Daniel Lowe @dl@cantos.social

@chr
If this is your first moot
You _have_ to toot.

#introduction

I used to be a lot weirder. I'm a middle-aged geek, father to two boys, and I bang out code at #Google. I live near Boston now, but I grew up in central Mississippi.

I know the conlangs #Lojban and #TokiPona. I write hobby code in #Tcl and #CommonLisp.

I play a bunch of #music instruments, but none well enough to perform. I've been playing around with a DAW.

I started the cantos.social instance, trying to be a part of the small-scale Internet.

I try to be as kind as I can.

I am a long time #IRC aficionado, but I've been reading the #Matrix protocol, and... I don't hate it. It fixes a lot of the problems with #IRC without introducing many new ones. I'm not super excited about http-all-the-things and json protocols, but it seems solid otherwise.

I don't think I'll really know how I feel about it unless I write a client for it.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pine64-announces-soquartz-system-on-module

The Quartz64 looks very interesting. I wonder if it could be crammed into a #PinebookPro shell as an upgrade.

My car spontaneously installed an Alexa app and I am really damn unhappy about it.

For people who are sad about Freenode, I am too.

I want everyone to take courage, though, because picking up and moving our crap elsewhere is freedom. It's the freedom given to us by IRC, by federated services, and by FLOSS software in general.

We only have this freedom because IRC isn't *owned*. This was and is the best thing about the open internet, and it's worth preserving as much as we can.

I'm still dlowe on irc.libera.chat.

So far the migration hasn't gone so smoothly, though. Someone named chainsaw-wielder has registered a ton of popular channels from freenode, like #tcl.

When someone uses the phrase "just a bad apple," you can assume that they think the problem is the appearance of wrongdoing, not the wrongdoing. The full phrase is "One bad apple spoils the barrel." They are not saying that the evil has implicated the whole organization. They are saying that the publicity of the evil is tarnishing the appearance of the organization, so would we please stop talking about it.

Note to libera.chat common lispers:

A lot of confusion can be avoided if you take #cl or #commonlisp and leave #lisp for the lisp family discussions like ##lisp on freenode.

I say this and my #PinebookPro immediately locks up and needs to be hard rebooted. sigh.

#PinebookPro tip - I set the CPU frequency governor to "performance" when plugged in instead of "ondemand", and the difference in snappiness is huge! Maybe I won't need to get a "real laptop" after all.

My #PinebookPro runs FLOSS and executes everything flawlessly except web browsers. It's like an anti-Chromebook.

I'm writing another MUD, using a bunch of ideas I've collected over two decades of running one and thinking about all the social and gameplay dynamics. I have zero expectation of getting any players (the time of MUDs is long past), but it brings me joy so I'm doing it anyway.

I know I just posted about this. I am working to improve my terrible hype skills.

Firefox version in the works!

Picture this: You are chatting online, and you want to share a cool link to a website you have open, but the address in the bar has cruft and tracking parameters. It would be nicer to share links without all that, but it's a pain to edit out the irrelevant bits. URLs from shortlink services hide the site and sell click tracking data.

In Chrome, the Linksnip extension (https://linksnip.app) will solve your problem! Just click on its button and a trimmed url will be in your clipboard.