my two cents about facebook & ActivityHub
My niece graduated from kindergarten, and I wanted to send a reply in a short video. I don’t usually use my iPhone on a whim for personal messaging, but my sister is deep in Apple’s world. Here’s the process:
- I Recorded a short video using the iPhone’s camera app
- Realizing I wanted to cut two parts out, I sent it over to the Mac with Airdrop
- On the Mac, I opened it in Snagit and edited it to my liking
- I dropped the MP4 into Messages and sent it to my sister
I haven’t done this before, but the process was so intuitive and seamless that it blew my mind. As a person who uses Linux on a daily basis, I forget how nice it is that technology is so seamless these days. 10 years ago, this was all science fiction.
When I read the pro and con arguments about Facebook federating, I feel the same way. Maybe Facebook’s integration with ActivityPub means I could reach my friends from college who never left Facebook and will always stay there. Maybe they’ll see my posts on their feed, and I could communicate with them without ever logging into Facebook Messenger. To me, that’s a win.
Does this mean Facebook’s motives are anything but profit and closed walls? No. This is the same way I think about Apple and Messages. But I like having options.
It’s easy for me to say, “Join Mastodon! Chat with me on Signal! It’s easy!” But to my sister and my college friends, it’s not. And yelling louder would only make me more obnoxious and these alternatives even less appealing.
I now have an official email with my domain…! Hooray. It’s my name here at the domain, also added to the About page.
I’ve been busy with a couple of updates, mostly on the wiki. More on that soon. Time to eat some Indian food, one of my favorite cuisines.
The flowers decided to show face and enjoy the breeze. I did the same. 📷📷📷
From Wired:
The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens wired.com
Read: www.wired.com
Wired doesn’t do much besides pointing fingers and raising the alarm, but it did lead me to this PDF from the DNI (Director of National Intelligence):
www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf dni.gov
Read: www.dni.gov
Data brokers “maintain large, sophisticated databases with consumer information that can include credit histories, insurance claims, criminal records, employment histories, incomes, ethnicities, purchase histories, and interests,” among other things. They are so effective that even the government prefers to go to them to get whatever their after.
In turn, these data brokers have special rates for local and federal governments to encourage these entities to buy this information.
The fireworks started here in NYC. Since COVID, I hate those with passion. The sleepless nights for these couple of weeks is not something I want to experience again. Glad to take a vacation for the 4th.
The Thing, 2011 - ★★★
I'm not sure I watched The Thing, or I don't remember if I did, but this movie makes me want to watch the original. The story is not too unique, but the execution kept me guessing and entertained. This is a good movie to watch with friends while eating popcorn. Don't eat meat though; it might come back up.
The Thing, 2011 - ★★★
I'm not sure I watched The Thing, or I don't remember if I did, but this movie makes me want to watch the original. The story is not too unique, but the execution kept me guessing and entertained. This is a good movie to watch with friends while eating popcorn. Don't eat meat though; it might come back up.
“The Cage” on West 4th Street in Manhattan 🏀. I watched an intense game between the Greens and the Reds for a few minutes.
Installing Emacs from source
Thursday evening I felt smart and decided to clear some space in my boot partition on my Linux Mint computer with apt autopurge. What this does is to clear the old kernels and clear space along with any libraries apt figures we don’t need.
The issue with this is that apt didn’t know I needed certain libraries that came with Emacs. That’s because I didn’t install Emacs with apt, but built it directly from source - to get a later version. The next day, Emacs didn’t launch and complain some essential library was missing.
The solution was to follow my instructions and install Emacs from source, but here I encountered a catch-22: the instructions were in org-mode inside Emacs, which wouldn’t launch.
Instead of taking out my laptop or switching to the Mac, I decided to deal with it sleep deprived, which is something that happens to me often. This, in turn, led to more frustration as I forgot the steps. Eventually, I gave up and went to sleep (which was the smartest thing I had done up to that point).
The next day I looked for help in Emacs IRC. The folks there helped me enough to fix the issue. Now that I have my notes again, I’m putting those here in my blog (as well as on my wiki), so I always have it handy for myself and for you, if you happen to be that sort of geek.
Here are my original instructions based on xahlee’s blog with some additional notes to help.
One last thing regarding Emacs chat on IRC: When going there using the web interface, use the UI to connect to the Emacs channel. Typing “Emacs” directly will open a new Emacs channel with you as the only person in there.
The Process:
- Download the gz file from the GNU at savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs.
- Untar using your file manager or
tar -xvf path/to/file - In the Mint menu, look for Software Sources, under Optional Sources turn on Source code repositories.
- Install essential build tools in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install build-essential - Get the dependencies using alt: sudo apt-get build-dep emacs
You can now build emacs:
- cd to Emacs download dir, run
./configure - run
make - now run
sudo make install - launch Emacs from terminal
I thought I’ll make a nice little video about CSS “reverse engineering” on my blog. Started out ok, but quickly went off track as I had to look things up and got tangled in CSS quicksand. An hour later I gave up recording, thinking, there must be an easier way to do this.