Every now and then, I get a sublime moment, a flash of how things could be. Another world; a better place for us all to live. A little taste, if only in my head, and all too fleeting. Intoxicating, though. Thanks to all the peeps out there making those moments happen a bit more regularly.

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Locked grooves, who remembers those?  Good times.

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Wow, I never played Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, but I wish I had.  It sounds absolutely epic.

Each faction excels at one or two important aspects of the game and follows a distinct philosophical belief, such as technological utopianism, Conclave Christianity, “free-market” capitalism, militarist survivalism, Chinese Legalism, U.N. Charter humanitarianism, or Environmentalist Gaia philosophy.

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My website fully migrated now to the new server at @mayel’s cloudvault hosting. Whoop! Been working on a few of the indieweb elements of it today, and giving it a bit of a lick of paint. Still a ways to go, but progress is good.

https://cloudvault.me/

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Popped into the local electronics shop for a battery, caught a successful fix in action. Old radio with a very simple fix, and a very happy punter. If I heard right, he said the radio was about 20 years old. Good #repairday vibes!

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Kids: `sudo netstat -ntupl | grep :443` is your friend.

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Wow. That killed me. Struggling to get letsencrypt set up. Was getting ‘Error getting validation data’. Quite a bit of wild goose chasing, but eventually turns out it was because OpenVPN was listening on port 443, not Apache.

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Finding some great music on #resonate right now.

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Liking how my sticker game is currently making my laptop look like a cute robot.

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simple last.fm scrobbler is really handy – send listens to multiple services at once.

Or make use of some of the ideas here: https://indieweb.org/scrobble

What I would like to do is post my listens to my own site. I’m guessing this will probably involve going through libre.fm or listenbrainz.

So there I was thinking, I wonder how I can get all my listening history out of last.fm? Quick duckgo, and here we are: https://benjaminbenben.com/lastfm-to-csv/ . Kudos to companies with open data APIs and the hackers who hack on them.

So there I was thinking, I wonder how I can get all my listening history out of last.fm? Quick duckgo, and here we are: https://benjaminbenben.com/lastfm-to-csv/ . Kudos to companies with open data APIs and the hackers who hack on them.

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Coming towards the end of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Thoroughly enjoying it. It does a great job of presenting an alternative to our present, dominant system. From an outsider’s perspective. It shows how inconceivable some of its characteristics and excesses would seem if you hadn’t grown up immersed in them. Fantastically written, too.

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Great Homebrew Website Club London this eve, with a great turnout and lots of interesting discussion.

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Thinking I should document my website setup a little. (Mainly as I can’t remember/don’t know how some of the indieweb parts of it work…)

#MozFest 2017 is going to be totally rad – even has a whole space dedicated to #decentralization this year https://mozillafestival.org/

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This weekend we hosted the first international gathering of community repair – http://fixfest.org/ . It was absolutely brilliant, so enthused after speaking to repair activists from around the world.

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“earn a living” <- strange phrase.

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Innovation is overrated. "Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations." https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more

Welcome to the freedoms of capitalism, where you have to fight for the right to maintain the lifespan of your own belongings. https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729744-tractors-smartphones-mending-things-getting-ever-harder-right-repair-movement

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I think what I like about notifications of app updates from F-Droid is that, behind that little notification is a whole cycle of ideas, discussion, coding, building, testing, packaging, releasing. It’s a little reminder that a whole bunch of open source just took place somewhere.

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Is it wrong to be excited by notifications from F-Droid about app updates? Asking for a friend.

For those awesome moments when your fonts mess up and the text in your terminal and GUI disappear in Unity. Super -> Tweak -> select Unity Tweak Tool -> Text Scaling Factor -> +

I’d like to make an Anki flashcards deck for helping learn/memorise some of the topics around open cooperatives. You can build Anki decks from a CSV file. So if we had an EtherCalc sheet on it, we could co-create it. Good idea? Who’s in? And who can provide an EtherCalc grain on sandstorm?

Freedom means freedom over time as well. Any open source offering that uses a file format that can’t be viewed and edited from a 10 year old device in one way or another, or that will be unreadable 10 years from now, is badly designed in my opinion.

I’d like to have a set of BDD-style specifications of what are important functions of modern apps – like specs and user stories of Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Instagram, what have you – that document what these things do and why people want that. Then we fulfil these features piece by piece in a way that is open and free.

It should be about common formats and protocols and a solid, well-defined collection of tools that can work with those.