To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

It looks utterly repulsive, but I kind of love the idea… the sheer convenience.

Dr*g?

So, I was at my pharmacy today getting my prescription dr*gs, and afterward stopped by my dealer to pick up some fucking heroin.

I agree; it probably didn’t occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90’s. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.

What they really got wrong was the clothing: so much anime/hentai.

This is a techno-goth.

A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it’s always far cheaper to use tape.

They could have done that with the drives, but today you’d have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you’re lucky) that’ll work on a modern motherboard.

But I’d guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.

F-Droid

Most of the apps I have and use are installed via Droidify. The ones that aren’t are company apps, like banking or airline. I could just used the web sites for those; they’re only conveniences.

My phone isn’t rooted, and I didn’t read the article so I don’t know how this will affect me. If push comes to shove, I’ll simply bite the bullet and get a phone I can install Linux on next time, regardless of how polished for daily driving it is.

Github is full of lists of things. There are even several lists of “awesome lists”. Far more than I can list here, and it starts to get painfully recursive (an awesome list of awesome lists of awesome lists?). Just search for “awesome list” on github; some live outside of github, so you could search for “awesome list” in Ecosia, or DDG, or whatever you use.

• https://github.com/athityakumar/awesome-awesomes
• https://github.com/topics/awesome-list
• https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

A series is the only way to do Dark Tower. It’s too much to try to cram into a movie; there’s just about a season’s worth in most of the books, and if 8 seasons is a stretch of a commitment for a studio, several of the books are smaller and you could probably reasonably compress the series into 5 seasons.

They need to do it while King is still around, IMHO. More than any other of his novels he seems to have been more emotionally invested in The Dark Tower.

The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point

And, for computers, was almost exclusively limited to monitors. In 2009, the Energy Star specification was version 4.0, released in 2006. In that specification, the EPA’s objective was to get 40% of the computers on the market to have power management capabilities 2010 – 40% by the year after Bitcoin was introduced. Intel’s 2009 TCO-driven upgrade cycle document mentions power management, but power use isn’t included in any of the TCO metrics.

All of the focus on low-power processing units in 2009 was for mobile devices and DSPs. Computer-oriented energy savings at the time was focused on processes, e.g. manually powering down computers or use of suspension and hibernation - there was very little CPU clock scaling available for desktop computers – you turned them off to save power. DVFS didn’t become widely available – or effective – until 2006, and a study published in 2009 (again, the same year Bitcoin was introduced) found that “only 20% of initiatives had measurable targets.”

So, yes: technically, there were people thinking about these sorts of things, but it wasn’t a common consumer consideration, and the tools for power management were crude: your desktop was on and consuming power – always the same amount of power – or it was off. And people did power down their computers to save energy. But, like I said, if your desktop was on, it was consuming the same amount of energy whether you were running a miner or weren’t. There was a motto at the time bandied about by SETI@home, that your computer was using energy anyway, so you might as well do science with the spare CPU cycles. That was the mindset of most people who had computers at the time.

I’m designing off the top of my head, but I think you could do it with a DHT, or even just steal some distributed ledger algorithm from a blockchain. Or, you develop a distributed skip tree – but you’re right, any sort of distributed query is going to have a possibly unacceptable latency. So you might – like Bitcoin – distributed the index itself to participants (which could be large), but federate the indexing operation s.t. rather than a dozen different search engine crawlers hitting each web site, you’d have one or two crawlers per site feeding the shared index.

Distributed search engines have existed for over a decade. Several solutions for distributed Lucene clusters exist (SOLR, katta, ElasticSearch, O2) and while they’re mostly designed to be run in a LAN where the latencies between nodes is small, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine a fairly low-latency distributed, replicated index where the nodes have a small subset of peer nodes which, together, encompass the entire index. No instance has the same set of peer nodes, but the combined index is eventually consistent.

Again, I’m thinking more about federating and distributing the index-building, to reduce web sites being hammered by search engines which constitute 80% of their traffic. Federating and distributing the query mechanism is a harder problem, but there’s a lot of existing R&D in this area, and technologies that could be borrowed from other domains (the aforementioned DHT and distributed ledger algorithms).

let me know if you have questions.

I have all the questions. I’m peripherally aware of ESP32; my experience with it, and its capabilities, is severely limited, and IME interface changes require recompiling and re-flashing things. Many of my questions stem from that ignorance.

1. Integration support. I assume GadgetBridge on Android is how you’d do it? Or is there another app?
2. How is the battery life IRL?
3. What does the watch face & app space look like? The FAQ mentions a “gallery”, and instructions for contributions describe the github PR process. Is the gallery just the list of watch faces on the sqfmi website?
4. What’s the process for changing faces, and installing additional functionality? From the docs, it looks as if this must be done over a serial cable, despite the device having WiFi capability. I assume that’s because adding faces is basically re-flashing the firmware, which is not supported over wireless? So, to get a new face, you clone the repo, compile a new firmware, and flash the device over a serial cable?
5. The FAQ verbiage is confusing regarding the display technology, but I think it’s saying the display isn’t reflective LCD like the Pebble.
6. Can you have multiple faces on the device, or do you have to re-flash it to change the face? The FAQ says the face is the entire firmware, implying only one face on the device at a time.
7. If you’re part of the community: have there been any discussions about future development to add, e.g. health monitor hardware?
8. Is there any integration with a phone, such as notifications? This is sort of the GadgetBridge question, but more about what integrations - if any - are supported. Vibrate on phone ringing? Quick responses to texts? Phone calls over the watch - yeah, I know it’s not that advanced, but for example.
9. What’s your opinion of the device? Do you use it as a daily driver?

At under $70, I’m not expecting much, but it’d be nice to know what you expect. The sqfmi site is pretty sparse on details. If there’s an additional, deeper FAQ or Wiki, a link to that would be great.

Thanks!

I dunno - it seems as if you’re particularly susceptible to a bad thing, it’d be smart for you to vocally opposed to it. Like, women are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement, and it makes sense because it impacts them the most.

Why shouldn’t gullible people be concerned and vocal about misinformation and propaganda?

Because it’s more than just not drinking milk. Vegans avoid all products that result from the direct exploitation of animals, including eggs and honey. It also includes not using animal products like leather; you can be a vegetarian and still wear leather.

Honey always seemed a stretch to me, as apiaries benefit bees, but veganism is pretty significantly different from vegetarianism; having a different term for it makes sense.

But control of the protocol - the definition and development - is still controlled by the for-profit company, right? It hasn’t been handed over to a nonprofit governance committee, has it?

Federation or not, if Bluesky dominates the protocol, they can decide to stop federating and essentially kill the independent servers. Much like what Signal did. Sure, you can run your own Signal server, but without access to the dominant player’s market, and using a protocol that’s controlled monopolistically, it’s practically useless to do so - which is why almost nobody does it anymore.

I really like the Nostr protocol, though. It’s too bad the network is so inundated by cryptocurrency topics.

It’s simple, it has a nice extension process (standing on the shoulders of giants), and it’s super easy and lightweight to self-host. It reminds me a lot of the early days of http, when it was more common (as a developer) to telnet to port 80 and just type in a couple of lines of header and get a response.

Sadly, Nostr’s association with cryptocurrency, and the fact that 90% of the traffic on it is cryptocurrency created posts, has been a severe handicap.

Cool, thanks

What battery life are you getting on that?

Thanks; TIL.

Pebble advertised their displays as “e-ink”, and I never thought to question it. The best lay resource I found while digging into this was an article on TechRadar, which was about a new product but gives a good overview of the technology and history.