Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister for me. Despite all the scheming the humour is so good-natured throughout.

It’s not the biggest pain in the world, but having all state and config in predictable folders is wonderful for backups. You don’t have to copy each random dotfile in your home directory, you just have a well-defined folder and can back up everything at once.

Repology might kinda help for your use case. It lets you search for software that is packaged on many different “families” of distributions. You can also filter by category.

Admittedly it does kinda depends on your definition of popularity. But it’s good at answering these questions:

• Is this widely regarded as free software?
• Has it been around for a while?
• Is it useful enough to have been packaged in many places?

Certainly! The line we don’t cross is that we don’t directly edit data. Every record in our database must be generated by the system itself. But, we can re-trigger behaviour, or select different flows, or tweak properties around the edges as much as we want.

For example:

• Reflows - for every message that enters or leaves our system, we store it in a table. We can then reflow the message either into our system or to our downstreams. This means if there was a transient error or a code change since we received the message, we can replay it again without having to involve anyone else.
• Triggers - i.e. ask the system to regenerate its output based on its inputs again. This is useful if there’s a bug that’s only hit in certain situations.
• Migration - we have lots of different flows and some are triggered only on some accounts. We have some scripts that lets us turn on/off migration and then automatically reflow all the different messages.

I run a prosody server and have a couple of users who run Monal, and notifications work reliably for us!

I made sure to follow the considerations for server admins and it’s been ok.

Regarding the push service: unless you deploy your own version of the app, it’s not possible to self-host your own push service. The flow looks like this:

XMPP server -> Monal pushserver -> Apple pushserver -> Device

Apple only allows the developer of the app to send notifications to their push server. They enforce this by giving the app developer a key specific to their app.

The linkage between XMPP server and Monal pushserver gets set up by Monal: when it connects to the XMPP server, it instructs it to send messages while it is offline to the Monal pushserver.

Idempotence / self-healing: the system should be built in such a way that it tries to reach the correct end state, even if the current state is wrong. For instance, every time our system gets an update, it will re-evaluate the calculation from first principles, instead of doing a diff based on what was there before. This prevents bad data from snowballing and becoming a catastrophe.

Giving yourself knobs to twiddle in production: at work we have ways of triggering functionality in the system on request. Basically calling a method directly on the running process. This is so, so useful in prod issues, especially when combined with the above. We can basically tell the system “reprocess this action/command/message” at any time and it will do it again from first principles.

Debugging: I always first try and find a way to replicate it quickly. Then, I try and simplify it one tiny step at a time until it’s small enough I can understand in one go. I never combine multiple steps per re-run and always verify whether the bug is there or not at every single stage. This can be quite a slow approach but it also means I am always making progress towards finding the answer, instead of coming up with theories which are often wrong, and getting lost in the process.

They will use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which means it’s not open source, and no-one else can sell replacement cartridges, parts etc.

It might still be a good printer and enjoyed by some, but it really annoys me when companies mix these terms up, almost certainly deliberately.

I write my CV in Markdown (just headers and bullet points), and then use pandoc to generate a pdf. Very easy and straightforward!

This has landed me interviews although not hired (I think that’s down to me, not the format of my CV 😅)

pandoc \
--variable title-meta:"ambitiousslab - CV" \
--variable author-meta:"ambitiousslab <ambitiousslab@example.org>" \
--variable lang:"en-GB" \
--variable geometry:margin=1cm \
--variable colorlinks:true \
--variable pagestyle=empty \
cv.md \
-o ambitiousslab-cv.pdf

It’s a good idea, but you’d ultimately have to trust the project to tell the truth about whether they really are free software or not.

That sounds simple but, especially around the edges, people can disagree about what is free and non-free. It’s quite common for free software projects to include some non-free components, either intentionally or unintentionally.

For instance, a project that doesn’t really know or care about freedom could advertise itself as open source, but include blobs, or use a non-standard license that doesn’t actually give you the four freedoms.

Even well-meaning projects can accidentally include incompatibly licensed code, or code that they actually don’t have permission to distribute to you, by accident.

A good heuristic, for Linux, is that if it’s packaged in Debian (ignoring contrib, non-free or non-free-firmware) or Fedora’s archives, it’s probably free software. This is because those communities really care about freedom, vet the packages for licenses and check that the four freedoms are actually given. Things do sometimes slip through, but when they are found, the packages are fixed or removed.

For Android, if it’s on F-Droid, it’s almost certainly free software, for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the FSF have a free software directory that contains a listing of programs they consider to be free.

I would say Snikket if you want decentralised, Signal if you don’t.

I use podget, which is a 248 kB bash script. I really like it, and think it will meet your requirements:

• It’s designed to be called from cron
• It lets you sort your podcasts into categories
• It automatically organises the downloads into different directories based on these categories
• It’s been around since 2005 and is still maintained

From its description:

Podget is a simple podcast aggregator optimized for running as a scheduled background job (i.e. cron). It features support for downloading podcasts from RSS & ATOM XML feeds, for sorting the files into folders & categories, for importing URLs from iTunes PCAST files & OPML lists automatic M3U & ASX playlist creation, and automatic cleanup of old files.

It also features automatic UTF-16 conversion for podcasts hosted on MS Windows servers.

mblaze: a set of Unix utilities for processing and interacting with mail messages which are stored in maildir folders.

Toot: a CLI and TUI tool for interacting with Mastodon instances from the command line.

Newsboat: an RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console.

Dino: a modern open-source chat client (XMPP) for the desktop.

podget: a simple podcast aggregator optimized for running as a scheduled background job (i.e. cron).

eldood: lightweight tool to find dates where everyone is free.

snac: a simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance.

beancount: double-entry accounting from text files.

Pass: a terminal based standard unix password manager.