How hard can typing æ, ø and å be?

2018-02-21 by mjr

Petter Reinholdtsen: How hard can æ, ø and å be? comments on the rubbish state of till printers and their mishandling of foreign characters.

Last week, I was trying to type an email, on a tablet, in Dutch. The tablet was running something close to Android and I was using a Bluetooth keyboard, which seemed to be configured correctly for my location in England.

Dutch doesn’t even have many accents. I wanted an e acute (é). If you use the on screen keyboard, this is actually pretty easy, just press and hold e and slide to choose the accented one… but holding e on a Bluetooth keyboard? eeeeeeeeeee!

Some guides suggest Alt and e, then e. Apparently that works, but not on keyboards set to Great British… because, I guess, we don’t want any of that foreign muck since the Brexit vote, or something(!)

Even once you figure out that madness and switch the keyboard back to international, which also enables alt i, u, n and so on to do other accents, I can’t find grave, check, breve or several other accents. I managed to send the emails in Dutch but I’d struggle with various other languages.

Have I missed a trick or what are the Android developers thinking? Why isn’t there a Compose key by default? Is there any way to get one?

Posted in GNU/Linux | 1 Comment

Rinse and repeat

2016-10-18 by mjr

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It has been over a year since my last blog post. Life got busy. Paid work. Another round of challenges managing my chronic illness. Cycle campaigning. Fun bike rides. Friends. Family. Travels. Other social media to stroke. I’m still reading some of the planets where this blog post should appear and commenting on some, so I’ve not felt completely cut off, but I am surprised how many people don’t allow comments on their blogs any more (or make it too difficult for me with reCaptcha and the like).

The main motive for this post is to test some minor upgrades, though. Hi everyone. How’s it going with you? I’ll probably keep posting short updates in the future.

Go in peace to love and serve the web. 🙂

Posted in Wordpress and Blogs | 1 Comment

Mick Morgan: here’s why pay twice?

2015-06-11 by mjr

http://baldric.net/2015/06/05/why-pay-twice/ asks why the government hires civilians to monitor social media instead of just giving GC HQ the keywords. Us cripples aren’t allowed to comment there (physical ability test) so I reply here:

It’s pretty obvious that they have probably done both, isn’t it?

This way, they’re verifying each other. Politicians probably trust neither civilians or spies completely and that makes it worth paying twice for this.

Unlike lots of things that they seem to want not to pay for at all…

Posted in Democracy | Leave a comment

Recorrecting Past Mistakes: Window Borders and Edges

2015-05-14 by mjr

A while ago, I switched from tritium to herbstluftwm. In general, it’s been a good move, benefitting from active development and greater stability, even if I do slightly mourn the move from python scripting to a shell client.

One thing that was annoying me was that throwing the pointer into an edge didn’t find anything clickable. Window borders may be pretty, but they’re a pretty poor choice as the thing that you can locate most easily, the thing that is on the screen edge.

It finally annoyed me enough to find the culprit. The .config/herbstluftwm/autostart file said “hc pad 0 26” (to keep enough space for the panel at the top edge) and changing that to “hc pad 0 -8 -7 26 -7” and reconfiguring the panel to be on the bottom (where fewer windows have useful controls) means that throwing the pointer at the top or the sides now usually finds something useful like a scrollbar or a menu.

I wonder if this is a useful enough improvement that I should report it as an enhancement bug.

Posted in GNU/Linux | 1 Comment

Rebooting democracy? The case for a citizens constitutional convention.

2015-02-20 by mjr

I’m getting increasingly cynical about our largest organisations and their voting-centred approach to democracy. You vote once, for people rather than programmes, then you’re meant to leave them to it for up to three years until they stand for reelection and in most systems, their actions aren’t compared with what they said they’d do in any way.

I have this concern about Cooperatives UK too, but then its CEO publishes http://www.uk.coop/blog/ed-mayo/2015-02-18/rebooting-democracy-case-citizens-constitutional-convention and I think there may be hope for it yet. Well worth a read if you want to organise better groups.

Posted in Democracy | Leave a comment

Outsourcing email to Google means SPF allows phishing?

2015-01-22 by mjr

I expect this is obvious to many people but bahumbug To Phish, or Not to Phish? just woke me up to the fact that if Google hosts your company email then its Sender Policy Framework might make other Google-sent emails look legitimate for your domain. When combined with the unsupportive support of the big free webmail hosts, is this another black mark against SPF?

Posted in Autonomy | 3 Comments

Social Network Wishlist

2015-01-08 by mjr

All I want for 2015 is a Free/Open Source Software social network which is:

  • easy to register on (no reCaptcha disability-discriminator or similar, a simple openID, activation emails that actually arrive);
  • has an email help address or online support or phone number or something other than the website which can be used if the registration system causes a problem;
  • can email when things happen that I might be interested in;
  • can email me summaries of what’s happened last week/month in case they don’t know what they’re interested in;
  • doesn’t email me too much (but this is rare);
  • interacts well with other websites (allows long-term members to post links, sends trackbacks or pingbacks to let the remote site know we’re talking about them, makes it easy for us to dent/tweet/link to the forum nicely, and so on);
  • isn’t full of spam (has limits on link-posting, moderators are contactable/accountable and so on, and the software gives them decent anti-spam tools);
  • lets me back up my data;
  • is friendly and welcoming and trolls are kept in check.

Is this too much to ask for? Does it exist already?

Posted in Autonomy, Community, Education, Training and Information, Web Development | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

GPG Transition Statement

2014-12-30 by mjr

Rather late but I guess that just confirms it’s really me, right? 😉 The signed text and IDs should be at http://mjr.towers.org.uk/transition-statement.txt

Thank you if you help me out here 🙂 I’ll resign keys in a while.

Posted in GNU/Linux | Leave a comment

Autumn Statement #AS2014, the Google tax and how it relates to Free Software

2014-12-04 by mjr

One of the attention-grabbing measures in the Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne was the google tax on profits going offshore, which may prove unworkable (The Independent). This is interesting because a common mechanism for moving the profits around is so-called transfer pricing, where the business in one country pays an inflated price to its sibling in another country for some supplies. It sounds like the intended way to deal with that is by inspecting company accounts and assessing the underlying profits.

So what’s this got to do with Free Software? Well, one thing the company might buy from itself is a licence to use some branding, paying a fee for reachuse. The main reason this is possible is because copyright is usually a monopoly, so there is no supplier of a replacement product, which makes it hard to assess how much the price has been inflated.

One possible method of assessing the overpayment would be to compare with how much other businesses pay for their branding licences. It would be interesting if Revenue and Customs decide that there’s lots of Royalty Free licensing out there – including Free Software – and so all licence fees paid to related companies are a tax avoidance ruse. Similarly, any premium for a particular self-branded product over a generic equivalent could be classed as profit transfer.

This could have amusing implications for proprietary software producers who sell to sister companies but I doubt that the government will be that radical, so we’ll continue to see absurdities like Starbucks buying all their coffee from famous coffee producing countries Switzerland and the Netherlands. Shouldn’t this be stopped, really?

Posted in Autonomy, Community | 1 Comment

software.coop reduces price of .coop domain names

2014-10-13 by mjkaye

During the Co-operatives North West “Co-operation Now!” event, software.coop heard concern at the price of .coop domains. We listened.

Having negotiated with our suppliers, we’re delighted to announce a significant reduction in the price from £75 to £64 per year.

You can transfer existing domains and benefit. We can make you a web site, too. Visit www.software.coop or email info@software.coop.

Posted in Cooperatives | Tagged , | Leave a comment