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Milwaukee Critical Mass Web Site

Milwaukee Critical Mass Web Site

Milwaukee Critical Mass Web Site

Disclaimer: I used to build web sites, by writing code… by hand. I started in 1995 and probably stopped around 2012 or so.

Hey, Milwaukee Critical Mass (bike riding event) has a web site at mkecriticalmass.com and that’s awesome! I’m going to (lightly) critique a few things but before I do I’d like to say that this is all my own personal opinion. I used to be a community organizer, I used to be a volunteer, I know that when you take on extra unpaid work you do the best you can with the time and resources available. I do not expect perfection, and anything I say can be completely ignored. On with the show!

I am extremely grateful that Milwaukee Critical Mass has a web site. It’s 2025 and now more than ever we need web sites that convey information and don’t lock it up behind a corporate wall of accounts and logins and having to use some terrible platform just to get basic information. We built the web to provide open and public sharing of information and we should never forget that.

I have no issue at all with the (lack of) design of the web site. It provides information. It’s simple HTML! It does use Milligram
“A minimalist CSS framework” but I have no idea why as it seems like it’s not needed. But maybe the site will change over time and require it?

You’ll notice the screen shot above shows a date in April, yet I captured it on May 30th, which was the date of the May ride, so someone forgot to update the web site. (It’s updated now, for the June ride.)

If you don’t know where Red Arrow Park is in Milwaukee can you find it? Go on, try right now! I was able to but not without going to another web site and searching for it. Missed opportunity there to just provide the address, cross streets, landmarks, etc.

There are links to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. I can’t see any of the Twitter posts because I deleted my account a few years ago when fascists took it over. For Instagram it tries to force a login and without one all you can see is “MKE Critical Mass rides start from Red Arrow Park at 6 p.m. on the last Friday of the month. Slow roll / no drop”. You cannot view any posts without an account. This might be fine if no additional information exists there that does not exist on the web site… which brings us to Facebook.

If you visit Facebook it tries to get you to log in, but you can skip than and get some information. The event is listed and if you click “More” you get more information, which is not on the web site: “We’re ending at Zillman Park for the Bay View Gallery Night Makers Market (2168 S Kinnickinnic Ave), and the tentative route is about 10 miles through downtown, Walkers Point, and Bay View.” There are a few more notes about the group ride, rules, reminders, etc… (This info is also in the Instagram posts but you cannot see it without logging in.)

But what we’ve just learned is that if you only use the web site, you are missing out on information. (We also get a link via Facebook to linktr.ee/mkecriticalmass which mostly links to things we already know about but adds two more links.)

“Okay Mr.Critic, how would you do it differently!?”

As I mentioned, I am I no position to tell anyone what to do, but I do have ideas about how I would do things…

I’m a huge fan of POSSE (which is Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere) so that the primary source of all information is your own web site, on a domain you control, and can be free of ads, tracking, required accounts, etc.

The “Syndicate Elsewhere” part of it then allows you to share info across social media sites. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, etc. I’m a bit hardline on not wanting to use corporate social media myself so I’d probably choose the Fediverse in some way. There’s also RSS, one of the most important technologies of the web. Using RSS allows people to subscribe to updates and do neat things with the information you are providing.

A calendar (in iCalendar format that can be subscribed to) is another great thing. Not a “Google Calendar” but a URL that you can plug into anything that can take iCalendar data. This could put every ride or event onto someone’s calendar with very little effort.

An email address might also be useful, as a means of contacting someone. Right now there the web site has no way of contacting the organizer(s).

For Milwaukee Critical Mass I may be overthinking things… Plenty of people probably just need to know “Rides start from Red Arrow Park at 6 p.m. on the last Friday of the month” and that’s enough. I don’t know if rides get canceled due to weather, or what the route is, or how long the route is, or whatever, but I’ve been thinking more about how we can make the web better for people so this post is the result of that.

I wonder how difficult it would be to assemble the tools or build a platform to make these things easier. (A platform free of corporate social media of course, so open source tools that can be self-hosted would be ideal.) I should check back in on how Scrappy Hour is doing things now.

Thanks for reading! See you on the streets!

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HomeBox for Parts Inventory

I’ve started using HomeBox to track the parts inventory for the things I build. This is something I used to do (somewhat) in a spreadsheet but I didn’t do a good job of keeping it up-to-date, and it lacked some important information. While a spreadsheet works for some things, it might not work for everything. As the only person in my company I get to choose the tools I want to use and no one else has to deal with my choices!

I know that “Homebox is the inventory and organization system built for the Home User” but I’m more concerned about the components and parts I have for my small business than I am for my own personal stuff at home… though I can see the appeal for some people.

HomeBox is open source and installing it on TrueNAS was super simple. There are plenty of features I don’t need and I can mostly ignore them… and on the flipside it doesn’t seem to be lacking too many features I’d really want.

Anyway, I’ll give HomeBox a try and see if it makes things easier for me and my (previously poor) tracking of inventory.

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Hello CryptPad, Goodbye Google Docs!

CryptPad

In my continuing effort to get away from Google (and most large US-based tech companies in general) I found CryptPad. I should note that everyone uses software and web-based services differently, and for me specifically there is one spreadsheet I constantly use for my small business. I never really use the documents or presentations that Google Docs offer, and I almost never use Google Drive. Still, CryptPad does offer all of those things, so if you need them, they are there.

There’s a lot to love about CryptPad and people seem to like it. CryptPad is an end-to-end encrypted and open-source collaboration suite and there are all sorts of options for using it, and I’m pretty sure your data won’t be used to train AI models since, you know, your data is encrypted and not even viewable by the system admins.

I am using CryptPad.fr (specifically) right now, and I make a small donation every month for the space and resources I am using. I do not mind paying some small fee for what I get, and for helping support an alternative to Google.

Public Money = Public code? Funded by and for users? Yeah, more software like this, please!

But is it as good as Google Docs? Again, it depends on your needs and expectations and what you are willing to compromise on. At first I found it “not as good” as Google Docs, but after using it a bit more and just getting used to it, I really like it, and I’ve quit Google Docs, hopefully permanently.

Eventually I’d like to self-host CryptPad. Oh, I should mention this weirdness around OnlyOffice, because some code from OnlyOffice runs within CryptPad. See this Shady Moves post. I am not concerned about any shady stuff because it’s actually being discussed in the open with CryptPad developers. This is very different than the closed-source model where you never even know what shady shit might be happening.

Do I trust open source developers in France more than closed-source developers at Google or Microsoft? Hell Yes. I expect large US tech companies to cave under pressure from a compromised administration, and you should too.

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HP Z420… More Drives!

The TrueNAS build is still going on! Last time we talked about Drive Caddies but that was weeks ago. Blame work being busy and some travel mixed in, anyway… I thought I could only add six drives to the Z420 because there were 6 SATA power cables… of course there were more than 6 SATA data ports! (Yes, there are five 2.5″ drives in the photo above.)

The optical drive power cable was one of the old 4 pin jobbers, but guess what? They make 4 Pin Male IDE Molex to 15 Pin Female Dual SATA Adapter/Splitters. So I got one. Well, two actually because it’s a two-pack.

So yeah, now I have 7 SATA drives plugged in, and can actually add one more. There are two pools, each with three disks, and then the boot drive, and I will see about adding a second SSD to mirror the boot drive. Yeah, 8 drives… who would have thought such things were possible! This is the free computer that just keeps on giving!

I will have to rethink the strategy of fitting all the drives into the front bay though. Luckily they are all 2.5″ so it may just be a matter of using some of those two-high 3D printed drive caddies I found.

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Focalboard for Task Management

Focalboard

Focalboard

Note: It’s 2025-09-29 and it looks like Focalboard has lost all of my data. I will try to confirm this and then update this post and write a new one about the data loss.

In my quest for a web-based task manager I came across Focalboard. In the past I’ve used Asana, Monday, and Notion. This post is going to talk about Focalboard but also cover why I do not like the other platforms… (I’ve included some screenshots of Focalboard in case you like pictures.)

Focalboard

Asana is the first platform I used for managing my tasks. I used it at work in a team environment and it worked well. For my own personal projects (and small business projects) I was able to use it for free, since I was just a single user. I think I quit using it when it removed the feature that would email you reminders. This was probably 4 or 5 years ago.

Focalboard

I switched to Monday because I wanted an alternative to Asana and maybe they offered the email reminders thing or something else I thought Asana was lacking. I used it for a while, once again as a single user as I am the only employee at my (very) small company. I don’t remember why I left Monday but I switched to Notion… maybe 2 or 3 years ago?

Focalboard

There were things I really liked about Notion, but shortly after I started using it they added this AI feature in beta and forced all users to have it. I mean it was in the interface every time you wanted to type something. Once they rolled it out the only way you could opt-out or disable it was if you had a huge corporate account…

I should note that right now in 2025 all three of these fuckers (Asana, Monday, and Notion) promote AI AI AI all across their home page. “Work Smater with AI. Increase Productivity with AI!” and on and on. I do not fucking want AI. I want a simple task manager…

Focalboard is a simple task manager. It lacks a few things I would like, but I can self host it on my own server, so the data I put into it is only for me. It’s not being used to train AI, it’s not being used to pump up user numbers for some corporation. Here is the code. But wait… it’s still not good.

Focalboard seems to be (sort of) abandonware. As in, the code repo is no longer maintained, and they are looking for a new maintainer. People have volunteered but there’s been no action yet. And I do hope someone takes it over, because when I looked up Mattermost I see they do work for the US Air Force and Department of Defense. Sigh…

So yeah, those are my notes about Focalboard. I am using it for now, it is open source, and for me it is self hosted, and yes, it does not have a few features I would like, but the world is full of compromise.

Focalboard is “good enough” for me right now because I ran out of the motivation and energy to find an alternative. I would like something that is open source, I can host myself, has minimal clicking needed (as in, I can type things inline) and I would love to be able to subscribe to a calendar of due dates for tasks… notifications (email, etc.) would also be nice.

I don’t feel like I am asking for too much but I’ve yet to find something that does those things… Suggestions are welcome!