Michel Salim @michel_slm@floss.social

#couchsurfing is now charging $2.39 per month or $14.29 per year for those in 'developed' countries.

They're claiming that the pandemic has forced this upon them...

https://blog.couchsurfing.com/couchsurfing-needs-your-help/

... nothing to do with the $22.6M venture capital then, I guess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchSurfing#Change_to_a_for-profit_corporation_and_financing_(2011)

#trustroots is community developed, free and open-source https://www.trustroots.org/ See you there!

Alright, we all know Microsoft now owns #github and that they have a pretty dismal track record towards FLOSS.

I want to add that #gitlab (as in Gitlab.com/Gitlab EE) now has over $400M venture capital in it, from Golman Sachs, Google, etc.

https://ain.ua/en/2019/09/18/gitlab-raises-268-million/

Let's not kid ourselves on that gitlab is an alternative. It's just a matter of time before they're going to start extracting wealth from their users somehow.

"This was a mistake. We had imagined that the textual representation would be used for remote comparisons and the QR code for local (in person) comparisons, but some users found it easier to send a screenshot of both formats via a public forum like Twitter, unknowingly publishing the phone numbers embedded in the QR code."
https://signal.org/blog/safety-number-updates/

So, Signal apologists, remind me how forcing users to associate their phone number with their #Signal account isn't a privacy risk?

the fact that i can browse offline wikipedia on a palm OS sony clie (given the right memory stick) and not my kobo e-reader is really telling of how locked down e-readers are (and kobo is way better in this respect than the overwhelming US market leader, amazon)

I feel so sorry for what happened to Keivan and AppGet: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

His tool got squashed by Microsoft. Microsoft does not love open source, it wants to own it.

My thoughts:
https://yarmo.eu/blog/textbook-eee

New Blog Post: Book Review: The Mediocre Programmer

https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/book-review-the-mediocre-programmer

#100DaysToOffload

SpaceX will launch humans into space tomorrow at 4 PM EST, the first private manned spaceflight and the first launch of humans from the United States since 2011

MitchieM - ぶれないアイで feat. 初音ミク aka Hatsune Miku; performed at Magical Mirai 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2xQSAZ-lmk

If you look closely you'll see me in the third row 😉

It's been ten years since I used Windows, but there are a few things I miss about it.

Back in the day, over the course of six months to a year Windows would get gradually slower and slower until the system was completely unusable, at which point you'd do some rituals and it'd speed back up again. Defragging, clearing stuff out of the registry, that sort of thing.

The relief was like when you've got a bad cold and a nostril suddenly clicks open.

somebody: look at this amazing deal on music software

me: *cries in linux-using music hobbyist*

Green pivot: Canadian oil well drillers turn to geothermal market in effort to put rigs back to work.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-oil-workers-turn-to-geothermal-installations/

weenies: "tech workers don't need unions"
reality:

@tootbrute fortinet is doing a man-in-the-middle on your nextcloud connection. you need some way of tunneling out of your work network. wireguard, ssh tunnels, or sshuttle might work, since these are "weird hacker things" that "enterprise-level solutions" might not know how to handle.

Over 4 billion people are in lockdown right now, because of the pandemic. That's over half the population of Earth. In a way, this is a big experiment to see if we, as individuals, can make a significant difference to the CO2 levels in Earth's atmosphere.

Turns out, not really. CO2 emissions fell by up to 20% over the past month, but the real problem is systemic. It's industries and corporations who need to make the changes which will make any real difference.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-co2-isnt-falling-more-during-a-global-lockdown/

A few of us are working to restart the Tech Workers Coalition newsletter. We published our first issue yesterday: https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2020/05/01/issue-1/

As the issue says: "Learning about how we’re all connected and building relationships to make positive change across the industry is a slow but necessary process."

Join us!

My favorite thing on mastodon is when people are nice to each other just because it’s a nice thing to do

I’d like to apologize to literally every environment designer to ever work on a post-apocalyptic game. I was wrong and foolish to expect subtlety and I now understand that your cartoonish vision was completely realistic. I expect I’ll be seeing skulls in toilets any day now

Instagram removes ability to view posts unless you are logged in.

Another example of why open source alternatives are increasingly important!

#deleteInstagram #usePixelfed

In the next version we are replacing Stonehenge as wonder for the Gauls by the Sanctuary of Corent which is more fitting for the timeframe (500 A.D. - 1A.D) #creativecommons #history #blender