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I came across an interesting Reuters report from July 9, 2024, titled: How Hezbollah used pagers and couriers to counter Israel’s high tech surveillance (headline has shifted over last few weeks). I quote from the article:

Cell phones, which can be used to track a user’s location, have been banned from the battlefield in favour of more old-fashioned communication means, including pagers and couriers who deliver verbal messages in person, two of the sources said.
Sounds like checkmate to me. But the article left out one important detail: Where did Iran-Hezbollah get the pagers? Well, no way such a minor detail could be too important.

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My writing setup by James (jamesg.blog)
At this week’s Homebrew Website Club, I asked everyone what tools they use for writing. Participants shared a range of tools, from BBEdit, a text editor for macOS, to “Written? Kitten!”, a web-based text editor that shows a photo of a cat after you have written a certain number of words. Delig...

Back in December I bookmarked a post on James Coffee Blog titled “My Writing Setup.” The post outlines one writing set-up and invites people to share their own via webmention. My writing set-up for full articles over at The New Leaf Journal is similar to when I wrote about my writing workflow in December 2021. I draft my articles in markdown using Ghostwriter and then export them into LibreOffice Writer (as .odt files) for final edits and transfer to WordPress. Since the 2021 article, I have added Yoga Image Optimizer to my workflow for compressing images and now use Shotwell instead of Nomacs for basic image edits. On this more humble site, I usually use the WordPress editor (note I use the classic editor) here instead of drafting the posts externally. There are some ancillary components of my workflow. For example, why am I responding to a post from 10 months ago? At some point, I saved it in a folder I created in my Zotero library for future article ideas.

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From a report at the Daily Upside:

The entertainment tech company filed a patent application for a “reinforcement learning model for optimizing long term revenue.” Roku’s system essentially aims to get as much revenue as it can without ruining the user experience.

Roku: Let’s see how far we can take this. How does this system work?

This system monitors the “user state” — the content users are currently watching, as well as profile information such as demographics, tenure, and activeness on the platform — to “personalize user actions based on different tolerance of the advertisement.” Along with tracking this information, Roku’s tech also determines the “revenue value” associated with the user.

Roku’s patent is dishonest on one point. Its so called “users” are its products. Its actual users are its advertising partners. While I know that my approach will not work for everyone, I recommend disconnecting your “smart” TV from the internet and powering it with a privacy-friendly Linux PC. I personally have had good luck with an N100 Beelink mini PC from Amazon, but even an old laptop or something of the like will work. If you have a 4K-or-up display, I recommend going with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment for this use-case (GNOME is also a fair choice but I had more luck getting an aesthetic KDE set-up).

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I read a new AlternativeTo blog post about the re-design of the Reeder app. Reeder, I read, is a feed reader for iOS and MacOS. I am not personally familiar with it because I do not use Apple hardware and even if I did, I would not opt for a proprietary feed reader. The design of the app looks interesting, however. As far as I can gather, Reeder was originally a traditional feed reader (that experience is apparently still available), but the re-design turns it into a feed reader with a more social media stream aesthetic. I would not opt for that design for reasons similar to those I offered for not wanting to use feed readers to follow social streams, but I nevertheless think the idea may be good for feed usage in general. Using feeds is good (regardless of the app), and offering people an interface they are more familiar with than that of a traditional feed reader may help increase uptake.

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Putin Uses Mongolia to Mock the ICC by Elena Davlikanova (cepa.org)

Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia is his first to a member of the International Criminal Court. That’s not a coincidence.

I have read several articles about Russian President Vladimir Putin using a visit to Russia’s small, once-mighty, land-locked neighbor, Mongolia, to poke the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). Mongolia is an ICC member, but being a country of 3,000,000 people which is sandwiched between and largely dependent on Russia and China, it is hardly in a position to do what the ICC cannot, even if it were so inclined. One headline from CEPA caught my attention: Putin Uses Mongolia to Mock the ICC. My take: Wholly gratuitous move by Russia. The ICC is more than capable of making a mockery of itself without any acts of diplomatic aggression from the always self-aware Russian government.

(Aside: Many foreign policy commentators who are into concern trolling about the “global south’s” views of supporting Israel are oddly unconcerned about how the “global south” may view big, wealthy, powerful countries trying to pressure Mongolia into picking a fight with one of the two nuclear powers it shares a border with.)

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Thanking my RSS readers by Jeremy Herve (jeremy.hu)

Found a cool message on Kev’s blog about appreciating RSS readers, so I decided to add something similar to mine. This WordPress snippet displays a random welcome messages to all RSS readers.

I came across a fun idea on WordPress developer Jeremy Herve’s blog (I previously wrote about using one of his plugins) to include a welcome message with RSS feed items thanking subscribers. I decided to add a small thank you note to my feed footers using Jeff Starr’s Simple Custom Content plugin, which I already used to ensure that all feed items conclude with a link to the original and a copyright notice. I decided to make my thank you message focus primarily on thanking people for subscribing, but added a note that feeds are the best way to subscribe.

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I discovered a new use for the excellent Hum link shortener WordPress plugin (provides entirely local short-links). I have a BuddyPress activity stream on this site. While I do not know if this would be the case for every activity stream set-up, especially when used with themes designed with BuddyPress in mind, long URLs (or even regular-length URLs) do not look good in posts here. However, Hum-short URLs work well, so that makes it much easier to include links to new posts (or New Leaf Journal posts) in activities.

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I had been planning to use the Gwolle Guestbook plugin here (I cannot use it on The New Leaf Journal because it relies on JQuery, which I disable over there). However, I decided that it was too heavy for what will probably be a light use-case. Over on The New Leaf Journal, I had briefly tried a comments-based Guestbook with an open source spam blocklist. However, we did not get any legitimate entries in that Guestbook before I shuttered it on account of the fact that a small number of spam comments were  somehow showing up as published despite my requiring moderation in the WordPress settings. Wanting a Guestbook, I decided to give it a try on both sides while adding Antispam Bee, an entirely local anti-spam plugin, to my set-up. I also added a Block List Updater from the same developer to keep the open source-sourced blocklist up to date without my manual intervention. Finally, I use a plugin called Plugin Load Filter with allows me to explicitly limit Antispam Bee to specific pages. For example, this means that Antispam Bee only functions on the Guestbook page of The New Leaf Journal at the moment. We will see how it goes. But the way, while this site’s Guestbook looks solid (if I do so humbly submit myself), take a look at what I did on The New Leaf Journal side of things.

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I published The New Leaf Journal’s 999th and 1,000th articles back in May. However, not all of those articles were mine. I published a few articles under the New Leaf Journal Editors byline and my friend and colleague Victor V. Gurbo has a good selection of posts on a number of mostly (but not entirely) music subjects. Today, I finally hit publish on my own 1,000th article: A stream of consciousness from someone who played EA Sports games back in the 90s about EA pontificating about shoving ads into its upcoming AAA offerings. I take readers from my memories of NBA Live 98 for Sega Genesis to a story from visiting my high school classmate’s man cave (it was a legit man cave, big TV, leather sofa, sports memorabilia, et cetera) where I witnessed the birth of a new phrase inspired by a game of Madden.

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I read an interesting post that appeared on Hacker News page 1 about creating full text and full archive RSS feeds. One method in its toolbox is constructing feeds from Wayback Machine captures of the RSS feed. That idea never occurred to me. Out of curiosity, I looked at Wayback Archive captures of The New Leaf Journal’s main RSS feed. Our feed was captured for the first time on August 15, 2020 (notre I published our first article on April 27 of that year). Between then and now, it was captured 41 additional times, seemingly most consistently in 2022.

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Your Blog Should Have an About Page by Wouter Groeneveld (Brain Baking)
The site stats tell me that my about page at /about is consistently one of the most visited pages on this website. That confirms what everyone already knows: people are very curious, sometimes even nosy.

Wouter Groenveld opined on his personal blog (I recommend adding it to your feed collection) that blogs should have About pages. I submit for the record that I wholeheartedly agree (albeit my About pages have a different emphasis).

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Have you ever made a typo that wasn’t a typo (unlike a typo-typo)? I was tying “teamviewer” into my terminal (it’s for work, for the record). I attempted to hit “e” after “w” and nothing else. However, my finger slid off “e” and hit “r.” This worked out fine since I needed an “r” after the “e.” But it was a typo. I really meant to first it “e” and then “r.”

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I saw on Hacker News that a law firm leading a lawsuit against Google for purportedly misleading claims about Chrome’s “incognito mode” is looking for plaintiffs who, among other things, used Chrome’s incognito mode at any time between June 1, 2016, and December 1, 2023. While $5,000 would be nice (note I’m not following the suit so I do not know any of the particulars and am not interested in them), it couldn’t give me more satisfaction than noting that I am pretty sure I have not used Chrome on one of my computers in the June 2016-December 2023 time-frame. That’s right: I figured out Chrome was bad well before I switched to Linux in August 2020.

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I have a diceware program for the CLI. I usually use it to generate passwords. I sometimes use it to generate usernames. On this occasion, I asked it to come up with a two-word username and kept going until I found one I liked. It gave me “LukewarmPhoenix.” Now that one I like. But it’s too good for a username. Saving it for future reference. Who knew that diceware is actually an idea generator?

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I have gone through three systems for contact syncing since transitioning to an open source tech lifestyle with my switch to Linux in August 2020. I tried EteSync, Radicale-DecSync, and most recently, using Posteo for server-side address syncing. Today I changed approach, borrowing from the Radicale-DecSync idea, which involved Radicale running locally on my computers, the DecSync app, and Syncthing. I first removed Posteo Sync on my GrapheneOS-powered Google Pixel 6a and then exported the .vcf file to a folder in my “Sync” directory that I Sync to my devices with Syncthing. I deleted my contacts from Thunderbird and imported the .vcf. After some testing, I opted to use Fossify Contacts instead of GrapheneOS’s default AOSP-derived contacts manager because the import and export was more to my liking. I then made some changes on Thunderbird, exported the .vcf, and imported them into Fossify Contacts. It worked as expected. I will keep playing with this system and see how sustainable it is.