Author Archives: mjr

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Autonomy, Community | 1 Comment

Three systems

2014-07-22 by mjr

There are three basic systems: The first is slick and easy to use, but fiddly to set up correctly and if you want to do something that its makers don’t want you to, it’s rather difficult. If it breaks, then … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments