james h jackson jr @jameshjacksonjr@librem.one

Whew

Well I made a fucksy.

I upgrade my internet a few days ago, and I noticed that I wasn’t hitting the expected numbers.

Now a few bits of my network infrastructure are pretty old. Good stuff for the day, but .. back when I bought this stuff no one expected gigabit internet to actually exist.

But I wanted to be sure so I switched my equipment out of bridged mode and tested closer to the metal so to speak and the numbers hit in exactly the right places. Good stuff, that means I just need to upgrade one little bit of hardware. Only the modem just would not fucking go back to bridge and I ended up spending hours with tech support. Luckly I had a good guy. Obviously its working again, but what a pain in the ass!!

I’ve been eating healthy lately. Salads and shit.

Now — its been paying off. A little more exercise (I’m pretty physically active at work and that helps, but I could do more. When the governments stops pretending C-19 is a thing maybe a gym is in order) and I’ll be looking good in no time.

However. Its clear that my body has no idea what to do with salad. My stomach has never seen this type of thing before, and sometimes makes its displeasure known to me in very unpleasant ways.

Oh this is much better than the heat, you guys.

⚡ ☔ 😊

We are an ethical alternative to Instagram.

The project is still young, but we are getting close to a polished v1.0 release with federation support!

We can't wait to join the fediverse. ❤️ #pixelfed

The Tag feature is ready.

It will be shipping tomorrow! 🥳

#pixelfed #tag #tagPeople

So suddenly there’s a lot of attention around email and it’s exposing how many people in the web community still use Gmail. Like actually trust all your personal information and communication (and that of your potentially marginalised or vulnerable contacts) with Google. 🤮

There are a lot of hard problems and lack of alternatives when it comes to rights-respecting technology. But email (as imperfect as it is) has a fair few affordable alternative providers. Small change, big difference.

Here’s the video of my talk “Beyond surveillance capitalism: alternatives, stopgaps, Small Web, and Site.js.” from Creative Mornings Istanbul on Friday.

Edited to fix the audio sync issue, add captions, chapters, and links to all the mentioned tools, etc.

Enjoy + please share! :)

https://small-tech.org/videos/creative-mornings-istanbul/

Why do the cookie popups start with "We value your privacy", clearly they don't because they would've just not included the crap.

Someone said "is that still a thing?" when I announced I was on Mastodon. Is it?
Boost this so we actually get a few votes maybe? How far can it go?

It’s raining today. Normally this would make for a bit of an unpleasant day outside, but compared to the sweltering heat of yesterday this is awesome.

Ah, new shoe day :) Some lovely wedges, very comfy. A bit taller than I’d like but I can only pick from whats available.

@jameshjacksonjr Big, if true.

Ok so when is the #pinephone going to get some half decent hardware support? Its a bit irksome that a device intended to be used with a mainline kernel has so many broken things like a non-functional camera and totally unstable/unusable wifi.

The battery life is rank bad too, like a few hours tops. Yikes.

Buuuuut its so cool otherwise…

As soon as I encounter a problem with a FOSS library or program I'm working with, I grab the code and start looking for a solution, and often my first communication with the project will be the patch that fixes the bug.

It takes practice to be able to dive into a codebase quickly and solve problems right away, but so does anything else worth doing.

"How do I get started contributing to open source? What are some good entry-level tasks to work on?"

These are questions I am often asked, so here's the answer for everyone to read:

Scratch your own itches. Find bugs that are causing you problems, conspicuously missing features you would find useful, and implement them - in literally any free/open-source software you're using. Don't worry about not being familiar with the codebase or programming language or whatever, just solve one problem at a time.

Try this: next time you go to report a bug, report it, and immediately start working on a patch which fixes the problem.

Scratching your own itches is the best source of motivation and maximizes your productivity.

Often that means not contributing to my projects at all, if you're asking how to get started with a specific project. Maybe you like it because it's flawless 😉 (hah!), in which case it wouldn't need your help anyway. Go fix something which is bugging you in another project. Spread the contributor wealth around and eventually it'll come back to my projects, too.