“Thoughts” is (will be) a weekly roll-up of my mastodon feed with some notable thoughts collected into a long-form blog post. “Long form” is relative here, as I will only expand a little on some selected subjects, not write screens and screens of text on each of these subjects.

If you think I toot too much to follow, this is an alternative to follow some of my thoughts.

This week (2021-05-15 – 2021-05-21) I started thinking about hiking. Besides from that, not much happened, to be honest.

Hiking

I started (german) thinking about #hiking a lot more recently because I don't think the pandemic will end soon and even if it does (it won't, srsly!), I cannot go on vacation anyways because my prefered way would be with a camper and I do not (yet) own one, plus, prices are high up in the sky, so I cannot afford one either. So the idea of hiking a lot more came up and I started planning hikes around my hometown and nearby (southern Germany).

I also started thinking about multi-day hikes (3 to 10 days) and am currently thinking whether this would be a plan for the next (approx.) two years, to be able to do the NST (german) in 2023 over the course of 6 months.

I'm not particularly fit at the moment, but a 15-20km hike with a light backpack is nothing I am scared of, so I guess that's a good start for training. Still, having approximately 1.5 years for training shouldn't be a bad idea. Starting slow with lower two-figure-km hikes and going up to 25 or even 30km, adding more and more baggage along the way, including (of course) a tent and sleeping bag, to be able to do multi-day hikes. Also, some of the gear has to be bought, of course.

Maybe this develops into a real plan.

Logging with rsyslog

Another thing I thought a lot about is how to log from several services (distributed over a network) to one central place, in one file per process. A friend suggested #rsyslog and I was investigating the possibilities with that. It certainly can do what I want.

For my particular problem, rsyslog would suffice. Still, I was able to solve it even less complicated, without the need for an additional service.

Per-Process Resource restriction

I also messed around with the idea of restricting resources per process on my notebook. The idea came up because of high RAM usage of #firefox and dolphin, slowing down other things. Putting these two into a resource-restricted environment, only giving them access to 16 GB RAM maximum for example, could solve that minor inconvenience (I have 32GB installed in the device).

IRC

After freenode vanishing from the face of the earth, I think the time of IRC is finally over.

The time of #irc is over. Join #matrix now!

(toot)

I'm not saying that there won't be #IRC channels anymore, but #freenode was the one big network in IRC-land. The takeover was no surprise but a question of “when” instead of “if”.

Still, alternatives exist today and I promote Matrix because I think it is a good thing. Don't tell me it is bloated, don't tell me it is slow, don't tell me the clients suck (go write one that fits your needs, instead of bragging about these things), don't tell me what I know (or what I have experience with that differs from your claims)!

Matrix is here today, has advantages over other communication protocols and works.

After a short research I descided to use sopel.

Setting up sopel was a pleasure, actually. I executed

pip3.4 install sopel --user
sopel

to install sopel and start it. It then starts an interactive configuration walkthrough and you can configure all the parts.

I then edited the config by hand to exclude most of the available modules:

[core]
enable = help,calc,countdown,isup,tell,uptime,meetbot,clock

and then started it as daemon via sopel -d. That's it? Yes, that's it!

tags: #chat #irc #network #open source #software #tools

Here is why I love mailinglists

I get a lot mail. About 1k mails per day, whereas most of them are mailinglists. Actually, the most of them are from the linux kernel mailinglist and I automatically drop them into a folder where I do not look at that often. But when I need to, I can.

But that's not the point of this post, actually. This post is about why I love mailinglists and think mailinglists are a better way of communication compared to, for example, the IRC chat.

When writing in IRC, you have to type quickly, depending on how many people are in the room and talking at this moment. You can hold discussions with several other people, but as soon as several people talk at the same moment but about different topics, things get nasty. That's not the case on a mailing list.

A discussion often starts with a question, a suggestion or maybe an announcement. Then, people comment on it, the discussion beginns. Because mails are persistent in a way chats will never be, one can talk his time to formulate a response. Discussions are seperated in subthreads, which is way more convenient than talking in IRC, getting from one point to another but never beeing focused on the discussion as one discussion but a chain of.

Also, on mailing lists one can focus on single points others make in their statements by quoting them in a really convenient manner. One can remove parts of the statements of others when replying, which forces everyone to focus on the actual points and not the stuff around it, which may be relevant, but often is not. When people talk over a mailinglist, you can read that afterwards to get a clue what is going on. I often search mailinglists for solutions of my problems rather than wikis or something, where problems are generalized and often do not match with my actual problems.

And, of course, if a mailinglist is open, one can post to it without beeing subscribed, which is really a good thing if you want to solve a problem which occours once but never again. Example: I try to configure my mail client at the moment, my offlineimap configuration, actually. I had several issues (related to eachother, of course), so I posted on the mailinglist for offlineimap, where people help me. After the problem is solved (it is not by now...) I will forget this mailinglist again, as I'm not subscribed to it. I don't care afterwards about offlineimap, because it should just work for me and that's it.

So, these are my points why mailinglists are a great tool for getting problems solved, doing discussions and the like. Please note that I do not think the IRC should be abandoned in favour of mailinglists. I love writing with people in IRC, too. But for solving problems, mailinglists are way better for me.

tags: #mail #mailinglists #social #irc #chat

irc_dump.sh (the repo) / ircdump (the script-call) is a short shell script which dumps your text in all joined irc channels you previously joined. It uses ii as irc tool.

If you want to paste something, you just invoke it:

ircdump I like trains

and it dumps the text directly into all available IRC channels. Of course, you must do some setup right before!

You have to use ii to create/join the appropriate channels. You should create them at /tmp/ircdump or set the appropriate path right in the script. Once you connected to a server and joined the appropriate channels, the script does everything else for you. Note that it doesn't paste to the server channel, just to the channels you joined.

Use it with care! You will paste to _all IRC channels you joined with ii.

People gonna hate you!

Update: There is now a repo at my github account which contains utils when dealing with ii: irctools.sh.

tags: #programming #chat #irc #shell