julian

Time to shake off another Big Tech and feel that delightful breath of fresh air, health and freedom.

Pruning the old overgrowth of commercial Big Tech and letting the new shoots of indie tech flourish.

“THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING”

Facebook Status:

Deactivating Facebook prior to deleting it from my life. (Not that it was in my life anyway. Hardly touched it in ten years. But because this account existed it looked like I was here. If you thought I was here, I wasn't; Zuck's system wanted you to think that. If you thought I was receiving your kind messages and rudely ignoring you, I wasn't; Zuck's system wanted you to think that.)

I love your stories, your pictures, your news, you as friends and family. I get that Facebook provides a way for you to share these. But I don't like Zuckerberg or any overlord controlling who I'm allowed to connect with and how we are allowed to communicate.

In Facebook I don't feel comfortable. I feel pounced-upon by the Algorithm. I feel the system is dangling your pictures and stories in front of me as a lure, as bait. I feel we are being manipulated, abused for commercial gain.

And so I haven't visited Facebook club. Not for years, aside from a few occasions when I went in briefly to look for something or other. And so I haven't seen your delightful sharing of life events and interesting stories.

Mind you, I'm not the socialable type, so I maybe wouldn't go there nor post anything anyway, even if the place we're talking about was a delightful public park under ownership of the commons.

Why Disconnect?

It's a ghost account. For ten years I haven't even been looking at Facebook, let alone writing back to the friends and family who post there. I already deleted years ago the few posts and pictures that I had initially uploaded there. The only reason I kept the account so long is in case I might one day want to contact an old friend or they might want to contact me and we might not have each other's phone or email... But really, it's ridiculous, just FOMO and inertia.

I detest the feeling of being beholden to Zuck's mega-corp. What do I get from that contract? I get the sense of maintaining what to me is merely a subsidiary way to potentially contact some people. Why should I need to keep subscribing to the Facebook club and playing its game by its rules, just for that?

So it's Bye Bye Facebook.

Shall I silently close my account and slink away? I considered it, and temporarily “deactivated” my account for a few months. But before closing it for good, first I want to tell the friends how I feel, and where to find me.

Where To?

I already feel great with my de-googled phones, email at my own domain, closing my Amazon account, Giving up Github, wearing an open-source smart watch.

More about my de-googling and other freedom from Big Tech's shackles:

• https://wrily.foad.me.uk/tag:degoogled

If you feel the urge to join the movement, the Opt Out Project has a fantastic set of practical guides for freeing oneself from all kinds of pervasive surveillance tech.

• https://www.optoutproject.net/

See you in the Free(dom) World

... through regular web sites and blogs like my Wrily;

... through the non-proprietary digital communication tools like email, the telephone system and SMS, Jabber/XMPP, matrix, and the fediverse (the network that unites Mastodon and dozens of other software and services) — we call these protocols — that are standardised, operated by a diversity of providers, and not under a single company's control;

... and perhaps occasionally in Real Life.

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p.s. A funny thought occurs to me. I can't help wondering if among my friends there are some who might consider this event “sad” or that I need some kind of “help”. If that's your reaction, I invite you to try on a different perspective.

A computer program that generates music. How quaint.

I remember when I first heard computer-generated music. My father showed me a book, “Music By Computers,” and we listened to some of the recordings of music generated by various kinds of programs.

That was in the 1980s. “Music By Computers” had been published in 1969, compiled from papers presented in 1966.

• “Music By Computers” at archive.org

The recordings for the book were supplied as gramophone records. Thin, floppy, playable gramophone records, tucked in to an envelope at the back of the book.

This was quaint, old technology. The recordings were already twenty years old. The music sounded like it had been made by a computer... and yet it was tolerably pleasant or entertaining music, perhaps, depending on one's expectations and level of musical sophistication.

We dabbled with making our own programs... beep-booply-beep-boop... on our modern Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

People are still playing music, and still playing with music generators. Now folks are calling their music generator programs “AI” to ride the latest hype wave...

I'm glad to see people are still having fun with the idea.

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An excerpt from “Music By Computers”:

1. Title Music to LINK, Side 2, Band 4

This short excerpt is the background music for the title and screen credits for the short documentary film LINK produced by the Argonne National Laboratory film group [3]. The film explains the operation of a computer program LINK, written by R. K. Clark of the Applied Mathematics Division at Argonne, for use in the automatic analysis of spark chamber photographs taken during experiments in high energy physics. Since it concerns a CDC-3600 computer program and includes com¬ puter-produced animation sequences which were photographed directly from the computer cathode-ray-tube display and which illustrate the program operation, it seemed only appropriate for the computer to provide the music with which to accompany and emphasize its accomplishments. Though the selection is only a minute long, it is in fact quite complex, accurately synchronized to the film (synchronization is a trivial problem) and contains some noteworthy illustrative effects.

An excerpt from a review of “Music By Computers” by a Mr Howe in 1970:

... [This work in recent years in computer synthesis of sound] involves the work of both scientists and composers, and thus raises both technological and aesthetic considerations. For people unfamiliar with this kind of research, the discussions in the book will seem very sophisticated and advanced, and it will appear that many rather general conclusions are now beginning to emerge out of quite disparate approaches to common problems. This impression, however, does not stand up under careful investigation...

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Illustrations derived from scans of the title pages of the book, accessed through archive.org. First excerpt from the same. Second excerpt from a review by Hubert S. Howe, Jr. in Perspectives of New Music Vol. 8, No. 2 (1970), pp. 151-15, accessed through JSTOR.

I'm caught in a self-sovereignty self-hosting knot of ambition. Some days it seems everything I want to simplify or improve or upgrade is blocked by something else. I want to blog more from my WriteFreely instance, and for the time being I can, but it's bothering me that it's out of date, running on an out-of-date Yunohost-11. I'm proud to have set up staging copies of much of my infrastructure so I can try a test upgrade, but that reveals the upgrade is broken, so instead I want to migrate it either to a fresh Yunohost-12, but I discover that no longer supports exactly the same way of logging in with its SSO at my base-domain which is managed separately outside Yunohost (I'm skipping lots of details, they're beside the point here), and it reminds me WF is one of my last few “production” services still running in YNH. I want to get them out of YNH because for all its good points it's designed as a monolith, not to plug and compose with other infrastructure, so... I could migrate Writefreely instead to another hosting method outside Yunohost, like MASH, so I try that and find support for Mariadb isn't yet implemented in MASH-WriteFreely, so I could either add Mariadb support myself and then migrate the DB directly, or let it use another DB and instead try to migrate the posts and subscribers and metadata through WriteFreely's API... and so on for my other services. Ugh. I mean, I knew it would be like this. I chose this path, and I kind of like it. Sometimes I even find that software has been developed in the meantime that does indeed simplify and improve things for me, like when projects add support for SSO, and that's wonderful! But just so much still remains to do... And I'm trying to skip some of the nitty-gritty by looking ahead to better technologies: want to move infrastructure from Docker in VMs in Proxmox to mostly LXCs in Incus, eventually learn Nix and K8s, want to get involved in improving, unifying, standardising some of the best of small-medium scale hosting frameworks like Yunohost, Co-op Cloud, SelfHostBlocks/Skarabox, Fediversity. I realised at this stage any more tweaking I do to my private infra is more or less a waste, now that I've learnt from it. What matters is what I can contribute to projects that others share, so I'm aiming that way now. And thinking of some ways to “level up” this world of personal data self-sovereignty and make things that ordinary people can use, plug-and-play kit for family and friends and schools to store and easily manage their identity and data. Have (some) skills and (maybe good) ideas; lack money and time. Must get around to writing about the ideas at least. Is my WriteFreely still holding up for now? Whew.

Polite software. Politeness in software is under-rated. And deference.*

Software that I truly control: you are likely FOSS/SOSS. You may call me “Boss”. (“Settings –> Boss preferences”; “Enter your bossname.”)

Command-line apps: you may call me “Commander”. (Hear me out: I'm serious beyond playing with words.)

Any system I don't control: you may refer to me as, “Esteemed client” or “Sir/Ma'am”.

Big Tech People-Farmers: you may justly call me “serf” or “chattel” (related to cattle; look it up).

Graphic meme idea: a collage of recognisable log-in screens etc., terminology edited.

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* Deference, but not fawning. Looking at you, LLM chat bots.

Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Firefox

“It's built with open source technology — that's good, right?”

An article about Building the Self-Agency Mobile Ecosystem: Push Messaging

Push messaging is the system that enables incoming messages to wake up and reach our apps, instantly and efficiently. But Who Cares Who Delivers Our Notifications? Our answer is: we care, and we do not like being locked in to depending on one mega-corp's system.

Therefore, in our libre mobile computing devices, we require a push-messaging infrastructure built from open standard technology that gives us freedom to choose our service providers and authority over them.

Read more in Going Google-Free with UnifiedPush in /e/OS and my other articles about UnifiedPush .

How We Get There

How can we build this? What is needed to get widespread UnifiedPush support in /e/ and other mobile OS?

This is a technical article. For a more general introduction to UnifiedPush you might read the first half of Going Google-Free with UnifiedPush in /e/OS or my other articles about UnifiedPush .

Should we consider standardising a UP client-server protocol so that a built-in distributor can work with several different server implementations and vice-versa?

Not necessarily, and I will attempt to explain why.

Congratulations UnifiedPush! Congratulations Murena!

Murena's /e/OS 2.5 ships with UnifiedPush support included as announced by a small note in the 2.5-t release notes .

This exciting development brings Google-free push messaging to the regular users of an important player in the freedom mobile OS space.

POSSE: I added this as a comment on the Forgejo discussion “[FEAT] Proposal to extend Forgejo URL structure...” on 2024-11-14.

Another upgrade in my self-hosted IT infrastructure.

Nextcloud is a self-hostable platform centred around file storage, providing a plug-in framework expandable to a broad range of services. It is one of the older hosting platforms, and unfortunately showing its age in several respects. I consider few of its default and plug-in apps to be of high quality. However, due to its popularity, stability and support it seems to make a good base for file storage services and connecting other services.

I have been running Nextcloud for years but so far only using it for one core stable service (contacts and calendar) and some experiments. This is partly because my deployment is an old, stale configuration, stuck on an old version. I need to update to a maintainable deployment.

There are a few ways to deploy Nextcloud. For this I will use MASH. It is not one of the “official” methods; it's a self-hosting framework from the author of the popular Matrix self-hosting framework.