Arindam Basu @arin_basu@mastodon.nzoss.nz

RT @ToolboxProApp@twitter.com

Toolbox Pro is now available to download for free! 🎉

More than 50 powerful new tools for Shortcuts.

📑 OCR
🌐 Global variables
📷 Image filtering
📡 NFC read + write

To celebrate the launch, I'll give 3 retweeters of this tweet premium later today ✨

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/toolbox-pro-for-shortcuts/id1476205977

I find it somewhat distressing that so many people are wringing their hands about the possible untrustworthiness of the Frightful 5 mega-tech-corps. No duh. They're fundamentally untrustworthy. It's a waste of time to even consider them capable of remediation. We need to cut them out. Yes. Abandon them. And luckily, because of a bunch of plucky #FOSS developers, it's both possible and (in my experience) quite delightful. Full story: https://davelane.nz/megacorps

For a few years I've been building up a list of notable books related to the #commons, mainly those that can be read on the web or downloaded without charge, and especially those licensed for free distribution license (eg #CC licenses):
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/notable-books/

I'm painfully aware this list is badly biased towards books by cis-het-white-men (like me), particularly as it goes back in time. Any suggestions for titles to add?

"A great many things stood in the way of a quick and 'orderly' transition from feudalism to capitalism, but especially the remarkable tenacity with which the rural peasants adhered to traditional agricultural practices and subsistence farming. Even when wages in the city were high, the peasants refused to accept factory jobs and stayed on their farms. They preferred a life full of holidays, not manufactured goods."
http://www.notbored.org/perelman.html

#ShowerThought imagine a hybrid blog/wiki platform where the primary author UI is a blog editor, but drafts are saved and versioned as wiki pages. The visitor UI would be a bit like #CoActivate.org, with separate sections for reading blog posts in published order, and for browsing through wiki pages. The wiki could also be private, allowing a trusted group to give feedback on drafts in progress, a la #Medium (do they still have that feature).

Sometimes, I'm just blown away by how helpful the #openSource community can be. I was trying to visualise spatial data in #rStats, fetching #OSM data and presenting it on a #tmap. One issue I was having with presenting multipolygons on an interactive map was given a workaround in less than 48 hours by the main tmap developer. Another issue I was having with acquiring OSM data was fixed with a commit (!) in less than an hour (!1!!) by one of the maintainers of osmdata. How good is that!!!?

Berkeley city council unanimously votes to ban facial recognition technology
https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/loss-of-face.html

My philosophically driven disdain and, well, visceral revulsion for the (proprietary) computing platforms and software titles used by most people is so great that I have rendered myself largely unemployable in my chosen industry. It's a tricky position. Luckily, I've found a great role with a non-profit foundation which shares my views...