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I keep reading this thing, repeated as if it's fact: "The Open Web is Dead". At first I agreed, maybe because I also felt bummed out by what's happening, but I have since come 180° on this viewpoint. The Open Web cannot die. As long as there is one person believing in it, it will be there. It's not a thing that you can "turn it off", "fence it in", "exclude it", or whatever else you want to say. The Open Web is what you, as the user, do with it. It will only die if we stop believing.

It's Your Web That Counts

You have all the agency to shape how you interact with the web. Publish your own blog, use Medium, use Bear, use whatever you want. Nobody can force you to use their platform.

In the same vein, you have 100% freedom in how where you want to spend your attention. Read your friends blog, look on the orange site, browse bears feed, go on LinkedIn, read Mastodon, BlueSky or Twitter. It's on you, not them, to choose what you read. ...

Working with outlook can be challenging, there are a lot of things I really hate about it, but they aren't that hard to mitigate:

1. Thunderbird supports outlook inboxes with the new auth, which solves most of my problems (offline viewing, better search, better automation, etc.)
2. The Unmangle Microsoft ATP Safelinks add-on removes the crazy thing that is "Safelinks"

There is one unsolved problems as of now, which is calendar sync. Outlook does not support any open calendar protocol with two-way sync, I am currently trying to roll my own solution, but it's more difficult than expected and def. not ready yet. ...

I am of the opinion that Capitalism can be summarised as an environment which creates evolutionary pressure among agents towards maximising monetary gain while minimising accountability (note that ethics do not play a direct role in this model). It is hence the job of the regulatory bodies to define a minimal-viable-level of ethical standards and to enforce accountability regarding these standards.

This creates an adversarial environment in which participating agents look for ways of circumventing regulations, in order to maximise their goals.

If there is only one takeaway from this article, I want it to be that we as consumers should remain ever vigilant, as failure to produce sufficient regulation has a direct, negative impact on their quality of life.

The rest of this article will be a more detailed breakdown of an individual case which is annoying me right now: ...

Instead of working through OS settings that often don't work, there's a simple solution to preventing your system from going to sleep: generating user input.

Here's a simple script that uses pyautogui to press the shift key every 5 minutes:

import pyautogui
...

After trying to get stm32CubeIDE working on NixOS and failing at every possible step, I decided to instead use VSCode+Plugins to work. This may or may not be a good idea.

• Step 1: Install VSCode and the "STM32Cube for Visual Studio Code" extension
• Step 2: Install STM32CubeCLT
• Step 3: Install STM32CubeMX ...

I like providing light/dark themes to users to suit their preferences, and I wanted to try out adding a fancy "toggle-theme" button to my website. Here's the write-up of my the solution I arrived at (which you can see on this website!).

Goals:

• Stable load: the website should never switch theme while loading
• Degrades nicely: if JS is disabled, the website should still work (switching themes without JS would be a major hassle, but possible!) ...

Beyond all reason is a great game. It's open source, free to play, massive, and massively fun. It's a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation-style games, and just feel extremely nice. They have so many quality-of-life features for controlling units and such, it really is a lot of fun to play.

I have not yet been able to compile the Recoil Engine from scratch to run the game, but luckily they provide a much friendlier way of distribution: an AppImage.

In order to run this on NixOS, a couple of things need doing, I have documented them below:

1. Download the BAR.appimage from their website ...

I ran into a memory leak while building a program synthesis loop in Python (I know, I know...). Debugging this turns out to be a fairly pleasant experience however. The package objgraph provides all the tool needed to see which elements are dangling from where.

Here's the complete snippet:

import readline, rlcompleter, code, objgraph
...

A friend of mine and me recently needed to remove a bunch of null/null coordinates from a GPX track, after a while, this is what we came up with (uses xmlstarlet and is prefixed with the shiny new nix run stuff!):

nix run "nixpkgs#xmlstarlet" -- ed -N gpx="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1" -d '//gpx:trkpt[@lat="0" and @lon="0"]' infile.gpx > infile_clean.gpx

...

As the title suggests, this was a doozy to figure out. A while ago I switched from

sudo nix-channel --update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
...

Here's a small fish script for automatically creating LUKS encrypted harddrives that store their key in pass.

set -l dev /dev/sdf
set -l part "$dev"1
...

I decided to switch my mail host from the default supplied one to something that seemed a bit more reliable. Friends and family use emails on my domains, and I have received occasional feedback that mails were not delivered, mailboxes not accessible, etc...

The Search

• fastmail was an obvious first choice, but their pricing is a bit steep, as it comes with calendars, file storage etc, which I already have thanks to nextcloud.
• Migadu was recommended by a colleague, and it appears to be exactly what I've been looking for: ...

/rant

As a bit of background, I currently work as a researcher at the university of Edinburgh. The story starts with me trying to borrow a power strip from the computing support at work for a ~30 minute photo shoot for one of my colleagues (I bought cheapo softboxes with way too short cables to be useful, so I need some sort of extension cord for them to be positioned in a useful manner). Computing support has spare mice, cables, etc. You go there if you need anything technical. I had borrowed a power strip from them multiple times in the past, it was never a problem. However, this time it was a problem. Apparently, since I am not trained for setting up electrical things, I can't borrow a power strip from them. If I want one, I need to put in a ticket so a trained technician can set one up for me. Peak brits. ...