January 2019

There were 24 posts published in January 2019 (this is page 3 of 3).

Changing the language indicator from flags

My MX linux laptop was showing flags for the two languages that I need to write in. I don’t happen to like either of those flags, with all that they represent, and certainly don’t want to have to stare at them all day long. And who says that languages should be represented by flags anyway? As if languages are so closely aligned with nations.

So I went to the trouble of creating new icons for these languages with just letters instead of flags. MX (or XFCE) needs an .svg formatted picture. It turns out that GIMP doesn’t do SVG. I had to export the pictures to .pngs, import them to Inkscape, then save them there as .svgs. In MX, the files are all in /usr/share/xfce4/xkb/flags/ so that’s where I placed them. But then, nothing happened. I logged out, logged in, restarted the computer, but the flags were still there. Hmmm. Then I discovered that my machine isn’t using XFCE’s keyboard input switcher at all, but one called “fbxkb”, from an earlier linux installation. The flags there were in /usr/share/fbxkb/images/ but in .png format – so fortunately I already had the files ready. Now I don’t have to look at those nasty flags anymore.

Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure

https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure (PDF download)

Our modern society runs on software. But the tools we use to build software are buckling under increased demand.

Nearly all software today relies on free, public code, written and maintained by communities of developers and other talent. This code can be used by anyone—from companies to individuals—to write their own software. Shared, public code makes up the digital infrastructure of our society today.

Everybody relies on shared code to write software, including Fortune 500 companies, government, major software companies and startups. In a world driven by technology, we are putting increased demand on those who maintain our digital infrastructure. Yet because these communities are not highly visible, the rest of the world has been slow to notice.

Just like physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure needs regular upkeep and maintenance. But financial support for digital infrastructure is much harder to come by.

In the face of unprecedented demand, the costs of not supporting our digital infrastructure are numerous. No individual company or organization is incentivized to address the public good problem alone. In order to support our digital infrastructure, we must find ways to work together.

Sustaining our digital infrastructure is a new topic for many, and the challenges are not well understood. In this report, Nadia Eghbal unpacks the unique challenges facing digital infrastructure, and how we might work together to address them.

time and the other

If time itself is an illusion, what is the numeration of years? Illusion or not, it was jet lag that kept me awake last night thinking about life, and not a concern for new year’s resolutions. Yet I decided three things:

  1. There must be progress towards embracing the underlying unity.
  2. How to correct the fallacy in perception that causes us to see a world of objects with ourselves as subject… the fallacy that has plagued our civilization from the beginning and has now grown to be of critical importance with our destruction of the biosphere? It’s hard to go from our normal insensitive and self-centered everyday behaviour towards this rational realization. Probably the way goes through the practical means of reducing our exploitation of people, animals or the earth itself for our selfish wants. It involves living with the bare necessary to sustain our existence, care in sourcing the products we use, love for those around us and sensitivity in our interaction with the earth and the creatures and humans with which we share it. The Biblical injunction ואהבת לרעך כמוך (love your companion as yourself) sounds preachy only as long as we insist on the unnatural separation of self from other, forgetting the underlying unity.
  3. Work must be done henceforth in a spirit of non-doing, without pressure or effort.
    I don’t know what will come, but from now on, I will work in this way. The hours spent may be long, and I don’t live for enjoyment, but the work will be achieved without pressure or sense of effort. This is the way I work best; or rather this is the best way that work is achieved through me.
  4. Entertainment is of no more use
    We become so addicted to activity that when there is nothing to do, we feel a need to fill all available time with something else. The silence between activities is there to be enjoyed. Rather than “killing time”, or filling time, why not just enjoy it by simply being?