possibly "computers are bad"
plus some general commentary on how and why.
It's a big thread, not surprised stuff disappeared.
Also, my several specifically is having some issues at the moment. Dunno if that is impacting anything.
@ajroach42
One thing that would be nice to add is: "use cryptocurrencys"
@Ghosty yeah, it would be nice if cryptocurrency was usable.
They’ll get there. Until then, I can’t recommend them.
@ajroach42
Yeah! Many big companies want to start to accept Cryptos
@Ghosty We gotta get through this speculation bubble, and get the various coins to a reasonable valuation.
Then we gotta get transaction fees down to pennies rather than tens or hundreds of dollars.
@ajroach42 Hey I just want to let you know that I support this effort but don't want to fill out your web form 😄
I hope that whatever I develop will complement your #decentralization vision.
@uranther Shoot, I forgot that form was even still linked from that post. I need to remove it.
@uranther form is gone.
@ajroach42 The problem is that we need to start working on it *now*. Otherwise, when things go wrong, it'll be too late.
There are some interesting ideas though. For instance, I've stumbled upon the idea of "peer web"; and of course there is Urbit (http://urbit.org, definitely recommend giving it a try).
@pfm Never heard of urbit before, I'll have to take a look.
Thanks for sharing!
I'm excited about the idea of urban mesh-nets but haven't had time yet to really dive in.
My impression is that several North American cities have local meshes that run on top of the Internet, but only New York's mesh has made substantial progress in creating community-run bandwidth that isn't dependent on other ISPs. If that's not true, I'd love to be corrected!
@ejworthing NYC and Detroit, last I checked.
@ajroach42 I some article about North Koreas Internet and how it was firewalled/geoblocked so it worked more like a big Intranet and had custom DNS too.
Exactly how UK universities locked down the Internet from 1990-1992. Not ironclad (18 year old kid could bypass controls😉 ), at the cost of being put out of University for such mischief. If penalties are loss of income/jail (and I probably still today have less career options b/c no degree) folk might not be so keen to push boundaries..
@ajroach42 in European countries, wired infrastructure is usually owned by what was fomer state controlled PTT (post, telegraph, telephone) administration, if privatised the company owning it will *always* have strong ties to the govt (usually the biggest and priority customer). In some countries (like DE, CH) the govt still has a substantial financial stake in it (30-50%) and there are modern EU countries like LU where its still fully nationalised!
I absolutely agree. It would be so wonderful to have the ease of use & utility of some of the older gear with today's power and storage.
@EuphoriaLavender That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Wishing you lots of luck!, especially since you seem to be someone who will share the findings so others can benefit too.
@ajroach42 we've seen this a few times already. Personally, host recently, with what.cd---say what you want about piracy, a lot of content that isn't available anywhere else got lost forever there.
@ajroach42 and the thing is, and this really sucks, there's no way to get it. It's like what you talked about---tapes that are lost forever, except some random memories that'll fade in a couple of years at most.
The system wants us to pump cash, and values any amount of money over the chance of being remembered at all, leaving small acts (and even bigger ones!) to be forgotten forever, if they can't be used to make cash right here & now.
Just have a backup plan. Period
I prefer 2 GB Hitachi or HGST drives.
@ajroach42 Some things were lost, some things were gained.
On the flip side, nowadays most freeware is also Free Software that you can inspect and change.
Shareware used to be only free to use for 30 days.
@ajroach42 I think the net and the general availability might be a blessing and a curse. On the one side I get powerful software on my machine at the blink of an eye.
On the other hand comming up with your own solutions is discouraged, mainly by people shouting 'don't reinvent the wheel!'
That's one of the reasons I keep telling people to code it yourself.
@ckeen @ajroach42 forthers_irl
@ajroach42 @ckeen and this is unironic tbh, since my impression (WARNING: ONLY FROM SHIT I'VE READ) is that forthers do tend to take a "rewrite it" approach
@a_breakin_glass @ajroach42 Yes, it is part of chuck moores corollary (sp?) to 'Keep it simple': 'do it yourself'.
Meaning you can only keep it simple if you truly understand your problem and choose a HW/SW combination (!) to solve it.
And of course the only way to do that is to do it yourself.
@ckeen @ajroach42 @a_breakin_glass It should also be noted that Chuck Moore had a library of routines that he regularly reused between projects.
The "write it yourself" mantra applies to when you're learning and/or developing something new. Once you've written it, you are free to re-use code YOU'VE written in a subsequent project, since:
1. You're in the ideal position to understand its tradeoffs, and,
2. You can fix and refine it effortlessly as needed.
@vertigo @a_breakin_glass @ajroach42 That's an excellent addition, thank you!
@ckeen @ajroach42 Thank you for the link -- I've bookmarked it for future reference. I absolutely subscribe to this manifesto.
(even when I am not writing in Forth.)
@ajroach42 What would be the major differentiation between #DIY and #FOSS?
@duck57 scope and scale. DIY software is generally small, built by an individual or a very small group, designed to do a thing.
Much FOSS is huge in scope, and built by dozens or hundreds of people, with a whole community around them. Often with corporate sponsors.
FOSS can be DIY software, but it's often much larger than that.
DIY software can be FOSS software, but it isn't always open source.
It can also be a matter of tools. the simpler the stack, the more DIY it feels.
@ajroach42 @duck57
I would say:
Most FOSS is DIY, but the mindshare when people think of FOSS is not DIY projects.
90%+ of open source software is something one person wrote in an afternoon and slapped a license on, and fewer than ten other people run it and they've all made their own modifications.
The remaining 10% is massive sprawling incomprehensible messes like GIMP or anything owned by Apache. But since everybody uses those, we think of them first.
@duck57 @ajroach42
(This doesn't matter so much until somebody says "improve your coding by contributing to an open source project" and somebody else takes that to mean "attempt to contribute a meaningful patch to the linux kernel" rather than "fix an obvious bug in somebody's 10-line shell script")
@ajroach42 @duck57
I think also it's our responsibility to make sure things are allowed to stay small.
Part of that is reminding people that not every piece of software is trying to become popular, the same way not every user wants a million followers.
@gemlog @duck57 @ajroach42 @hairylarry
Yeah. Neither will be accepted, probably!
But, one of them is actually doable, and the other involves a decade of study, young grasshopper.
@enkiv2 @duck57 @ajroach42 @hairylarry Ooh! I like this 'young' stuff! I may just boot up a zx81 to celebrate! :-)
@enkiv2 @ajroach42 @duck57 It is probably true for proprietary software projects too, except the part about modifications.
@ajroach42 @veer66 @enkiv2 @duck57
Our patients database software (basically a load of .net forms filling an SQL Server DB) is to be fair quite highly customisable and this can be even done by non technical staff like nurses (we have different categories of patients, ranging from seniors with dementia to younger folk who are mentally capable but have serious long term health conditions, each category has different assesments for some but common elements as well).
The tricky thing to solve for free software funding is mass-market commodity software like Windows, LibreOffice, Oracle and GNU. But those things already exist as free software too, even in the face of proprietary competition.
It's not solved, core free software infrastructure is still lacking in funding, but the software world would definitely not fall apart without intellectual monopolies.
@clacke @enkiv2 @veer66 @ajroach42 @duck57
Personally, i've never made money from nonfree software - and i've got quite a decent CV now.
@ajroach42 This is part of the reason I'm looking up ways of digitally storing all those Acorn Electron tapes I just bought.
The expected lifespan of a cassette tape is around 30 years, so it's definitely at the upper limit by this point 😂
If it was me:
get a good cassette player, record them to wav files with audacity, label the wav files with as much metadata as you have available, and upload them to archive.org.
Scan the Manuals, and do the same.
Keep a local copy if you have the space. Test the wav files in an emulator if one exists.
@ajroach42 that's interesting, since almost all current #social software seems to follow usenet's evolution bar centralized identity. Except for, maybe, #snapchat ?
@ajroach42 You know there’s a dude working on an Arduino OS, right?
@JoshuaACNewman I was unaware of this project. Can you point me towards some additional information?
@ajroach42 It’s called MicrOS, and its here: https://github.com/GeoSn0w/micrOS
@ajroach42 it's the talking about things that is hard. I don't want to be that person who is always pushing their stuff in people's faces.
@Shutsumon Yeah, no I get that.
One of the things that I want to do is to help put together a space that exists just for people to talk about the things they've released and stuff. A content discovery engine, you know? But I haven't figured out how to do it yet.
It's also why I love communities, because I can talk about your shit and you can talk about my shit and we don't have to self promote.
@ajroach42 a content discovery thingy would be wonderful.
On the upside I just blathered about my novel for a couple of toots.
*hides under a rock*
@Shutsumon Wouldn't it though?
I gotta work out some of the kinks, but I have some ideas.
@ajroach42 in my youth I was more an EDM fan, but this was the best thing about the early rave scene. No one gave a shit about sampling, remixing, bootlegs, mashups etc.
Nowadays you run an online station and get instantly these startup companies monitoring your content and sharing it to "copyright feds" the world over as a service to artists to try and extract a fraction of Euro cents per play, but instead they scare away would be DJ's from setting up online radio!
I understand that a lot of musicans (bluesmen) got ripped off by the industry.
Still this idea that I don't want anyone making money with my music is backwards.
If they sign with a major label and get paid the label is going to make all the money.
If they allow airplay (which is statutory for published songs) the radio station is making money playing their songs.
Just about the only way to reach a large audience is to agree to let someone make money with your music.
@ajroach42 Some musicians have an artistic statement that their music only exists while they perform it, but they’re a vanishing minority compared to musicians who just never recorded themselves and then got trapped in a normal life.
@ajroach42 I have a number of recordings I'd love to be able to post publicly, because they're completely unavailable otherwise, but I don't have the rights (generally, I was the recording engineer but not in the band).
I have contact information for some of the acts, but not for all of them.
Just getting in touch with the ones I *have* been able to track down would be quite a project, and I'm not even sure how to phrase the request.
Would very much like to see more awareness of this issue.
@woozle Same!
I worked at a recording studio for a few years, and I have copies of songs that probably no one else in the world has anymore (I certainly have *mixes* of songs that I'm the only one who has, because they are my personal preferred mix that the band passed on.)
I hardly have contact information anymore, even.
It's a frustrating position to be in.
And, when I watched this play out in real time, I saw people frequently choosing not to archive their content in highly public places out of fear that
- It wasn't good enough
or
- People would take it without paying for it.
And I guess either of those things might actually be viable concerns the day that you release the content, but I can't tell you how many of those things that folks decided not to make *too* available are just gone now.