Aka why I keep having bad customer experiences.

Assuming the idea of a business (and us when we represent it) is to stay in business then it should aim to make the customer (a fellow person) happy as happy people are loyal.

This means the person needs to understand what the other person wants from the transaction to be happy. It also means both parties must understand the details of the transaction to know how this makes them happy. The product must be understood  to ensure maximum happiness.  And finally if the product or service offered is not making the customer happy then it’s the responsibility of a good business to help the customer find happiness another way. 

Doing good business is about understanding people, and having empathy. 

This is also why why car dealerships keep disappointing me. Stop pushing product. Start making people happy. 

I wrote a quick and dirty upgrade.sh script that sits in the parent directory of my Known site (updated now with the new composer setup). I'm using the following directory structure:

config.ini  
Uploads/
html/
upgrade.sh  

The offical Known git repository is checked out in html/. The config.ini and Uploads folder have been moved to the folder to sit alongside it.

The contents of the upgrade.sh script can be viewed as a gist on Github:

It's not elegant but it makes updating to the latest Known changes pretty seamless.

On Linux operating systems, Spotify does not always show the file and view menus. This makes it harder to hide the "Find Friends" bar as there is no close button on the sidebar itself.

However there's another way: Click on the chevron in the top right corner next to your spotify username, then on Settings > Display Options > untick Show Friend Activity.

#linux #howto

After another hour of resolving issues with pyenv and a personal project that requires Python 3.7 I thought it best to note the steps I used to install Python 3.7.1 on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed:

# Install requirements for compiling Python
sudo zypper in zlib-devel bzip2 libbz2-devel libffi-devel libopenssl-devel readline-devel sqlite3 sqlite3-devel xz xz-devel 

# Compile Python
cd ~/Downloads
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.1/Python-3.7.1.tar.xz
tar xf Python-3.7.1.tar.xz
cd Python-3.7.1
./configure
make

# AltInstall ensures 3.7.1 is installed alongside your system python
sudo make altinstall

# Fix dynamic library loading
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib64/python3.7/lib-dynload /usr/local/lib/python3.7/lib-dynload

I've updated the Common build problems · pyenv/pyenv Wiki page to reflect the updated required packages. Thanks to Andrew Cooke for the dynamic library fix

#python #linux

Aaron Gustafson wrote back in 2008:

Getting into the progressive enhancement mindset is quite simple: just think from the content out. The content forms the solid base on which you layer your style and interactivity. If you’re a candy fan, think of it as a Peanut M&M:

The Chocolatey Layers of Progressive Enhancement

JavaScript first websites have the peanut inside out!

#development #javascript

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

I’ve updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.9.9 and earlier. It's now also up to PHP 7.2 compatible, and has a number of small fixes to improve code legibility and alignment with the WordPress Coding Standards.

#hidetrackbacks #link #wordpress

The WordPress Project says:

The Classic Editor plugin will be officially supported until December 31, 2021.

[...]

Since the Classic Editor plugin is central in this transition, we are considering including it with upgrades to WordPress 5.0.

In the context of my professional work with WordPress it would be beneficial to see the Classic Editor plugin be included by default into the installation package. This would signal to plugin and theme developers that we are in a transition phase but supporting the existing installations, until Gutenberg is more fully accepted by the wider community. Not doing do could put pressure on smaller developers to just test their updates for Gutenberg only, resulting in a lot of broken sites or a security nightmare where people won’t be able to update to the latet versions of WordPress or their plugins until the teams and processes are ready.

#wordpress

Recently, I've come to the conclusion that it's the nature of realtime social media to cause drama and upset. In the search for ever increasing thirst for gossip, instant reactions are stimulated so heavily that  there is no time to research or read about the context of a story, and open discussion isn't possible when group mentality means we must be outraged or be part of the problem.

At the same time, people have never engaged so little with web content, being the metaphorical frogs in the pressure cooker of Facebook and Twitter that is modern society. We are the product that is monetised by the advertising dollars that demand page views in a broken system of inflatable viewership figures.

In the music scene, the illusion of hyper promotion and like-networking results in a feed of people and content I have little interest in following, in the hope that they will listen to what I have to say.

Pointless and bad for my health. So therefore I'm distancing myself more from social media now.

If you want to follow what I have to say about technology, read vandragt.com. If you are interested in my music visit cloudseer.me. They will soon have a mailinglist and RSS feeds without advertising and like buttons.

#technology

Linux is so userfriendly, so the rpm that can be downloaded is missing dependencies. However, I'm quickly becoming a fan of zypper and OpenSUSE's dependency handling, and comes to the rescue:

sudo zypper in cryptomator.rpm

Even though cryptomator made a mistake in signing part of the application, it can still be installed by pressing ignore. Are you sure you want to do that? It seems a bit crap for such an essential utility.

#linux

Both the official RPM and the discover package failed for me due to missing dependencies, without specifying what those are. However the following worked:

sudo zypper install dropbox-cli
dropbox start -i
dropbox autostart

#linux

Having wasted too much time installing Ubuntu on a laptop recently, I thought it would be helpful for the future self to document the issues.

Issues

sudo su
apt install cifs-utils
echo "//path/to/windows-share /mnt/team cifs credentials=/etc/samba/credentials,uid=1000 0 0" >> /etc/stab
cat > /etc/samba/credentials <<EOC
username=UserName
password=PassWord
EOC
chown root.root /etc/samba/credentials && chmod 400 /etc/samba/credentials

This document will get updated as I stumble and fix other issues.

App Alternatives

#linux

I've replaced this blog-post with a reference.

Have you ever tried to leave a social network? Want to be free to move web platforms because your needs have changed? Perhaps you might no longer agree with the business practices employed by the service provider, or no longer see the value in paying for having content monetised.

Currently, this means you have to build up new social connections and can't move over your friends as they might not be on the new network. This is a dark pattern employed by the investor-heavy digital media giants to keep people siloed, making it easy to move in but burdensome to move out.

Social networks can then add messages and events on top, keeping the money making engine oiled with an persuasive analytics layer. Other places like media hosting providers where it seems a subscription fee supports the music uploaded to the system but causes artists to lose control over their fan base.

The silo is responsive and cushy yes, but ultimately the users are at the whims of the platform. I have accounts on hundreds of websites because every site wants to identify their users. Sites start their own network; to build things on top off.

It seems to me that it is very wasteful to keep building social graphs and user account systems when we can do so much better. Instead, have the person be in control of the people they interact with, and manage the information that is displayed to them!

Imagine launching a dashboard app that sits on your computer and is independent from any information sources. It's free of tracking and open source to us all and doesn't do too many things. It doesn't belong to anybody but yourself. It's just a window where information from friends can be shown in a timeline. It can connect to a friend's dashboard so you can stay in touch. Hey what's new? It manages who you follow.

Web services you visit can ask permission to add information on your dashboard. Want to see when concert tickets are available for your favourite artist? Allow them to display that. Allow the event provider to display dates of the next group meeting, and the music hoster to add in new tracks from that producer you follow.

Never again be stuck in a silo. Disconnect a source and attach another. A social reader for the new generation.

#technology

Interesting article about developing your passion and keeping and open mindset.

The belief that interests arrive fully formed and must simply be “found” can lead people to limit their pursuit of new fields and give up when they encounter challenges, according to a new Stanford study.

Read the article

#life #link

I've been finding that browsing has been slow for me lately on my linux box, which has Ubuntu 16.04 installed. After some investigation it seemed worthwhile to try to install a DNS cache to speed up DNS queries. This has sped up successive DNS queries from 21ms to 0ms, removing sluggishness.

sudo apt install bind9
cd /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d
sudo echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" >> head

Apply the configuration as follows:

sudo resolvconf -u

The improvement can be seen by using dig to query a domain and looking at the Query time output. After the first dig, subsequent digs return in 0 ms.

#linux

Four Things Procrastinators Need to Learn - read this now or later?

#life #link

If you visit this site you will know what browser cookies are and that they are used to store information about you across visits to that website. A typical website will store a few to a few hundred cookies on your computer.

Each cookie has an expiry date for when they are no longer valid and then automatically deleted by the browser. Did you know the lifetime of some of these cookies are several decades in the future and that they are routinely used by data brokers and analytics companies to gather data on you?

That's why I've recommended installing a plugin like PrivacyBadger, to prevent these tracking cookies from being passed back to websites that track you across websites.

But you can also override the maximum lifespan of these cookies. I've experimented and 10-14 days seems to be a good medium between having to login to all your websites all the time and maintaining privacy.

Update: 2019-08-29 - the following no longer works on recent Firefox releases:

On Firefox, open about:config and search for network.cookie.lifetime, you will find network.cookie.lifetime.days (set this to 14) and network.cookie.lifetimePolicy (set this to 3 to override the default behaviour or letting the website decide).

On Chrome or Vivaldi (update: and now Firefox) browsers it's possible to set these values by installing my FreshCookies addon, which does not contain any tracking itself.

#technology #projects #freshcookies

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

I've updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.9 and earlier.

#hidetrackbacks #link #wordpress

We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.

This is why I run PrivacyBadger to block tracking, not ads.

#link #technology

[caption id="attachment_2699" align="alignnone" width="245"] A perfect illustration for Brexit[/caption]

#life