SOPA protest – Wikipedia blackout

Since I consider this some kind of historical Internet event, I’ll dedicate a short blog post:

The English Wikipedia will be taken offline for as long as 24 hours as a form of protest against the U.S. “SOPA” law, which is considered a threat for Internet Free Speech by the Wikipedia community and many others.

So… no ‘lemme look that up on Wikipedia’ from Wednesday 5:00 UTC to Thursday 5:00 UTC.

In this context I’d like to recommend watching Cory Doctorow’s speech on what he calls The Coming War on General Purpose Computation – the content mafia trying to shape the Internet may just be the beginning… For those who have a preview of what’s to come already (i.e. those living in China, for example): here is a direct link to download the video in MP4, and here is a torrent through which you can get the same MP4.

TT-RSS 1.5.5 in Portage

I have blogged about TT-RSS just recently. And when Andrew Dolgov, TT-RSS’s initiator and main contributor released version 1.5.5, I thought I’d try to improve the ebuild a bit, given that it is in Portage now.

So I added a ‘daemon’ USE flag, which makes it easy for Gentoo users to get TT-RSS to update the RSS feeds. When you emerge www-apps/tt-rss with USE=daemon, it will now install an init script to start the ‘ttrssd’ daemon (or multiple, if you have multiple TT-RSS instances on your host). This is the preferred way to keep the feeds updated, according to TT-RSS’s documentation.

So, if you need a great, centralised (i.e. synchronised state amongst your computers, phones, etc.) news aggregator that runs on your own server / web host, give tt-rss a try! And if you’re a Gentoo user, I’d appreciate if you could test the new ebuild’s features (USE=daemon), and give feedback here or open a bug report if there is anything that could be improved further.