Month: October 2019

Went to the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester today. Had a bit of a brain flipout taking in all the intersection of cotton mills, labour, industry, capitalism and slave materials, looms and textile machines, early computers and computer theory, all the parallels to the current 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions.

Also I now have a hitherto unknown love of fibres and yarn and textile manufacturing machines, they are wild. Also I kind of want to do some knitting.

(A mechanical love that is.  As historical artifacts they are pretty checkered.)

Got problems on my box installing Guix when using UEFI and GPT. But it’s working alright with BIOS and MBR. I’m not anywhere near likely to use a 2TB drive anytime soon. I can live with logical partitions. Do I lose anything else if I just stick with BIOS/MBR? Any performance issues?

#Guix

I think that a personal wiki should be primarily ‘for you’. Keep the barrier to writing in it low. It’s not performative. If it’s a jumbled mess, that’s fine, as long as you can navigate through it. If others’ happen to find some needles of information in your haystack, great. But that’s not the goal. If you want to concretely share some info with the wider world, shape part of your wiki into an article.

Whew boy, there’s a real phalanx of uninspired skyscrapers screeching up in central Manchester right now. Dunno if it’s offices, expensive flats, or what. Who’s building them? Who are they for?
As I’m starting my personal wiki / knowledge base, first thing I’m noticing is that I feel like I shouldn’t just be trying to collect ‘knowledge’ on ‘topics’… if it becomes just a set of ‘facts’ that I’ve discovered about my particular interests, then it’s just a poorly maintained subset of Wikipedia… I think the trick is to make sure not to lose the personal and the personality. It should be the stuff that Wikipedia deliberately avoids.
Trying to keep my software social (https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/06/the-blog-and-wiki-combo/), so I’ve started tagging articles that I save to Wallabag for reading later with a couple of new tags – ‘wbaf’ and ‘sbaf’ – short for ‘written by a friend’ and ‘shared by a friend’ respectively. (Where ‘friend’ is the A and B channels of my discovery strategy – https://doubleloop.net/2019/10/05/discovery-strategy/.)

When I have some spare time to read something, I go to wbaf and sbaf first. Should be good for building bonds, and a win against filter failture, possibly a loss against filter bubble, but let’s see how it pans out…

Liked https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2019/10/9712/ by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

Google’s Chrome is not a browser, it’s advertisement delivery software. Adtech after all is where their profit is. This is incompatible with Doc Searls‘ Castle doctrine of browsers, so Chrome isn’t fit for purpose.
Removing Chrome
image by Matthew Oliphant, license CC BY ND Read Chrome to li…

Booo, got the following error when installing Guix:

error: '/gnu/store/dzr35fc1wvgkgz2d4qp3xzhn6wg313c-grub-efi-2.02/sbin/grub-install --boot-directory /mnt/boot --botloader-id=Guix --efi-directory /boot/efi' exited with status 1; output follows:

Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
/gnu/store/dzr35fc1wvgkgz2d4qp3xzhn6wg313c-grub-efi-2.02/sbin/grub-install: error: failed to get canonical path of '/boot/efi'.

guix system: error: failed to install bootloader /gnu/store/kcimndl2hncnng4vhyylipabdxk7f0r9-bootloader-installer

On the plus side, I feel like I’m installing GNU/Linux 20 years ago again, kind of nostalgic in a way