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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Again, I reiterate, because this is important!

Techno-scientific psychology. The study of how the environments that people live in affect what subset of all scientific knowledge is actually contained within their head, and also how technology plays a role in that.

Throughout all of human history, different people who lived in different geographic environments had trouble from moving from one environment to the next. Why? Of course, because their brains only had the pertinent scientific knowledge for one environment. Not until their actions in their daily lives exercised a mental requirement for scientific knowledge of another environment did those people start learning the scientific principles that govern that environment. Namely, that exercise was met through moving into the target environment and living within it.

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Atom/RSS Feeds on Jekyll

2018-05-28

Categories: blogging  
Tags: blogging  

How do you setup an RSS feed on your new Jekyll blog fast? Here’s how.

  1. Add the plugin to _config.yml.

    plugins:
      - jekyll-feed
    
  2. Verify that _site/feed.xml is being generated.

  3. Add a visible link on your blog to _site/feed.xml for the user to “subscribe” to your blog.

  4. Edit default.html or head.html to add the <link> tag that points to your Atom/RSS feed so that browsers can show the special RSS feed button for your website.

20180528/DuckDuckGo jekyll subscribe to feed icon
20180528/http://joelglovier.com/writing/rss-for-jekyll
20180528/DuckDuckGo jekyll add tags to html head
20180528/DuckDuckGo html head site:jekyllrb.com
20180528/https://jekyllrb.com/tutorials/convert-site-to-jekyll/

20180528/DuckDuckGo do people use GNOME anymore?

Yep, it’s official. If people say they get tendonitis after using GNOME 3 for a week, yeah, they hate it and it’s a bad idea.

Yes, this does mean that window manager and desktop design is an area for very little changes and “improvements.”

20180528/https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-people-hate-GNOME-3

After some practice, I’ve come to consensus on the process of scanning a collection of artificial, human-originated information into the computer that principally is accessible by humans in a normal indoor “room-sized” environment. It is only a few simple steps.

  1. Document the information environment as-is. Your goal is to create some sort of coarse-grained image indicating generally how the unaltered environment appeared when you first found it.

  2. Reorganize the environment around optimal archival preservation storage and digital library scanning principles, and document the new environment organization. For example, like-sized papers should be stored together, all digital media storage disks/drives should be stored together, items should be sorted in chronological order, items should be easy and efficient to remove for scanning, etc.

    • Footnote: Again, I reiterate, because this is important! Papers should be stored horizontally, not vertically.
  3. Perform restoration treatment. For example, often times in the case of paper, there are sub-optimally archived items such as curled or crinkled papers that need to be flattened. The best way to treat this is to store it in optimal orientation for at least a week.

  4. Create high-quality scans from the newly optimized and restored collection. Review the scanned material to check for poor scans or material that is missing a scan.

  5. When feasible, maintain and preserve the original information objects so that they can be re-scanned at a later date. The digital data you have on hand today is limited by the capacity of today’s imaging and digital data storage technology. Tomorrow’s technology will always be much more promising than what you have today, and you could just as well want to rescan the original objects with the newer technology, provided that they are sufficiently preserved.

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As it turns out, the solution to dealing with Jekyll for local development on a blog involving huge numbers of tiny files is non-trivial. Why? Because Jekyll itself, when you run the local server, will copy out every single individual post into a tiny file of its own. So, clearly when you are running your local development server, a bad problem of thousands of tiny files is going to become a worse one. What is the way out of this? Clearly, any solution must be improved efficiency at the filesystem level.

So, I am going to propose this potential solution to the problem, though I haven’t tested it yet: compressed RAM disk filesystem. On Linux, this means using the zram module. The idea is that you can reasonably deal with filesystem fragmentation causing padding out to 4 KB if you can compress the filesystem: assuming all of that extra padded wasted space is all zeros, this will compress to be a sparse coding format, hence solving your problem of wasted space with thousands of tiny files. Again, I haven’t tested this yet, so time will tell if this works well for me or not.

20180527/DuckDuckGo linux ram compressed file system
20180527/DuckDuckGo linux compressed ramdisk
20180527/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

Okay, so now I’m thinking about buying a second Raspberry Pi for the purpose of setting up a dedicated home server. My current solution, that of using an old laptop, appeared to be a good idea when it was first setup, but given the fact that basically I’m the only local user interested in using it, it no longer seems to make sense to allocate such a high power budget for a machine running 24/7. Hence my plans to migrate to a low-power single-board computer.

But, before I go out and just buy another Raspberry Pi, I should evaluate the current state of the single-board computer market. Already there has been lots of quibbling about competitors to the Raspberry Pi that are technologically superior, so I should see if one of those will better meet my needs than a Raspberry Pi. And indeed, one of them definitely does better meet my needs: Banana Pi.

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Why LibreCMC doesn't use GitHub

2018-05-27

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc   blogging  

Why doesn’t LibreCMC use GitHub? Because GitHub itself has its own problems of not being libre-friendly.

20180527/https://librecmc.org/
20180527/https://librecmc.org/github.html

So, there is an interesting alternative to use in place of GitHub. notabug.org provides free hosting using the gogs Git server solution.

20180527/https://notabug.org/about


But this is the most interesting. Who is gogs developed by? This community that calls itself “peers” and has existed for at least since the Dragora GNU/Linux distribution was developed.

20180527/https://peers.community/

Freedom-delayed? Are there any projects I know in there.

20180527/https://notabug.org/pizzaiolo/freedom-delayed

Ah, yes! There is. ZynAddSubFx, but of course I know there is that Yoshimi fork. What’s going on here? For the course of modernizing the user interface, the developer. Come on! What’s wrong with the existing user interface? Yes it may look “dated” on Windows and MacOS platforms, but I think it looks just fine on a GNU/Linux digital audio workstation. Sure some of the user interfaces are going to look dated or obscure, but that is just the way things are expected to be by the target users.

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For sure the Raspberry Pi 2 and up support SDXC. But what about the Zero? Unfortunately all I can say is that is inconclusive without testing.

20180527/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi compatible sdxc
20180527/https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/28571/raspberry-pi-2-are-64gb-uhs-i-class-1-sdxc-cards-supported
20180527/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi zero sdxc
20180527/https://reprage.com/post/what-are-the-best-sd-cards-to-use-in-a-raspberry-pi

Many times in web/Internet history of times past, people have advocated toward uninstalling things on the local computer system to make things more secure. “Uninstall Java.” “Restrict plugins.” Of course, nowadays things like Java and plugins have been made obsolete by the advent of modern JavaScript programming frameworks and HTML 5 APIs. But, that’s just the thing. Where does security relate with all that new JavaScript code?

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Newer GitHub DDoS

2018-05-26

Categories: security  
Tags: security  

Wow, GitHub was a victim of another DDoS, this time one of the largest DDoS attacks on the entire Internet: Nearly 1.4 terabits per second was directed at GitHub for nearly 8 minutes. How? Via memcached servers exposed to the public Internet, used as traffic amplifiers.

20180526/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
20180526/https://www.wired.com/story/github-ddos-memcached

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