@gabek@social.gabekangas.com

gabek

@gabek@social.gabekangas.com

My name is Gabe and I'm here to say, I'm rockin' on the mic every two or three days.

I'm the maintainer and primary developer of #Owncast. I'm generally always happy to talk to you about the project, it means a lot to me.

I'm not on Mastodon, I'm on the Fediverse. So are you.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

gabek, to random

I’ve been having a great time with my new @frameworkcomputer laptop. The flexibility is really unique. First I got to build the laptop myself with parts, and now I get it to be what I want it to be with regards to input and ports and such. I’ll probably swap out the screen bezel for a bolder color, though. The purple is not very purple. Worth the 6 month wait!

Framework laptop with keyboard aligned left and rgb macro pad on the right.

gabek, to random

I hate ads. With the fire of a million suns. And I think I hate them more than most people do, because I’m completely self-aware that I’m pretty easily influenced by them. Sure adblockers are great, and I run Pihole and I do everything I can, but these days, with so many different types of services, on so many different types of interfaces (I watch all streaming services on an AppleTV, for example), that doesn’t cut it. So I pay for the ad-free version of everything that I actively consume.

And it saves me money, or at least probably breaks even. Because I’m well aware I’d end up buying a couple of things from those ads at some point.

Ads suck in every possible way. But they also suck in the way they are designed to suck, to take advantage of people and convince them to buy something they don’t actually need. They call that “marketing” but I call it psychological manipulation, and I’m opting out by paying a premium where I have to. It’s the best of a bad situation.

gabek, to random

I've had to stay off the internet for the past day because I didn't have a chance to watch Eurovision live, and instead had to watch it today. I've now watched it, so I can again come back online.

gabek, to random

@shadowfacts Where would you prefer support style feedback takes place for Tusker?

gabek, to random

Cool blog post about how to make sure nobody ever uses your open source software. https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/

It's literally the complete opposite of the blog post I wrote. https://gabekangas.com/blog/2022/06/ship-software-not-code/

gabek, to random

Web people previously: “I know web browsers are just for documents, but if we add a rediculous amount of crazy JavaScript on top of it, we can make it do things it’s not meant to do, and treat it like a real application platform!”

Same web people now: “Who added all this crazy JavaScript on top of the web? It’s doing things it’s not meant to do. This is ridiculous.”

gabek, to random

I put in a pre-order for a @frameworkcomputer laptop in November, and sometime between today and Friday the order will finally go through. Then for the first time, I have to recreate my Linux desktop environment on another machine. I’ve yet to decide what to do. I use AwesomeWM right now on a Debian-based distro. Framework suggests best hardware support with Ubuntu or Fedora. Do I try Wayland? If so, then what window manager would I be happy with? Or do I just clone my existing drive and restore it? These are not real problems.

gabek, to fediverse

Super excited that with a handful of minor maintenance releases behind us, can start looking towards big features again. Lots of preparation work is going on now for all of that. Check out the roadmap, and say hi if you'd like to be involved! https://owncast.online/roadmap/

gabek, to random

On the topic of Owncast, and some discussion about donations and open source budgets:

Owncast has always been lucky to have fantastic donors to help us pay our monthly overhead. It took me a long while to feel comfortable using that money to reimburse myself for things I was used to paying for the project, but it's worked out for a couple of years now, and I've been so appreciative.

However, the project is in the midsts of this year's second unexpected legal cost (you probably saw me asking questions a couple of weeks ago, I'll explain more later), and it's clear that we're not in the place to be able to handle more of these bigger-ticket items going forward. So as of now, I'm going to stop reimbursing myself the reoccurring project costs from the Owncast budget, and instead start putting money into the budget to make sure the project can handle unexpected things that come up in the future. Any bigger items that come up can then be paid for, and reimbursed, and tracked through OpenCollective. It might sound dumb to put money in just to take it out at some point down the road again, but it allows for transparency.

gabek, to random

The best account on The Fediverse is now officially @1796996923 and there is no room for debate.

gabek, to random

Mastodon is not The Fediverse.
The web is not The Internet.

Thanks for coming to my Fred Talk.

gabek, to random

@shadowfacts How do I Tusker. It doesn’t Tusker the same way it used to Tusker. I’m a user so this is the only detail I’m providing.

gabek, to random

HashiCorp getting acquired by IBM was not on my 2024 bingo card.

gabek, to random

Sometimes I want to write things down that aren't appropriate for an issue/todo, but there's no obvious place to do so. At once point I stood up a Cryptpad instance, but that was too heavy and nobody wanted to use it and read things that were in there. I keep looking for a middle ground for longer form things like planning documents, but I'm never sure where they should go.

I thought about just putting markdown files in a repo, but nobody will want to check out the repo and make PRs to edit them.

GitHub has a wiki, but nobody uses that. I could build my own wiki I suppose, but then it would require people to create accounts and stuff. There's no real good answer.

gabek, to random

The number of words that people self-censor in YouTube videos is out of control. I've more than once watched a video where a sentence was incomprehensible because so many words were removed.

"Tim <mute> with <mute> because of <mute> and their <mute>. Unfortunately, <mute> <mute>."

I hope those YouTubers are enjoying their "freedom" of "working for themselves" and "not having to answer to others" when making content they care about.

gabek, to random

I go back and read this article every once in a while. It's literally the only thing of value TechCrunch has ever published.

9 years ago Jon Evans wrote about the internet being a space for misfits and curiosity:

"...the pretty people are taking over, flooding out of top-tier universities with MBAs and social graces and carefully coiffed hair, shouldering the misfits and weirdos out of the way"

"It’s all too easy to imagine the American tech industry in ten years as a new Wall Street, a giant machine built largely to siphon yet more power and privilege up to people who already have too much."

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/

gabek, to random

I noticed the company who wanted to add their service directly into Owncast, and I said no, started releasing their own version of Owncast with their own changes in it to support this use case.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. It's kind of a fork, but it's really just another release of Owncast by somebody else. They're releasing something called Owncast with functionality and decisions that have nothing to do with the real Owncast. It specifically says stuff like "Owncast does X", and Owncast does not do X, and will never do X. Only their changes do X.

I fear this may confuse people. If something goes wrong with their version of the software, people are going to ask me for support, and might make the real Owncast look bad. But I don't know if this is wrong, or if this is completely acceptable. It's open source, and the name "Owncast" isn't owned by anybody, as Owncast is an open source project, not a company. So I guess they have the right to do whatever they want and call it Owncast.

But it feels wrong, and it seems like really bad things could come of this.

gabek, to random

It's so cool that people use Owncast.

gabek, to random

I'm working in the South Bay from a coffee shop today. I don't often work from a coffee shop these days. I also don't often get an iced latte because SF doesn't actually get very warm. But the combination of working from a coffee shop and an iced latte brings me back to all the hours I spent working from coffee shops in Omaha for some reason.

gabek, to random

Back when I was working on a Fediverse client, one of its features was it would update your profile with the currently playing track you're listening to. I always thought that was cool, so I finally brought it back for myself. I'm not sure how real-time account profile federation is among servers, but even if it's not completely real-time, it's still neat.

gabek, to random

My favorite band in the entire world is Nine Inch Nails. Years ago, they broke up and @andypeters, and I traveled hours to see them for the last time. I was devastated they were over. But luckily, they came back.

Every once in a while over the years, Trent Reznor would make a remark about NIN maybe being over and my reaction was always "NOOO!"

But I've been watching the music landscape change so rapidly over the years. And I hate it. I get saddened when I think about NIN trying to play that game. A version of this band that only releases singles to try to get on top of Spotify playlists and make it big on TikTok would kill me. If Trent Reznor had to update his "IG OMG" every day to please the algorithm, I'd probably literally vomit. Not figuratively. Literally. And because of that, if they were to quietly walk away at this point, I think I'd finally be ok with it. This version of the music world is completely awful, and I don't want them to have to be a part of it if they don't want to be. They've given me so much already.

I know the music industry is an industry, and the marketing business is a business, and maybe I'm just used to what I'm used to. But I can't imagine this is it. It's the worst of the music world and the internet in one.

gabek, to random

I'm so used to products not working as advertised, that when they do, I just assume I'm gaslighting myself into believing it's working.

gabek, to random

Somebody put a number for Owncast’s monthly active users on Wikipedia. There’s literally no way to know that number. I don’t even know how you’d define a user.

gabek, to random

I had a dream last night I was the xz guy, but it was Owncast, and people were yelling at me that I wasn't moving fast enough. So I did the same thing that happened in real life.

And to answer your question, yes, I have a therapist.

gabek, to random

I just learned there was a speedrun competition of open source software installation the other day. I would have loved to watch that. Sounds super fun. I hope to catch it next time something like that happens. https://coopcloud.tech/blog/selfhosted-infrastructure-any/

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