today's howtos
-
Nathaniel ☛ why lowercase letters save data
How can it be true that changing a few uppercase letters to lowercase letters saves data? The answer is compression.
It isn't intuitive, but once you understand how text compression works, it will begin to make sense.
-
[Old] TechRadar ☛ Build your own search engine with YaCy
Mainstream search engines like Google are pretty good at what they do, but many people choose not to use them because of privacy concerns. Then there are those who are concerned about content falling through the cracks just because the creator hasn’t followed the best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).
YaCy, an open source distributed search engine, works pretty much like its mainstream peers, but doesn’t suffer from any of their ills. YaCy uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, so every user running an instance of the search engine joins in the effort to index the internet. The index is distributed and redundant across all YaCy users.
-
[Old] LWN ☛ YaCy: A peer-to-peer search engine
Developers in the "free network services" movement often highlight Google services like GMail, Google Maps, and Google Docs when they speak about the shortcomings of centralized software-as-a-service products, but they rarely address the software behemoth's core product: web search. That may be changing now that the decentralized search engine YaCy has made its 1.0 release. But while the code may be 1.0, the search results may not scream "release quality."
The rationale given for YaCy is that a decentralized, peer-to-peer search service prohibits a central point-of-control and the problems that come with it: censorship, user tracking, commercial players skewing search results, and so forth. Elsewhere on the project site, the fact that a decentralized service also eliminates a central point of failure comes up, as does the potential for faster responses through load-balancing. But user control is the core issue: YaCy users determine which sites and pages get indexed, and it is possible to thoroughly explore the search index from a YaCy client.
-
Rek Bell ☛ Making a font
This month I decided to learn how to make a font to use in my comic hakum. Previously, I was drawing the text digitally with my pen tablet. The result was fine, but sometimes difficult to read(the text would grow and shrink often in one page). I didn't want to use an existing font, so I decided to make one based on my own handwriting. A font would keep my writing legible, and consistent throughout the comic.
-
Kayce Basques ☛ The eleventh circle of hell: setting up an RPi camera module¶
Short story long, don’t trust any of the community content; it’s full of ghosts and wolverines and those people you meet at parties that start the conversation with “so what do you do?”… Rely solely on the official RPi docs. And make sure that whatever you’re reading was written for the specific HW/SW permutation that you’re using. In my case (RPi4 + RPi OS Bookworm + RPi Camera Module 3) the correct doc is The Picamera2 Library.
-
University of Toronto ☛ The HTML viewport mess
Over on the Fediverse, someone I follow recently wrote a basic HTML page, tried it in a (simulated) phone environment, and got a page with ant-sized text. Some of the people reading this already know what the issue is, which is that the page didn't include a magic tag to tell phones to do the sensible thing, although the tag is not generally described that way. It's a little bit absurd that in 2023 we still have this problem, but here we are.
-
[Old] Steve Litt ☛ Linux Productivity Magazine
Ubuntu 11.04 is getting old. I need to upgrade to 11.10. But I can't make that upgrade until I get my email data out of Kmail and into something else. I was staring vendor lock-in right in the face, and it was scary. Suddenly replacing Kmail had become my top technical priority. And I had not the slightest idea how to do it.
The remainder of this document tells the story of how I escaped from Kmail, both my experiences and the architecture and configuration used to do it. What this means is although this conversion took me about a week, you can use the information in this document to do it much more quickly -- maybe in less than a day.
If you've been using Kmail and have become concerned that Kmail is going the wrong direction, kick back and enjoy this issue of Linux Productivity Magazine.