Since Creative Commons updated their portfolio of licenses to version 4, I decided to revisit the license for this site and update my own license.

I used this handy "choose a license" page, though I kept the same license I had before -- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International-- just updating it from version 3 to 4.

As you can see from the image above, generated from my license-choosing preferences, the CC site tells my that the license I chose is not a "free culture license," because I'm not allowing unrestricted use of my work in commercial settings.

I'm not saying I won't revisit the issue in future, and there are plenty of things I am comfortable releasing for unmitigated commercial use by others. But on the whole, I'm sticking with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

I don't know if that has anything to do with my use of Unison to push and pull content from my server for Ode, but I've been seeing entries labeled comments instead of 0 Comments.

To that end, I'm posting this entry without the use of Unison to see what happens.

A minute later: I'm getting comments without the use of Unison, so it doesn't appear to have anything to do with file timestamps or permissions as affected by the file-synchronization utility I've been using for the past week or so.

A few more minutes later: Now my previous entry is showing as 0 Comments, so I am chalking this up to "stuff happening at Disqus."

Even more minutes later: Now this post carries 0 Comments. Consider this a false-alarm/something I previously did not notice in Disqus' interaction with Ode.

Fedora has great documentation. It's one of the many reasons that the Red Hat-sponsored community project's operating system is a compelling choice for your desktops, laptops and maybe even servers if you like to tinker.

The Power Management Guide caught my attention, and I used this part of the docs to install Tuned.

I'm not unhappy with the battery life of my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop. I get a whole lot more out of it than I did my previous Lenovo G555. But I'm always on the lookout for more optimization, and right now I'm focusing on the hard drive, which throws off more heat than I'd like (but not so much as to be a problem).

I installed tuned and made it run at startup.

There is an error in the F19 Power Management Guide in how to do that.

The correct command (run with rootly privileges) to make tuned start at boot is:

# systemctl enable tuned

The last two words are reversed in the docs. And yes, I did file a bug.

Korora is to Fedora as Ubuntu is to Debian. Got that?

That means Korora adds on all those helpful bits that a Fedora user just might want. Everything from multimedia codecs to Steam, Adobe Flash to VirtualBox -- you get it all in Korora, though most of it isn't terribly hard to add to "virgin" Fedora.

Just like Debian: There are plenty of things that ship in Ubuntu, but the halfway knowledgeable user with a little time on his/her hands can do most if not all of it on top of Debian.

But just like with Debian and Ubuntu, it's nice to have something like Korora to give us a complete out-of-the-box experience.

The only difference between Korora and Ubuntu? Nobody's ever heard of one of them.

Never mind that. In the next cycle, Korora is upping its game. The Korora 20 Beta builds are now available, and I'm happy to see that Xfce has been added to the list of available desktop ISOs, which already included GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon and MATE.

I'm downloading the Xfce and GNOME ISOs now, though what I'm really looking for is something with a 3.13 Linux kernel so I can put it through its paces on my still-needs-help-suspending AMD-running laptop.

My Fedora system has most of what is in Korora, though not Steam (don't care), Jockey (do care and WANT it) or VirtualBox (could be worth a play). But I've thought for a long time that Fedora needs its own Ubuntu/Mint, and Korora looks to be fulfilling that role very nicely.

MLED, aka the Microlinux Enterprise Desktop, is Frenchman Nicolas Kovacs' attempt to bring together various bits and pieces of the Slackware community, including Slackbuilds, slackpkg+ (which I confess I've never heard of until now) and more to create what he calls a "full-blown production desktop."

Yes, that includes multimedia codecs.

You get MLED by installing Slackware, then importing "tagfiles" (first time I've heard of this concept) and doing more than a bit of configuration, choosing KDE, Xfce or MATE along the way.

It's not as easy as a full-blown ISO but not as hard as finding all the bits on your own.

Kovacs talks about why MLED is based on Slackware here, and I agree with pretty much everything he says.

If you're looking for a long-term-support distribution with extremely conservative underpinnings, Slackware is a compelling choice, and it looks like MLED will get you from zero to desktop that much more quickly than assembling the bits on your own. I'd prefer this to be more automatic, but those are the Slackware-fueled breaks, I guess.

John Gruber's Markdown, the human-writable markup language that can be turned into HTML in many your favorite blogging applications, has now come to WordPress.com.

That's great news since Markdown will really help those of us who use WordPress get posts formatted that much more quickly. I hate using the formatting buttons that come with WordPress, and Markdown beats hand-coding HTML any day.

(Note: This is an Ode blog, and it uses Markdown.)

Now all we need is Markdown in self-hosted WordPress.org. Then we'll be cooking with gas. The thread that announced Markdown for .com sites says it will be eventually be part of Jetpack for .org installations.

Until then, WordPress people remind that there are many Markdown plugins available.

WP.com is also offering this quick reference page on its particular implementation of Markdown and a general Markdown support page.

I've been using Fedora Linux for the greater part of this year, starting with F18 and upgrading via Fedup to F19. For most of that time, I've used the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver as packaged by RPM Fusion instead of the open Radeon driver that ships by default with Fedora and most every other Linux distribution.

I'm not proud of it. But the differences in performance are too big to ignore.

Things that stink with both drivers: Neither the open- nor the closed-source driver will resume my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop after suspend. (The machine uses the AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.)

Things that stink with the open driver: Only the Catalyst driver delivers working 3D acceleration, meaning without it I can't run GNOME 3 at all, most games look like hell, and a certain wonkiness crops up here and there on various web pages.

With Catalyst, my glxgears frames per second are 100 times greater than with the open driver. I don't know what glxgears fps numbers really mean, but 5,200 has got to be better than 50.

Things that stink with the closed driver: In Xfce, many application windows have lost the borders on the left and right sides. I can't explain it.

I also cannot successfuly use UEFI secure boot with the Catalyst-enabled kernel, though I can do so without Catalyst installed. It's not Secure Boot itself that is stopping the boot. It just hangs at some point -- after some IP tables lines in the dmesg, I think. The solution is keeping EFI but turning off Secure Boot.

You'd think the solution would be easy and ubiquitous. Here's what I wanted to do: My personal blog run with the Perl-based Ode system. Ode doesn't use a database. Instead it stores its entries as text files in "normal" directories on the server.

I wanted to have exact copies of everything in my Ode documents directory on my local computer and the server. And I wanted the freedom to add to or modify anything in this directory on either side (server or laptop) and have everything track on both machines.

Many of us use Dropbox (or Box, or SpiderOak, or Google Drive, or ...) to both back up some or all of our files and mirror them on other desktops and laptops we happen to use.

But what if you want to keep a filesystem in sync across any number of servers and desktops and laptops without using a third-party service?

My first thought was, "I'll just use Dropbox. Certainly there must be a way to use Dropbox on my server/VPS/shared-hosting. Nope. No. It doesn't work that way.

My second thought was, "Holy shit, Dropbox is missing out on a whole lot of revenue and screwing its users besides."

Read the rest of this post

For one reason or another, I've been thinking about Movable Type. I went to both of the web sites associated with the blogging software -- movabletype.org and movabletype.com and found no mention of the formerly "free," open-source Movable Type software I used for so many years.

Instead, MT 6 is for up to five users and $1,195 for unlimited users. Ouch. There's quite a gap between /home/public//cgi-bin/ode.cgi and $1,195.

Nowhere on those "official" sites could I find a link to the /home/public//cgi-bin/ode.cgi versions of Movable Type (i.e. everything up to Version 5).

I did some searching, and here they are. Start a directory up and there are downloads of MT 6, which I presume will ask you for some kind of licensing information.

But if you want MT 4.x or 5.x, they are available.

And the software that swallowed Movable Type's user base whole is still available -- and still free.

Movable Type was always a great platform, and it still handles multiple blogs and multiple users better than WordPress in my opinion.

But you really need a full-time hacker on the job if you want to use Movable Type seriously. There never was enough of a community out there with plugins and themes to get you going.

I am now using my updated, responsive CSS at the non-blog root of my domain, stevenrosenberg.net.

I also added to the list of blogs and social networks. (I have too many in both categories.)

Later: The page isn't terribly responsive on mobile. That's a project for the future.

The next day: Problem fixed. Per Hans Fast, I added this code to my HTML:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

Hans goes into this here and here.