mxuribe's recent activity
-
Comment on ‘Do not pet’: A robotic dog named “Spot” made by Boston Dynamics is the latest tool in the arsenal of the US Secret Service in ~tech
-
Comment on Tips for increasing online privacy (without going insane)? in ~tech
mxuribe LinkHi @willopillo, the first thing i would say is that: you are not alone! From catastrophizing (as you noted elsewhere in this post), to finding that right balance of privacy and dare i say...Hi @willopillo, the first thing i would say is that: you are not alone! From catastrophizing (as you noted elsewhere in this post), to finding that right balance of privacy and dare i say convenience, there are plenty of people in a similar place to where you find yourself. As others noted, get an understanding of your threat model, level of comfort, etc...would be good idea to re-assess (I say "re-assess because you aren't starting from scratch here). And the privacy guides that another person posted is pretty good too! I guess the other aspect i would suggest is not to let this negatively impact your mental health. I say this from experience! I'm quite sensitive about my privacy, but then also need to maintain a balance to not let that desire for privacy and data sovereignty overtake my actual, real life. Stay safe, but do take care of yourself! :-)
-
Comment on Advice Needed: Simple and Reliable notifications in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentI suppose the same kind of concepot can be applied to several other platforms....for example, i actually got this idea for a matrix room from many, many years ago...where at my dayjob we used a...I suppose the same kind of concepot can be applied to several other platforms....for example, i actually got this idea for a matrix room from many, many years ago...where at my dayjob we used a private Twitter group (so long ago, i forget what they used to be called)...but any way, it was private and users culd only view contents sent to the twitetr feed if invited/added to said private group...It worked great because the VP at time was constantly on twitter...so while about to enter sales visits, he would view twitter to see if we had reported outages or automated system messages to the private group, etc.
Obviously separate of matrix, twitter, etc...you could use a similar approach....I have to imagine telegram, discord, wherever you spend enough time that behaves like a chat room or message inbox or soirts, you could setup some private space/area...and send notifications there. I hope that helps! :-)
-
Comment on Advice Needed: Simple and Reliable notifications in ~comp
mxuribe LinkHi @Bwerf not sure if my recommendation may be exactly what you need...but what i use is a private, dedicated matrix room to receive automated notifications. Why? Because I'm in matrix chatting...Hi @Bwerf not sure if my recommendation may be exactly what you need...but what i use is a private, dedicated matrix room to receive automated notifications. Why? Because I'm in matrix chatting with folks often enough, that receiving notifications - like a backup job finished or failed - is easy for me to actually see/not miss, etc. So, I also use my own python script (https://github.com/mxuribe/howler) to send http calls for each message directly into said matrix room...Of course, since the matrix api for this is quite straight-forward, there are plenty of scripts out there beyond just python.
If matrix messages are not your thing, and prefer email, have you considered using a service like mailgun, or messagebird for smtp...that is, separate from your gmail setup, so might fail a bit less? Before i started using my matrix message approach years ago, i used to use a python script to smtp send an email by using messagebird...and associated it to some generic, dedicated domain name just for this (to avoid messing with my main email address), and the usage was low enough that it fell under their free tier...so was easy api use, really great reliability, nice performance, and of course free cost....but i only moved away from this because i started chasing - at the time - the new hotness called matrix...this was back in 2018 or so...and so far matrix has worked great, but again, email is totally good option too. Thankfully, there are many such email providers with quite generous tiers.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions on matrix stuf...also, while i linked to my python script, there are many, many other matrix tools that can be used as well...one cli example is matrix-commander (https://github.com/8go/matrix-commander). Good luck!
EDIT: Fixed urls for the 2 links.
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentFair enough, and thanks for the confirmation! :-)Fair enough, and thanks for the confirmation! :-)
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentYeah, waaaay back in the day, I'd use the orange RSS icon as a link for feed subscription...and then also would reference my old school social media accounts, etc. Would use a similar approach,...Yeah, waaaay back in the day, I'd use the orange RSS icon as a link for feed subscription...and then also would reference my old school social media accounts, etc. Would use a similar approach, but swap out my fedi account for the legacy social silos. ;-)
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentOh wow, this is almost exactly what i might have wanted to use if i wouldn't go the SSG route! However, reviewing all the feedback I'm convinced to offer an RSS/Atom feed, so I think I'm going to...Oh wow, this is almost exactly what i might have wanted to use if i wouldn't go the SSG route! However, reviewing all the feedback I'm convinced to offer an RSS/Atom feed, so I think I'm going to head down the SSG route - which should include feed generation. But, thanks alot for sharing this; the project seems really cool!!!
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentYep, good points! Beyond the silos, it would feel good to have my own feed under my own control. :-) Yes, i am aware of Bear Blog, and admire their approach...but since [Bear Blog can not be...Including a feed is important IMO because it's a simple standard that helps people follow you without a corporate middleman or an algorithm. The world is so dominated by proprietary social media today that it's nice to be able to fight back in any small way.
Yep, good points! Beyond the silos, it would feel good to have my own feed under my own control. :-)
Have you taken a look at bear blog? If you really don't want any fuss, that could be a good way to go.
Yes, i am aware of Bear Blog, and admire their approach...but since [Bear Blog can not be self-hosted] (https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog?tab=readme-ov-file#can-bear-blog-be-self-hosted), its a hard "no"/stop for me. I kinda need to have my posts live under my domain name and associated hosting space. But, i'm sure Bear blog and other platforms like it, would make perfect sense for others. :-) Thanks for the suggestions and your feedback!
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentYeah, looking like taking the plunge on a static site generator might be the way. I appreciate the feedback and helpful links!Yeah, looking like taking the plunge on a static site generator might be the way. I appreciate the feedback and helpful links!
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentI do care about having readers, but its not going to be my dayjob or anything that i need/want to scale either. As far as feedback, this is a good question...Because id am not a fan of having...Some questions: How much do you care whether you have readers? Do you want to get feedback when you write something new? If so, how will your readers find out? There are lots of ways to get notifications these days...
I do care about having readers, but its not going to be my dayjob or anything that i need/want to scale either. As far as feedback, this is a good question...Because id am not a fan of having inline comments to each post, and totally expect to engage with comments on the fediverse, er, social media.
The most old-school way is email...
You know, that has been gaining a bit of steam...and i half wondered....But, nah. For my writing I'd almost feel like I'd be intruding. But, definitely a great idea!
An alternative would be to post a link to social networking sites whenever you have a new article. Some people can be reached that way, but it's pretty fragmented these days, so you might have to post in multiple places.
Yeah, that is what i used to do years ago - even when i did have an rss/atom feed. So, I assume I'd do something similar....although, nowadays i'm so rarely on the coventional social media, and lots more on the fediverse (if anyone might consider these 2 as different).
Thanks for your suggestions by the way!
-
Comment on Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentI suppose that makes sense. I wonder if at some point - assuming an audience that is sufficiently leveraging a feed - it makes more sense to somehow concentrate more on the feed aspect and care......I'd simply forget to check some of these sites/blogs if I didn't, particularly those that only post occasionally...
I suppose that makes sense. I wonder if at some point - assuming an audience that is sufficiently leveraging a feed - it makes more sense to somehow concentrate more on the feed aspect and care less about some static html file...Maybe the feed file gets consumed automatically far more often, while the destination html file is probably never or close-to-never actually visited directly (because how the heck would anyone find it otherwise)? Hmmm....interesting.
-
Are Feeds - like RSS or Atom feeds - Really Worth It For A Personal Blog?
I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well,...
I stopped blogging several years ago. Over the last few years, I've been writing plenty of private essays. However, very recently I have been considering starting to publish my writing and, well, start blogging again publicly. I have no desire to waste time on templates, look-and-feel, visual stuff, etc. I just want to write a bog-standard html file, and then publish it...I do value leveraging html elements that help with meta data (e.g. microformats, etc.), but don't care about how things look - and these elements that i value are all invisible to most users anyway. I would be fine with just crafting html by hand, deploying it via sftp or some boring deployment pipleine, and that's it. But, then, I started thinking: what about having an RSS/Atom feed? I used to consume content via an rss reader, but have not done so in years. But, I don't want to manually craft that feed file; nope, sorry. But, I've heard a comment or two from acquaintances that rss/atom feeds and syndication are really something that people - like my potential audience - might really desire. So, I should really consider having one. This means that either I have to craft several things manually (from the blog post itself, the list of archived posts, the feed file, etc.), or use a static site generator that will handle all this for me, etc. I don't want to get trapped down a rabbit hole where I am spending so much on the tooling, the scaffolding, twiddling with templates, or the publish process itself. I just want the minimal for writing and publishing, I want it to live on my domain name, and that's it. Am I crazy or extremely lazy for not wanting to generate an RSS/Atom feed file?
So, here's my ask of you all nice people: are feeds like RSS/Atom feeds even worth it? If so, does anyone have recommendations for a manual process where i can craft the blog post's html by hand, but somehow leverage a portion of a static site generator (or some minimal tool) to only automate the creation of the RSS/Atom feed file? Thanks in advfance for any constructive feedback!
P.S. - One thing that re-ignited my desire both to write more in public, and keep it alive with minimal fuss was my re-reading of Jeff Huang's excellent "This Page is Designed to Last" post: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
19 votes -
Comment on Switching to Linux, looking for distro recommendations in ~tech
mxuribe Link ParentAh, yes, i failed to suggest using a virtual machine; clearly you're in the know! :-) Also, glad to hear you settled on a distro. But, sorry to hear about your stability issues.Ah, yes, i failed to suggest using a virtual machine; clearly you're in the know! :-)
Also, glad to hear you settled on a distro. But, sorry to hear about your stability issues. -
Comment on Switching to Linux, looking for distro recommendations in ~tech
mxuribe LinkMaybe i'm too late @IsildursBane , but have you tried playing around with numerous Live USB/CD images of several linux distros so that you can them for a spin? Every few months, when i get the...Maybe i'm too late @IsildursBane , but have you tried playing around with numerous Live USB/CD images of several linux distros so that you can them for a spin? Every few months, when i get the little itch to try either a new distro, or some recently updated established distro...the first thing i do is grab my usb that has Ventoy on it, and burn the distro's iso image copied to it....Then play around with said distro on whatever laptop i have laying around - but try it via the live usb image....so it does not harm anything on my "real" machine. Funny enough, a handful of years ago i used to jump around a bit as it relates to distros...Nowadays, i usually stick to Fedora spin with KDE desktop enviuronment....and every time i play with a new distro on that live usb...i have always come back to Fedora KDE! :-) Obviously, for me that makes sense...But everyone has their own preferences of course. I encourage you to try several distros in this fashion, and who knows, maybe that will help you find which distro works for you....at least for now, until you feel like jumping again. :-) Cheers!
-
Comment on Brazilians flock to Bluesky after court bans Elon Musk’s X in ~tech
mxuribe Link ParentNot sure if this is what you were referring to: https://brid.gy/ I used to use this years ago to cross-post my blog stuff from my personal blog to facebook at the time (like i said, years...Not sure if this is what you were referring to: https://brid.gy/
I used to use this years ago to cross-post my blog stuff from my personal blog to facebook at the time (like i said, years ago)...and it worked wonderfully! And, at a quick glance, seems to support connection to bluesky. ;-)
-
Comment on The Modern CLI Renaissance in ~comp
mxuribe LinkHi @Toric i just read the post, and it was great! Firstly, keep on writing more! :-) Secondly, i find myself more and more using CLI tools, and enjoying to do so! I think its more because i feel...Hi @Toric i just read the post, and it was great! Firstly, keep on writing more! :-)
Secondly, i find myself more and more using CLI tools, and enjoying to do so! I think its more because i feel more productive. Whether its factually true or not, well, who cares. As long as i get my stuff done, then cool.
Also, separately, i do think that this whole AI trend to use prompts is so conceptually similar to CLI usage, that its certainly driving the more recent popularity in increase of CLI tools. I guess time will tell...but i envision more non-techie users beginning to leverage more CLI tools - at least to some degree - simply from being accustomed to using AI platforms via prompts. I have a somewhat funny prediction: I predict that in the coming years (like in a handful of years, and not decades) that "using the command line" and "using AI prompts" will merge into a single "way of working". ;-)
Anyway, again, keep on writing! Cheers!
-
Comment on DeGoogling 2024: Replacing Photos, Gmail, and Search in ~tech
mxuribe Link@guissmo First of all, i applaud you for even trying to degoogle; as it is not easy nor fun! I'm on my own journey to degoogle, and early on, i saw how i have to be comfortable with some...@guissmo First of all, i applaud you for even trying to degoogle; as it is not easy nor fun! I'm on my own journey to degoogle, and early on, i saw how i have to be comfortable with some compromise and a sort of quality of life balance as well (as well as quality of life balance for my family)...for now...Especially since it was not so common for people to seek out more private options years ago. It seems alot of this desire to seek out more privacy really started to pick up in attention only in the last decade or less...so easy, fair value, and solid options/services/providers aren't fully there yet for all aspects...But i think more and better options will eventually arrive. Here's hoping that alternative providers keep focusing on privacy as a primary/core feature, and not an after thought. (By the way, i'm a superfan of open source, so i lump in wanting either paid providers who champion open source, as well, as options for self-hosting in my desires too.)
Now, since really amazing or close-to-perfect safety and privacy is not so quick nor easy, i started to slightly pivot my goals. For example, i started to wonder if maybe i should seek out options to be more fault-tolerant and resilient (first, and then come back to privacy later on)...This is so that i am not dependent on a single provider for all my key needs...Then, over time i can replace each individual service provider with a better privacy offering, etc. I feel like I've been able to make much better progress in this vein of effort (focusing first on decentralization and then on privacy). Is it perfect sovereignty, or is it easy, or is it inexpensive? Not always! But, little by little, i'm making progress!
By the way, I'm using one of Zoho's paid plans for email and calendering. So far, they've been brilliant in quality/service, and the cost is quite low! For filesync and photo storing (and photo sharing), i use self-hosted nextcloud, but i also pay for family plan of Microsoift Office 365. I dislike/distrust Microsoft as much as dislike/distrust google...and do not use OneDrive myself much at all. But only keep this MS paid plan for my partner (more so because they are so attached to Word and Excel - again, finding a sort of balance in quality of life - in this case with my partner). Plus, I have been testing nextcloud to see if can eventually move to it full time. The good news is that nextcloud is at an amazing level of quality for the basics of file sync and basic photo storing/sharing! The not great news is that for non-tech users the office stuff needs a bit more baking...its not bad, but needs a little more love and attention. Also, for self-hosting, nextcloud still takes time to administer. That being said, if nextcloud tests keep looking good, then instead of my self-hosting nextcloud, maybe i pay a professional/dedicated provider to host nextcloud for my family...which is a thing! (I've heard of providers such as Hetzner, etc.) With email and file management (and office docs) already moved away from google, the only thing left is search and maps...Well, for search, i have defaulted to duckduck go for the last 2 or 3 years...so, the only thing that has been difficult is as others have already noted: maps. Ugh! I still retain my old gmail, but no one has that emailm address anymore...except for a handful of spammers. Also, i'm a rare person in that i don't spend much time on youtube...so the rare times i do use it, i am doing so with my old gmail account...and if there is content i wish to save, then i download it with yt-dlp...other than that i'm not using any other google services.
Anyway, best of luck on yuor degoogling journey, and kudos for sharing your journey!
-
Comment on What’s your method for archiving bookmarked/liked social media posts? in ~comp
mxuribe Link ParentOh my goodness, yes! I never really knew much about the epub format...until recently as i have begun to download epub "ebooks" from places like project gutenburg, etc...and only glancing at the...Oh my goodness, yes! I never really knew much about the epub format...until recently as i have begun to download epub "ebooks" from places like project gutenburg, etc...and only glancing at the epub standard, i see that it really could/should have been a more universal (better!) format replacing PDFs...but clients-side/consumption side for viewing epubs is not so great or not ubiquitous in typical places like web browsers. Its really that pdfs have had such a long time in the limelight that clients and infra. have been built up over time....but if epubs were somehow given more limelight - and not only for ebooks - then i think there would be more usage of epub files for other scenarios beyond merely ebooks. Yeah, i've recently become a fan of epubs for sure!
-
Comment on What’s your method for archiving bookmarked/liked social media posts? in ~comp
mxuribe LinkNot only specific to social media posts, I have somewhat standardized my approach to archiving any web or social media content that i wish to preserve in one of a few ways: if its text only, and i...Not only specific to social media posts, I have somewhat standardized my approach to archiving any web or social media content that i wish to preserve in one of a few ways:
- if its text only, and i don't care about formatting, i likely might copy/paste into a text file on my local machine and save it in some folder such as "inspirational" or "references", etc. I include the original url as well as maybe a little summary or context of my own to help my future self remember why i saved it, etc.
- if its text but i need to preserve somewhat the look and feel or some aspect of formatting at least a little bit, or maybe some images in the post are essential, then i toggle the "reader view" option in my browser (if the site supports it, which is odd that a very few do not)...and then "print to pdf", and save the pdf to local folder somewhere. Why the reader view instead of printing the original view of a web page? Because webpages nowadays often are built with so much crap or at least so many ads displace the content in weird ways when viewed in "print view". (This happens way more with commercial or social media sites, and less with the single person humble blog site of course.) So, the reader view really does a nice joib of "cleaning up/away" alot of the cruft but keeping the meat of the content of a webpage/post...most of the time.
- Finally, if the preservation needs to be as identical as possible to the original, then i resort to screenshots. In some very rare cases, i take the screenshot, and also create an "companion" local text file containing the originl/source url and a little summary about the topic of the screenshot to aid in local search/grep.
By the way, i still on occasion bookmark urls using my browsers bookmark feature...but i assume most things will eventually break because things just die on the web (sadly)...so there's an expectation of urls being ephemeral. Bookmarks are more like a temporary holding place for me; like a todo of web stuff to maybe watch in the near-future (or not).
Also, do i like saving things in pdfs? Hellz no! But, over the years i've tried other options (full web page, web page with only html per browser save, Word docs, etc.), but none seem to be consistent enough nor easy/quick enough like printing/saving to pdfs...and, wow, do i dislike pdfs on several principles. But, hey, they seem to mostly do the job.
There are many other options to archive web content, such as, but not limited to Singlefile (https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile), ArchiveBox (https://archivebox.io/), WARC (https://archive-it.org/post/the-stack-warc-file/), etc....But i have been too lazy to explore.
-
Comment on What would you recommend for a single, minimal, "overview-of-the-world" news source? in ~talk
mxuribe Link@Eric_the_Cerise what you are asking for is unfortunately pretty difficult; well i think so. I myself have been looking for something similar to what you're looking for. Also I prefer the "text...@Eric_the_Cerise what you are asking for is unfortunately pretty difficult; well i think so. I myself have been looking for something similar to what you're looking for. Also I prefer the "text only" versions of news websites (since RSS has been killed off in too many places sadly). I tend to leverage the NPR "thin" version and the CNN "lite" version...however both are far from ideal because of course being either U.S.-centric and/or very left leaning. (I'm left-leaning, but i want to hear all sides of top news topics!) I have used both of these sources long enough to know how to filter out the left or right leaning stuff...but again neither are perfect.
I'd like to share the following webpage - which while not new, i only learned of it recently - is a bit of a list of text-only (or, at least slim sort of) news sources: https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/
Not sure how good it will be for more world news...but maybe review and see if any items help.
Also, please do share whatever source you end up using...Because as i noted i'm looking for something similar to you! :-) Cheers!
No, no, blankets only help with hiding yourself! :-D
Oh, you meant throwing a blanket on the killer robot dog....yeah, um, sure, yep, ok, that ought to do it...until the next model comes out with additional articulating arms specifically designed to counter blanket types of countermeasures...in other words: counter-countermeasures! ;-)