Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al
Cyborg rights activist, developer, designer.
@aral While I'd agree with on the Windows trainwreck, this story is actually Microsoft backpeddaling in damage control mode, so therefore a good thing.
See, 10 S edition was a sort-of PR disaster for Microsoft so with this announcement they say:
* Windows 10 S edition is permanently cancelled and all S-only installs are upgraded to Home free of charge.
* If you still really really want to use S-mode, you can choose to switch in and out of it, freely, from Home and Pro.
I think you'll find this free software app, RSS Box, useful: https://rssbox.herokuapp.com/
Rest In Pieces, general-purpose computing.
While I wasn’t watching (because, seriously, life’s too short to care about the train-wreck of an operating system that is Windows), Microsoft apparently outdid Apple last year by releasing an app-store-only flavour of its desktop OS & now it’s expanding that as an option to its other versions (Home and Pro).
Soon devs may be left as a special privileged class able to use Windows machines as general-purpose computers.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/03/07/windows-10-s-mode-coming-soon-editions-windows-10/
Looks like https://social.coop is down. If anyone knows the admin, could you let them know?
For anyone using #Friendica, you can follow any RSS feed as if it was another user, just add the RSS feed's address as a new contact.
Reclaiming RSS
“Before Twitter, before algorithmic timelines filtered our reality for us, before surveillance capitalism, there was RSS: Really Simple Syndication … As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.”
Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag: We're not sleepwalking into a dystopian future, we're there today
“In order to make any meaningful progress, we must at least agree that the Googles and the Facebooks of the world are not forces for good.”
I’m very happy with how this interview we did with Nesta ended up. Laura and I will be speaking at Nesta’s FutureFest conference in London next week. (https://www.futurefest.org/)
The Real News: the Turkish elections
My interview with Ben Norton.
Peer: dat://ar.al/2018/06/27/the-real-news-turkish-elections/
Centralised: https://ar.al/2018/06/27/the-real-news-turkish-elections/
Argh, just tried upgrading my Mastodon instance from 2.2.0 to 2.4.2 on Scalingo and it failed. I guess I’m stuck on 2.2.0 for a while…
(My kingdom for seamless upgrades.)
Blog post: Why ActivityPub is the future https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is-the-future/
I learned a new word today: Kyriarchy
(Thanks to @garbados)
Peer Web: dat://ar.al/2018/06/27/kyriarchy/
Centralised Web: https://ar.al/2018/06/27/kyriarchy/
> the actual long-form DAT address that it maps to is a cryptographic public key that is unique to the content of this site
the url is not unique to content, only to the public key. that's what allows you to update the content of the archive: so long as you have the private key, you can write to the archive at that public key. IPFS urls, on the other hand, do uniquely map to content (which is why they change when the content changes)
Web+
My new site progressively enhances the centralised Web with peer-to-peer functionality using the DAT protocol. It’s a Web+ site: a little bridge between the centralised Web and the Peer Web.
Peer web: dat://ar.al/2018/06/26/web+/
Centralised web: https://ar.al/2018/06/26/web+/ https://mastodon.ar.al/media/1dw4DNXcAmY6TRvoRxY
.@mhall119 is developing an ethical alternative to #MeetUp called #GetTogether.
There's already a flagship site up and running:
https://gettogether.community/
The dev is working on #ActivityPub support and is requesting feedback on what more needs to be done:
https://github.com/GetTogetherComm/GetTogether/issues/60
If you're interested in helping federate GetTogether, join the discussion at the link above.
There’s so much we need to fix with the Internet… I know, let’s start by building a new programming language!
🤦
I wonder how hard it would be to take all of those "intro to web APIs" courses that feature the Twitter API, and instead swap things out so that it's all fediverse stuff.
Part of what made Twitter popular was that its API used to be super open, allowing people to build all sorts of things on top of it.
A quick update/heads-up on the Dell XPS pricing issue:
Thanks to multiple interventions by https://twitter.com/@barton808, the price of the new Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu is now cheaper than the equivalent Windows version on the Irish store (https://www.dell.com/en-ie/shop/laptops/new-xps-13/spd/xps-13-9370-laptop/cnx37014).
(Just yoinked one for €1,948.99 inc. VAT and delivery using a €120 discount that ends today. The price previously for the same machine was over €3K) https://mastodon.ar.al/media/6zifMuAXjuSAlmsam2g
Watching with bated hope and suppressed trepidation as Turkey goes to the ballot box to determine if democracy has a future in the country.
New blog post: How to implement a basic ActivityPub server https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/
