Thank you Bram Moolenaar

 

Blog freely

     Blogging is one of my favorite past time. However, my blogs are not thought out, laid out and thoroughly researched. Majority of them are thoughts/rants which make me "write". I think I have been blogging since the year 2010. As you can see, there is no specific time and routine with which the posts are written. They vary from technical to note taking to local issues upto the restaurant at the end of the universe. So, what keeps me blogging. Well, to start with, my basic drive is the fantastic world of FLOSS developers, users and maintainers. What passion do these people have!. When the whole world believe that the end point of all actions of human beings is money, these people think different. For them, money is the means to satisfy their passions, their will, their tastes, their thinking of general well being, their thought that the fantastic food, the human race is enjoying today is because of the FLOSS philosophy of all the people associated in studying and preparing food.

    I had always wanted to blog from my favorite editor, emacs. By, the way, I also love vi. However, I will stop here on this topic. I dont want to add to the plethora of information available on the public network. The war of words is so great that our future generations, when we become the cave people will be astonished at this war of words and will forget all about the wars which bought the ending of human race and concentrate on this. There you go again, you have dragged me into it. I knew you would do it. I hate you for that. Or do I love you for that!!. Argh!!!.

    Coming back to my first line in the second paragraph, I came across a project called write.freely. I liked it. I liked that it federates beautifully. But, then somehow, it just went out of focus. Maybe because I was not blogging much at that moment. I do have longer lean periods than periods of flourish. However, I am active on mastodon(@srinicame). Again, as active as my blogging habits in posting. But, I am an avid reader and try to consume posts from my favorited individuals. During one such session, I came across a post from Marcel on the Mastodon fediverse offering invites to his write.freely instance. Thank you Marcel, for allowing me to create an account on your instance. Once this was done, I was in the FLOSS market for plugins so that I could publish my blogs directly from emacs. And lo and behold, there is exactly one here https://github.com/dangom/writefreely.el

    Followed the configuration on the github page(Did not work for me), and I am now ready to post a blog from emacs. Downloaded the command line tool from https://github.com/writeas/writeas-cli/blob/master/cmd/wf/GUIDE.md. This is now my first post on a federated blog. Congratulations to me. Thanks to all the devs and users of the write.freely fediverse.

This is the link to this post(This same post) on the federated blog https://qua.name/bknf7v9835

Well, What is on my raspberry pi 4

The first thing I install is my client for the cloud based notes application. I use simplenote. It has the advantage that it is available on all the major platforms. There is a terminal client called sncli. This is my go to client.
The next thing is to install terminology for the terminal. After trying out many, I observed that terminology is the fastest on the pi.
i3 window manager. I cannot live without it. None of my Gnu/Linux installations is complete without this. It is lightweight, easily configurable and simple.
For the browser, since I have started using computers I have sided with Firefox. I am at home with this browser. I install noscript, ublock, privacy badger and dark reader plugins. I like it. It has always met my expectations.
For the application launcher i go with rofi. The run menu is shown in a small window in the bottom left corner of my monitor.
For searching on the command line I use ddgr(DuckDuckgo client for the terminal) and surfraw. After installing surfraw I install a small script called menu-sufraw available on github. This integrates beautifully with rofi. Must try.
For the office suite, My choice was OpenOffice before it went to the butcher's table with the Apache foundation. Now it is libreoffice. I like it. It gets the job done.
For my text editor, wait, wait, I use both Neovim and Doom emacs as demanded by the situation. I use emacs with the client/server model. It is quick and very snappy to start and to work.
Feh for my wallpaper needs.
There is one more plugin which I install on firefox, it is called play-with. This I combine with mpv. We now have an awesome combination for playing streaming content on the pi. For this configuration to work there is one more piece of software required and that is youtube-dl. A beautiful example of the unix philosophy working for the modern age of the internet.
Not to forget that all the apps are in dark mode, if available. I like the dark mode. It has been excellent for my eyes. Even now when firefox flashes before loading a tab, I close my eyes for a while. Thank you, Apple, only for bringing the dark mode into vogue.
My hardware setup is already discussed in one of my previous posts.
font-awesome for that "graphics" in the terminal.
d2code for the font, wherever possible. I like its legibility.
I use i3status showing the date, time, empty space, processor speed and the temperature.

Thanks to all the devs/users of all the freedom software. My respect to one and all without which this post wouldn't exist.

Meeting RMS at Mandya(Once in a lifetime opportunity), Karnataka, India

As I have written in many of my blog posts regarding my introduction to computing in 2002. No event affected me more than the reading of RMS's escapades with the printer at the AI laboratory. There was something about the philosophy being churned out in the help file withing the church of emacs. Now, maybe if i had tried editing my configuration files in vi I wouldnt have come across this philosophy of sharing. I still am not sure what prompted me to fire up emacs from my RH 6 machine. I finished the tutor and the was looking for further directions. It was at that time I read the about page on emacs. From that day I have been an ardent fan of RMS and his strict idealistic ideologies which is a mouthful for many an individuals who take sharing as sharing and nothing else. It is very difficult to understand him. He is egoistic. He is very strict on his beliefs and ideologies. I still remember when he last visited India and was interviewed by swapnil bhartiya. He did not drink bottled water until he got a bottled water not manufactured by coca cola. The reason being that he was against some un-ethical practises by the said company in some part of the world.


Let me come back to the present. I was damn lucky to meet him in person at Mandya, Karnataka, India. The event was organized by FSMK(Free software movement, Karnataka). I did not know that such a group existed and am indebted to their efforts in organizing this event. Now, how did I know about it. I am not on any proprietary social networks. I got the information on Mastodon. This makes my decision to stay on Non-proprietary online information sharing tools more interesting. This place, Mandya, is around 100Kms from my place. It was a 2 hour journey. I was present in the auditorium an hour before the stipulated time. There were announcements made to the attendees regarding the mentioning of Linux and GNU/Linux. He was on time and he walked in to a rousing standing reception. And the first one liner was shot. "Dont stand for me, stand for free software" He removed his shoes and started his presentation almost immediately. He did not want to waste a minute. He wanted to get right to the point almost immediately. The organizers were shocked at his speed. It took some time to get their bearings. After 10 minutes or so into his talk, The Indian way of welcoming the guest with a Mysore peta(Traditional cap of Mysore made with silk thread and a sandal wood garland) was done.


His homework regarding the local issues were excellent. He asked for "Mandya Gowdara Tea". Since there was a delay he was given tea made from Tea bags he had brought all along. He spelt the name of the language spoken in our parts perfectly i,e, Kannada(Majority of the Indians who dont stay in our parts spell it Kannad, which is wrong). The most striking was the parallel he drew of our freedom struggle with the present software freedom struggle. His say was that to gain freedom we have to embrace things which we are not comfortable. Freedom is not free. We have to work for it. In the Indian freedom struggle though the British flooded the Indian market with ready to wear clothes from Great Britain(Of course the raw material was from India). We as Indians fought against it by announcing swaraj, wherein we starting spinning our own textile raw material and stitching our own clothes from raw cotton. This was definitely not comfortable at all. But that is a cost we paid for gaining the freedom we cherish(or taken for granted) today. Excellent point. He used the word "Svatantra", the kannada word for "libre" instead of "Uchita" for "Free". RMS, I love you.


The talk and the content was standard. The freedoms associated with the software licensed with GNU GPL v3 and above and why all the developers should use this version particularly and also mention "GNU GPL v3 and higher" which would make the job of the FSF easy when faced with issues regarding copyright.


As usual, the Q&A is where he succeeds or fails miserably


There were questions regarding privacy, china government's mode of working etc which received long and boring answers. Let us cut back to the little interesting ones.


Q. I wanted to contribute to the FSF. When I opened the contribution page I saw that the amount of information I have to give before even entering the payment details was more than that required for opening an amazon account. The contribution process should be simple and as easy as clicking a button
A. Oh. I dont know about this. e-mail me the web page you are talking about. The payment cannot be as simple as a single click(It is for the reader to decide what is right or wrong about his answer)
Q. Wil the development of GNU os continue
A. No. It will not be developed. We had all the userland utilities and were lacking a kernel. Now we have the Linux kernel.
Q. What are the future projects of fsf
A. Oh, you can see our website regarding where the money comes and goes. librejs is being developed to remove the proprietary JS being used.
Q. What about building social networks. Like GNU social
A. Muffled answer.(I dont remember much)
Q. Free software conservancy hosted few videos on its website requiring proprietary JS implementation which if not enabled is not allowing to be viewed and fsf is one of the sponsor of the event of the video. Isnt it ethically wrong
A. I cannot keep track off each and every activity of the FSF.(summary I dont know and I am not going to anything about it)
Q. As a first time developer I am very interested in making money. How am I going to make money by giving my code away
A. (Unclear points) followed by You can work as a waiter for a living and then you can code in your spare time for the public good. If I did not have this job then I would have been a waiter to support what I am doing now.


Thank you,RMS, for everything you have done and will do in your endeavor towards pushing freedom software. Yes there will be fallacies, there will be pitfalls. But walking the talk is what matters. In a world where ethics are washed out at the drop of a hat, we have you, as a benchmark for the philosophic side of freedom software. I wish you would live for eternity, negating all the naysayers.