I've been waiting for this ever since I heard about it last year. Now available in the UK, I bought mine from Hive Books .
“In this hopeful story Ada and her friends join a movement that started back in 1983. Their courageous adventure of software freedom and learning how technology works is a wonderful way to introduce young people everywhere to the joys of tinkering!”
—Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
How powerful! What great makers and engineers we can inspire! Let's get a copy into every library and every school!
UPDATE: Look! David Revoy, awesome software-freedom artist famous for Pepper&Carrot, drew this impression of Ada — great to print as a poster or (dimmed) as a screen wallpaper — creative-commons licensed CC-BY-SA. Hi-res downloads, licence, etc.
Grown-ups: read Cory Doctorow's book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (ebook, audiobook, USA); or from Hive (hardback, UK). “When the tech platforms promised a future of “connection,” they were lying. They said their “walled gardens” would keep us safe, but those were prison walls. The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction... Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate.”
I am delighted to be joining the PubHubs project, working on adding moderation tools.
Public Hubs
The purpose of PubHubs is to enable real-world public organisations such as libraries, broadcasters, schools or health care, to provide online group communications for local citizens, in ways which match their real-world values and needs.
Self-hosting: it's difficult, inefficient, fragile. So why do I do it?
I self-host, unwillingly, in order to own my own identity. I insist on my online identity being independent. I don't accept being Julian @ some-messaging-co or Julian @ some-video-sharing-co today, and Julian @ some-other-co tomorrow. I'm just Julian @ my-own-domain. Services may come and go, while this remains my identity under my control for as long as I choose.
For many services today, unfortunately, self-hosting is the ugly means to this desired end.
With any proprietary services, I'm unable to be me. So I use open standards.
Without self-hosting, currently, I'm unable to be me. So I self-host.
Let's Not Try to Replicate a Hospital Environment. Let's Replicate a Cosy Nest.
This is what the techie in me wanted to know: What kind of baby monitor best picks up sounds, maybe even breathing, maybe video? Which baby monitor privately transmits them to me, without going through the manufacturer's cloud web servers? Can I build one myself?
This is what the daddy in me found, after trying to use a baby monitor for about a day: ignore the monitor, listen to the baby! I threw away the monitor.
This is what I would wish to tell my younger self.
I am experimenting with sharing my diary entries with my family, using the awesome matrix-based FUTO Circles app. I write in an offline Diary app. My off-line diary is perfect for my diarying, and Circles is a great tool for sharing stories. What I want to do is combine them, posting my daily diary entries perhaps at the end of each day, as Stories (is that what we call them?) in a Circle.
School communities are begging Google to continue supporting Chromebooks beyond the scheduled end date this year. I wish them success with their short term goal. However, I wish more dearly that they would have an opportunity to learn about the down sides of corporate involvement in education, and about ethical alternatives.
Whichever way the petition goes, the media focus there will on Google pushing their Big Tech, likely framed as “generosity”, which we recognise as an anti-pattern. It would be good if we could avoid wasting our energy engaging directly with this news story but instead, riding the wave of it, promote our own story.
Could we write a story something like this?
“
Having placed all of their eggs in Google's gift basket of once shiny Chromebooks, now rusting away, some schools react by begging the Big Tech for an extension. Meanwhile the [Codename: Ed Foundation?] is preparing to show school leaders a more wholesome future aligned with educational values, with the launch of *[Codename: Ed Suite?]*
Gandi treats CNAME value '@' inconsistently. In DNS queries it's expanded, but, in the API (at least as used by octodns-gandi) and in the Gandi DNS record editor preview, it's not.
You’re my uncle, sister, friend, mother, nephew or colleague. You want to message me, send me your photos and news, read my latest blog post, have a video call. Where do you go, online? You know my phone number, my email address, but just now you're not looking to call or email me.
You! You, university! You, sports club! You, local library, city council, school, church, youth group! Your social media links could look like this:
Join us in our own spaces!
— [Mastodon] – [Pixelfed] – [Friendica] – [PeerTube] ...
— [Blog] – [Fediverse] – [Matrix] ...
We are also on commercial media:
— [G] [A] [F] [A] [M] ...
I have been using some parts of NextCloud for years, on my own set-up at home. My general feelings about Nextcloud, first the good bits: the core of NextCloud makes a very useful framework for connecting teams and their data. It's a good base to build on. The most basic parts, the files storage and sharing, are pretty solid.
On the other hand, the NextCloud-provided or built-in “apps” are of mixed quality. “NextCloud Talk” is I think one of the better ones. I find many of the rest are poor quality or too simple to be recommended. I'll give some examples.
— [Blog] – [Fediverse] – [Matrix] ...
We are also on commercial media:
— [G] [A] [F] [A] [M] ...
