I am
reading that Google has released Android 13 for certain Pixel devices and so initiated System Update on my Pixel 4a and found it available. I haven't been following
Android 13 closely so frankly I don't know whether there is much to it, but I am a glutton for new, shiny objects and so I have initiated the process. The installer is classifying it as a security update.
#Android 13 is installed and the good news is that I am not noticing a tremendous amount of difference. One thing I do see out the hop is that the track currently playing in Spotify is displaying on the ambient display, which is good. I also notice that there is media controls card that displays when I press the power button.
#
I am preparing to build a Docker container for
River5 to ultimately run on
my Raspberry Pi server. First, I am going to work on creating the image using Docker running in a Debian 10 container hosted in my
Proxmox environment.
#
How To Make Notes and Write is a free e-book on taking notes and organizing information. I've downloaded to my iPad to read but have not yet read it.
#
One frustration I've had with Mac OS is window management, particularly the need to resize windows to the way I want them when I attach my
Macbook Air to my external monitor. Today I learned about
Moom and I have installed it to try it out. Looks like Moom has a lot of features, but all I want to do is save the windows as I have them and then be able to invoke the configuration when I want. Can't believe I have to buy an app to do this as this should be built-in. I know Windows has the same problem but at least I Microsoft provides Powertoys.
#
Via Andy's response to
my brain dump yesterday about indexes, I learned about
Indieseek.xyz, which upon first glance looks like a modern Yahoo alternative. To my point I tried to make yesterday, when I go to Indieseek.xyz and browse through the categories I find new things. Browsing is how we first used the web, but it takes more time and is more laid back. Browsing is different than
searching, both have their place. To what I was going for yesterday, like most things modern, I think there is value in separating the presentation and interaction with of indexes with data of the index itself. For whatever reason, I like the expand/collapse format of outlines, but others may prefer the more "flat" format as exists on
Indieseek. Ideally, users could do both but interact with the same data, if you think about it, that is what RSS provides and I think is the idea behind OPML too and hence
why Dave was trying to get other developers like Logseq to fully support OPML... then users could use the tool they prefer to view and interact with the same data/information.
#I have started using LXQT on Ubuntu and just learned how to create a shortcut for an application. You have to drag and drop it from the menu to the task bar. It's strange to me how LXQT doesn't really support right-click on objects.
#
- What if there were a RSS feed just for an article/essay like the one I wrote here? Imagine that each paragraph in the second then was a RSS item. I think then you would want the RSS content to persist in a reader but be updated whenever a change was detected in any of the items. I think the result would be a "living" document updated on one's computer whenever the author made a change. Hold on.... it just occurred to me we already have this with OPML, Drummer, and opmlBrowser! Time to pull together a demo.#
- Ok, here is a demo of what I was describing, all doable in OPML using Drummer and renderable using either pagePark or opmlBrowser. I created a new OPML file in Drummer with all of the parent nodes as you see. I collapsed my contributions to the document. I then asked Andy Sylvester to create a public OPML file containing his original post and provide me the URL, which I then included in to the outline that you can now see. #
- I think there are a couple of downsides to using Drummer and Dave's pagePark installation for hosting and rendering the OPML file. One is that in order for Andy's outline to be included it needs to be expanded in Drummer, as soon as I collapse it from Drummer the content included from his OPML file disappears. Consequently, I suspect that any updates Andy makes might not appear unless i have the file open in Drummer. Not sure if it has to be the active tab before the upgrades take affect. #
- I therefore think Andy's implementation of the opmlPackage might be better as it doesn't need Drummer to facilitate the updates. To test that theory I probably need to provision another server. In the mean time, I hope that you see how people could collaborate on a document that represents a body of knowledge on a particular topic. #
Played a bit with
orgmode today by walkthru
Andy Sylvester's Org Mode For Beginners videos. In comparison to
todotxt, one of the things that I do not like is that in orgmode prioritization only works in agenda mode. Right now I don't schedule tasks, I am keeping a simple list of tasks with A, B, C, and D priorities. There is only one A priority task, the one that I am currently working on. B tasks are what I plan to work on today, C are this week, and D are the next week.
#
Went on a trip out of town this past weekend and while I was away
my Raspberry Pi server lost connection to the WiFi network in my home. My wife told me there had been some brief disruptions in power, so I assumed it had not booted properly and just figured I would wait until I got home to troubleshoot. What I found is the Pi booted just fine, but for some reason dropped connection to the network.
A search on google found several sites of information from other people who have had the problem,
one that suggested disabling Power Management made sense, particularly after I found Power Management was on. Ever since I made the chance the
Raspberry Pi has maintained connection, so hoping this did in fact resolve the problem.
#
I think Dave is saying
something provocative here, that one cannot make money on writing and publishing to the web. At least not if it is the prime directive. The fact that Medium was always about making money should not be a surprise, Ev basically made his name and first money selling Blogger and then Twitter. While Dave has kept developing his tools and writing everyone else has been trying their darnedest to get rich. Even Dave's arguments with journalists is rooted in their making money. It has always been about making money. It's not so much about blogging or even the Internet, it's about the culture in the United States.
#BTW, for most people wealth is addictive. It seems that once one makes their first million, they spend all their energy on making their next million. Dave only seems to be immune because he appears not driven by "more" and perhaps because he broke free from addiction, but unfortunately U.S. society as a whole is not as wise. Attention is also addictive.
#Seems to me that nearly everyone dislikes Biden, as if they forget how awful and dangerous Trump was. I can't help but think ageism is a big part to do with this, in general we tend to treat old people with contempt. At the same time, I got to point out that a part of the problem is that we are stuck picking baby boomers as presidential candidates. Many Democrats who dislike Biden prefer Bernie Sanders, who is 80 years old. Hilary is 74 years old. People freaked out because of Barack Obama's ethnicity, but the fact that he was just in his fifties while president probably caused come consternation too. Sooner or later the next generation is going to step up even though I know most boomers are scared to see it happen.
#
The more I think about
the ninth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the more angry I get at the fundamentalist judges on the Supreme Court. The amendment clearly states it is not the intent for the Constitution to enumerate every right of citizens, but it also refers to those as "rights retained by the people." To me that says we, the citizens of the United States determine what are rights if they are not enumerated in the Constitution and not some Supreme Court justices using logic that justifies their ideology. The purpose of government, said the Founders, was to preserve the rights of citizens, not to remove rights.
#We are one of those rare households that has an active AT&T landline and over the weekend we discovered that we had no dialtone. No idea for how long it was out though. Technician is at our location now tracking down the cause.
#
I have several
Raspberry Pis on my home network that I access via the .local domain rather than IP address. Most of my devices know how to resolve the .local names but for some reason the Ubuntu 20.04 server hosting my lxqt desktop does not.
#Found cursors on pling.com and decided to keep it simple and use the Windows 10 versions available.
#Good morning. Today is the first work day that I am using the LXQT desktop I set up in
Proxmox last week rather than the desktop running on a
Raspberry Pi. Not too surprised that so far the LXQT desktop, even though it's running in a VM on old Intel hardware seems smoother than
Raspberry Pi. Not tremendously different, but perceptible. One thing that I need to do is figure out how to get new mouse cursors installed.
#
I am going to use each of these desktops that I have set up in
Proxmox as an alternate to the one that I've been running on a
Raspberry Pi as my personal computer during the work day. During the day I am sitting in front of a 32-inch
BenQ Monitor at 4K and when I connect to a VNC display using a 1921x1080 geometry, which works well on my Macbook, the scaling doesn't work well on the big monitor. The solution is simple, start another VNC display using the 2560x1600 geometry that I've been using with the
Raspberry Pi. It looks much better!
#Today i built a LXQT desktop based on a Ubuntu container running in
Proxmox, and I am testing it by writing this post.
#Hello to July! We are well in the midst of summer now.
#
One of the frightening facts is that the U.S. Constitution has very little in qualifications for any positions of government, particularly the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court Justice just needs to be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Trump could be a justice. and your Uncle Bob could be a justice, and they would be justices for life unless they were impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. Consequently, decisions by the Supreme Court could be pure B.S. and based only on the fact that they don't like a prior decision, so long as a majority of justices agree. In theory, Congress would impeach justices who made B.S. decisions, but if 60 Senators held the same ideology as the justices who made the decision those justices can do great harm to the country.
#I don't know how anyone can legitimately say the Supreme Court is not a political entity, and as such it is extremely dangerous to have people in such positions have lifetime terms. The practice of rigid ideological lines and total disregard for what a majority of citizens want create a de facto dictatorship. The realities of how things currently are require an overhaul of SCOTUS, starting with adding more justices and passing amendments that set terms. I wouldn't feel this way if I could trust SCOTUS to make decisions consistent with the will of all people and for the good of all people, but I no longer have that trust.
#I've installed
Proxmox Virtual Environment on an old, HP Probook 6460b.
Proxmox is a type 1 hypervisor that gives me the ability to create virtual machines as well as run lxc containers. It took some work to get
Proxmox running on the 6460b because I think the install expected it to run UEFI rather than a legacy BIOS. I found that
UEFI was available as a BIOS setting even though HP classified it as "experimental."
#The problem I had was that the computer wouldn't boot into
Proxmox, presumably because it couldn't find a boot loader. It would attempt a PXE boot unless I had the install USB inserted so that I could use "Recovery mode" to boot. The problem lead me down a rabbit hole of different grub configurations but nothing worked until I decided to try the "experimental" UEFI configuration in the BIOS. Fortunately, that worked. Now to learn about what I can do with
Proxmox.
#
How does one reconcile the idea that if a right is not enumerated in the constitution then it is not a right with
the ninth amendment that says:
#
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
#The right to control and chose what happens to one's body is for me fundamental to liberty. You don't find a clear statement in the Constitution that every citizen has the right to be free, because as the Declaration of Independence states, liberty is an "inalienable" right. A natural right. If necessary the ninth amendment cements that right. How does this decision by SCOTUS not infringe upon that right?
#An "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution suggests a belief that the original writers were right in their worldview and thinking. The worldview at the time the Constitution was written was a clear hierarchy, most would call it divine order, that put white men above women and people of color. The obvious evidence of this fact is the need for the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and nineteenth amendments to the Constitution that made people of color and women equal citizens and gave equal protection under the law.
#The problem is that majority does not rule in the United States because the Electoral College and the Senate make citizen's votes matter more depending on which state in which they live. The Electoral College, and thus the Constitution that defines it, is effectively gerrymandering at the state level. If the majority of people live in only a few urban areas, they are represented by a minority of senators and have a constrained influence of electing Presidents. When is the last time a Presidential race was decided by California?
#As the Constitution is currently constructed, the only way for the majority of citizens to true representation they need to move away from states like California and New York and toward states like Iowa and Ohio.
#What I find so infuriating is how the current SCOTUS justices see themselves so smart, so enlightened, that they know more and are better than all the prior justices over hundreds, in the case of the second amendment, and tens, in the case of Roe, of years. How can we rely on any Supreme Court decision when future justices are so willing to nullify prior decisions that they don't like.
#And congratulations Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, you got what you wanted, but compromised on all the values and teachings of Jesus that you claim to hold dear, and abortions will not be eliminated because a women needs to get an abortion is not based on whether or not is legal.
#
"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." Matthew 23:23-24
#
I've been thinking about
River5 because I have been self-hosting
an instance of it on a virtual machine in Google Cloud. Now that I am no longer working out of the office my remote access needs have decreased so I could life with an instance running on my home server that I access via my LAN. (Although I have CloudFlare tunnels working for Internet access to some apps when I need it.) My home server mostly runs Docker containers, so I intend to Dockerize
River5 like I did with River4 a few years ago. Back then I used River4 as a test app to learn how to make my own containers.
#I am watching what Dave is doing with
feeder app. So far it looks like a way to render individual RSS feeds, feeds for a individual sites, but is not an aggregator for multiple RSS feeds, which is what
River5 is. Might be that feeder is just one lego piece.
#
The problem of how RSS feeds are displayed if they don't have titles that Dave describes
in this blog post exists with
River5, but I tolerate it because I prefer the stream format of display my feeds rather than an inbox format. The reason why I prefer the stream format is that I use it to triage what I want to read by selecting items to be read later in Pocket. When read in Pocket I highlight items I want to store/remember, which flow through Readwise and ultimately to a graph I have in
Roam. I use
NetNewsWire, which is an inbox style news reader, on my iPads but don't really read items in it but rather share items to Pocket.
#
- One of the constants in my life is a fascination with different todo management applications across the variety of platforms I use. A challenge is managing todo items for my job apart from my personal life. I find for me that the topic is less about managing my time (being productive, deciding what to do when) and more about remembering and keeping track of things I think I need to do. Consequently, for me, I realize what I really do and need is an application that makes it easy for me to create and manage lists and I don't really need all the bells and whistles of most of the applications like Things and Omnifocus.#
- It also has dawned on me that it might be wise to think in terms of the data, which leads one to file formats and "markup," and that lead me back to todotxt.org/">todo.txt. Todo.txt is a specification for creating and maintaining lists in plain text files. Gina Trapani is the original author and she created the specification to manage todo items using command line tools. Gina was motivated to use tools that were fast and within the work environment in which she spent most of her time, which was a command line. #
- A lot of activity occurred in the early 2000s in developing applications on a variety of platforms, most of them used Dropbox for storage and synchronization of the text files. todotxt.net for Android might be the closest to an "official" application and it was last todotxt.net/releases">released in 2019. Given that todo.txt is really a plain text specification, any text editor can be used. What I found, and I have been using, is the todotxt-mode">VS Code extension todotxt-mode that provides me with a set of actions that I can use to manage items in my todo.txt files using VS Code. #
- At work I am storing the files in a directory that synchronizes with Onedrive, but I am really only editing the files on my work computer. My personal todo.txt files are stored in a private Github repo which I then clone and synchronize with remote computers. I am mostly using a containerized version of Code Server to edit the files using VS Code in a web browser but I can also access the files on my iPads using Working Copy. Github is not a seamless background synchronization tool but it works good enough for me at this time. #
Today I got the idea of creating
a master OPML file of the books that I have read during the last two years. I have a separate OPML file for each year and the master OPML then has nodes of type include with the url using the public outline URL provided by Drummer. The master is made public and thus viewable via the web with pagePark.
#The actual inclusion done by Drummer has to be executed before any of the "included" nodes are published and viewable,
here is the result. I built the 2022 file using
Little Outliner and for any update to appear on the published web page it needs to be pulled in to Drummer.
#
Is an indented bulleted list an outline? In my head flat indented bulleted list that is produced via the opmlPackage
as shown here is different than one that in which you can expand and collapse nodes
as shown here. Each has a different use, but when I think of viewing an outline in a web browser I think of something that I can interact with and is not flat view.
#As an example, go to
my tech outline and click Everyday Tech, Google Pixel 4a, Ongoing impressions, which I find to be a much better experience than if ever node in that outline was expanded by default.
#
WorldWideWeb is a simple HTTP/HTML server for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. It is interesting, but today's web sites usually require more back end code such as Nodejs. What I think would be really interesting is a version of Docker for iPadOS.
#
Elephase is an app that uses Artificial Intelligence to write for you, is that something good?
#
- I think the root cause of the problems we have in the United States is a lack of understanding and therefore a lack of consensus on the fundamentals about what the United States is all about. The Revolutionary War was a fight for freedom from tyranny and the Declaration of Independence makes the case for why the King of England was a tyrant. Freedom/Liberty from tyranny is why the United States exists and protection from tyranny by preservation of individual rights is the purpose of the government of the United States, and the Constitution is the blueprint for how the founders believed tyranny could be prevented. #
- For a government that is made of people who represent citizens of a country to prevent tyranny there needs to be a common understanding of what is tyranny and that in fact it's prime directive is to prevent tyranny. The problem is that in the United States today we do not have a shared understanding of what is tyranny. In fact, what is worse it seems, is that we also don't have a shared understanding if what is the rights of citizens, let alone our values and norms. If we are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge there has NEVER been a shared understanding of tyranny, particularly because tyrants frame their actions as being good rather than evil. #
- Slavery pre-exists the founding of the United States, it was an issue at the time when the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were written. The founders punted on the topic and the Constitution institutionalized an attempt to square democracy with slavery by way of things like the Electoral College and the Senate. Even the second amendment, with it's tortured language and revered status is a reflection of this dysfunctional beginning. In reality, the United States traded one tyranny for another, it was just a difference of who was on top of the pyramid. England's response to our declarations for independence pointed out this very hypocrisy. #
- Slaves and sympathetic northerners saw southern state governments and plantation owners as tyrants. Southern state governments saw the north as tyrants, who they feared so much they insisted on the second amendment to preserve their militias that tracked and killed, if necessary, runaway slaves. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President southern states tagged him as a tyrant and thus succeeded from the Union, declaring their independence from the north. Then and and for many now, the south saw themselves as revolutionaries or freedom fighters while the north saw them as traitors. #
- In the finger pointing between the north and the south, who was right about who was the tyrant? Your answer depends upon your point of view when there is no shared values and no shared agreement on freedom for who and for what! Truth is the problem was not resolved and with Lincoln assassinated, reconstruction surely reinforced the south's belief that northern states are tyrants. During the 20th century the lines between north and south transformed to Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, urban and rural and perhaps the only reason why there hasn't already been a second civil war is that during that time that both factions had common external enemies that we fought in the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and on and on. #
- Unfortunately, the end of the Soviet Union in the 90s removed the primary shared external enemy and ever since the old internal enemies took up their battle anew. Globalization has created an additional element that is creating an alignment between previous enemies, Republicans and Evangelicals with Putin and Russian Orthodoxy with Conservative Roman Catholicism all desiring to institute "divine order" of supremacy that sees democracy the enemy to that order. Members of this collation see themselves and market themselves as the good guys, fighting for freedom to be as rich as they want and to do whatever they want by establishing "divine order" that puts them above those they view with contempt, those who seek true equality with all the disorder that entails.#
I don't think Apple's Stage Manager will be available on non-M1/M2 devices., which means that if I want my iPad to use an external monitor as God intended, I would have to upgrade to one with an M1 processor. My iPads only have the A series processors. My first reaction is that there might not be much in iPadOS 16 for me.
#I don't get the need for
overlapping windows on the iPad that has 12-inch screens or smaller. Perhaps I am influenced by the fact that I don't use overlapping windows with my notebook and desktop computers, but small windows on small screens don't make much sense to me. No doubt I work this way because I started working with computers before windows managers were even a thing, so they just aren't natural to me. On my BenQ 32-inch monitor I keep three windows open at a time, one for MS Teams, one of Outlook, and the other was a workspace. The workspace equates to 16-inch monitor, the other two windows are glanceable.
#Of the changes that I've seen coming with iPadOS 16, support for external monitors is the most important to me.
#
I think I have got to the point where I must upgrade my wiki server because functionality that I use is no longer working. Normally I scavenge for new content by
adding updated sites to my neighborhood and then view recent changes. I am seeing an error for the activity plugin used by
Recent Changes indicating that sites won't show. I can't upgrade the wiki software because the latest releases require the latest Nodejs that is now only available on 64-bit operating systems. I've known that I should migrate/upgrade the server to a more current version of Ubuntu but have been avoiding doing so, but now I appear to not have any choice.
#
I just completed a road trip from my home in the Detroit, Michigan suburbs to Colorado and back. The trip took me through Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado, and we made a side trip to Wyoming. Gas prices in Iowa and Nebraska were the cheapest at around $4.30 per gallon or lower, I think mostly because of the higher ethanol content. The highest price was $5.79 in Joliet, IL and prices here at home are around $5.49.
#I've long pondered how it is that gas prices at nearly all local stations are the same, it is something that I think is artificial in that the prices don't change because a station's cost has changed but rather because the competitors price has changed. But, who decides to increase or decrease first? I would think that if there were real competition that there would be some variability in pricing.
#However, a thought recently occurred to me. The last significant fuel shock in my life time was in
the mid 70s due to an OPEC oil embargo, and the big story then was about long lines at gas stations. Why is it that there are not now long lines at the pumps? I think the reason is that the gas prices at all stations are in sync and change at the same time so that there is no real reason for people to queue up at one station over another. At current prices, if a station had prices at $0.05 or $0.10 lower I bet people would go to that station over another and soon there would be a line at that station until it ran out of gas. With the lack of variability in pricing there is no real reason to seek out a specific station and we continue using whichever is most convenient.
#I don't know exactly what is happening, but something just doesn't feel right, and I bet you the gas companies will be announcing record profits. Higher prices should be bad for business but not if all prices are the same. In this case the rising tide causes all fuel company profits to rise and that doesn't feel like a market, it feels like collusion, but I bet it never gets investigated let alone charged.
#
Dave has compiled a nice
list of OPML-compatible apps. In my opinion, import/export is not a really working interoperability, you want apps that work with files natively so that you can simply File, Save.
#It has been a long time since I have had to work within the constraints of a thirteen inch laptop screen, and it's a huge downgrade from the 32-inch monitor I normally use.
#Working from Colorado for the next ten days or so due to a family situation. We are set up in a Residence Inn and to my disappointment I've found that the workspace furniture in our suite is not ergonomic. At least ten years ago I complained about how hotels need to improve their furniture for ergonomics, a low chair relative to a desk puts ones wrists at a terrible position for carpel tunnel.
#
Sometimes I have to wonder whether Google developers even use the applications that they write. Android has a Reminders function that is centered around the Assistant but there is an app to view and presumably edit reminders, except that it doesn't work. When I try to change the date of a reminder that is past due, the app locks. Worse, when I try to create a reminder the dialog in which one would complete pops up from the bottom and gets completely covered when you tap a field and the onscreen keyboard appears. How does something so broken ever get released? If I were the developer I would be embarassed!
#
Dave has made
a cryptic reference to a new Mac outlining app that interops with Drummer, but does not link to the app. I think the app being referenced is called
Bike, I saw a reference to it via MacStories.
#Decided to do some testing between Bike, Electric Drummer, and Drummer. You can read
my testing notes.
#One thing I can confirm is that Bike does not retain any of the header variables that Electric Drummer adds to the OPML. It reads the body of the OPML file and when it saves it writes back out a new file in its entirety with only a meta tag in the head. I also note that the outline entries have their IDs in a different location than where they are placed via Electric Drummer. I am assuming that Bike is ignoring the header variables in the file and writing the OPML out in a vanilla format. It looks like Electric Drummer, and I assume the same is true for Drummer, has a slightly different OPML format that includes headers understandable to it. Consequently, there is not clean Interop between Bike and Drummer. Is this really
the app Dave was referring to?
#I think that by default Bike should read the OPML header entries that exist in the OPML file, retain them, and write them back out on the file same to preserve roundtripping/interop of the file between itself and other programs that can edit OPML files. I don't know the OPML spec to know whether there is a rule for how to treat header variables.
#