Being sick over Christmas meant that I was flat on my back with lots of time for nothing but reading.

N. K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy

A fantasy trilogy of politics, world building, and god and human relations. As I wrote before, it’s on sale right now.

Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger Trilogy

Far future space opera with pirate semantics. I’m on book two of three.

I bought this on sale from Steam. It’s a fun sci-fi RPG, rogue-lite, turn-based card battler.

I’ve put about 20 hours into it already across 2 runs. You have a party of three characters that you get to pick a base class for, and then pick a second specialization for.

Lots of loot, plus crafting. It’s not very hard, although when pirates invaded the station on my first run I did get completely wiped.

Recommended!

“Amazon wants to replicate every product it sells, discarding partnerships once they have their own version of that partner’s product”

Dave Mark on the WSJ article ‘How Amazon Wins by Steamrolling Rivals and Partners’, found via mjtsai.

This is exactly how I feel Amazon treats open source. It’s not illegal according to various licenses. mjtsai’s other linked commentary makes the same point about a physical product example.

But the result is the same: clone and crush.

I know there are well meaning open source folks at Amazon. I use Amazon for infrastructure. I think AWS has amazing operators.

But your actions and culture are actively damaging. If you only listen to the law, rather than ethics, courtesy, and a spirit of partnership, we will evolve licenses that force you to behave.

“Imagine if every company using open source were to provide tangible sponsorship, on an ongoing basis, directly to the developers of the open source libraries and tools they use and rely upon.” – Cognitect, Sponsoring Open Source Developers

So many great quotes in this article. I disagree with some of it, eg:

Open source licenses effectively preclude developers from charging for their work.

But the whole thing is laying out facts that have been obvious to some for a long time. It helps build the awareness and movement of the evolution of the concept of open source and how businesses should treat it.

With Fission, we’re just taking the first steps on this path. We’re going to blend “traditional” open source with non commercial, with users banding together to fund features, and more.

I’m really glad to have publicly posted our beliefs.

I’m working my way through past purchases. It’s been nice to at least spend time every Friday listening to and exploring music a little bit. This week is Resurgam by Alias, released in 2008. The artist passed away in 2018.

Here’s the I Heart Drum Machines track:

I’m bad at genres, this is labeled on Bandcamp as electronic / hip-hop / beats. This also gives me a starting point to look for other music that is new-to-me. /me starts browsing ‘beatz’

Song Exploder Vol 2 is now on Netflix:

I really enjoyed the Dua Lipa and The Killers episodes. Genre-wise, I guess both of these are “pop”.

I bought Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia (out now) and The Killers’ Sam’s Town (from 2006!).

The bigger “commercial” artists however mostly only sell through platforms, so I bought these two through iTunes.

I do use Amazon Music for random play lists and discovery. I have had a bunch of Dua Lipa favourited in there that I’ve been listening to.

Oh, and my iTunes Match subscription renewed. It’s not really promoted by Apple any more. For $30CAD annually, all my music from any source (e.g. music I buy on Band Camp and add to the Music app) is stored by Apple and available on any device. Essentially, a fancy unlimited file sync service, optimized for music.

As recommended by @carchrae, here’s one of my Bandcamp Friday purchases: Keleketla! By Coldcut:

I became aware of Bandcamp Fridays from Jessica @ticky and it just so happened that I was buying Good at Falling by The Japanese House:

I also bought Evil! by @dirtyspells. This track America is currently melting my brain in a good way:

The Sifter thesifter.org

a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks.

– A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Atlas Obscura

The data on this site is super interesting. Whatever is running the site is not great. It’s some sort of out of the box Microsoft thing including default loading animations.

But! It aims to be a sort of Wikipedia. I’ve signed up to be a contributor and I hope that this can be built on and be licensed for re-use.

I did a search for “Vancouver” and found only one entry, so my used cookbook collection may be able to add a handful more. It does say it only wants pre-1940 cookbooks, but it’s unclear why.

It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s.

Yes! Super interesting to me. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

(From the Gastro Obscura section of A.O.)

I always work across multiple machines and operating systems. I wrote up my laptop choices back in Feb 2020, and I ended up dipping my toes back into Windows with a laptop. Before that, I had bought two Chromebooks in a row, and I still think they are some of the best value.

Ryan recently asked me a question about Chromebooks:

I’m thinking of getting my 12 year old a Chromebook for back to school and wanted your input. For context, most of what they’ll be doing is google docs driven and she’s not a gamer.

Yeah, the Chromebooks are solid. And now that you can put Linux on them as a built in feature, there’s lots more that can be done with it.

You can also game on it: with streaming services like Stadia or Geforce Now, or Steam and some Linux games.

I usually follow the Wirecutter recommendations – I have personal experience with buying two ASUS Chromebooks and have been very impressed.

Looks like the ASUS Flip C434 is available at London Drugs for $700CAD.

The Lenovo model that is current WireCutter top rating looks to be good and available for about $560CAD.

If you see Chromebooks for less than $500CAD – they are usually way too underpowered.

And then Greg emailed me, so I’m turning this whole thing into a little Chromebook FAQ:

We’re wanting/needing to get something for my kids to use for school, and since they use the GSuite at school a Chromebook seems like a good idea. However, they still want to be able to play Minecraft.

Is there a site you would recommend for me to go to, in order to figure out what Chromebook to order? What Chromebook are you running?

Today, you don’t need to “dual boot” into Linux any more. Like WSL for Windows, you run any flavour of Linux that you want and you can run graphical apps like Minecraft no problem. This site on installing Minecraft for Chromebooks has too many ads on it, but basically – Linux stuff installs directly on Chromebooks these days.

Having a really solid browser environment, plus basic apps you can install, makes for a good stable system that is very inexpensive for what you get. You need to pay more for a Windows or Mac laptop – approximately 2-4 times the price of a solid Chromebook – to get equivalent performance.

My current Chromebook is the ASUS C434, but as I said at the top, I’m also switching between an ASUS Windows laptop and a Mac desktop.

I still wouldn’t pay more than $1000CAD for a Chromebook (and even that is pretty high).

I’ve just ordered myself a custom Timbuk2 messenger bag.

Custom? Yes, custom: you pick and choose fabrics and colours and various other options. This is mine.

I have had a great red/gray reversible messenger bag for many years that my sister Gaby gave me. First one of the inside clips broke so it needed to stay gray, now the outside closing clip broke.

I still use it while walking, but open bag flaps and biking don’t mix.

Asking the Internet about bags is hard, so I went to Wirecutter and they said Timbuk2.

When I was looking earlier the custom options weren’t as obvious, and I kind of wandered off. Did I want a bag the same as everybody else, especially in drab colours?

Which led me over to Freitag, which my current bag is sometimes confused for.

Colourful, unique, up-cycled bags? Yes! Well, except for two things. 1. Fashion is pricey — about $350CAD before shipping 2. Did I really want to ship up-cycled bags across the ocean?

For a well-made, relatively unique bag that I intend to keep for a decade, price isn’t the barrier.

But (2) got me thinking: can we ship IP rather than products?

Especially as the pandemic has people thinking about supply chains and supporting the local economy, what would it take to collaborate with someone locally in Vancouver and make a bag?

Vancouver has lots of apparel, outer wear, and other gear designers, so that’s a plus.

And in fact, when I asked around and shared the idea a bit, both of the people I talked to had a 1-degree connection to people who had made bags. And then I even found a 1-degree connection of my own who had made his own bag and was making more.

So let’s say I budget $400-$500 for a customer one of a kind bag. Could I find 10 or 12 other people locally who would be interested?

And once I did this, could I make the design (and sourcing of materials and manufacturing/sewing, etc) available for others to do in their local areas?

Yes, I could. And we might just have a little network of locally made goods. Never mind connected links of makers and supporters interested in this sort of thing.

Are you interested in the Vancouver custom bag experiment? Is there another custom thing you’d like to see created locally? Let me know!

More on co-op models and small business peers and shipping IP another time.

Starting from the north end of Commercial Drive where we live, we did a grand loop and various adventures on the e-bike today.

We started at Woodland and Venables, going up Woodland to the 10th Ave bike route and headed west.

Federal Store, Quebec at 10th

First stop was at The Federal Store, on 10th just before Ontario.

Rachael’s tea latte cup had a lovely little stamp. My cappuccino just had “The Federal Store” stamp. Note: The Federal Store has Johnny’s Pops and is open most days until 6pm.

Then headed south on Ontario Street.

Main at 28th

Rachael went across the street to Jasmine Mediterranean Foods for fresh limit (Turkish bagel) and picked up a few other things.

Riley Park (Ontario at 30th)

We lay in the grass at Riley Park. It was a gloriously sunny day, but with a bit of a breeze blowing. We had our coffee & tea drinks with limit and hung out for a bit.

Looking at the map, it seemed like a pretty straight forward route south on Ontario and then east on Kent to the River District, which is a new Van Mural Fest neighbourhood.

Rachael and I have never been down in that area at all, so seemed like a good adventure destination.

East Kent Avenue

We drove down Ontario until we hit Marine Drive. We passed by Coupland’s Infinite Tire and continued on a couple of blocks into an industrial area and a set of east - west train tracks. There’s a great bike path all along Kent Avenue.

It’s a bit confusing at times which side of the tracks you need to be on. Both are East Kent Avenue, labeled S or N. In some places there is a clearly marked and dedicated bike path, in others you’re going along the road.

Gladstone-Riverside Park

We stopped at Gladstone-Riverside Park – we made it to the Fraser River! Across the river is Richmond, so this is the southern edge of City of Vancouver.

There are a variety of both bike paths and walking paths, again on either a northern “road” path (which had bike paths, too), or a mixed pedestrian - bike path walk ways on parks and green space that is right next to the river. Several other bikers and e-scooters were stopping and looking at maps.

You can see in the map the dotted green paths along the river, as well as East Kent N and S. We stayed on the road (which had a separated two way bike path), as the park paths had a lot of pedestrians.

It was very interesting to see the mix of single family homes but really quite a lot of condos and townhouses either newly built or under construction. This is an area that I know nothing about. It was nice to have bike paths, but it seemed like where we were there was no transit at all, and no retail either. I guess all of that runs along Marine Way.

River District Murals

Here’s a custom Map label for roughly where the murals are (you can see it in the screenshot above on the right hand edge).

It’s in the middle of a ton of construction, and there are detours and fences that will guide you in a loop through the construction. If you’re following audio map directions, they will be very confused and insist that you u-turn :)

Rachael did a much better job capturing the murals and artists, so I’ll embed her Instagram here:

View this post on Instagram

@bmann and I did an epic ride to the River District to see @vanmuralfest murals. A few are finished but most are still works in progress. They are all fantastic. It’s an area we’d never explored before along the Fraser River… . #getoutside #vancouvermuralfestival #vancouvermural #publicart #streetart #vancouverart #yvrart #vanmuralfest #explorevmf

A post shared by Rachael Ashe - Paper Artist (@rachael_ashe) on Aug 30, 2020 at 3:48pm PDT

The murals are great and many of the artists are at the end of their epic week or so of painting. Apparently they will be up in this temporary space for about a year or so – installed along fencing and the path that detours through the construction site.

The photos I captured below really were about me thinking about this construction and neighbourhood and some of the contrasts.

I asked this artist how they got here, and they said Uber. I continue to have questions about how we’re still building car oriented dense housing in Vancouver.

Caitlin Mcdonagh

Instagram/@northweststyles

This and the next murals were along an east-west path, fencing off a construction site with a few abandoned industrial buildings still remaining.

Rachael looks at an unfinished mural

The sketched out design looked super cute!

Instagram/@luke046_art

Overhead Power and Construction

You see old, original poles, skinny and weathered brown, and the new, larger, treated greenish poles. And this ridiculous jumble of overhead wires that we have all throughout Vancouver. Even in this new area, I guess they’re not burying lines and laying fibre for Internet?!?!?

Van Mural Fest River District Sign

Lists all the artists. More discarded building materials and some sort of hangar or industrial building in the fenced off area.

Looking west, Rachael looks at a mural

The fence to the north (right in this photo) blocks off rail tracks, then East Kent Ave N, with condos, townhouses going up on the north side of that avenue.

Blackberries, Barbed Wire, Power, and Construction

Kerr Avenue

After seeing all the murals, it was time to head home. There are a couple of different south / east routes, the most straightforward looked to be heading back along East Kent, and then going north on Kerr Avenue.

Well, it turns out Kerr is an incredibly steep climb from East Kent to Marine Drive, and then keeps going up with Fraserview Golf Course on one side and Everett Crowley Park on the other. The area at the top is called Champlain Heights :)

Anyway, got off the bike and walked it up a good chunk of this. Not enough power for getting both of us up here. There are a couple of epic hills in Vancouver, where a slightly more powerful motor would really help.

We stayed on Kerr until it turns into Rupert next to Killarney Park, then west on East 45th which is a bike route.

Then right and north on Earles Street, crossing Kingsway at the Purdy’s Chocolate factory.

Left and west on Vanness, which turns into BC Parkway path, and a little left along the edge of Slocan Park.

Right and north on Slocan, which is a long down slope. You’ll pass Banana Grove Market at 22nd, and keep going down and north until you hit South Grandview Highway.

Cross that, and you’ll hang a left and be heading west on North Grandview Highway, which is the Central Valley Greenway.

The CVG has been another common route for us, we’ll often head out to Burnaby Lake. But heading home and west we go to Lakewood, and then head right and south until we hit Adanac, and then turn left and west until we’re back at Commercial Drive and home.

We were at one bar of power by the time we made it home, so one of the longest trips we’ve made. Doing a rough map calculation shows about 30km. There are a couple of mega hills in there as well as just long continuous slopes that are rough with two of us on the bike.

Wesgroup

At home now, I’m doing a little research on this River District. This is a “planned community” being built by Wesgroup. Here’s one article:

The River District is located along the Fraser River, just off Marine Way, west of Boundary. It is a brand new, award-winning, master-planned community created by Wesgroup – a Vancouver based builder that has been building in the Lower Mainland for over 50 years. Wesgroup has spent the last decade carefully planning River District, the last waterfront development in the city. Spanning 130 acres, it is three times the size of Granville Island and will soon become a vibrant destination for living and shopping when complete in 2017…

It’s now 2020, and there are lots of new homes completed, but as you can see from my photos, lots of new buildings still going up.

There are 20 pages of requests for multiple discounts for Shopify to be able to apply free shipping.

The way to do it without a plugin, is to add a new rate, label it “Free Shipping”, and set the conditions to only apply when the min and max are both $0.

Any other paid shipping options will still display – and be selectable by the customer! – but obviously they can just pick free shipping and there won’t be a charge.

So to give a “free” item to someone, make a dollar value discount code of the price of the item, so that the cost is zero, and then this free shipping rate will appear. Note: if you are dealing with multiple currencies, sometimes the conversion means that your dollar value discount code makes it not quite $0. You’ll need to experiment and set a discount $ value appropriately.

Chris Fralic of First Round Capital explains how to figure out what your LinkedIn member number is.

Basically, go to your own profile, “view source” to look at the code for the web page, and search for “member”.

I’m member #1746. Yes, I was early to social networks :)

The hashtag #MozillaLifeboat is highlighting the ~250 people laid off by Mozilla.

Here’s Mitchell Baker’s official announcement.

Daring Fireball has further links and commentary, including that the layoff number is “about on-third of its workforce”:

Firefox was very popular, and Google paid Mozilla a small fortune to make Google search the default in Firefox because it was so popular. But then came Chrome. Why should Google fund Mozilla when Chrome is about 10 times more popular than Firefox, other than out of the goodness of their heart?

It is a very good thing for the world and the web that a truly independent browser exists from a privacy-minded company, but there’s not much of a business model for it unless it’s popular enough to get the dominant search engine to pay for placement.

The Open Web, open source, Web3, global Internet commons infrastructure. Security. Privacy. Data ownership. We’ve got a lot on our plate that is looking pretty concerning.

I pretty much felt the same in the early 2000s, facing down FUD from Microsoft vs. open source. And we … won? Sort of? Except now it’s time to reboot again, because the ad supported web and big tech owned open source is an awkward place to have ended up.

I don’t know Chris Riley who just got laid off and tweeted this, but I’ll bold the key part here:

It’s been a heck of a ride at @mozilla for the past 7 years. But this is where I get off the train too. I’m sad; I’m going to miss the people, a lot. For me, my calling to make the internet better will continue. I just need to find the right next venture for it. #MozillaLifeboat – @MChrisRiley

We’re all in the same lifeboat. Grab an oar and get involved.

Craigstarter on Github

A free to use / edit / extend crowdfunding tool for Shopify with multiple goals and variants as campaign tiers.

Shopify is an absolute massive ecosystem. Blending crowdfunding with straight up sales is a really powerful way to more directly own your platform for the long term, whereas one-off Kickstarters you immediately need to plan for off-platform websites, sales, communications, etc.:

Kickstarter is an excellent way to run a crowdfunding campaign. But if you already have a community built up, and have communication channels in place (via a newsletter, for example), and already run an online shop, then Kickstarter can be unnecessarily cumbersome. Kickstarter’s 10% fee is also quite hefty. By leaning on Shopify’s flexible Liquid templating system and reasonable CC processing fees, an independent publisher running a campaign can save some ~$7,000 for every $100,000 of sales by using Craigstarter instead of Kickstarter. That’s materially meaningful, especially in the world of books.

This is particularly relevant because I’m in the midst of learning more about how to run and setup Shopify stores, both for work, and ideally for some side projects. Gathering interest from a group of people so we can collectively fund / buy things is exactly the kind of thing I want to do.

Via @pat

Responding to @Tobie’s thread on examining open source as a commons.

In the context of digital abundance, the open source code itself can be infinitely copied.

1) open source code = public good

2) support, maintenance, etc. = common good

3) paying customers = common good (assuming multiple consultants or hosting services etc.)

From my understanding of @Dries’ Makers and Takers post, the distinction between a public good which can’t be depleted and a common good which can be, and must be protected, is key.

The activity around open source code is a common good. It is provided by the maintainers and other contributors. @tobie mentions maintenance, but also documentation, marketing, communication, responding to issues, and so on.

The “consumers” of these activities may evolve into new contributors, so in one model providing this activity will grow the commons. And even the add to the public good of the code if the new contributors eventually provide code, too.

But taking time for these activities is a scarce resource, as Tobie points out. Sponsorship and similar types of funding can potentially “buy” more of a maintainer’s time, so they can provide more support for (2) – but isn’t really a business model or a commons management strategy on its own.

Finally, my third point from above. Dries made this point quite clearly: if you have multiple businesses built around an open source code base, the (paying) customers are a common good: they can (mostly) only be the customer of one business.

Approaches that restrict aspects of a project to paying users run the risk of making this no longer a common or public good, and yet Ostrom mostly proved that “good fences make good neighbours”. This is the challenge we face that @tobie highlights, and the ongoing experimental phase that I see open source at large moving into.

For a sustainable commons that goes beyond code, we need more makers than takers.

Slack is Fumbling Developers and the Rise of Developer Discords by @swyx

Slack’s revenue is firmly linked to enterprise, so I don’t see this as a strategic error. It is, however, a fact that open developer communities are increasingly using Discord.

I also expect more Matrix adoption in the next 1-2 years.

Although Discord open sourcing at least server instances while still following their federation model could be interesting. Or interop with the Matrix protocol.

I have a draft post that I’ve been meaning to finish for months of how Fission uses Discord chat + Discourse forum. Soon!

Kyle Mitchell writes The Truth is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free as commentary to Nathan J. Robinson’s editor’s note in Current Affairs of the same name. “Quality” journalism is paywalled and the rest is free?

This point by Robinson on membership models seems key:

a podcaster who sells their product on Patreon rather than giving it away but filling it with mattress and “box-of-shit-a-month” ads has an important kind of freedom: they only have to please the audience, not the sponsors.

“Open Source”, funding, and digital works available at no cost have many parallels in industries beyond software, including journalism.

Kyle points out that not all creators should expect to be compensated just because they are creators:

I deserve…no compensation whatever for the bad musical improvizations, repetitive doodles, or unfunny or dead-end software libraries I churn out from time to time. Everyone, including me, should be fine with this.

Also, that in areas of creative work, especially those available digitally, “giving away” work may be the best strategy:

I happen to believe that in most areas of creative work, and in most adjacent industries, giving more away for $0 online would improve outcomes for most players, overall. Our business instincts and well-worn patterns haven’t quite kept up with the times, and never do.

I’m thinking a lot about digital abundance lately in this same context.

Read the whole thing. You can also sign up on Kyle’s Artless Devices forum if you want to discuss this further.

My parents have sold their house on #bowenisland. They move out in October, after 41 years living there.

This also means shutting down the Seven Hills B&B, which they’ve run for 25 years or so.

They’re lucky to not have to leave Bowen. They’re building a 4-Plex with 3 other couples, which is just 500m closer to Snug Cove from where they are now.

It was a lovely BC Day long weekend. But also a bit of an end of an era. My childhood home, that was always there for me, always “home”, won’t be around much longer. I’m lucky to have had it, and of course my parents and Bowen Island itself are still there.

The Sunlit 3 beta is available, and now open source.

Is an open source “Instagram” possible?

I had a long discussion with an artist about moving off Instagram and Facebook. I told him he was putting photos up inside a mall, and he didn’t disagree. Because he can sell inside the mall.

He was uncomfortable about it. That I was kind of accusatory, shouldn’t he go first, to walk out of the mall and lure people outside instead.

So how do we encourage people that doing street graffiti is something they might want to do?

Putting my technologist hat back on, an open source mobile app like Sunlit is an interesting starting point.

Supporting Micropub and WordPress are great starting points.

Now what about a SquareSpace interface? Drupal and Joomla? Mastodon?

Tumblr? Flickr?

This mix of open source and protocols and networks gets us to an interesting spot.

Does multiple forks of Sunlit help? That is, say other people use the code and deploy apps to the App Store. Can that be additive to a network of users using open protocols and platforms? I’m sort of asking if we can kickstart a more open and federated network.

What if that app added “Buy Now” buttons? Where users could add their own links to a place where they could buy what is in the photo. Or tip the photographer!

Thanks @manton for open sourcing. That begins to give us the opportunity to contribute and build upon what’s there now.

Tom Critchlow writes ‘Setting up a Discord Room for my Blog’, calling it a “cozy chat space”, for me a direct call back to this:

the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams — Venkatesh Rao, Extended Internet Universe, May 2019

I have introduced/explained Discord to several friends with kids who use it extensively for gaming and hanging out with friends.

I’ve used Discord for several years now, as many of the global tech communities I’m part of use it. I’d say that there is definitely an increase of adoption by open source projects.

I tweeted about why Discord:

[Discord has much better] permissions [than Slack]! It's default open, with members, roles, channels being able to have permissions.

Plus, of course, mod powers like Kick and Ban.

Slack is swipe card entry only, Discord is a public festival with various members only sections, VIP rooms, and an operations center.

Our usage for public, group, and company-only chat at Fission has gone well, all in one server.

I have a longer post in draft about how we pair it with Discourse forums.

Discord being free means…something else is the product. Mostly it’s stickers right now.

Matrix is my exit plan.

Mozilla selected Matrix as the chat protocol / platform to move to, away from IRC. It is an open protocol as well as being open source, meaning many clients and servers can be built and interoperate.

New Vector, the main company behind Matrix development recently announced that Automattic, makers of WordPress, made a strategic investment.

All these things make it clear that Matrix has momentum, and it’s important that there be an open — and secure! — option for chat.

At the same time, because chat is ephemeral, I consider it less important that such a platform be open: the feeling and UX rank much more highly in importance.

You can join the Fission server or try out my AllTheBest.Recipes server if you’d like to experiment.

Prompted by Ton commenting on Tom’s post.