Tim McCormack says words
This seems like as good a place as any to link to some of my favorite posts:
But here are the most recent pieces...
Yesterday I installed updates on my Ubuntu 24.04 work laptop and rebooted, and was annoyed to find that I was being logged into the Unity desktop, not XFCE. Not only that, but after logging out again I discovered that there wasn't even an option for selecting XFCE. The login screen also looked different.
The solution seemed to be to select a different greeter. More details under the cut.
Over this winter break I've had some more time to work on Cavern, the social journaling protocol I've been developing intermittently for a few years now. If you're not familiar with it, it takes some inspiration from blogs, feed readers, dead-drops, IPFS, Dreamwidth, and self-hosting sensibilities.
It's pretty quixotic but I think it could meet the needs of a bunch of people. I don't get as much time to work on it as I would like, but I've been putting more time into it recently and I thought I'd make some notes on what I've been up to.
Inspired by Foone's suggestion this week I decided to start serving poisoned versions of my blog posts to any AI scrapers that I could identify—because I don't think it's enough to politely ask them to stop with a robots.txt file. They've already scraped my posts without asking; it's too late to undo that. But maybe I can hurt them just a little bit, going forward.
This post is about the technical side of implementing this.
We have some slightly odd Easter traditions in my household. This year I made it a little weirder.
I received some Blink outdoor security cameras a while ago but haven't been able to make use of them because they require a smartphone and internet access to set up, and I don't have a smartphone and don't want these things streaming video of my comings and goings to Amazon.
According to what I've read, I should be able to turn off cloud streaming and have the cameras instead stream to the sync module, which will store videos on a thumb drive. That's what I'd like to do, but without the cloud connection. Maybe I could set them up on a temporary wifi network and then remove their internet access again? But again, I don't have a smartphone. I'd have to borrow one.
In the meantime. I've decided to try reverse-engineering them to see if I can make them into something useful—and also just for the fun of it. I haven't succeeded, but I've made a little bit of progress, so I'm posting what I have in the hopes that someone else will be able to build on it.
I'll update if I learn more.