Holiday is on, and apart from relaxing with the family, I aim to look into a bunch of stuff before I'm back at the factory in January.

My Indieweb life is coming on well, thanks to Known, and the #indieweb community in London. I attended my first couple of Homebrew Website Club meetups in town in 2018, and although my contributions to the community so far is non-existant, I'm very glad to have met a handful of people to talk indieweb stuff with in person, on a regular basis. I've also logged onto the Indieweb slack/IRC channel where I'm a regular lurker.

One thing I'd like to do is, to import all the posts from my homegrown CMS into Known, so they get equipped with all the indieweb goodness which is part and parcel of Known. I've had comments turned off on my own CMS for years, because I gave up dealing with the deluge of spam coming in through the comments form. I'd like to have comments back. Known has an import feature which will let me import Wordpress RSS-feeds (which my old blog produces), so it should be possible. I did try a few weeks ago and wasn't successful, but I gather with a bit of tinkering I can make it work.

On the selfhosting front I'm very happy with my current inventory (bookmark service from Shaarli, Tiny Tiny RSS for reading feeds, dokuWiki for documenting/notes), but I also want to host more stuff. In particular, I'd like to try to run my own instance of Mattermost. With my current hosting provider, that option is a bit limited. As long as whatever service I want to selfhost has very standard requirements, such as PHP and MySQL, to run, then I'm fine. But I find that more and more of the things I would like to try to selfhost, requires a bit more, such as artisan, go, docker, and a bunch of other things that I either a) never heard of before or b), have heard of before, but have no clue about.

I will sign up for a month of VPS with one of the providers in the field, and try out a few things. It might be overkill, but then at least I'll know I'm in way over my head, and I can return to my shared hosting, and whatever that allows me to install.

Happy holidays (:

• Ad nauseam is a browser extension meant to click on all the ads that you come across when browsing the web. The philosophy behind it is, that if you click on all the ads that you come across, the advertising profile that will be built from this data, about you, is useless. You have no characteristics. You like everything. If that kind of stuff is interesting to you, you should read the article “Monkeywrenching the Machine”, it's about how you can make it harder for corporate AIs to mine your data. Both are relevant in this day and age. If you prefer something less reactive, you should install EFF's Privacy Badger in your browser. It minimises how much of your activity is trackable online, by blocking ads and trackers. You can also make some internet noise to confuse data collection algorithms.
• I recently spent 3 weeks in Costa Rica on vacation. Fascinating country, warm people, and exotic animals. The Costa Rican address system is also exotic. They don’t really have a formal one, as you do in a city like London. One guesthouse we stayed at had the address “200 meters past the intersection with the church, on a particular road, in this town.” Their address system typically uses recognisable landmarks, and navigates you from there via directions. It turns out that 4 billion people in the world, live without an address, and one company trying to tackle this is What 3 Words. They do this by putting a 3mx3m grid over the entire world, and give each square a unique name, which is a combination of 3 words. It’s genius. We should all use it, it’s even good enough for Switzerland! Surprisingly Awesome did an episode on postal addresses worth a listen if you find this interesting.
• More geography fun. The United States has 10 cities where the population is more than 1 million people. For China, that number is 102. I might know a handful of them. This helped me better understand exactly how populous China is, and how concentrated the population in the US is.

#stickylinks