the reality, the mythology

"Kaepernick took it to the next level by pitting the reality of American racism against the mythology of American patriotism."

-- Gary Younge, in "Remember this about Donald Trump. He knows the depths of American bigotry", over at The Guardian.

orthodox

I switched to using Double Commander as my full-time file manager about six months ago (see: "'go-to' file manager?"), after SpaceFM development ceased.

A few weeks back, I was reading about so-called "Orthodox File Managers" (see: http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml) and decided that taking the time to really learn to use something like Midnight Commander would provide me with tools to work more effectively with any Norton-style, orthodox file manager.

Learning to use Midnight Commander did help me to use Double Commander better; but, at the same time, after a while I became hooked, and now "mc" is my "new" full-time file manager.

Here, I have Midnight Commander running on a second tab in Terminator, in GNOME 3 (in Debian Stretch):

There are lots of online tutorials and so forth to help get someone started with Midnight Commander, but the manual page that comes with Midnight Commander helped me more than anything else; just type man mc at the command line.

Midnight Commander also comes with a Help document, which appears to contain pretty much the same info as the man page, but is easier to navigate. It's accessible with F1 if the terminal has function key support. Otherwise, press Esc and then 1 to open the Help document, or simply click on the Help button at the bottom-left corner of the window.

Once in the main help screen, it's important to press Enter "to learn more on how to use the interactive help facility." The full key list of the help viewer is shown here:

I studied the documentation, took some notes, got in some practice, and stuck with it for several days. After that, I felt so comfortable with Midnight Commander that I couldn't see any reason to go back to using Double Commander or any other file manager. OFM, FTW.

web standards

Opinion piece by Jesse Smith in the September 25, 2017 issue of DistroWatch Weekly: "The W3C, encrypted media and software freedom"

In conclusion, Smith writes:

At this point it looks like people who value software freedom and an open web have just three options remaining. The first is to file a complaint with the W3C and ask them to reverse their decision. The appeal against baking DRM into the web failed, but perhaps enough protesters can get a vote to repeal the new web standard.

A second option is to boycott web browsers which implement the new, non-free standard. If Safari, Chromium and other mainstream browsers implement non-free code, we should avoid them and promote free software browsers which do not include non-free blobs by default. We can also petition distributions to patch out the non-free parts of otherwise open web browsers. If Firefox includes a non-free decryption module Linux distributions should remove it as part of their build process.

Finally, we should support organizations, such as the EFF, who are actively fighting in favour of software freedom and an open Internet. We should also avoid using websites which provide DRM-protected media. DRM is not good for anyone - it causes more hassles for the user, does not successfully block content piracy and it now introduces security risks for all of us - it should be avoided as much as possible.

Re: that second option, check out what the Pale Moon folks wrote at their Pale Moon Survery 2017 page:

DRM: We're aware that in-browser DRM is being pushed pretty hard by several big players (who, not-so-coincidentally, are also involved in editing and publishing the very HTML specifications that make this possible in-browser) and our approach is that "black-box" DRM content decoding modules have no place in an Open Source browser. It is even debatable whether DRM actually does anything to combat what it is supposed to be designed for.
In light of this, and also following the results from this survey, we remain firm in that, out of principle as well as our users' desire, we will keep the browser completely free of DRM. People who have commented that this approach was (one of) the main reason(s) to choose Pale Moon as their browser can rest easy in the knowledge that it will not find its way into this browser.

Pale Moon is my primary web browser, so I was happy to read that.

reid's op-ed

Eric Reid: Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee