Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 26

Happy solstice everyone!

Maybe this could be something groups like #Pine64 could develop in the future?

#ShowerThoughts looking at digital TVs and wondering how hard it would be to convert them into simple libre #VideoGame systems. Thinking about a single-board gaming consoles that could be hooked up directly to the hardware inside the TV, replacing the default OS, with games on SDcard or USB 3.0 storage. Then thinking about a standard mount that could be added to the back, to accommodate and connect the console board, allowing it to be easily upgraded for as long as the TV hardware is working.

@superruserr there's a period film, The Lives of Others, based on the life of a #Stasi officer. Also, it's only peripherally related, but #NothingToHide, the #documentary about surveillance, includes an interview with a woman who was monitored and arrested by the Stasi for anti-nuclear peace campaigning.

Curiously, according to websitecarbon.com, the #HonorPay homepage is estimated to emit only 0.11g of carbon per page load:
https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/honorpay-org/

... while other pages are more like 0.63g:
https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/honorpay-org-how-it-works/

... and probably a lot more with the embedded YT videos running.

#HonorPay.org can't even do basic navigation around the site without allowing #Javascript from ajax.googleapis.com. Not even a website.

#MakeJavascriptOptional

In an #InterSchool social network, all connections could be 2-way, and access to other users could be an earned privilege not an instant right of all users. Initially students only have access to their teachers, other students in their class, and anyone they can exchange #QRcodes with in person (ie their friends). With good behaviour (as judged by their network with teach oversight), they could be granted access to friend request anyone in their school, then the whole inter-school federation.

#ShowerThoughts I'm envisioning an invite-only federation of educational #SocialNetwork instances, one per school, with connections between schools built up by a #WebOfTrust among the school staff who admin each instance. When students reach 18, their accounts would be portable to any other social network that allows account imports using an open standard (ideally including any #fediverse instance).

On a recent edition of the #ActOut #podcast,
#EleanorGoldfield did an intriguing interview with
Chairman #OmaliYeshitela of the African People's Socialist Party:
https://actout.libsyn.com/episode-233-chile-bolivia-and-africom-imperialism-revolution-what-we-must-ask-of-ourselves

"Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism — and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats."

"Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge — particularly, one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action — the reaction is the same; the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights; no nukes), then starts ratcheting up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement; which, pretty much invariably, is far less democratically organized."

I remember noticing exactly this in the 2000s.

"Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures."
- #DavidGraeber
https://voidnetwork.gr/2019/09/26/hope-common-tactical-briefing-david-graeber/

@noorul the #Trisquel live system has GParted installed by default, but this method will almost never give you the latest version, which the GParted live disk .iso does. When I'm modifying partitions on a trying to keep existing OS and data intact, I prefer not to take any chances :)

@Wolf480pl
> not sure what gparted live disk is exactly

An .iso you can etch to an optical disk or USB, and boot directly into GParted. See the GParted homepage.

> appending `nomodeset` to kernel commandline in bootloader will do the trick?

Can you explain this in more detail or link to noob-friendly docs?

Does anyone know how to boot into the #GParted live disk if it doesn't play nicely with your graphics chips? I've tried using #Forcevideo to manually choosing config options, but I have no idea what to tell it when it asks me "what driver for your VGA card?". The one #Trisquel uses works. But how do I tell GParted to boot using that?

I have a lot of respect for the legacy of #RalphNader, and he clearly respects the legacy of #RobertFellmeth, but listening to these two old men discuss internet regulation on Nader's #podcast is truly painful:
https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/facebook-anonymity-your-day-in-court/

For a start, they don't know that FB already enforces real names and have completely missed the long-running debate about the #UnintendedConsequences of this:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/09/facebooks-real-name-policy-can-cause-real-world-harm-lgbtq-community

Everything else in the discussion is about as far behind the 8 ball.

"Tusky" isn't a generic word like "office", and the Free Tusky creators are probably at risk of #trademark action for using essentially the same name for such a similar app (#LibreSignal ran into threats of this: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217664961 ). They might be better too use a tongue-in-cheek variant like Trunky or Toothy, that references its origins, but also gives it a unique identity. Like IceWeasel and IceCat do with Firefox, and IceDove does with Thunderbird.

When I updated the fediverse.party apps watchlist recently: https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/wikis/watchlist-for-client-apps

... I saw that a fork of #Tusky without the instance blocklist is now available on #FDroid as "#FreeTusky". For better or worse, this is an example of what #SoftwareFreedom looks like. In a parallel universe where the Tusky blocklist contained instances used by #SocialJustice activists, the same people who might be upset by Free Tusky would be celebrating its creators as heroes.
#FoodForThought

I've been trying to download a file from SourceForge for hours. I'm getting less than 20kb/s at times. That's dial-up speed! I've got about 50MB left to download, and it's saying it's going to take about 40 minutes. I'm using the Japanese mirror, which is the closest one I could see to China. Our net connection here is rubbish!

"...the realistic alternative to meat eating is not a better life but for those animals to not exist in the first place."
- #ScottAlexander
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/

I wonder if Scott realizes this sounds an awful lot like one of the justifications for human slavery? I call false dichotomy. Without farming of non-human animals for human food, our food production would take up a fraction of the land it does now, and the balance could be rewilded to support larger population of free non-humans.