Yesterday I had been reading yet another late Victorian tailoring manual, and this morning I was telling @Diego Roversi about the part when the author claims that there are some measurements that would be useful do draft certain garments, but a (male, of course) tailor can't take them on a female customer, and there are ways to guess them. But at least in one case, he suggested doing the obvious thing, and just ask the customer to have her husband or maid take the measure.
And I commented that everybody who was buying cycling or riding trousers from a tailor was living with a husband, or a mother, or a sister, beside having a maid.
Unless she was unmarried, and only had brothers, and her mother had died (while giving birth, of course) and she was running her father's house because he had not remarried yet.
Or even, she was unmarried, only had brothers, she was running her father's house because he didn't want to remarry and she was quite happy with the situation because she didn't want to marry herself but wanted to keep living with that very close friend (but just a friend!) who had been living in their house for quite some time now. But then, her not-a-lover could very well take her inseam measurements.
Things escalate quickly, right?
@Vi 💙 and now I need to read the steamy romance short story involving those two and the inseam measurement.
for
reasons
scientific reasons
purely scientific reasons
Roll Top Backpack, Handsewn
Posted on July 25, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear
I might be slightly insane? Or am I going to prove something about the nature and accessibility of sewing and MYOG1 as a hobby?
I love my modular backpack, but it has a very modern look that is maybe not the best thing when otherwise dressed in historybounding dress, and it’s also a bit bigger than I planned or needed it to be.
So, when one of the shops I buy from had some waterproof cotton canvas on sale I failed my saving throw against temptations and bought a few meters, with the intent to make myself a backpack in a different style.
It needs to be a backpack, because my back doesn’t like asymmetrical bags2, and as far as I know 19th century backpacks weren’t the most comfortable things, so I decided to go for a vaguely timeless roll top model that has the added advantage not to require a lot of hardware for the closure, just a few D-rings.
Leather straps would look cool, but also require some tools that I still don’t have, so I decided to look for some cotton webbing, and when I finally found some in 25 mm and 50 mm width I could finally start on the project.
Except for one thing: thread. As much as I believe that regular n°50 cotton thread got a bad reputation from sellers who decided to cut quality in favour of profit, it is not up to the task of sewing a backpack. Nor that I’d use regular sew-all poly thread either.
I do have some of the thread I used for my other backpack, which would have been strong enough, but it’s also in black, which isn’t exactly the look I was aiming for on the natural / ecru colour of both the canvas and the webbing. I also misremembered it as only being available in that colour (it isn’t), so I wasn’t tempted into doing a full online order of technical materials just for that.
On the other hand, I did have in my stash some strong thread I could trust for this job, in natural / ecru. There was only one problem: it was 33×2 Tex linen, and not suitable for the sewing machine. You can’t handsew a backpack.
Or can you? Of course it’s going to be much slower, but I’m still in a situation where I have more time and space for handsewing than I have for machine sewing. And as for strength, my perception is that for the same stitch length an handsewn backstitch is stronger than a machine lockstitch, or at least it is more effort to unpick (and thus harder to accidentally unravel if the thread breaks).
And so I tried.
And it worked.
Having to backstitch everything instead of being able to use a running backstitch of course meant that it was slower than other sewing projects, and any time there were more than two layers of fabric I had to use the stabbing motion rather than the sewing one, which is even slower, but other than a few places with many layers of both fabric and webbing it wasn’t hard.
And to be fair, the seams were fewer and shorter than other sewing projects, and with the usual interruptions and uneven time availability it was done in less than a month, which is somewhat typical for one of my handsewn projects.
It may have been because of the pattern, but I think it’s relevant that it was also easier than other backpacks I’ve made, with significantly less cursing, even when doing seams that would have been quite fiddly when sewn by machine.
I have to admit that now I’m tempted to plan another backpack using the same pattern or a slight variation, sewn by machine in a different fabric, to see the difference in the time it takes and to check if the changes I think would make it easier to sew by machine are actually the right thing to do. But maybe I’ll wait a bit, other projects are in the queue.
The pattern is as usual online, released as #FreeSoftWear.
Having used it for a while, I have to say that it is just the right size to fit all the things I usually carry,
The fact that it only opens from the top means that finding things that have fallen to the very bottom involves a bit of rummaging, but not having to change a zipper every few years when (not if) it breaks is also very nice, so I’m not sure which shape of backpack I prefer.
The soft back of course is an issue when the backpack is filled with small items, but the molle webbing is there exactly because I have plans to solve it, beside the trivial “put something flat towards the back”.
As an object, I’m happy with the result. As a project, it was way more than successful, exceeding all expectations, especially for something somewhat experimental like this one was.
- Make Your Own Gear, i.e. sewing or otherwise constructing outdoorish equipment.↩︎
- at least not if I fill them with stuff as I usually do with my backpack :D↩︎
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You can’t handsew a backpack.
Or can you?
Look at leather sewing and the tools they use.
Thanks @Elena ``of Valhalla'' - I love reading about sewing by hand.
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working on #confy while attending #guadec2025 :
Until now, schedule data was updated when opening a conference, if the cache was expired and the device was online. This means that if you keep confy opened and schedule changes, you'll never get any update.
Latest code update automatically the current open conference schedule when cache expires (if online)... thinking about it, maybe there could be some sort of "diff" when something changes...
The update process now also should delete removed events from cache, hopefully (like the duplicated talks in that video...)
A small bug introduced recently that prevented to correctly open talk detail page from "next up" notification has been also fixed.
Meanwhile I was thinking that this thing needs a full rewrite on how data is stored. Right now every conferences gets its sqlite db in user's ".cache" folder. The db store schedule data and user stared talks. This means that if you clear cache, you lose you stars.
This data should be saved in another place, be another db in ".local/state" or maybe in dconf... 🤔
/me, this morning:
and they are going to close the underground between Cadorna and Garibaldi. the stations, not the generals.
and now I'm thinking about a machine that turns a proverbially bad general into a competent and ideals-led one.
(note for people who will be in Milan next month: check the actual closures, that was just the bit of interest to me, but there will be disruptions everywhere)
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@Xab ecco, non ho visto se han chiuso qualcosa anche su quelle linee
ma tutto sommato Como - Milano a piedi non è così lunga, dovrebbero essere un paio di giorni, no? :D
(OSM mi dice 47 ore per fare Como - Genova, 26 per fare Como - Pavia e 14 ore per fare Como - Milano; soprattutto per la tratta Pavia - Genova non ho idea se tenga conto delle pendenze però)
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Things I Have Learnt At DebConf
Posted on July 24, 2025
Tags: madeof:bits
An unsorted list, including some I already knew, but was reminded of.
dpkg-mergechangelogsexists.- Sewing your own shirt, posting it on planet and wearing it on the first day of DebConf, is more effective than a badge for making people recognise you.
- I need to look into a number of tools for testings things (and try to start using some of those at $DAYJOB).
- Masks are good. masks protect you from debbugs. masks protect you from ring cameras in the hotel you’re staying on the day after debconf.
- It’s really nice to be chatting of random topics during lunch and discover that you are talking to the maintainer of a package of which you are one of the very few users! (the latter bit needs to be changed :) ).
- I need to look into sequoia and all of the modern OpenPGP stuff.
- Even if I don’t have a lot of money, apparently I have even less sense (there will be blog posts on the topic in the mid-term future).
- I can go to a talk about AIand not hate the speaker (yeah, the bar is pretty low there :D ). The automatic subtitles still failed in the same way as automatic subtitles always fail.
- Debian gets used in really cool places.
- At times it is a bit — or a lot — dysfunctional, but Debian still feels like a family.
And I still haven’t watched the recordings of those talks that I couldn’t (or decided not to, because the hallway track was more interesting) attend.
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/me, a person with an EU phone, currently in the EU, but living near the Swiss border> WHY is internet not working on this phone? we are in the EU!
/me, a day later, checks the mobile settings
Data Roaming. off.
sometimes, when things don't work it's not the #PinePhone's fault (actually, most of the time with internet not working it isn't, it's me not having remembered to pay for it)
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FreeSoftWear
Posted on July 18, 2025
Tags: madeof:bits, topic:debian, FreeSoftWear
There may have been a lightning talk.
Things similar to the rest of this article may have been said.
I think that most people in this room care about running Freely licensed software on their computers.
Some probably would also like, when possible, to use Freely licensed hardware, or to enjoy Freely licensed art.
And then there are very few people who decided that they’d prefer to wear DFSG-Free clothing.
If you make your own, it’s not that different from software: you get a pattern, the source code, and compilation instructions. The compilation process is a bit manual, but there are a lot of people who enjoy that.
It doesn’t have to be sewing, it can be knitting, crochet, any craft that can be used to build something that you wear and has patterns or other kinds of source code. I’d say that a certain tartan also qualifies.
If you’re interested in the idea, these are the places I know of that do FreeSoftWear: two are personal websites, included mine, freesewing is a community and an online platform to design patterns.
And debian has some useful software, including valentina, for sewing patterns, and kxstitch for cross-stitch and other counted thread embroidery.
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Federated instant messaging, 100% debianized
Posted on July 15, 2025
Tags: madeof:bits, topic:xmpp, topic:debian
This is an approximation of what I told at my talk Federated instant messaging, 100% debianizedat DebConf 25, for people who prefer reading text. There will also be a video recording, as soon as it’s ready :) at the link above.
Communicating is a basic human need, and today some kind of computer-mediated communication is a requirement for most people, especially those in this room.
With everything that is happening, it’s now more important than ever that these means of communication aren’t controlled by entities that can’t be trusted, whether because they can stop providing the service at any given time or worse because they are going to abuse it in order to extract more profit.
If only there was a well established chat system based on some standard developed in an open way, with all of the features one expects from a chat system but federated so that one can choose between many different and independent providers, or even self-hosting.
But wait, it does exist!
I’m not talking about IRC, I’m talking about XMPP!
While it has been around since the last millennium, it has not remained still, with hundred of XMPP Extension Protocols, or XEPs that have been developed to add all of the features that nobody in 1999 imagined we could need in Instant Messaging today, and more, such as IoT devices or even social networks.
There is a myth that this makes XMPP a mess of incompatible software, but there is an XEP for that: XEP-0479: XMPP Compliance Suites 2023, which is a list of XEPs that needs to be supported by Instant Messaging servers and clients, including mobile ones, and all of the recommended ones will mostly just work.
These include conversations.im on android, dino on linux, which also works pretty nicely on linux phones, gajim for a more fully featured option that includes the kitchen sink, profanity for text interface fanatics like me, and I’ve heard that monal works decently enough on the iThings.
One thing that sets XMPP apart from other federated protocols, is that it has already gone through the phase where everybody was on one verybig server, which then cut out federation, and we’ve learned from the experience. These days there are still a few places that cater to newcomers, like account.conversations.im/, snikket.org/(which also includes tools to make it easier to host your own instance) and quicksy.im/, but most people are actually on servers of a manageable size.
My strong recommendation is for community hosting: not just self-hosting for yourself, but finding a community you feel part of and trust, and share a server with them, whether managed by volunteers from the community itself, or by a paid provider.
If you are a Debian Developer, you already have one: you can go todb.debian.org/ , select “Change rtc password” to set your own password, wait an hour or so and you’re good to go, as described at the bottom of wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianSo….
A few years ago it had remained a bit behind, but these days it’s managed by an active team, and if you’re missing some features, or just want to know what’s happening with it, you can join their BoF on Friday afternoon (and also thank them for their work).
But for most people in this room, I’d also recommend finding a friend or two who can help as a backup, and run a server for your own families or community: as a certified lazy person who doesn’t like doing sysadmin jobs, I can guarantee it’s perfectly feasible, about in the same range of difficulty as running your own web server for a static site.
The two most popular servers for this, prosody and ejabberd, are well maintained in Debian, and these days there isn’t a lot more to do than installing them, telling them your hostname, setting up a few DNS entries, and then you mostly need to keep the machine updated and very little else.
After that, it’s just applying system security updates, upgrading everything every couple years (some configuration updates may be needed, but nothing major) and maybe helping some non-technical users, if you are hosting your non-technical friends (the kind who would need support on any other platform).
Question time (including IRC questions) included which server would be recommended for very few users (I use prosody and I’m very happy with it, but I believe ejabberd works also just fine), then somebody reminded me that I had forgotten to mention chatons.org/ , which lists free, ethical and decentralized services, including xmpp ones.
I was also asked a comparison with matrix, which does cover a very similar target as XMPP, but I am quite biased against it, and I’d prefer to talk well of my favourite platform than badly of its competitor.
museomils.it/inagibilita-dei-l…
NUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
INAGIBILITA' DEI LOCALI DEL MUSEO - M.I.L.S. - Museo Industrie Lavoro Saronnese
AVVISO DA LUNEDÌ 30 GIUGNO 2025 IL MILS (MUSEO DELLE INDUSTRIE E DEL LAVORO SARONNESE) NON SARÀ PIÙ VISITABILE.Museomils (M.I.L.S. - Museo Industrie Lavoro Saronnese)
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I was baking knäckebröt, I have a bag full of freselle and started to think, as one does, of empires
in southern Italy they have freselle, and they taste good. in Sweden they have crispbread, and it tastes good. The British had hardtack, and they had to keep conquering places to be able to eat.
and going back to the Roman empire, as one does, the Greeks had good bread, the Romans were quite good at the logistics of processing wheat on the march, but they were known for making bad bread.
and now the USA (other than some privileged parts of the population) have ultraprocessed bread.
I think that a pattern starts to form.
(this probably only applies to parts of the world that are wheat-based, rather than maize- or rice-based)
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stavo preparando del knäckebröt, ho un sacchetto pieno di freselle, e come di tanto in tanto succede mi son messa a pensare agli imperi
in sud Italia hanno le freselle, e sono buone. in Svezia hanno il knäckebröt, ed è buono. nell'impero britannico avevano le gallette, e dovevano continuare a conquistare nuovi posti per riuscire a mangiare.
il passaggio successivo, ovviamente, è l'impero romano, e all'epoca i greci avevano del pane buono, i romani erano efficienti nel lavorare il grano mentre erano in marcia, ma erano anche noti per non saper fare pane decente.
e adesso negli stati uniti (ad eccezione di qualche fascia priviliegiata della popolazione) hanno il pane industriale.
Inizio a vedere un pattern.
(probabilmente si applica solo alle parti del mondo basate sul grano e non sul mais o sul riso)
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My attempts to burn myself with hot (bees)wax failed!
Also, my attempts to melt beeswax in the solar oven were successful and much faster than I expected, and pouring it into an old ikea chocolates mold also seems to have worked (I'm waiting until it has completely cooled down before taking it out of the mold)
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it worked!
they came out of the mold pretty easily, they are a good size for waxing thread, and they look nicer than the crumbly lump worked together with my hands that I've been using for years :D
yes, it's dark, but I've been using this wax for ages even on white thread for sewing white fabric and I've never had discoloration problems. I hope I haven't just cursed myself :D
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@Bomkatt when sewing by hand I wax the thread by running it over a small lump of wax to help prevent breakages and make it easier to untangle any tangle. It's especially important with linen thread, but it also helps with cotton.
years ago I bought a lump of beeswax from a local honey seller, and I've always wanted to melt it into molds, but only actually found the time / had the equipment ready to do it today (I was procrastinating doing other things :D )
(they are also part of my “encouraging people to handsew” kit, and having them in a nice shape looks better than the shapeless thing I used to make)
(they won't remain good looking for long, but making them wasn't a big effort)
/me, avendo a che fare con la stampante> ma pérche?
/me> ma anche un po' perkele
(no, non parlo Finlandese, credo di conoscere tre parole in Finlandese e una è il nome di un cibo)
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Hypolite Petovan
in reply to Fabio • • •Fabio
in reply to Hypolite Petovan • •Hypolite Petovan likes this.
Fabio
in reply to Fabio • •Hypolite Petovan likes this.
Hypolite Petovan
in reply to Fabio • • •@Fabio
It is pretty handy tho.
Fabio
in reply to Hypolite Petovan • •I'm sure. Still I don't like it.
Hypolite Petovan likes this.
Fabio
in reply to Fabio • •@Hypolite Petovan
array_filter()gets the array by value, so no entries are "removed". you always get a new array.so why not just
$empty_array = [];?Hypolite Petovan
in reply to Fabio • • •Fabio
in reply to Hypolite Petovan • •Hypolite Petovan
in reply to Fabio • • •