Ethan Gates @The_BFOOL@digipres.club

It seems like The Storygraph is actually gaining some buzz/traction as a Goodreads alt so just putting my profile out there, curious if there are any fedi friends to follow! https://beta.thestorygraph.com/profile/329b2bf9-f960-4e8d-9229-0e69bb5d09b8

A strong and definitive legal precedent for emulating/virtualizing Apple hardware as fair use makes it waaaaay more likely that, say, a certain academic/research grant-funded program could directly sponsor open source development in that direction 😇

Oh now this Corellium news is VERY interesting

In particular I did feel like I got in a lot of good reading this year

A rhetorical question I've been mulling over since reading Lathe of Heaven in July: *was* Ursula K. Le Guin the best English-language writer of the 20th century??

I don't *think* I'm going to squeeze in any more new books/movies/shows into 2020 (we just started rewatching Peep Show for the ~fourth time, so), meaning I can post my year-end recommendations:

https://ethan-gates.com/2020/12/best-of-2020/

I couldn't get it together to actually apply to Logic School's first cohort - any digipres clubbers interested in doing some kind of follow-along with them in the spring?

https://school.logicmag.io/program-details

We literally had a request today from the art gallery that was like "hey what do we do about Flash" so thanks @despens for the quick primer!

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/dec/21/flash-preservation/

@ashley inspired me to do my own end-of-year review thing! this year was terrible and I felt terrible for most of it but at the same time there were a few very bright spots that I would never take back! life is confusing!

https://ethan-gates.com/2020/12/2020-personal-review/

"If you are using FOSS in a commercial deployment, stop it, only we're allowed to do that"

trick is to select "don't call the BIOS" from the Safe Mode menu during boot - BeOS and hardware seems to load...no issues so far, but would like to get sound running

Anyone ever managed to get BeOS (stand-alone Professional edition, not the funky Personal Edition Windows binary) running under QEMU? I can get it going under VirtualBox and VMWare, but hit some kind of kernel panic in QEMU no matter what settings I use...

An underrated tragedy that Apple went for NeXT instead of BeOS - maybe we would still have "don't nag" buttons

Over the past month our landlord kept tinkering with our wifi/internet setup (internet included in our rent) without checking with us first at inconvenient moments (basically anytime 9-5 on weekdays...)

This was really frustrating, esp since he means well and was trying to make things better for us knowing we are stuck WFH

...but now at the end of it we've got a mesh wifi set up and I'm hitting ~600/20 Mbps on wireless and like I didn't even realize that was possible???

tfw you're making a disc about "World Trade Flows" but have a max character limit for path

Less great:

- Listservs need work. The suggestion to bundle contacts doesn't really work when you can only bundle based on "From" contacts, no "To" contacts (unless I'm missing something). Putting all those on digest mode is necessary, not the worst thing anyway.

- "Imbox" is still a cognitively annoying word. But, the concept is solid and it's wild that after a week I have like two threads in there and yes, those are the only ones that actually needed my attention or a response

Finally did the thing and got a Hey account and am moving over my various personal Gmails. Impressions so far:

- The Feed is a *really* good idea. Since I don't get distracring notifications for them, all those newsletters for orgs and companies I actually like are no longer stressful and become a thing to flip through by choice instead of social media.

- Screening out dumb nonsense auto-marketing accounts forever is way easier than searching for the hidden "unsubscribe" and extremely good

Really hope you all weren't counting on much U.S. participation in World Digital Preservation Day this year

general kudos to you all, but I will have to read your blog post in 2021

Our power has been cutting in and out this afternoon (downed tree limbs after yesterday's snow), which means we've been left with our thoughts, the scariest Halloween trick of all

You'd think when you learn about computers both as a job and hobby you'd be the one without any trouble setting up for virtual game night but really you're the one who gets stuck troubleshooting Proton for hours

RIAA's ready to start Round 2, let's go

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md