Blackmoor Vituperative

I use Obsidian as a daily journal for my own mental health, and for writing and organizing my fiction writing. I use Dropbox with Dropsync (on Android) to sync. I write primarily on my tablet (Android, using Dropsync), and occasionally on my desktop (Windows 10). I follow these rules:

1) Set up different configuration folders for my tablet and my desktop in Obsidian under “Files and links”. (e.g., “.obsidian-ulthar” for my desktop, “.obsidian-s9fe” for my tablet).

2) Always exit Obsidian when I am done.

3) Do not use Dropsync to auto-sync on my Obsidian folder (Android only).

4) Set up my Obsidian folder in Dropsync, including hidden files.

I have created a color scheme for Minimal Theme for Obsidian. I mainly use Obsidian on my Boox Tab Ultra tablet, which is an e-ink device. My intention is to create a very high contrast theme that is easily legible on an e-ink device like the Boox, while also being attractive enough for desktop or color tablet use.

The theme is nowhere near as colorful as most themes. If you like everything to be a different color, this theme is probably not your cup of tea.

This is written as a CSS snippet, but my hope is that the author of Minimal will eventually allow this theme to be added to the core Minimal color schemes. Obsidian really needs a clear, readable color scheme for e-ink devices. That’s what I want, in any case.

I have posted the CSS file to my github page. If pasted into the theme.css file in Minimal (between gruvbox and macos), the code looks like this…

.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light{--color-red-rgb:145,28,28;--color-orange-rgb:145,28,28;--color-yellow-rgb:145,28,28;--color-green-rgb:21,83,83;--color-cyan-rgb:21,83,83;--color-blue-rgb:21,83,83;--color-purple-rgb:126,32,126;--color-pink-rgb:126,32,126;--color-red:#911c1c;--color-orange:#911c1c;--color-yellow:#911c1c;--color-green:#155353;--color-cyan:#155353;--color-blue:#155353;--color-purple:#7e207e;--color-pink:#7e207e}.theme-dark.minimal-kalos-greyscale-dark{--color-red-rgb:253,245,245;--color-orange-rgb:253,245,245;--color-yellow-rgb:253,245,245;--color-green-rgb:235,250,250;--color-cyan-rgb:235,250,250;--color-blue-rgb:235,250,250;--color-purple-rgb:252,245,252;--color-pink-rgb:252,245,252;--color-red:#fdf5f5;--color-orange:#fdf5f5;--color-yellow:#fdf5f5;--color-green:#ebfafa;--color-cyan:#ebfafa;--color-blue:#ebfafa;--color-purple:#fcf5fc;--color-pink:#fcf5fc}.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light{--base-h:0;--base-s:0;--base-l:100%;--accent-h:240;--accent-s:60%;--accent-l:10%;--bg1:#fbfbfe;--bg2:#f8f8fd;--bg3:rgba(255,255,255,.5);--ui1:#0a0a29;--ui2:#18185f;--ui3:#000;--tx1:#000;--tx2:#222;--tx3:#3d3d3d;--hl1:rgba(105,105,217,.5);--hl2:rgba(169,169,233,.5)}.theme-dark.minimal-kalos-greyscale-dark,.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light.minimal-light-contrast .mod-left-split,.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light.minimal-light-contrast .titlebar,.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light.minimal-light-contrast .workspace-drawer.mod-left,.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light.minimal-light-contrast .workspace-ribbon.mod-left:not(.is-collapsed),.theme-light.minimal-kalos-greyscale-light.minimal-light-contrast.minimal-status-off .status-bar{--base-h:0;--base-s:0;--base-l:0;--accent-h:240;--accent-s:100%;--accent-l:100%;--bg1:#050514;--bg2:#0a0a29;--bg3:rgba(0,0,0,.5);--ui1:#fbfbfe;--ui2:#18185f;--ui3:#fff;--tx1:#fff;--tx2:#fdfdfd;--tx3:#fafafa;--hl1:rgba(105,105,217,.5);--hl2:rgba(169,169,233,.5)}.theme-dark.minimal-kalos-greyscale-dark.minimal-dark-black{--ui1:#000}

This is not the future I expected.

The air is cleaner and the sea level isn’t as high as some science fiction authors predicted. Other than that, the real world has gotten much worse much faster than this science fiction obsessed kid ever expected. Rivers drying up, corporations owning lifetime copyright on our cultural heritage, nonstop wars, a major political party turning into a death cult, more wealth in fewer hands than ever before, and the looming threat of AI making most of us useless and disposable to the corporations that actually own this world.

And the sea level is still rising.

But the air really is cleaner than it was when I was a kid. That’s pretty nice.

This is pretty interesting. It had not occurred to me to use node.js to automate containerization. Neat stuff.

Personally, I am more interested in Golang and Rust, but this is a good thing to have in one’s toolbox.

https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1240084/Efficiently-Dockerize-Platform-Agnostic-apps-with

“The struggle between profitless simplicity and profitable complexity is eternal in the world of software.”
— https://world.hey.com/dhh/they-re-rebuilding-the-death-star-of-complexity-4fb5d08d

I started my career in programming during heydays of Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This was late 90s/early 00s, and there was a rich ecosystem of enterprise vendors hawking application servers, monitoring tools, and boxes upon boxes of other fancy solutions. These tools were difficult to learn, expensive to license, and required an a…

David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails

Interesting article about containers, cloud, etc., by the fellow who created Ruby On Rails.

If you are a Windows user looking for a replacement or alternative for Iobit Uninstaller (which has become little more than a vector for trojans), give Bulk Crap Uninstaller a try.

https://www.bcuninstaller.com/

Ever since Firefox 98 (I think), a popup appears every ten minutes or so, showing files that have been downloaded successfully (or not, I assume). Whether I have downloaded anything recently or not. It does not go away until I manually close it.

That is annoying. Here is how to fix it.

Go to about:config (accepting the warning along the way).

Change browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel to false.

Imagine a world where Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple had the combined wealth and power of Mailboxes, Etc. …

Proposal: some services must never be operated for profit. As in, if you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. What kind of services?

• Hospitals
• Military
• Police
• Post Offices
• Prisons
• Roads
• Schools
• Trains

Story hook: a team of people from 2080 go back to the 1960s to attempt to prevent the end of Human civilization. How? By lobbying legislators to put civilian use of ARPANET under exclusive control of the US Post Office before Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf develop TCP/IP.

Update: In case this was unclear: if you put “Contracting Company” after any of these services, it should make NO DIFFERENCE. NONE. If you want the license to operate, you operate as not-for-profit, with all of the oversight and regulation that entails. We are at least a generation past the point where the “contractor” loophole should have been legislatively closed. Human beings are not “resources” to be squeezed dry and discarded.

The consensus among security researchers has been consistent for about 15 years: forcing password expiration based on nothing but the date makes passwords less secure.

https://www.sans.org/blog/time-for-password-expiration-to-die/

Also relevant…

I looked for ages before I found this advice, so I am preserving it here. Credit goes to Keyboard Playing for the original post, though.

In LibreOffice Writer, you can replace \s+(\r?(\n|$)) with $1 to remove all trailing spaces. A single execution should be efficient this time.

The regular expression (aka “regex”) can be decomposed this way:

\s+ matches one or more whitespaces;
(\r?(\n|$)) matches a carriage return (\r?\n) or the end of a paragraph (\r?$) ; \r? is there only to be compatible with Windows carriage return format;
$1 is the first captured group ((\r?(\n|$))) as it was found in the text (we put back what was found).