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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012

I just installed ownCloud: It's like my own, wholly controlled version of Google Docs (without the spying) and Dropbox (without the cost)

I didn't think installing ownCloud would be so easy, but it was.

My continuing reliance on Google Docs, which is cheerfully offered up for free in exchange for Google's searching through your files and marketing to you based on what it finds, plus the plethora of similar privacy-sapping services, has me very interested in personal-cloud services such as ownCloud and the early-days Freedom Box project. The Freedom Box will happen eventually.

OwnCloud is here now, and while there is certainly a commercial component to the whole thing, it is basically a free software project with code that anybody can download and use.

And so I did.

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Sat, 11 Feb 2012

Why I'm going back to Icedove 3.0.11 in Debian Squeeze after months with version 5.0 from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive

Why would I do such a thing -- go back to Icedove (aka the Mozilla-coded Thunderbird e-mail client) version 3.0.11, which shipped with the now-aging Debian Squeeze, after months of using version 5.0 from the Debian Mozilla team APT archive?

A number of things -- some pertaining only to me and my workflow, others more general -- made me revert to the older Icedove on my main Debian Squeeze laptop.

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