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Diaspora pod diaspora.happeningin.eu is going on strike on the January 18th, to protest against the Internet Censorship Bill (SOPA)

January 15, 2012
Americas, Diaspora, English, Europe, IT, Middle East, Politics, Western Europe
1 Comment

To all users of diaspora.happeningin.eu and connected pods,

We are going on strike on the January 18th, to protest against the Internet Censorship Bill (SOPA).

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

As most major services are located in the US, we are supporting the protest from Europe as well.

There will be NO service of any kind on diaspora.happeningin.eu until the January 19th.

http://sopastrike.com/

https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/posts/6259

Using the Diaspora* social network as your blog, website and/or publishing platform

December 18, 2011
English, Europe, IT, Western Europe
2 Comments

Diaspora*, the free, open source, decentralized, non-profit, user-owned, distributed social network that is based upon the free Diaspora software, can also be used as your public blog, website or publishing platform,

After signing up and configuring your Diaspora account, all of your published posts marked as public will be then made available at your own Public Diaspora URL, a URL in the format of https://yourdiasporapod/u/yourusername; mine, from the screenshot above, is available at https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/u/rovemonteux.

There are no limits for the size of the posts, you can upload multiple images + videos all together in a single post and photos will come up in a lightbox-like/slideshow interface, you can categorize the posts using hashtags, and the process of creating new posts, uploading pictures and posting videos is both intuitive and effortless.

You can then add your own internet domain name  to your new blog/website, or redirect entries from your existing domain, like, say, blog.myname.com, to https://yourdiasporapod/u/yourusername, and effectively use Diaspora this way as your daily publishing software (Diaspora also have a mobile interface, making it also a Mobile Publishing Platform).

A simple and effective way to accomplish it when using the Apache Web Server is to use a mod_rewrite rule,

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.myname.com$

RewriteRule (.*) https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/u/myusername [R=301,L]

When buying a domain (.com, .net, .info, .co.uk, etc), you will also be offered a free “URL Forwarding” option –  this option will enable you to forward your domain to your public Diaspora page in minutes, even if you have no web server nor hosting account, making the only expense for the entire process the cost of your fully qualified domain itself, for the entire lifetime of the domain.

Or, alternatively, you can use a free fully qualified domain, such as the ones offered by dot.tk, what will result in something similar to http://myusername.tk/, http://myusernameblog.tk/, or any name domain at your wish plus the .tk; they will also give you a URL forwarding option, making everything absolutely free.

Live example: http://rovemonteux.tk/ and https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/posts/197.

Each individual public post will be then made available for index and inclusion in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo! (this feature is disabled by default in most Diaspora pods – your pod need to enable it for it to become public, see note at the end of the post), and each individual entry will appear alone, in its own dedicated address as an individual entry in searches, or as a collection of posts in a blog-like page in the root of your new domain.

Please note that none of your non-public posts, ie. posts not marked as Public at the time of publishing, will be available to the internet, thus will not be available in your new address and/or Public Diaspora profile. Posts marked as Aspect-only (default) only reach people you authorized to be in the same Aspect (group), and only.

You can also publish a Public post from inside Diaspora to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr all in one go, after you setup the external services at Profile->Settings->Services (https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/services).

Below is a screenshot of a post of mine on Diaspora (the video is automatically rendered after posting the YouTube address, and clicking the camera icon enables you to easily upload and publish as many photos as you wish at once), and you can format messages ie. name links, use bold and italic nested or in their own, quote text, etc (see https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Message-Formatting),

And the same post automatically published to a Facebook account,

More information

Diaspora @ Happening in EU

podupti.me

Note for public Diaspora pod hosts and users: Edit your robots.txt file and remove the /u/ rule to enable the indexing of public user pages and posts; the same is enabled on Diaspora @ Happening in EU (https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/robots.txt). No private profile information, gender and location is ever made public, and users can disallow indexing and search for their own accounts in profile settings (https://diaspora.happeningin.eu/profile/edit).

Update, 20th of December 2011:  The following is a screenshot of a Google Search for “Rove Monteux Stream of Passion“; it shows my public Diaspora stream with a preview, the post mentioned in this article with its correct publishing date (“2 days ago”), correct title and description, tons of Google +1 buttons around them all, and as I have lots of contacts in the developer’s Pod joindiaspora.com, the third result is a copy of this same Public post that automatically went to tag stream “Metal” in that Pod,

 

Update, 21st of December 2011: While going through Diaspora’s source code, I have find out that the maximum length of a post in Diaspora is 65535 characters; that is enough space for a very long blog-like post. Tumblr have a 1000 characters limit, Twitter 140 and Facebook 420.

‎Česká republika: Špatný vzduch nad Ostrava (Tschechien: Dicke Luft über Ostrava)

December 13, 2011
Czech, Deutsch, Europe
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Die Luft ist zum Schneiden, den ganzen Tag brennen die Lichter.

Eine dicke Smogglocke hängt über der nordmährischen Stadt.

Schuld sind die Stahl- und Hüttenwerke, aber auch Privathaushalte mit der noch weit verbreiteten Ofenheizung.

Ostrava

Vzduch je střih, světlo hořet po celý den.

Tlustý Smogglocke visí nad městem severu Moravy.

Dluh je z oceli a železa práce, ale i domácnosti sohřívací pece, které i nadále velmi rozšířená.

Video: http://mediathek.daserste.de/sendungen_a-z/342024_europamagazin/8736980_tschechien-dicke-luft-ueber-ostrava

Christmas, rubbish commerce, lies and the Santa myth

December 1, 2011
Atheism, Criticism, History, Opinion, Religion
1 Comment

My own view is that the Santa “myth”, rationally speaking, is a lie.

A lie (also called prevarication, falsehood) is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement, especially with the intention to deceive others.

To lie is to state something with disregard to the truth with the intention that people will accept the statement as truth.

Lies imposed over years to your own children, promoted by commercial misuse in the name of an artificial material gratitude; as in, the lie is amplified by junk products that are barely useful, and would barely sell in a normal situation.

And as any lie, it diminishes the trust between parties, in this case your own children.

A diminish in trust puts one in the lookout for signs of betrayal; one got lied by the parents in the past, one might find him/herself in a suspicious position wondering when the parents will betray again.

The end of the myth, when children stop believing that some sort of Santa ever existed and it was all lies fabricated by the parents, normally happens at the age of 7/8, right before the start of puberty and teenagehood,

When children first learn how lying works, they lack the moral understanding of when to refrain from doing it. This takes years of watching people tell lies, and the results of these lies, to develop a proper understanding. Propensity to lie varies greatly between children, some doing so habitually and others being habitually honest. Habits in this regard are likely to change in early adulthood.

A parent’s guide to surviving the teen years

When you consider that the teen years are a period of intense growth, not only physically but morally and intellectually, it’s understandable that it’s a time of confusion and upheaval for many families.

Can’t be good or of any help to anyone involved, can it ?

Plus do take in account the fact that the child might believe that by continuous lying, the child will continue receiving material benefits, that lying brings up benefits upon himself, and it is a basic tool to achieve something, to get something, and to get anywhere. What sort of example does that set ?

And it skins your pocket in the process; how many people do fall in debt after Christmas ?

Four in 10 will be saddled with debt after Christmas splurge

Four out of 10 adults expect to end up in debt to fund the Christmas celebrations.

And it will take some people up to seven months to pay back what they have borrowed to buy presents, food and drink, a new survey shows.

Women are more likely to run up debts than men.

The average spend per adult is set to be €562. Irish people are also set to top the spending league in Europe.

Most people will be forced to dip into their savings to fund the seasonal splurge, with one in 10 set to use their credit cards, a new survey commissioned by the Irish League of Credit Unions indicates.

Others are set to borrow from credit unions and from moneylenders.

I think if a holiday of the sort is to be celebrated, it is a family holiday, where the family is meant to gather together for a couple days in the year, talk, enjoy, catch up and get to know each other better.

But even like that, family does not necessarily means that everybody get well along, or have something in common at all, so it is a personal decision to do it or not, not something that has to be done every single year at the exact same date.

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