julian

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] ...

with an explanatory footnote or pop-up:

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.

Since going own-domain a few years ago, I chose Fastmail for email and Gandi.net for DNS, both of them for their FOSS-friendly credentials and no-nonsense decent standard-based offerings with APIs and docs etc., suitable from casual home use up to business use.

My brief assessment of Fastmail for my use case. Positives:

• general reliability and speed have been great;
• spam filtering is very accurate: false positives and negatives are both rare;
• supporting FOSS and open standards, developing the important new JMAP standard;
• filtering of incoming emails: has a nice filter editor, and uses the standard Sieve language for writing filters, but see the corresponding negative;
• exceptionally good webmail client but see negatives about it;
• exceptionally good config settings UI and associated docs.

Fastmail negatives:

• webmail is proprietary, in a world desperately needing a decent FOSS webmail client;
• webmail only stores email contact addresses in their own address book, whereas I host my own personal CardDAV/CalDAV address book and calendar elsewhere (in my Nextcloud) and use them for other things like mobile phone calls and other mobile apps — these days my contacts and calendar are not primarily for use with my email — so that doesn't work for me;
• filtering emails: unfortunately Fastmail does not support the standard ManageSieve protocol which would allow managing one's mail filters from one's own email client [1];
• Fastmail data take-out/independent backup [2] options are poor, I discovered recently: “install a desktop IMAP email client (such as Thunderbird) to make a local sync of your mail, and visit these various pages to download your various other data in various ways.” Ugh, yes, really.

That all said, for now I'm sticking with Fastmail for my mail hosting.

This is my POSSE copy of my comment on a YunoHost-PeerTube issue, Stuck at “Starting a systemd service” for hours #358.

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Glad you had fun playing with it!

These “generative AI” programs remind me of two things. First, the 1960s programs “ELIZA” by Joseph Weizenbaum and “SHRDLU” by Terry Winograd at MIT. Using polite phrases and repeating back parts of the user's input, ELIZA in limited contexts made plausible conversational replies, resulting in some users attributing it with “intelligence” or “feelings”.

Some quotes from the Wikipedia article:

1. A communication is distributed property. (It's my data and your data at the same time.)
2. My data, my rules. (Your data, your rules.)
3. Retention is non-binary. (There are degrees of accessibility and modes of retention.)

I like real-world analogies.

When I send you a paper letter, I choose whether to keep a copy, and you choose whether to keep the copy you receive. Together we agree how confidential it is, whether we should share it or publish it or destroy it. In light of that agreement I decide where to keep my copy, perhaps in my office, or pinned to my front door where any passer-by can read it, or in a vault that will only be unlocked once I die. If we publish it, we accept there's a public copy out of our direct control but still subject to laws and our stated wishes.

Any electronic system should give me and you those options, no matter how it's structured internally, if it claims to be serving us well.

This is my POSSE copy of a Lydra Ansible-Yunohost issue, Support ansible check mode #98.

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In the series: Gadgets and Gifts that Respect Our Freedom

A smart soldering iron? An open-source-hardware soldering iron?

Yes! The Pinecil by Pine64.

The Pinecil — Smart Soldering Iron by Pine64

Designed by Pine64.

Pinecil-v2 reviews: at hackspace.raspberrypi.com, at tomshardware.com

Pinecil Accessories include a flexible heat-proof cable and sets of tips.

Would I Use It?

Since I was a teenager I have been using my father's trusty old 15W Antex Precision Model C soldering iron, which has gone through a couple of new tips back in the days when I was building a lot of circuits, and otherwise just keeps working.

However, the old soldering iron's mains cable, very thin though it is, has become so hardened and springy that I have to pull against it to move the iron where I want it. And it heats up slowly so after plugging it in, and waiting for minutes before tinning it, I end up leaving it on, its tip smoking and charring, until clearing up time at the end of the project.

I would love a Pinecil, especially for its temperature regulation and for its quick heat-up, claimed as 6 seconds.

But the 32-bit microprocessor? The control buttons, the USB connector? I can't see it lasting 50 years. This would not be a purchase for lifetime reliability. This would be for fun, for utility, and for the sake of supporting open hardware design.

UPDATE 2023-2024: YES — Thanks to my father, I now have a Pinecil. It works well. I am very pleased with it.

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#awesomeFOSS, #openHardware

My outlook on this area of life is exemplified by the addresses I list on my “Contacts” page:

•  julian . foad.me.uk (my web site address)
•  julian @ foad.me.uk (my email address)
• @julian : foad.me.uk (my matrix address)
• @julian @ fed.foad.me.uk (my fediverse address) [1]

These are my addresses on different systems. See how they are all substantially the same (except for formatting and a subdomain)? They all take the form: <my-name> <at> <my-domain>. More importantly, see how they are all owned by myself? My addresses all belong to my domain, not to any service provider's domain.

In today's broken Internet we're told it's normal to identify ourself using addresses we don't own:

• my.whole.name @ megacorpmail.com
• an.other.name @ big.mastodon.instance
• choose.a.name @ matrix.org

Two problems. First, what we call “our” addresses are in fact not ours at all, they are owned and controlled by the service providers. Second, we are forced to use lots of different addresses, a different one for each provider.

I call this an anti-pattern.