The problem is one person wants a complex feature here, another person needs another complex feature there. When you edit book-length texts you need styles, regular expressions in find/replace, plugins for referencing software etc. Interestingly, Word may do bells and whistles, but LO does the first two better than Word, and the third one as well as Word.

I use Markdown a lot for the plain text advantages but to me a huge limitation is that it doesn’t do colours and tabs. There are of course people writing books in Markdown, but I find it very limiting and ultimately counterproductive even for note-taking.

I would think that a plastic bag of rice is anything but porous.

IME storing beans in a foil bag that I open and re-open every day accelerates oxidation even though I roll the top to expel all air. I suppose this is less noticeable if the bag runs out very quickly.

Ah, there is another idea for an entrepreneur. Sealing the bottom between uses. I haven’t tested this, but instinctively I think not much air will push its way up compared to the air sucked in from the top as beans drop.

I have been doing this and it made things worse because I had to open the bag to get more beans out more often. Expelling the air every time should help though. The best method I’ve seen is vacuum packing single doses of beans but that’s a lot of work.

That’s the principle I had in mind. Applying that to the hopper is the poor man’s version and there is no need for further interaction with the beans until you have to refill the hopper. When you open your canister fresh air gets in but I suppose pushing it out seconds later minimises exposure to oxygen. Using a bag and rolling the top before you seal it should achieve the same thing at zero additional cost.

That assumes that a gasket would create a vacuum in the hopper over time. I think fresh air will find a way in anyway. Filling that space with a balloon or a bag is simpler. I will be surprised if this hasn’t been done already by a grinder or accessories maker. There are plunger canisters already.

There will always be exceptions, but what matters is systemic trends.

Evidenced report after report shows that poverty is rising fast in wealthy countries. In the UK, a G7 economy, people in full time employment doing a decent job (eg teachers) can’t afford to buy a home or pay the rent and rely on food banks. Life expectancy is decreasing too. This is the first time this is happening after many decades. You would think that in a G7 economy these people would at least be able to survive, or even thrive. Instead, people have to make a choice between ‘heating and eating’, and young people are forced to live with their parents in their 30s.

There are many reports on children poverty too. This is not going to end well.

Frankly, the rising standards and choice narratives are not just misguided. They are insulting.

Thanks for doingthe digging. An archivist may know something more. Or the archive.is people.

I have been using Zotero every day for more than two decades and somehow it hasn’t cross my mind. You may be on to something.

Zotero supports public and private shared bibliographies that you can subscribe to through the client or their web interface. Each entry contains the bibliographical details, notes attachments, file attachments and links to local files. It also captures webpages and metadata through the browser addon. The local database can be backed up and, if self-hosted, you have control. The best part is that academic researchers will be familiar with the software and process. One downside is that the cached file is not independently archived so it could be tampered with. Thanks for the idea.

A wiki is a good idea. Putting a Singlefile or similar all-in-one file in a repository and provide index numbers organised as a look-up table would also work for easy retrieval by a random research user. Both require some admin and more effort from the researchers.

I wish there was a hostable version of archive.is for near-zero maintenance. You just submit a URL over the internet and the web page is cached once along with a screenshot. Then, anyone can access the archived version. This can be done already with archive.is but we have no control over its future, which is critical for long-term dependable archiving.

One advantage and disadvantage of having webrecorder host our archived pages is that the archive may survive longer than, or not as long as our project.

I have been using singlefile for years. It’s great but not for seamlessly making cached web pages available to the general public reading our reports and finding that cited links are now dead. And it doesn’t support URLs point to PDF, CSV files. A public-facing repository of singlefile files with an index for ToC might do it though. Simplicity is good for future-proofing an archive.

Something like archive.org and archive.is would be ideal, but we have no control over its future and practices.

I wonder if an authorised remote user (ie an affiliated researcher) can easily instruct ArchiveBox to store a URL and later retrieve it. Also, ideally a random user should be able to retrieve the archived web page or file (eg a PDF, CSV etc). The idea is that authorised researchers can get URLs archived, and then any user reading our reports can click on a citation and get our archived source if the original is not available any more. I’ll need to run it and see, but it looks promising.

Keeping the archive alive for years later, possibly after funding dries up, is another challenge but there are public repositories that may be suitable for that.

It is but creeping privatisation may change that, as does legislation becoming more hostile to unionisation since the 1980s.

The broader point is that individuals can try all they want to preserve their privacy, but then friends, family and organisations spy on them, often unwittingly, eg when we share with them calendar events or email messages. The only way forward is collective resistance, building alliances and influencing public policy. But it’s always been like that with systemic issues.

And resistance can only be collective. Another reason unionisation is as important as it’s ever been.

I thought it was Autonomy. You installed a program, instructed puppies agents, logged out, and while you were offline the puppies searched through several engines. Next time you logged in the findings waited for you. That was the time of 56k modems and metered connections.

In addition to wifi, Bluetooth beacons would be good too.

Seeing the same SSIDs (eg in a cinema) might also mean you are not moving, but then how can you tell you are not sitting near another train passenger with their hotspot on?

I’ve been using this for a few weeks and it’s great. In addition to offline-first, it would be nice to be able to ask Colota: List my trips between date1 and date2 when I was near (ie within x meters from) point y.

I am planning to use this for a long time too, so an export/import data for when I change my phone would be nice. I see Export but not Import.

Also, being able to delete trips between date1 and date2 would be useful. Currently, you can delete 1-by-1 or recent trips only.