Minimal Software

Complexity is the business we are in, and complexity is what limits us. - The Mythical Man Month.

Log Entries

Portability is a very underrated quality. Typically we have a few set of tools that help us get on with our life: maybe that is a GPS, a messaging platform, a design tool et.c.

When the tool we use are only available on one platform, then we are coerced to use only that platform, ceding more power to that one platform. When we have software that is portable, we can leave the platform and use something else. It therefore empowers the user, giving them a voice.

Typically portability and compatibility is on the lowest of the totem pole in priorities of a company, that is unless there are forces that make them need to consider it.

One force that makes a company consider it is regulation and standards. These forces can make companies act ethically but also force them to follow standards that make the tools portable and interoperable. It is not purely a negative for companies, as they then tend to be able to leverage the tooling that has been made around that standards, but they do lose control. There is an interesting phenomena there were adding some restrictions to what we can do collectively, allows us more choice and freedom in other ways.

Another force is market forces, when there is a big enough market for software on different platforms, companies are forced to make it interoperable. We see this with the web, where the dominance of Internet Explorer made it so that companies stopped targeting other browsers, outright banning their use. By clawing back control through using alternatives, it allowed users of other operating systems to also use the web, and forced developers to account for more than one browser. It also forced internet explorer to start playing nice, and not employ anti-competitive behavior, as they could no longer break the established standards.

It might be worth asking ourselves when we choose a piece of software how portable it is, and how much does it lock us into one vendor, or one way of doing things. Not just the software itself, but also the data it generates.

- Marc

I have recently (ish) become interested in file formats. In particular, file formats that are human readable and human writable.

These formats have quite a few advantages:

• They are (obviously) modifiable by hand
• They are easy to backup
• They are easy to maintain
• They are (often) easy to build software for.

But they also come with challenges:

• Human-writable means that data integrity is not guaranteed
• They are inefficient

To me the biggest beauty of these file formats is that they can outlive the software that created them. Even if I am on a foreign computer, without internet, hit with amnesia, I can still make sense of and modify these formats.

Software in some way or another takes data and outputs data, that's what a computer is meant to do. I think it is worth thinking about how we can make sure that the data generated outlives the software that made it, inspired by Permacomputing.

I kicked off a thread on Mastodon to see what kinds of human-readable data formats people know of. I am excited to see what people share.

- Marc

Email combined with isync, makes it is possible to access email offline and have it synced on a regular interval.

I looked around for options for having a shared TODO list with Andrea and sometimes the most obvious solution is what is in front of you. All the local-solutions that I have used in the past made sharing difficult, and neither one of us wanted to sign-up for some third-party service nor download an app just for TODO items. Then I started thinking about how I have always shared links with myself in the past, which was through email.

Well, thanks to fastmail's web filters, I was able to set up a specific email-address that Andrea and I could use to share TODO items between each other. All email sent to that email address ends up in my TODO inbox. How do I share TODO items? Well, just add Andrea on CC and then it's done. No sign-up to a new service needed. When the item is complete, I just reply done and then my email rule will automatically drag it to my Done archive.

Similarly, I use this as my social bookmarking service. I have a special email-address and a email rule so that when that address receives links from the right people, those links end up automatically in my links archive.

These two solutions work cross-device as well. All my devices have email so sharing across BSD, iOS, and Android becomes trivial. All of them support email.

This could be further extended with interfaces that operate on the isync directory. You could then have TODO apps that use email as a backend, and what is nice is that people would not need to download an app to operate on it, so it would be a form of "progressive enhancement".

- Marc

I have began using recutils to build a database of what I have read, watched and also for references on how to do things.

The tool has a decent amount of utilities for querying data and its simple formatting means that even if recutils one day stops working, it would be trivial for me to build my own replacement.

The usage becomes simple. To find all FreeBSD specific information, I can simply run the recsel -q freebsd ~/refs.rec and I will find all my Freebsd related references. I made an alias of it so I just have to type refs freebsd.

- Marc