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Hoping we survive this attack by Y’all Qaeda.


Started off New Year’s Day with a large ice storm and our power being out for five hours, due to a tree on the power line. Because it’s a new year, I’m not going to try to read into how that bodes for 2021. :-)


http2 activate!


For some reason, I realized I didn't have http2 enabled on my #nginx server for #friendica. It's an easy fix, and now the page load seems very zippy, even compared to loading on my local connection before! #sysadmin





I have to admit I’ve used these apps quite a few times during the pandemic. I’m going to resolve to order direct from the restaurant and actually go and pick it up myself, and be less lazy about cooking, of course. :-)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/opinion/delivery-apps-restaurants-fees.html?referringSource=articleShare





Whoops!


Hope this gets out there. Decided on a whim to update from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 LTS. I guess because of the complexities of my server config, it totally messed up the boot and zfs mounting. On, the upside, it appears I have restored it to 20.04! #liveandlearn




On journalism: "If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true." -Sally Claire



LibreOffice is now in 53,000 classrooms in Turkey! Students will benefit from free and open source software, which encourages sharing and learning how it works: https://muhammetkara.com/post/2020-08-21-libreoffice-on-pardus-in-53000-classrooms-in-turkey/




iSurf Social Registrations open again!


Hi all!

Well, with some of the bugfixes and improvements that have gone in with system cleanup and performance, I've been able to re-enable some cleanup settings. That, in turn, has led me to re-open registrations for new accounts here.

If you know of anyone who's been looking to give a North American Friendica setup a go, do let them know!




iOS Shortcut to record police interaction.


If you and/or someone you know use iOS, someone made a very handy Shortcut task to automatically record, notify a contact, and upload a video if you get pulled over. I just discovered Shortcuts on my iPhone, and seems like a very powerful way to program tasks.

https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/hey-siri-im-getting-pulled-over-new-shortcuts-app-allows-users-to-quickly-record-police/83-600653116

Snowtiger reshared this.



Spring has sprung


...and apparently we’ve been deemed the house for orphaned wildlife. Also have a resident baby robin.





iFixit is building a repair database for medical equipment, and it needs your help - A call for service manuals


Repair specialist iFixit is building a database filled with repair information for the world’s hospital equipment in anticipation of the increased demand caused by COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. In particular, it’s calling for repair manuals for ventilators and BiPAP machines that can be used as ventilators. iFixit’s database can be found here, and the company is calling for people to create new device pages and upload photographs and manuals.

The reasoning behind creating the database is simple: as the novel coronavirus spreads, the experience of Italian and Chinese hospitals suggests that the world’s supply of ventilators is going to be placed under huge stress, making it essential that these can be repaired quickly if and when they break down. This equipment will be an essential part of treating anyone who develops respiratory problems as a result of COVID-19.

See iFixit is building a repair database for medical equipment, and it needs your help

#technology #health #covid19

Image/photo
It also plans to make repair guides.

https://gadgeteer.co.za/ifixit-building-repair-database-medical-equipment-and-it-needs-your-help-call-service-manuals


Simulating Social Distancing


A great, visual article on the effect of various amounts of #socialdistancing on a virus like the one causing #COVID19 .


Help fight COVID-19!


Since I have some CPU cycles to spare on my personal server at home, I decided to contribute computational power to Folding@Home to help fight coronavirus. Thanks @Hank G for posting the article for the idea!

I encourage everyone to download Folding@Home in some fashion to help with computational power. They even have ones for Android, so if you have an old phone lying around you can use that too!

Download at: https://foldingathome.org/alternative-downloads/




Friendica 2020.03 Release Candidate (RC) available for testing


Today we have branched of the release candidate (RC) of the upcoming Friendica 2020.03 version. We’d like to invite you to test the code so that some last rough edges can be smoothed out prior to the release.
Cloud of most used words in the pull request titles of the 2020.03 milestone
The release contains many bug fixes (about 40% of the pull request were aimed to this goal) but also some new features. Some highlights from the upcoming release:
  • The multiple profile feature was removed and replaced by free form profile fields that you can present different audiences (unverified visitors of your profile and selected Friendica contact/-groups). The old (additional) profiles are converted automatically for the new format.
  • The hide-wall profile option was replaced by a hopefully more clear option to have your public postings unlisted on the community page of your node.
  • The creation of delegated accounts was made more easy.
  • The accessibility of the web-interface was improved.
  • Admins can now manage the users of their node from the command line.
  • An addon to use Markdown instead of BBCode while composing new postings and comments was added.

Important


Please remember that Friendica now needs at least PHP version 7.0 and MySQL 5.6 (or equivalent) installed on the server to function properly.

How to help testing the release candidate?


Assuming that you are running the 2019.12 version of Friendica and that you have installed via git: Please pull the current sources for the core of Friendica and the addons from github. You should see a notification about a new branch called 2020.03-rc during the pull. in both repositories. You just need to checkout this branch with a

git checkout 2020.03-rc

and remember to follow the usual steps after updating using git. Please report any issues you encounter using either the issue tracker at github or the Friendica support or admin forums.

Thanks for testing the new code with us!

Should the DB update process get stuck


If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

./bin/console dbstructure update

from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
https://friendi.ca/2020/03/08/friendica-2020-03-release-candidate-rc-available-for-testing/





If you have a .org domain name: go renew it now. For the full 10 years.

Registration rights for .org were just bought by a private equity firm. And as part of that contract, the price caps were removed.

Anything in .org will get much more expensive, soon.

A ten year renewal will cost you a bit over a hundred bucks. Which is probably less than one year will cost you in the very near future.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_shambles/



Wow, and this is from a Republican who's been on the inside!


Seems an interesting way to encourage a more direct democracy, even among millions of people. I wouldbe curious to know if this would work for larger cities in our country.





Vision Quest


Got some more time away from the grind to visit some awesome parks in #Missouri . Visited Amidon, Silver Mines, and Knob Lick Overlook.

#photo #mywork



Even tech-savvy people can fall victim to spear phishing attacks. This cautionary tale by @RobJHeaton shows how creative hackers can be. The lesson here? Never click on a link from someone you don’t know unless you’re 100% sure it’s legitimate. https://robertheaton.com/2019/06/24/i-was-7-words-away-from-being-spear-phished/


New House, New Rules


I suppose moving to a different municipality means that the ISP (which is the same one I had before) enforces ipv6 a lot more than before. That means it's messing with my laptop's ability to resolve hostnames, use Skype, and I had to add some extra configuration to all of my nginx configuration files for ipv6 listening.

In other words, the joys of moving/owning your own house.