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Table of Contents
You Tube
Dispensible Distractions
Goodbye YouTube.
Starting your war against Ad Blockers ⇒ I'm not using You Tube any more.
I don't want to watch adverts. I am not prepared to pay the inflated price for You Tube Premium.
All I want to watch on You Tube is stuff from geeky hobbyists about their geeky hobbies.
Not “Content” from “Content Creators”.
I don't want to watch “media”.
I don't want to watch adverts.
I understand I have two choices:
1) Disable AdBlocker and put up with the adverts
2) Stop using You Tube.
Nothing on the Internet is so important that we cannot live without it.
We managed perfectly well for many generations without You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. etc.
We still had intelligent interactions with real people.
Read books.
Saw cinema.
Watched TV.
Listened to Radio.
Wrote letters.
Visited people face to face.
You Tube, as with the rest of Social Media, is completely expendable.
I vote for 2)
Bye Bye
— John Pumford-Green 09/10/23 13:05
MediaWiki
— John Pumford-Green 02/07/22 09:00
I have been thinking about moving to MediaWiki
instead of Dokuwiki
and decided to try it first to see if I preferred MediaWiki
.
I installed MediaWiki on my sandbox server using the basic process that I later documented :
I do like the look/feel of MediaWiki
as a reader but the operation and maintenance as a user is very different to Dokuwiki
.
It looked like there would be a steep learning curve, and a lot of functionality I'd added to Dokuwiki via plugins would not immediately be available. I also installed it on my main VPS server, and imported a few pages, and then did a lot of editing to get them to look right. It was going to take A LOT of work if I was to fully import this wiki over to MediaWiki.
There are some conversion scripts around to (partially) convert Dokuwiki formatted text into MediaWiki format, but they are far from perfect and the converted pages still need a lot of work.
After spending|wasting several hours I decided to abandon the idea of switching to MediaWiki and to stay using Dokuwiki. It does make a lot of sense - I'm comfortable with the syntax, it's much easier to backup, as all the pages are simply flat text files, adding functionality via plugins is much easier to do. It just works.
So, I've deleted/removed the MediaWiki install & MariaDB SQL server from the VPS machine. I might keep the Sandbox Server MediaWiki install, just to play with from time to time, but unless something serious happens I can't see any point in spending|wasting hours and hours trying to get my existing Wiki converted to MediaWiki, and then learning how best to organize a MediaWiki setup.
I deleted the Mediawiki install & MariaDB server from the Sandbox machine today too, as I don't think I will be migrating to MediaWiki.
Notes and Cuttings
Some notes & stuff
Links
Monobook template wikis
A list of wikis I've found that use the monobook
template
They are listed here for easy reference, as they often include interesting techniques & plugins etc.
one
http://www.can-wiki.info/doku.php?id=start
https://support.rbg.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/wiki//en/start
http://topas.dur.ac.uk/topaswiki/doku.php?id=topas
https://www.dam.brown.edu/dpd/doku.php/start
https://badgrads.berkeley.edu/
two
http://wiki.synchro.net/wiki:index
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~jhoe/doku/
http://troop-394.org/wiki/doku.php/start?do=recent
https://murmann-group.stanford.edu/doku.php?id=main_page
https://math.chapman.edu/~jipsen/structures/doku.php?id=start
three
http://www.cptcif.com/pfe/wiki/doku.php
http://www.ub.edu/persp/metaphysics/doku.php?id=start
http://www.trirand.com/jqgridwiki/doku.php?id=start
https://www.astron.nl/wsrt/wiki/doku.php?id=start
https://www.pmstieber.com/mstieber/doku.php?id=start
http://pacs.ece.ohio-state.edu/doku.php
Mastodon & Twitter
— John Pumford-Green 20/12/22 07:39
I recently tried Mastodon - the distributed, not-powered-by-advertising, not-run-by-megalomaniac-billionaires social media platform.
This was after years of “not-using-Twitter”. I didn't use Twitter for a variety of reasons. One was “what's the point of it?” and another was “I don't like AI and Algorithms deciding what I should see” and another was “I ABSOLUTELY HATE ADVERTISING”.
I'd looked at Mastodon a few times over the last year or so, but thought “what's the point of it?” and “everyone else is on Twitter anyway”.
Then Elon Musk took over Twitter and there seemed to be a mass exodus of people, and Mastodon was where they were going.
So I set up a Mastodon account and started to explore.
Initially it seemed to make sense - I had an account on an “instance” centred around the radio hobby, and most of the postings were interesting (or at least “on topic”) and it looked like it was possible to get involved, make “friends” and share experiences, and even post/read/enjoy the odd off-topic item.
I couldn't shake off the annoyance I felt that many of the posts were references to things still going on “over in the other place”, “on the Bird Site” etc. Lots of Twitter-in-jokes and references, that made no sense to people who had no interest or previous connection with Twitter, and were probably also annoying to people who had “escaped” Twitter and were enjoying the new atmosphere of Mastodon.
Carrying over old Twitter baggage started to dominate (as I saw things) as more and more “refugees” made the jump.
Endless “have I done the right thing?” or “I'm here now, what do I do?”, or “This doesn't work like Twitter, I don't like X, Y or Z”.
… then the floods of “memes” referencing ongoing Twitter happenings…
In my mind if you leave Twitter and join Mastodon you don't need to keep dragging over Twitter-related posts, jokes, comments, memes.
I started trying to filter out content I didn't want to wade through, stuff that made no sense to me (as a non-Twitter user), then I started un-following people that persisted in filling up the timeline(s) with such stuff.
Then I thought “What's the point of this?”
I'd managed perfectly well without Twitter all these years.
I was now spending more time trying to “clean up” my Mastodon timeline & home feed than I was happy with.
So I decide “No. It's not for me”
and Deleted my Mastodon.radio account (as well as the account I'd set up but not yet used on Mastodonapp.uk)
Enough was enough.
I'm just not a “social media microblogging” kind of person, I suppose.
Random Musings
Articles and blog-like posts