My journey from my grandfather's library to my booklog: A library without walls
🌐 https://blog.gridranger.dev/a-library-without-walls/
#reading #books #degoogling #blog #post #blaugust2026 #blaugust
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Dávid Bárdos
@david_bardos@mementomori.social
mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+mementomods-2026-10-11clean coder 👨💻 python enthusiast 🐍 test automator 🧪 devOps engineer ⚙️ tech nostalgist 👾 update addict ⬆️ casual gamer 🕹️ GAFAM escapee 🔒
137 Followers
109 Following
49 Posts
Joined April 29, 2025
🏡 Homepage:
🧑💻 Profile pic:
It's me sitting at a desk, turning away from the two displays in the background to look at the camera. I'm wearing a white shirt.
🖼️ Background:
A forest scene so lush so you can almost smell it. It's actually a lakeshore, but the camera was facing away from the water. A large tree trunk lies across the middle. This place bears a special importance for me.
Replying to
@grumpy_website@mastodon.online I liked XP the best. It had some eye candy but was still functional. And you could turn it back to the 9x look anytime.
I liked 7 too, but Windows haven't been able to feature a consistent UI since Vista was released.
Replying to
@Crell@phpc.social @wwhitlow@indieweb.social AI sometimes reminds me of lead.
The ancient Romans knew it was poisonous, especially in anything that touched food or drink. Yet they used it in their aqueducts anyway. Cheap, easy to mine (= comfortable to access), so no one cared about the consequences.
Sure, lead was not the only cause of Rome’s collapse or the thousand years of barbarism that followed. But cognitively impairing entire urban populations surely took its toll on political competence. 🤷
Replying to
@virtuosew Makes me remember to Ursula K. LeGuin's "A Wizard of Earthsea". The headmaster of the wizard school, Nemmerle, had wise old giant raven as his pet / familiar / animal companion.
The programming language "Nemerle" has a raven in its logo referencig to the archmage.
I baked some pastries, which brought back good memories.
🌐 https://blog.gridranger.dev/the-fifth-grandmother
#blog #post #indieweb #family #recipe #pogacsa #scones #nostalgia
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Agundur/116832728435976501
I wonder how low score do you need to be safe from LLMs stealing your content.
I’m a developer with a degree in philology and linguistics. Here’s how these two passions have shaped each other, and me.
🌐 https://blog.gridranger.dev/intersecting-interests/
This post was inpired by the monthly #indiewebcarnival theme chosen by Zachary Kai.
#writingprompt #blog #post #indieweb #bloggingchallenge #coding #linguistics #creativewriting
Reading similar posts by @scribblanitea@cupoftea.social and @daj@gofer.social brought my unusual relationship with these punctuation marks to the surface.
Replying to
@kyleford
Step 1: Take a job from rentahuman.ai
Step 2: Do nothing or do it intentionally wrong.
Step 3: Report it ready.
Step 4: If the AI complains, say thanks for pointing out your mistake and repeat indefinitely from Step 2.
I haven't posted a long time, but yesterday I couldn't help but write a post as a response to @daj@gofer.social
Here is my version of "Who knows that you blog?"
🌐 https://blog.gridranger.dev/who-knows-that-you-blog/
#blogging #writingprompt #writing #personal #post #indieweb
I've just read about #Nolto. Do you use it? What are your experiences? Have you found articles about it?
I wanted to try it out instantly, but as I opened the page, something felt odd. The mastodon in a suit is convenient mascot, but can you just reuse or build on an existing mascot to get yours? How does it work legally? It was kind of a warning sign for me.
And my next thought was: If the mascot might be in a legal gray zone, are other areas okay legally? Who will own, use and handle my data if I register on someone's instance? Will it be safe? And I've looked for articles to read about Nolto and found nothing relevant besides a toot stream that its codebase looks a bit odd. That's two more warning signs.
I won't register yet but follow the app closely before giving it trust. The web app couldn't even show me content from the inatance. #mastodon instances do it. I would like to replace #LinkedIn, but only with a more reliable alternative.
So, a car with digital camouflage is openly spying on Finnish streets for a Chinese company. The driver insults and attacks a journalist. He is clearly acting like someone who was caught committing a crime. Why isn’t he in custody already?
How can a German company conduct such an operation in another European country?
https://www.is.fi/autot/art-2000012103404.html
Replying to
@GrapheneOS @kris @Vivaldi Let’s not mix things up. The paternalistic behavior of tech companies has nothing to do with security. It’s only about locking users in to exploit them.
Just like some politicians who can't stop talking about keeping people safe, but really just want to take away their freedom.
Replying to
@gmh What a "coincidence" that someone has just published a vulnerability right now forcing people to update.
Replying to
@justdude Perhaps #postmarketos offers the most decent linux experience on Fairphone 5.
It supports more hw parts and more linux stuff than Ubuntu Touch and supports android emulation (SailfishOS for FP5 doesn't have Jolla's compatibilty layer).
Also this is the only one I didn't try. I wrote a bit more details in this toot: https://mementomori.social/@david_bardos/115912432037394955
#Fairphone 5, with tha large number of supported OSes, was a big step towards not being at the mercy of Google. I think, the next similarly big step would be if the devide would be built form components whose manufacturers do not hide the drivers, but instead push them to the kernel or make them available as open source.
Camera, audio, NFC and fingerprint reader should not be conditional based on what distro you use.
A device being open like that would hardly have any competition.
#openhardware
I came across a webring-like thing today, and built it into my site to try it out:
https://blog.gridranger.dev/navigator/
Replying to
@jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net I agree. Monthly pricing demands efficiency. Token-based pricing, however, rewards wasting time and resources while finding the solution the longest and most overcomplicated way possible.
Replying to on mas.to
@PicardTips@mas.to William T. Riker is an honest man. He can't pretend, so he doomscrolls.
#riker #startrek #tng #doomscrolling
Let me share the good news with you! 🎉 My wife will have her first group #exhibition in #Helsinki.
Feel free to support her art by joining us on the opening! 😊
@zitapanyicom@mastodon.art
A game that brought dormant memories to the surface and made me face complex feelings: Along the Edge by @novabox@mastodon.gamedev.place
🌐 https://blog.gridranger.dev/along-the-edge/
#blog #blogpost #indieweb #familyhistory #alongtheedge #personalstory #visualnovel
Replying to
@kris @Vivaldi @GrapheneOS Well, the post was about European alternatives, so Graphene is out of scope being Canadian.
On the other hand, Google is working hard to render both Murena and Graphene based devices useless.
On the long run, I think, pure Linux based alternatives can get us out of this trap. Like SailfishOs from @jolla and @postmarketOS.
Replying to
@mmalc @EUCommission Once, a USB-C cable was left plugged into an adapter on a table in the office. I was in a hurry and didn't notice how thin the cable was. I plugged what I thought was the docking station's cable into the notebook and rushed to the daily stand-up. By the time I got back, the cable was hot, and the notebook's charging circuit was fried.
It is also good to know that some product warranties cover charger issues only if the device was charged using its official cable. Oculus Quest 2's manual mentions that it can catch fire otherwise. 😅 You can take risks or play the unpleasant memory game of "which USB-C cable came or compatible with which device".
Replying to
@hailey Awesome. 🤩 I've just found some old CDs from old gamer magazines. A perfect way to spin them up.
RE: https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/116363925727899651
I wholeheartedly agree. My whole day today was consumed by reviewing a PR mess made with Claude. And the author of the PR didn’t even read the comments, just shoveled them into Claude again.
Of course, the LLM didn’t fix the issues but created new ones.
Even though I wrote suggestions (so they required only a click on the apply button), the author didn’t read, didn’t think, just pushed my responses to Claude.
I ended up checking out his branch and doing junior-level fixes all day, because no way I let that slop into our codebase.
@AlSweigart@mastodon.social I got tired of GitHub. My repos were archived already. I deleted all of them just now.
I seriously doubt there is any switch that would keep them away from train AI on our code. They can fork your code anytime and train the AI on the fork.
GitHub has also no reason to respect the setting, since the users have no way of checking on them.
Replying to on tiggi.es
@Aiyame@tiggi.es
On SailfishOS, banking worked fine through my bank's web app since it is mobile optimized. Mobile key verification, on the other hand, requires android app. But I had no android compatibility layer to test that.
On UbuntuTouch I tried the Waydroid for banking, it worked fine. But neither Morph broswer nor Firefox for UbuntuTouch were mature enough to handle the web interface.
I don't have first-hand experience with postmarketOS, but I would bet that my bank's web interface works on its browser and the android app works under Waydroid.
The result heavily depends on your bank's android app / webapp and how the user validation happens in them.
Replying to on gofer.social
@daj@gofer.social 🤩 Wow! I will definitely try this. Thanks for this great post.
I've read something interesting, but when I wanted to share it, I was disappointed to see it was loaded from Substack. 🙁
#natbios ~ "Nice article, too bad it's on Substack."
Replying to on gofer.social
@daj@gofer.social This looks great!
I’ve been searching for the ideal alternative to Keep for a while now. Obsidian feels too heavy, and everything else I’ve tried has missed the mark. Memos came close, but it lacks the ability to sort items by their checked status, which is a critical feature for our shared shopping list.
Replying to
@HadroSoft@mastodon.gamedev.place Looks cool! 🤩 The first clip made me remember the original Prince of Persia and Battle Chess from 89.
Replying to on mastodon.social
Replying to
Replying to on gofer.social
@daj@gofer.social Thanks, David. I’m glad you liked it. Not long after posting, I read your post about peer group pressure for kids, where you mentioned that you’re in a similar situation.
This chain of firstborns sounds fascinating. Yet even the most interesting stories don’t have to push us in a direction that isn’t right for us.
If you’d like to share any of the stories you’ve uncovered, I’d love to read them.
Replying to
@Antti98 @MichelPatrice @jbz @gael I'm on /e/os now with my fairphone 5, but I tried #sailfishos and I loved it. I would happily pay for the android compatibility layer to get it work on my phone, but I've just bought my device before they announced their new phone, so won't like buy another one. 😅
Replying to
@ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club @iris_meredith@mastodon.social That was fun. A way to reflect. I guess, I became a dual-class Cleric / Paladin. Does any of you have the description of the latter? I only saw the cleric's.
Replying to on fosstodon.org
@kev@fosstodon.org I love this mind-blowing puzzle. 🤩
But wait, donuts have a hole punched into them when they are still raw. Staws are bent into a pipe-shate but no hole are made on it. I propose the "0 holes" solution.
Perhaps the question is how we define the "hole".
Nothing says security like storing your documents in a washing machine. The shield’s colors and font scream Facebook, which just makes it even creepier. 😅 And if it’s not a washing machine, why is this flyer hanging on a laundry line with a clothespin?
Replying to on mas.lab4.app
@max@mas.lab4.app I like the analogy. But considering the amount of technical debt that vibe-coded source code usually carries, it can probably accelerate the cycle that characterizes startups: a sudden surge, followed by burnout. Technical debt can quickly become a more suffocating factor than anything else that might threaten a project.
Replying to
@tante@tldr.nettime.org There are always those who believe they can outsmart everyone else and get rich overnight. Whether through AI, crypto, lottery, poker, horse racing bets, pyramid schemes, or building a perpetual motion machine in their shed.
What these all have in common: wasting fortunes, not just their own but their loved ones', on something that was doomed from the start.
A mix of addiction, arrogance, and a complete disconnect from reality.
I had a weird #dream. It was about #RobotFramework and #Trump. I laughed so hard when I woke up. 😂
"Junior and mid-level engineers require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added in the briefing note."
(Might be paywalled, though worked for me.)
https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de?syn-25a6b1a6=1