Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 10, 2024

• Terence Eden ☛ A completely plaintext WordPress Theme

  This is a silly idea. But it works. I saw Dan Q wondering about plaintext WordPress themes - so I made one.

  This is what this blog looks like using it: [...]

• Kevin C Tofel ☛ May 9, 2024 - TIL

  Enter LocalSend, an AirDrop-like app that works with Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s free and open source, found right here.

• Blake Watson ☛ Rebuilding my website with Eleventy

  Well, um, I did it again.

  WordPress is gone. This site is static once again, generated by the amazing Eleventy. This is a bit of a long post so here’s a little outline if you want to jump to specific sections.

• Luke Harris ☛ Modern WordPress theming: CSS in everything

  How can the team improve FSE? Separation of concerns. Strict structure. Be text editor friendly and store templates and stylesheets on disk. If being backwards-compatible is getting in the way, throw it out. This was supposed to be the next era of WordPress, and we don’t need to be dragging in the last one with it.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Simon Willison ☛ Modern SQLite: Generated columns

    It turns out I had an incorrect mental model of generated columns. In SQLite these can be "virtual" or "stored" (written to disk along with the rest of the table, a bit like a materialized view). Anton noted that "stored are rarely used in practice", which surprised me because I thought that storing them was necessary for them to participate in indexes.

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging Computers annoyed me twice yesterday. Not really computers, I suppose. Computers are either on or...

    Annoyance 1. There's an element of this that is my own fault, and you'll probably see why at some point, but I consider that it's mostly just an annoying situation. Oracle bought MySQL a long time ago. A lot of people weren't happy about this because people don't like Oracle. Some people were unhappy enough that they forked MySQL and created MariaDB. Owing to licensing, and compatibility with the MySQL API, Debian kicked MySQL to the kerb and replaced it with Maria. They didn't even change names - when you install mysql-server, you get MariaDB, and that is mostly fine.

    However, for me yesterday it was not fine. Amazon are finally ditching MySQL 5.7 and forcing you to upgrade to 8. In this time there has been some divergence, to the point that it doesn't seem to be a straight swap between Maria and MySQL any more when you're on MySQL 8. We moved to using Maria in development because its 5.7-compatible version 10.3 installs on Apple Silicon without emulation in Docker, but that's no-longer viable. We need to upgrade a pretty large codebase and I need to be sure that it still runs on MySQL 8. So I need to be running MySQL 8 in development to spot issues.

• Education

  • Lev Lazinskiy ☛ Lazar Lazinsky | Lev Lazinskiy

    Some of my earliest memories are going to his room in our apartment in Baku with a huge pile of books for him to read for me. When we reunited in Cincinnati in 1994, he helped me continue my love of books and reading by taking me to the library every single day. He helped ignite a spark of curiosity and thirst for knowledge that continues to this day.

  • Barry Hess ☛ Ikigai

    I recognized that I personally needed to do something that I considered productive. A number of things were attempted in this period. I gave a weekly volunteer schedule a go for a month or two. I got pretty heavily into woodworking, a hobby that helped me manage my stress during my prior job. These were interesting things, and useful things, but they weren’t quite hitting the mark.

  • Lucidity ☛ Breaking My University's Machine Learning Competition

    Let us explore this dysfunction, starting with the lessons I learned from getting a perfect score on a machine learning competition then being asked to bury having done so to save everyone face.

    As you read in horror, remember that I attended Monash University, which is one of the best in Australia.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Bookending

    I’ve found this practice is useful on two fronts: one, it serves as a kind of bookend, starting and ending the day, so that you don’t end up working all the time, with no sense of beginning or completion. I think this is important for any work, but especially for remote work, where the environmental differences between working and not-working are wont to blur. Turning off all those apps, and spending a few minutes with pen and paper, creates an adjustment to the environment that helps bring the work day to a close in the evening, and permit it to open with a sense of calm and intention in the morning. At the same time, taking even a few minutes to reflect or contemplate helps with the inevitable overwhelm that most remote working environments generate. It gives you a place to ground yourself and return back to each day, no matter what happens in between.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ School's out: how climate change threatens education

    A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can result in heavy rains and flooding.

    This can damage schools or put them out of commission while they are used as shelters.

    Hot weather can also drive wildfires and spikes in air pollution, which have caused school closures everywhere from India to Australia.

    "The climate crisis is already a reality for children in East Asia and Pacific," the UN children's agency UNICEF warned last year.

  • Barry Hess ☛ Focus

    Suddenly it is Friday and you know not what you have done. Your back hurts. You’ve knowledge-worked so hard as to cause yourself physical pain. What was it you set out Monday to achieve?

    Focus is a learned skill that must be practiced. You cannot wish yourself to a focused work week or a focused life. Goals are a first step. Limits help you carve out pockets of time. Practice leads to forming one of the most powerful habits you can learn.

  • The Atlantic ☛ No One Knows What Universities Are For

    The world has more pressing issues than overstaffing at America’s colleges. But it’s nonetheless a real problem that could be a factor in rising college costs. After all, higher education is a labor-intensive industry in which worker compensation is driving inflation, and for much of the 21st century, compensation costs grew fastest among noninstructional professional positions. Some of these job cuts could result in lower graduation rates or reduced quality of life on campus. Many others might go unnoticed by students and faculty. In the 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber drew on his experience as a college professor to excoriate college admin jobs that were “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

    Another reason to care about the growth of university bureaucracy is that it siphons power away from instructors and researchers at institutions that are—theoretically—dedicated to instruction and research. In the past few decades, many schools have hired more part-time faculty, including adjunct professors, to keep up with teaching demands, while their full-time-staff hires have disproportionately been for administration positions. As universities shift their resources toward admin, they don’t just create resentment among faculty; they may constrict the faculty’s academic freedom.

• Desktop/Laptop

  • System76 ☛ A Blog to Satisfy Your Monthly COSMIC Fix(es)

    We’re fixing to fix your unfulfilled fix for more COSMIC with a new COSMIC blog. And here it is! We’ve been hard at work building out features, polishing up implementations, and getting ready to unleash the alpha release of the COSMIC desktop environment to the world. Here…are the updates!