Like every year, I've just renewed my support for Software Freedom Conservancy.

The victims people at Conservancy are doing the hard and/or boring work of dealing with lawyers, accountants and other undeads so that we hackers don't have to, and this alone should be enough to earn our support.

btw, there are still a few days, until january 15th, to have your donations count twice thanks to a matching donation.

My new backpack!

I started this project in august (pattern and material list) / september (actual sewing) and finally, this evening, it is usable!

It wasn't the only project running (not even the only *sewing* project), but still it took enough time that I'm glad I can finally use it, even if right now it doesn't really have any real advantage over what I could have bought from any store for less money than I spent on materials (but I have many leftovers — and plans to use at least part of them)

It also was pretty challenging, both for my skills and for my home sewing machine, and there are a few things that could have been done better (and maybe they will, in the next backpack I'll make?)

But is it really done? No, that webbing in the front (and sides) is there to attach extensions, and I have at least a couple planned (one easy, that I will do soon, and another complex one that will wait until I've recovered from the project fatigue with something completely different).

I'm also still waiting for the buckles that will close the compression straps in the front (not that they are really needed now that there are no extensions to keep compressed), but they are details I can take care of later.

P.S. I took pictures and notes, and the pattern is already on git, but a full tutorial will have to wait, probably even months, as now I have a bit of sewing backlog.

In one of the comments (near the bottom) on tacticalintelligence.net/blog/… there was a suggestion to alternate the direction of the loops to prevent the paracord from twisting badly.

This is the process and the result:

(making a full belt with 20m of paracord took about a day of picking it up, doing a couple of rows while in front of the computer and putting it down again)

I'm stuck home instead of being able to go to DebConf, but that doesn't mean that Debian Day will be left uncelebrated!

Since many of the locals are away for the holidays, we of @Gruppo Linux Como and @LIFO aren't going to organize a full day of celebrations, but at the very least we are meeting for a dinner in Varese, at some restaurant that will be open on that date.

Everybody is welcome: to join us please add your name (nickname or identifier of any kind, as long as it fits in the box) on dudle.inf.tu-dresden.de/debday… before thursday, August 10th, so that we can
get a reservation at the restaurant.

NSFW, if by "not safe" you mean "you will waste your day on it and risk losing your job"

I didn't know that there was a fork of tvtropes, with a Free license (as opposed to the NC one that tvtropes has moved to):

allthetropes.org/wiki/All_The_…

I'm not sure if I want to keep an eye on it or if I should *stay*away*from*THAT* just like the original one.

A piecepack set of generic board game pieces is nice to have around in case of a sudden spontaneous need of gaming, but carrying my full set takes some room, and is not going to fit in my daily bag.

I've been thinking for a while that an half-size set could be useful, and between yesterday and today I've actually managed to do the first version.

It's (2d) printed on both sides of a single sheet of heavy paper, laminated and then cut, comes with both the basic suites and the playing card expansion and fits in a mint tin divided by origami boxes.

It's just version 0.1 because there are a few issues: first of all I'm not happy with the manual way I used to draw the page: ideally it would have been programmatically generated from the same svg files as the 3d piecepack (with the ability to generate other expansions), but apparently reading paths from an svg and writing it in another svg is not supported in an easy way by the libraries I could find, and looking for it was starting to take much more time than just doing it by hand.

I also still have to assemble the dice; in the picture above I'm just using the ones from the 3d-printed set, but they are a bit too big and only four of them fit in the mint tin. I already have the faces printed, so this is going to be fixed in the next few days.

Source files are available in the same git repository as the 3d-printable piecepack, with the big limitation mentioned above; updates will also be pushed there, just don't hold your breath for it :)

Andfrnd Uploader Beta

URI: content://media/external/images/media/140849
File name: /storage/emulated/0/DCIM/Camera/OpenIMG_20170528_150023.jpg

I think this is a good time to remind the Free Software World, especially the part of it based on a certain programming language¹, of the existence of this Debconf Talk (textual, not (too) titillating discussion of N S F W topics).

¹ one that is not my programming language, but even that programming language is ok if used on your own server with a consenting sysadmin.

When I set up my XMPP server, a friend of mine asked if I was willing to have a virtualhost with his domain on my server, using the same address as the email.

Setting up prosody and the SRV record on the DNS was quite easy, but then we stumbled on the issue of certificates: of course we would like to use letsencrypt, but as far as we know that means that we would have to setup something custom so that the certificate gets renewed on his server and then sent to mine, and that looks more of a hassle than just him setting up his own prosody/ejabberd on his server.

So I was wondering: dear lazyweb, did any of you have the same issue and already came up with a solution that is easy to implement and trivial to maintain that we missed?

From the answer to the last question on fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event…

# this_was_too_epic_not_to_do_this
# what_do_you_mean_this_is_not_tumblr?
# of_course_it's_not,_this_is_federated!
# also_my_screncapping_skills_are_not_tumblr_grade

And, for a person I know who complains about screencaps, this is the transcript:

but remember the GPL was designed to defend your freedom
and the conversation you're actually having is
how much freedom can we take away, please tell us!
and we say "you are not allowed to take away any freedom"
but can we take away a little bit of freedom?
well you have to ask a lawyer
why should we have to ask a lawyer how much freedom we can take away?
you should tell us how much we can oppress you
don't fall in that trap