@amolith That would be awesome. I've been wondering how their project has been going!
@aral I missed listening to the live stream, but I was able to watch the recording at https://heyst.ac/lectures/in-conversation-with-laura-kalbag-from-the-small-technology-foundation
@laura : It was a good talk, and I'm glad I had a chance to catch up on it. Thank you!
"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.
You can find a recording of my talk on Small Web at Creative Mornings Istanbul today at https://small-tech.org/events
(The audio is rather hot and there’s an audio mismatch which I’d thought I’d handled in my tests this week – I’m running off a laptop at the moment and it’s having trouble keeping up – but hey, this was the first time doing anything with this new setup so I will tweak as I go.) :)
General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS
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.
@tinfoil_hat@fosstodon.org I voted no, because I don't trust the reliability of the applications. The granularity of location services isn't sufficient, nor can such applications detect barriers such as walls.
I fear that such devices would simultaneously:
a) Have too many false positives
b) Give people a false sense of security, leading to unsafe gathering practices
RT @MarkoSaric@twitter.com
New post: How to pay your rent with your open source project
Including @Ghost@twitter.com, @discourse@twitter.com, @matrixdotorg@twitter.com, @gitlab@twitter.com and other great, sustainable open source products.
https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-funding
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1273613098956599302
@amolith I voted "Link to it" as I believe that would give better exposure to his PeerTube channel, and PeerTube itself in general.
I appreciated this video because he is articulate, insightful, and talks about how to improve the world in a more subtle way than you may have heard before.
This is the kind of git commit messages I would like to write: https://dhwthompson.com/2019/my-favourite-git-commit
@aral @dsfgs It's a tough one. The likes of Twitter and Facebook might be able to hire enough moderators to get libel (etc) taken down. but small "social media" platforms (like Mastodon) wouldn't really be able to keep up. In theory, 230 helps protect those little guys. In practice, it unfortunately allows the big guys to get away with too much.
I totally agree that individually owned and controlled spaces is the ultimate answer. The road to get there for non-techies isn't clear to me ... yet.
@dsfgs @aral There are better definitions at the EFF -- https://www.eff.org/search/site/230 -- but the tl;dr is that it is a US law that basically says that the company that host content are not liable for what that content says.
In other words, if I post libel on Twitter, you can bring legal action against me, but you can't bring that legal action against Twitter.
Wait, what's that? An 8GB version of the Pi 4?!
Sweet 😊
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/8gb-raspberry-pi-4-on-sale-now-at-75/
Need to send encrypted emails? #Nextcloud mail uses browser add-in Mailvelope for this, and the latest Mail release improves the integration of this add-in.
https://blog.wuc.me/2020/05/18/nextcloud-mail-mailvelope-refined.html
From HN comments: "Gemini sites load so fast, it's a little crazy". Not at all, what's crazy is that we've come to accept as normal that downloading O(1000) words of text that we actually care about reading takes long enough to notice and sometimes might make your laptop fan spin up a little - in 2020!