When I wrote blogging is better, it was aspirational. I could only find a few interesting blogs and didn't write posts more frequently either.
After finally giving up on the rotting corpse that is Reddit, I started going through theforest.link from a hacker news post. I started finding exactly what i was looking for. Honestly expressed viewpoints for things you don't usually hear and thing you didn't know you wanted to hear about. Stuff like lane sawyer or robin rendle.
I spent a few hours yesterday trying to figure out why my mouse disappeared on my main screen, but still showed on the secondary.
Nothing shows up in the logs, but I finally hit the right keywords and found https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/issues/3189. How in the hell does that even happen?
Anyway, it supposed to be fixed in Wlroots 0.15, cool. Wlroots 0.15 only exists in Debian experimental...not cool.
This adds on to the existing frustrations with Wayland. Xwayland Firefox menus are not usable when at the top of the secondary screen. So I enable the wayland version and it works fine...except when left running for a while, Firefox will crash.
So I'm currently running sway from experimental so my mouse doesn't escape to the ether anymore. Given all the these little issues I'm left wondering if I should switch to i3 or one of the big wayland DEs.
While working on my 'let's make OSM usable for normal people project aka OpenSuperMaps', I've been drawn into OpenAddresses. Coming from the OSM side, a big question about this data has been quality. I'm going to point out bad data I've found and try to draw some conclusions.
The data comes from numerous sources, many with their own idiosyncrasies. Since the bad data sources are currently limiting me, let's start with those. My methods for finding bad data are mostly manual, only illegal XML characters throw errors from my build pipeline. I'll be looking at data quality from those sources especially and few others that show red flags like punctuation and special characters in the data.
The city of Rancho Cucamonga, CA decided to put -- for the number and street fields in 4521/56714 records(8%). Statewide Florida has a record with number=\x02, aka a Unicode control character. Looking further, the 32 rows where street starts with &, 13 different where number is &B.
Many of the statewide NY number has non-numeric contents are valid since 1/2 addresses are a thing, but there's a lot of unit designations in there too.
The county of Yakima, WA is a prolific offender: lack of standardization, normalization and with a topping of garbage data. It has 326 records where the street starts with &. For example, number=41 street=& 43 DEER COVE LN. Unit numbers are comingled in the street field and not standardized. There's number=109 with street = E 3RD AVE, 113 E 3RD AVE, 115 E 3RD AVE; number=140 with street = PATRIOT LN, (UNIT A & B); number=11, street = ROCKY RD UNITS 1 - 6; number = 515, street = 515, 517 ,519 ELM ST. There's more, but I'll stop there. 20,138(~%20) of the records are number=0 which aren't valid addresses.
| Source | number has non-numeric contents | illegal XML | number=0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statewide FL | 13675 | 1 | 0 |
| Statewide NY | 46117 | 0 | 32 |
| Yakima WA | 0 | 0 | 20138 |
As you can see, each dataset tends to mangle the data in unique ways and the fixes range from trivial to probably impossible. Someone could easily exclude the bad data if needed, trying to fix it would be the labor intensive part.
I'm planning to follow this up with an overall characterization of OpenAddresses data quality.
I bought a Moto Z3 play after a botched battery replacement on my old Moto forced a quick replacement. It was on sale for $215, carrier unlocked, bootloader unlockable and decent specs for the price. An aftermarket OS can cause some serious issues when you're still receiving OTA updates so I stuck with stock. Unfortunately, Moto dropped support 2 years after launch, 1 year after I had bought the phone brand new. I was expecting security updates to go for another year based on what I read about Moto. Conveniently, Moto never commits to a full update schedule, they only tell you if your device is still supported, until support is silently dropped.
LineageOS to the rescue! Official support came a few weeks ago, but I decided to wait after TWRP failed to restore my backup the last time I tried out Lineage. I followed the install instructions and everything went smoothly. LineageOS is currently on Android 10 so I got an OS upgrade along with a few months of security updates with the install. Lineage feels more responsive in general, but the best part is no bloatware and google based apps aren't installed by default. I put the pico package from OpenGapps to put the bare minimum of Google on it so that all apps still work.
The gotchas for Lineage are that the manufacturer no longer supports the device and support is done by a random person. The lack of manufacturer support means that vendor security items like firmware won't get updates. That's not ideal but with the Lineage getting monthly security updates from Android and the Linux kernel getting releases you're still in decent shape. The random person support means quality and communication are variable. Quality is typically good, but it's not uncommon to run into oddities that cause issues. For instance, the Z3 play has no builds up right now because there were reports of people having issues while I've been running it for 5 days with no issues. The communication has been more annoying for me in the past. A maintainer can stop at any time and the users get no notice that this is happening. Your phone can go from official support 1 week to nothing the next and you'll only find out when you stop getting updates.
My overall view is that Lineage works better than stock, but the ecosystem is a mess due to Google's decisions. Lineage's official builds come once a week with android security updates once a month. Compare that to Moto who sent security updates every 3 months and the newest update was a month behind. I was about to talk about how the lack of reliable non-Google backup solution caused issues, but a quick search shows Lineage recently got built in support for SeedVault. In true open source Android fashion, Google keeps changing things with their thumb on the scale while open source groups try to keep non-Google Android usable in the real world.
Blogs are a great way to get information on niche a subject. It's a person sharing what they know about a few subjects where they're knowledgable. The monetary motivation is limited greatly compared to other sources where clicks=money so content tends to be better researched. The lack of money chasing leads to a few other positive effects. You avoid social media rot where the site is specifically created to hook you into an endless feed. You avoid tons of websites bloated with tracking, ads and web design fads. You avoid giving tons of data directly Google or Facebook that they can use to control the web(You're using Firefox with uBlock Origin and DuckDuckGo right?).
The range of blogs out there is impressive, everything from pthree.org that has posts on interesting mathematic concepts(and the best ZFS guide out there), markosaric.com that posts on online marketing without tracking to paritybit.ca that writes about their experiences with FOSS and life in general. It's a breath of fresh air compared to what you'll find on social media or media in general.
Writing a blog is a great way to educate yourself. For example, I know a good deal about Linux, but when I go to write a post I end up doing a bunch of research to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. I have to comprehend the material, condense it down to a sensible length and terminology for the intended audience. I often use it as a way to document what I've learned if I couldn' t find that information anywhere else.
Honestly, I think Marko Saric said it better so take a look if you get a chance.