Note: I used the tag 'searx' for this post even though I've been using SearxNG for quite a while. There's enough compatibility between the two that the stuff I've written (so far) will work. However, I haven't decided if it's worth the hassle of changing the tag and possibly making things harder to find.
A constant problem when you have a sizeable external memory is finding what you need, when you need it. It's a problem that I've been poking at for a while and, which I probably don't have optimal solutions I've found a couple that work well enough …
I guess I'm as back on my game as I'm likely to be for the forseeable future. I finished the run of paxlovid a couple of weeks back and things only recently stopped tasting like soap. I still get tired pretty quickly. It's not unusual for me to fall asleep around 2300 hours local time, give or take, but I wake up feeling fairly decent. My lungs are still pretty irritated, which has necessitated adding a hit of advair from an inhaler twice daily. Said advair was prescribed because I was using my rescue inhaler to get asthma attacks under …
There is a conspiracy theory online called the Dead Internet Theory. So the story goes, some years ago people - actual, organic people sitting at keyboards or holding phones - stopped posting anything, anywhere online. Depending on who you talk to (and this includes credentialed folks who study various aspects of the Net, not just denizens of image boards or random users on forums), the proliferation of spambots, botnets, folks who use bots to age Twitter accounts to sell (link anonymized) for various purposes (like astroturfing) and SEO shenanagains effectively pushed organics out through sheer numbers. One person can use custom software …
From time to time lately I've been thinking about what Cory Doctorow called the enshittification of just about everything and peoples' reactions to it. Sometimes there are less shitty alternatives which present themselves with a little looking, sometimes there aren't. Most interestingly, and this is a bit more common than I find comfortable, other solutions or alternatives to those things that are suddenly now user hostile are just... well... the reaction to them is like somebody just told the other person to shove a pair of daisies up their nostrils and hum Yankee Doodle. I've started filing this under the …
One of these days I'll get around to doing a writeup of an indispensible part of my exocortex, Wallabag. I used it to replace my old paywall breaker program, largely because pumping random articles from the web into a copy of etherpad-lite was janky as hell and did not make for a good user experience. To put it another way, when you're looking for a particular thing in your archive it's a huge time sink to then go through and edit the saved document because it's a single huge line of text. At least Wallabag saves copies of …
Long time readers are probably familar with two things: Horror stories about my dental work, and my endless quest to find search software that'll let me make sense of my data hoard (because I never delete anything). Thankfully, the former's been fairly good lately so I don't have any real complaints there. Things have improved on the latter front, remarkably.
I've experimented off and on with a personal search engine called Recoll, which was designed to work alongside Linux desktop environments initially but later it was ported to Mac OS X and Windows. It is noteworthy in that it tries …
Not too long ago I got fed up with how good a job Duckduckgo's site search feature wasn't doing. No matter what I did I couldn't find dick around here. And, folksonomies being what they are, unless you plan them (and then they won't be folksonomies) you probably won't remember what tags you used. It's frustrating to get get lost in what amounts to your own house. So, one night I got well and fed up and decided to put some of my spare computing power to use. I did a walk-around of my exocortex and figured out that Jackpoint …
I promise I'll explain what Fess is in a later post. I want to get this information out there in preparation.
If you haven't used Searx before, it's a self-hosted meta-search engine which queries a wide array of search engines (some of which are also self-hosted), collates the search results, and returns them as a regular search result page, an RSS feed, or a JSON API.
One of the lesser known features is that you can add your own search engines. You can either write your own (using an existing one as a template) or you can leverage one of …
It should come as little surprise to anyone out there that I have a bit of a problem with hoarding data. Books, music, and of course files of all kinds that I download and read or use in a project for something. Legal briefs, research papers (arXiv is the bane of my existence), stuff people ask me to review, the odd Humble Bundle... So much so that a scant few years ago I rebuilt Leandra to better handle the volume of data in my library. However, it's taken me this long to both figure out and get around to making …
A couple of weeks back, I found myself in a discussion with a couple of friends about searching on the Internet and how easy it is to get caught up in a filter bubble and not realize it. To put not too fine a point on it, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, and so forth) profile users individually and tailor search results to analyses of their search histories (and other personal data they have access to), it's very easy to forget that there are other things out there that you don't know about for the simple reason that …
