Decentralisation begins at decentring yourself

My talk at the Department of Art & Media Technology, University of Southampton, on Wednesday, February 16th, 2022. This morning, I was invited to gave a talk at the Department of Art & Media Technology, University of Southampton. I was invited...

Détestons Facebook, mais pour de bonnes raisons…

Même si Facebook Meta s'est efforcé de démentir rapidement, la nouvelle a eu le temps de recueillir un beau succès : ne serait-ce qu'envisager de priver l'Europe de Facebook et Instagram a semblé une si plaisante perspective que beaucoup sur les...

Everyone Hates Facebook (but this is more than just about Facebook)

“And my timelines lit up in a rare unity, the left and right, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, all pleading and nodding and saying, yes, yes please, please do that.” - Adam Dalliance Well, it’s official, everybody hates...

NodeKit Update

NodeKit gets its own command and instant server start times.

The web0 manifesto

The web0 manifesto is a short and sweet middle finger to web3.

The Three Laws of Personal Devices

The Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights states that we extend our selves using digital and networked technologies and that this extended self must be protected under human rights law. As the primary means by which we extend ourselves today are...

Saying goodbye to an old friend

Our tracker blocker for iOS and macOS, Better, was poisoned by a rotten apple and died.

Comet

figcaption { margin-top: -3em; margin-bottom: 2em; } Comet. Wallpaper illustation by Margo de Weerdt After several months of work, Comet version 1.0 is now available to install on elementary OS 6. Comet is one of the artefacts from my...

Ireland’s two-tier health insurance system

Only large corporations/US Big Tech firms can get waiting periods and pre-existing conditions waived.

GDMR: this one simple regulation could end surveillance capitalism in the EU

GDMR: The regulation EU citizens deserve. No, you didn’t misread it and, no, it’s not a typo. GDMR – the General Data Minimisation Regulation – can end surveillance capitalism in the EU. The problem is that no such regulation exists. So, let’s...

The magic one-line ImageMagick 7 AppImage installer

To install ImageMagick 7 on any distribution that supports AppImage, copy and paste this one-line script into your favourite shell: bash -lic "wget -O /tmp/magick https://download.imagemagick.org/ImageMagick/download/binaries/magick && chmod +x...

How to apply a chroma key using ImageMagick

Learn how to apply a chroma key that maintains transparencies/soft edges without colour spill using ImageMagick.

My three-month-long elementary OS 6 upgrade adventure in three parts. (Part 1: Catts)

The first of three projects that came out of my “upgrading” to elementary OS 6 was Catts (Calmer Alt-Tab Task Switcher).

How to count Unicode glyphs in Vala using Gtk

Want to try something really scary this Halloween? Try counting the characters in a string in Vala. For example, how many characters do you think there are in the following string? var zombie = "🧟‍♀️️"; One? You’re right! So how would you go about...

How to change the colour of the underline in gspell

It’s not as easy as you might think. In fact, it’s actually pretty hard.

How to disable Gtk-Message warnings in your app

One does not simply disable a Gtk+ warning.

Aral Balkan (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)

Mozilla isn’t an ally. Mozilla is Big Tech. Mozilla is Big Web. #SmallTech #SmallWeb

Implementing dark mode in a handful of lines of CSS with CSS filters

I finally got round to implementing dark mode for this site (the cobbler’s children have no shoes and all that…) Here’s all the CSS I had to add: @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { /* Invert all elements on the body while attempting to not...

Omnibus GitLab Let’s Encrypt renewal error and fix

Documenting it here in hopes it might help somebody else (e.g., future me) ;)

Key Mapper: a visual tool for remapping keys (and more) on Linux

Remapping keys on Linux has never been easier.