Today, we observe (deep breath, now) the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict, which I feel like I shouldn’t need to explain when it already has more than half a dozen of clarifying words in the name. I also apologize for the unfortunate (on so many levels) acronym.

Timber at Donnelly Mills, Australia

Anyway, I have projects…

Pebble

GitHub - jcolag/pebbleJohn's exported Pebble (T2) archive. Contribute to jcolag/pebble development by creating an account on GitHub.

As mentioned last week, Pebble opted to shut down, when they discovered that venture capitalists had no interest in funding a bland clone of early Twitter with no concrete plan beyond “probably do exactly what Twitter did” without a large audience to exploit and monetize, and that the audience for “probably do exactly what Twitter did” doesn’t really exist.

Anyway, on their way out, they offered a nicely packaged export of data. I don’t think that it has much historical value, but I have published my Pebble archive for anybody who wants to dig through it.

Some observations that might help make sense of it:

  • They inexplicably made certain things—users, dates, and so forth—look like links, even though the destinations no longer exist.
  • They inserted the time of the post in the HTML code, but didn’t bother to show it anywhere on the screen.

These issues have the effect of making the replies functionally useless. For example, you can see where I told someone off.

Alternatively, you’re uncomfortable with injuries to your political rhetoric. I won’t respond further, because I literally just posted five thousand words on the topic that gets at each of your arguments, which haven’t changed in decades.

However, without doing some serious digging—and I only have about eighty posts, total, so imagine how this might look for a more prolific user—you would never connect that with a response (which I believe moderators deleted, long before the site closure) sent to me about my post on affirmative action.

As I recall, that user tried to draw me into a “debate” by praising my thoroughness, then asking questions that I literally wrote the post to answer, sometimes almost word-for-word the hypothetical questions used in the post.

Oh, one other thing to note, which I may write up as a tech tip post at some point, after researching more: Because GitHub Pages originally assumed that everybody would use it to publish Jekyll-built blogs, when you publish a more conventional repository—like this Pebble archive—it does not publish any file or folder whose name begins with an underscore character, such as Jekyll’s _posts folder. To fix that behavior, I needed to add a file named .nojekyll to the repository.

Periodic Scripts

GitHub - jcolag/periodic-scriptsAn archive of daily (or similar) scripts that John uses to maintain processes - jcolag/periodic-scripts

While not a huge milestone, I updated my night-and-day-mode script to work with my new computer.

Probably most useful to someone else, it changes the GTK+ theme on the system, using gsettings.

It also toggles Redshift. I wish that more background-running applications had the decency to accept signals—or any sort of remote input—to change their states.

Ham Newsletter

GitHub - jcolag/ham-newsletterScripts to assemble my monthly newsletter. Contribute to jcolag/ham-newsletter development by creating an account on GitHub.

I could have lumped this into the library updates, below, but it took enough effort to figure out—if you noticed that the newsletter went out late on Saturday, this made up part of that delay—so a minor change gets its own section.

When running the scripts to put together the October newsletter—which you can still sign up to get “new” on Buy Me a Coffee, if you want to read it—my new browser bookmarks didn’t show up. Investigating, it looked like the move to the new laptop required reinstalling the libraries.

However, the better-sqlite3 library wouldn’t build for reasons that I couldn’t really follow in a random GitHub issue referencing the error. However, it did provide enough context to realize that the problem would probably go away by changing to the latest version of the library.

And maybe shockingly…it did the job. 🎉

Library Updates

I needed to bump library versions for Slackup, Renewal DB, and Uxuyu.

Next

I may try to de-Pebble-ify my Pebble repository, since I suppose that it might include some assets protected under their copyright, like the logo. I’d also like to get back to Notoboto and finish off that work, at some point. And I do still have more library updates waiting for me.

Credits: The header image is Timber Donnelly Mills 2005 by Sean McClean, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license.