Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 87

@clacke @dansup will 2019 be the year of the #ActivityPub-ready #GNUsocial? ;-P

Weird that GH sold #Gitter, a mature codebase they'd kept proprietary, and which already had a significant user base, and then bought a much newer, #FreeCode chat platform like Spectrum, which is only just out of beta. What can we read between the lines here about the MS for GH going forward?

#Spectrum.chat has been acquired by MS via GH:
https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce

"Spectrum will stay open source, and we’ll continue collaborating with the open source community to serve you the best way we can."

I hope so, but given that GH keeps a bunch of their secret sauce proprietary, I'm not going to hold my breath. One less #SlackaLike to recommend ;)

#WTF #WordPress! Requiring free code developers to use #Slack to contribute to your code, and making end users use #IRC for support? You've got this exactly backwards:
https://make.wordpress.org/chat/

@Cochise thanks so much for these links! I definitely have no interest in reinventing the wheel, even if I had the skills and time to do so. The only thing essential to Software Burger is the burger format (name and version of package as buns, files and deps as colour-coded ingredients). If I can find a way to get this built on top of existing tools, so much the better!

@alcinnz From the POV of average users, anything that isn't spoken language written down, is code. Engineers can nitpick all they want about whether markup languages count as code. The only reason not to count them is elitism, wanting to keep the term "coder" as an Old Boys Club for engineers, no web designers welcome. It's an attitude I find incredibly frustrating, and one that's got me into one or two fights here with bloody-minded engineers.
@z428

@Cochise these are all new to me :) Thanks for the tips. The idea of Software Burger is to visualize the outputs of these kind of tools, so that mere mortals are more likely to be able to access them, and understand their implications.

@z428 the fundamental idea of HTML is that it allows a publisher to describe content in generic term (this is a heading, this is bold, this is a video etc), and leave the final appearance under the control of each user. #AdobeFlash and #ShockWave and various other toxic things brought in this now-common ideology that an elite of designers should be able to dictate to users how everything looks, often breaking #accessibility in the process.
@alcinnz

@z428 have you used the #Ionic framework for making mobile apps? There's a WYSIWYG editor, and you just drop components on a page, like using a desktop publishing app. You can get in and edit the code, but for the most part you don't have to. This kind of thing is a cool way to make a ramp for ordinary people to become UI designers, then learn coding as they need it, if they want to.
@alcinnz

@alcinnz I used #NVu (now #BlueGriffon) for a while as a WYSIWYG web page creator. Eventually I just switched to using CMS and wikis (run by other people). Now I really wish I'd stuck at it and learned #CSS, especially with the growing interest in returning to static sites. Audio books and speech>text software are really useful, but it's no substitute for knowing how to read and write.
@z428

@LWFlouisa sorry, bad choice of words on my part. Wasn't meaning to imply malicious intent :)
@cwebber @joshim

@noorul Oh! Yes. I've gotta stop posting while sleep deprived. Don't ever use #BitTorrent through #Tor! It's akin to downloading a 1.5GB movie on someone's $1/MB dial-up connection. How rude! Do use a #VPN though if you can. They're cool. Like fezes ;)

@noorul
> I just asked about IP leakage to get mentored by you.

Hmm. Maybe I need to start sending out invoices ;-P

@ebassi ah, OK. So I presumed the Ars author knew what they were talking about and didn't check my facts. Looks like you were right
@adfeno . Egg on my face for the second time this week! Do either of you know of any links that explain the relationships between GTK, GNOME Shell, and the GNOME DE (or is that what you mean by "Shell" here)?

@LeftCoast I could be wrong, but everything I've seen on the subject says that #LXDE has merged with #RazorQT to create #LXQT. There will be ongoing LTS maintenance work for Lubuntu 18.04, but AFAIK there will be no new versions or features. Got any links that say otherwise?

@clacke or they're actually paying developers to invent proprietary wheels for days at a time. I honestly don't know which frustrates me more :/
@lightweight

@clacke
> I think your hourly rate estimate is pretty low.

You've never been to Aotearoa have you ;) From what I've heard talking to folks at #Enspiral, $40 an hour would be a generous rate for social enterprise work. Happy to be corrected on this. @lightweight ? But yes, as you say, since most of what they propose to "build" already exists in multiple free code CMS, I'm picking most of that money just gets pocketed by the boss.

@bob
> The reason why people don't use free as in freedom things isn't because of the intrinsic properties of the commodity.

There may be other reasons, but not being available to buy in the same shops that sell "normal" devices, and not working properly when tacked on as a postmarket hack, are definitely reasons. As I said to @dch , people trying to make libre devices struggle, because upstream suppliers don't think there's money in it. Demonstrating demand could help.
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/101438157726616653

@z428 damn my typos! That was meant to be "MarkDown *OR* HTML". The point being that the user gets a familiar workflow (#MSWord style toolbars and buttons), but pressing the button shows them something they could just type out, if they want to, to get the same result. The same principle could be applied to many things, ergo, my #TowBar proposal
@alcinnz

@clacke when did that start? My friend used to just send MS Office spreadsheet files to my his accountant. Seems like an area that need a big push for either full automation (accountant software on your own PC or server that can do everything) or an #OpenFormat / #API across the profession.
@conservancy