My daughter bought Minecraft the other day and invited a friend over to play. I didn’t think they’d have any trouble playing together. Boy, was I mistaken.

Wouldn’t you think that as long as everyone buys the game, they could join the same server and have a good time?

Nope. My daughter bought Minecraft on our Mac, which means she’s running the Java edition. Her friend, however, had brought her Nintendo Switch over, which runs the Bedrock edition. With no simple way to get on the same server, the dream of playing together started to fade.

A week ago I gave Codex a try and I was thoroughly impressed by it!

First, I gave it a small task, converting a .rst file to .md, which it did easily.

Suitably impressed, I went home and vibe-coded an entire website over the weekend. You can check it out at https://people.dataverse.org. It’s on GitHub at https://github.com/gdcc/people.dataverse.org.

As I wrote about on the Dataverse Zulip, this “people” website is something I first tried to build manually years ago. (That old code is also on GitHub if you’re interested.)

The other day I looked for books on design and “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon came up. Originally it was a talk, then a blog post and now a book with its own Wikipedia page. It looks like he gave another version of the talk a while later.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit. It’s not really what I expected. It’s somewhat about design, I guess, but more about how to live a good life and how to be an artist.

From https://www.foursightonline.com/the-science

• Clarify: People who like to clarify, who want to understand the problem.
• Ideate: People who like to ideate, who want to imagine the possibilities.
• Develop: People who like to develop, who want to work out the perfect solution.
• Implement: People who like to implement, who want to jump into action.

A buddy was gently nagging me about how I run a blog over vanilla HTTP rather than HTTPS. Little did he know I have nine of these sites. 😬

Yes, I’m well aware of HTTPS Everywhere, how Chrome marks HTTP as not secure, and how Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. I know Let’s Encrypt and Certbot have been around a long time. Wow, 10 years already.

It wasn’t too hard to find a blog post that described what I should do, on Ubuntu 22.04 even, with Apache. As with most of these tutorials, they assume you only have one site (example.com and www.example.com). What about me with FQDNs at movies.greptilian.com and music.thedurbins.com (among seven others), all hosted on the same ratty $4-per-month Digital Ocean droplet?

Today I wondered, not for the first time, why there isn’t a button on GitHub pull requests that says “merge the latest from main” or whatever your default branch is called.

It turns out, there can be! But it’s a hidden feature of GitHub! The button is called “update branch” but it’s off by default.

I can’t find the original announcement of the “update branch” button, but here’s a follow up post: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-02-03-more-ways-to-keep-your-pull-request-branch-up-to-date/

For Christmas, we bought a new iPad and our first Apple Pencil. I asked my brother, a professional illustrator, to recommend a drawing program and he suggested Procreate. I’m so glad he did. I’ve been having a blast.

Playing around with Procreate is convincing me that you don’t need a full desktop app to make great artwork. This is a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I’m still very interested in learning desktop apps like Inkscape better (check out my drawing of my dog), but it’s a lot of fun to sketch and play and I love the portability of an iPad.

A while back, when I started using git, I thought it would be a good idea to keep my binary files outside of git.

I created a directory called “incfiles” on my server at the time. It was for files I want to include elsewhere. These days that directory lives at http://thedurbins.com/static/incfiles. I just found a pic of some cacti in there:

I was just pleasantly surprised that Hugo allows me to use non-local files as the featured image, like this:

At the recent OFA conference I met someone who has brought her copy of Coding Freedom to Harvard to get it signed by the author, Gabriella Coleman, who is a professor in the department of Anthropology.

I’ve read a lot of history of open source but never from the perspective of an anthropologist, never as part of a serious academic exercise.

I just finished the book and I’d recommend it. It’s a bit academic and dry at times, but maybe it’s the sort of book I should have on my bookshelf to review the dense parts now and then. Coleman discusses a number of philosophers such as John Stewart Mill. She covers liberalism in the traditional sense of the word:

The other day I was minding my own business when an email hit my inbox:

“OpenForum Europe is organising the OpenForum Academy Symposium in Boston on 13-14 November at Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard Business School. It is an academic conference that covers questions related to the social, political and economic impact of Open Source.

We found your website Boston Open Dev for the open source meetups and we thought of sharing the invitation in case you and your networks might be interested.