Free software, coding and activism
Our home printer, an HP LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw, constantly broadcasts a wifi network called “HP-Setup>40-M281”. Why does it need to do that though? We only ever plug it in by USB. I tried every option I could find from the built-in screen on the printer to disable this …
Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools (2013) Great talk. I really connected with Tim's need for tangible, non-computing activities like woodworking — a passion I share. I'd wondered if this was all just nostalgia and romance, but Tim makes some really good points about the fundamental tradeoffs in automation. Prefer …
This OSError: write error issue has been frustrating me for years — ever since I began switching Python/Django web applications across from gunicorn to uWSGI Emperor. Up until recently, I didn't understand what caused these errors, whether they represented a problem worth solving, and if so how to deal with …
It's still early days for Guix 's guix deploy , but it may well be my server deployment tool of the future. I'm quite excited! guix deploy promises to simply and reliably drop predefined operating systems onto remote machines; including services, configuration, packages and data. In the past I've used Ansible …
SVG supports SMIL animation — no JavaScript or CSS SVG can use SMIL animation elements such as <animate> and <set> to create declarative animation/interactivity. This allows you to dynamically change attributes like position, opacity, fill and CSS class. These features seem very widely used, but would be handy for a …
Emily Ashley: 7 Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Place & Time Emily described how the human side of collecting and visualising time-based data is more complicated than you might think, highlighting issues like varying precision where some data might have a year only, or some might be ordinal where some event happened …
We've recently released MediaGoblin 0.11.0 ! The release ends our support for Python 2 and significantly simplifies the maintenance of the project. It also re-introduces audio spectrograms in addition to a handful of bug fixes. This is my second release in the maintainer seat after becoming a co-maintainer in …
[Updated 16 April 2020 with response from Catherine King MP and ATO. See bottom of this post.] I've just sent a letter to the Commissioner of Taxation about the rollout of MyGovID as the only way to log in to the ATO Business Portal. Here it is in case it …
(Spoiler) In short, it appears that you currently can't use OpenShift Online as a Kubernetes cluster for gitlab.com. I'd be happy to find out I'm wrong though. I don't want to learn how to administer a Kubernetes cluster right now. I want less infrastracture to manage, not more. With …
One particularly powerful aspect of Clojure is that it allows you to use Java features without actually writing any Java. And the best way to get my head around the Java interop features is to do a practical example; something like I'd do for work. And as far as examples …
Updated 21 September 2018 and 29 August 2019. See bottom of this post. I just received my GnuBee Personal Cloud 2 in the post. It's a device newly manufactured specifically to run completely free software, making in completely unique. The device is designed for network accessible storage, providing slots for …
I hate having to re-enter my email settings in a new or reinstalled device. Secure passwords are particularly painful to transcribe via a phone keyboard, but it's not just the basic settings. It's also those extras like signature, disabling notifications and folders that buy you if they're not right. I've …
Django 1.9 comes with a feature that enforces strong passwords. It's an excellent security feature, but password complexity is not what you want in development. Here's how to turn the feature off to allow simple passwords. It goes like this. You've created a new database, run the migrations and …
Today's project involves automatically uploading electrical metering data to an FTPS server (explicit FTP over TLS, otherwise knowns as ESFTP). Shouldn't be a problem, since Python supports FTPS out of the box. Only it doesn't work. Here's the code: import ftplib ftp = ftplib . FTP_TLS ( 'host' , 'user' , 'password' ) ftp . set_debuglevel ( 1 …
The water may be a little chilly, but to coincide with today's opening of the Brown Hill outdoor pool for the summer, we're launching the first page of the Brown Hill Community Hub website — a page about the pool. We've been getting more involved the local community over the past …
Today, AngularJS isn't doing what I expect. I've auto-generating a really long form in Django, and adding ng-model attributes so I can summarise the form. Unfortunately, Angular is overwriting my defaults. Here's a shortened example: < html > < head > </ head > < body > < form ng-app = "testApp" ng-controller = "TestCtrl" > < select name = "colour" ng-model = "colour" > < option …
"Bruised" is a little how I feel about my first experience porting a program to ClojureScript — configuring production builds has a few traps for newcomers. That said, I am very pleased with the results and excited to do more working with ClojureScript. My Dad is a soil conservation officer with …
At Sturm we build web apps that perform beautifully on both tiny mobile devices and huge desktop monitors. To achieve these, we use Nginx to resize images on-the-fly. This approach was used in our recent Course Finder project with Federation University. The Nginx web server comes with a handy image …
It was wonderful to see an outpouring of support for Conservancy last week at LCA 2016 . A number of speakers highlighted Conservancy during their talks, Bradley Kuhn gave a talk about GPL compliance , we held a Supporter lunch (photo below), and both the conference organisers and the new Linux Australia …
I'm very excited to be speaking about GNU MediaGoblin this Friday 5 February at linux.conf.au in Geelong, Australia. MediaGoblin is a media publishing tool for artists. I began using MediaGoblin nearly four years ago as a way to share photos of our new baby with our family and …
I just ran into a strange situation where grunt build on a Yeoman Angular project was hanging at the following step: $ grunt build ⋮ Running "ngtemplates:dist" (ngtemplates) task The cause turned out to be an extra double quote symbol in one of the HTML view templates: < form method = "get" action …
I love that Emacs notices merge conflicts in Bazaar versioned files, highlighting the differences in green and pink. It's a small thing, but I really miss this automation for when working with Git — I have to manually type M-x smerge-mode . The feature works by looking for conflict files and markers …
A few years back, only the legal and computing industry understood the dangers of software patents. Today I was amazed watch John Oliver's detailed and hilarious treatment of the subject on Last Week Tonight (YouTube). The narrator summed up our concerns beautifully: In the last decade, the number of software …
I've recently returned from LibrePlanet 2015 where I presented a workshop called Rock Your Emacs . The workshop is designed to help Emacs users over the initial barriers to writing their own customisations with Lisp code. While we're waiting for official videos to be published, here's the video, slides and exercises …
There’s just one minor annoyance with my new LibreBoot Thinkpad X60 from GLUGLUG . Working it hard causes it to overheat and shut down. Thankfully, the fan turns out to have much more capability than the defaults allow; all but solving this problem. In Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0, the …
The recent resounding defeat of ACTA in the European Parliament has given me a lot of hope. Many citizens took the time to contact members of parliament and this seems to have made all the difference. I hope that Australian can also reject this harmful agreement. That won’t happen …
*The following is a letter written to Choice , the leading Australian consumer advocacy organisation. I urge Choice to speak out against products like the Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. They use Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology to restrict your basic freedoms. The Kindle uses DRM technology to give Amazon full …