Tag: web

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ListenBrainz – Track Your Listens

ListenBrainz home

ListenBrainz home

This post is about ListenBrainz but we need to start with the Last.fm service. So 20 years ago I learned about Last.fm as a way to track my listening habits. I listen to a lot of music, mostly using a computer. I would run this “Audioscrobbler” program to send what I listened to over to Last.fm and you’d see it at https://www.last.fm/user/rasterweb

This was all super cool, except for one thing. I saw too many services shut down over the years and I did not want to lose my data, so in 2010 I created Heard – a Last.fm mirror, which is still running on this site.

Fast forward to 2025 and I’m using Jellyfin to listen to all my music. Jellyfin has a plugin to send data to Last.fm so all good! Except… remember that Last.fm is owned by CBS Interactive, and you know what? Fuck those guys.

Right now I am still sending my data to Last.fm but that will stop soon. I now use ListenBrainz, which is basically the open alternative to Last.fm and you can see my listens at https://listenbrainz.org/user/raster/

ListenBrainz raster

ListenBrainz is run by MetaBrainz, and organization which actually has a Social Contract you can read. Because of this I’ve also chosen to support them financially. When possible I’d prefer to pay for services from the good folks than get free stuff from the bad folks. (The bad folks will just use your data against you/for profit anyway.)

Also, there is a ListenBrainz plugin for Jellyfin so that’s all working fine, and there is a Last.fm compatible API for ListenBrainz so I should be able to update heard to work with it.

And yeah, heard was moved from GitHub to Codeberg because Fuck GitHub, Fuck Microsoft, and Fuck their AI Slop.

ListenBrainz open

And also yeah, the ListenBrainz code repository is still on GitHub because you cannot win every battle. Sigh…

One more “Also” here! I do know about libre.fm but I had a heck of a time / wait getting an account set up so I’m behind on that but will still investigate it. (Dammit! GitHub again!)

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Bandwagon.fm Music

Bandwgon.fm Site

Bandwgon.fm Site

If you saw my previous post about Bandcamp you might know that it’s a good place for people to put their music. Of course Bandcamp has issues, so we still need alternatives, or at least additional outlets/options.

Take a look at Bandwagon.fm now. It’s “Better Social for Musicians” and “Connect to Your Fans on the Fediverse” which might be confusing if you don’t know what the Fediverse is. Read the About page for the full version, but the short version is that it’s a way to be free of the corporate media sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. But how can I trust these Bandwagon.fm folks to run a reliable web site? Well, you can run your own site if you want, it’s all open source.

Bandwgon.fm News

So you can just put your music up on Bandwagon.fm, but what about the Fediverse part and connecting with fans? Okay, my site is at bandwagon.fm/@rasterweb and my account is @rasterweb@bandwagon.fm and you can follow that account with any Fediverse account. Mastodon, Pixelfed, or any site that uses the ActivityPub protocol.

Bandwagon.fm user on Mastodon

For my masotodon.social account I can follow myself here: https://mastodon.social/@rasterweb@bandwagon.fm

When I (@rasterweb@bandwagon.fm) release new music or post a news update I (@rasterweb@mastodon.social) can see it in my Mastodon feed.

Bandwgon in an RSS reader

But maybe you’re like “ActivityPub sucks! I just use RSS!” and that’s okay… we got you covered because like other ActivityPub sites they provide an RSS feed. Here’s mine: https://bandwagon.fm/@69847667e6ff0fb4436fb821/feed?format=rss

Pop that URL in your feed reader (I like NetNewsWire paired with FreshRSS) and you can follow along and see all the updates.

And RSS is powerful! You can transform it into an email newsletter or do other weird things.

Bandwagon.fm web site

Basically if you are a musician, a band, or put music online, I think it’s worth looking at what Bandwagon.fm is doing. It’s interesting stuff and could be the way out of corporate social media with all the evil shit their platforms give us. Imagine connecting directly with your fans and cutting out the advertisements, the algorithms, and the bullshit.

This is the IndieWeb we all need to build, together.

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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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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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Rose Ferreira and NASA

I saw a post about Rose Ferreira being deleted from the NASA web site because the article about her was a story about “Women in STEM” and with the current (oppressive) administration trying to erase certain people I figured I would cite the original article here.

You can also see the article on Archive.org, but that too is under attack, so the more mirrors of important stories we have, the better.

NASA Intern Found Hope in the Moon

When Rose Ferreira first saw an image of a field of galaxies and galaxy clusters from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in July, she “went into the restroom and broke down a little,” she said. This “Deep Field” image showed galaxies not only sharper, but deeper into the universe than a similar image she loved from the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Being able to contribute in any way to the efforts of the team within NASA that released this new Deep Field just felt like such a profound thing for me,” said Ferreira, a student at Arizona State University who interned with NASA this summer. “I was just a little bit in shock for, like, a week.”

Rose Ferreira estudia ciencias planetarias y astronomía en la Universidad Estatal de Arizona.
Credits: James Mayer

Webb, the largest space science telescope ever, which launched in December 2021, played a big role in Ferreira’s internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She also supported a series of live news interviews for Webb’s first images and multimedia tasks for NASA’s Spanish-language communications program.

Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Ferreira said she didn’t have access to science education. She was taught skills like cooking and cleaning; she didn’t know NASA existed at that time.

But during the frequent blackouts in her village, when the Moon provided the only light, Rose Ferreira often wondered – what is the Moon all about? “The moonlight is a lot of what I used to see, and I was always so curious about that,” she said. “That obsession is what made me start asking questions.”

When she came to New York, she was placed in an underserved high school that sent her back multiple grades because they weren’t satisfied with her English language skills. She left and earned a GED diploma instead, hoping to go to college faster.

At age 18, Ferreira became homeless in New York and lived in train stations. By working as a home health aide, she was able to earn enough to rent an apartment in Queens and, eventually, get an associate degree.

Life threw other major challenges at her, including getting hit by a car and a cancer diagnosis.

Ferreira ultimately enrolled in a planetary science and astronomy degree program at Arizona State University. She received a “great birthday present” in the spring of 2022: her official acceptance to NASA’s internship program.

Among the highlights of her NASA experience was recording a voice-over in Spanish for a This Week at NASA video. She also served as a panelist at an event for the Minority University Research and Education Project, organized by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement.

Ferreira dreams of becoming an astronaut and has a shorter-term goal of earning a doctorate. But the internship also fueled her passion for sharing space science with the public. Chatting with Goddard astrophysicist Dr. Michelle Thaller, host of the Webb broadcasts, was especially meaningful to her.

Rose Ferreira, foreground, in the broadcast control room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in July 2022.
Credits: NASA

She has this advice for young people who are also interested in pursuing space science: “Coming from a person who had it a bit harder to get there, I think: first, figure out if it is really what you love. And if it is really what you love, then literally find a way to do it no matter who says what.”

Besides Webb, Ferreira is excited about NASA’s Artemis program, which connects with her passion for the Moon. Through Artemis, NASA will send astronauts to establish a long-term presence on and around the Moon. She’s looking forward to what Artemis will uncover about the Moon’s geology and history while the agency uses the Moon to get ready for human exploration of Mars.

“Even when I was living on the streets, the Moon used to be the thing I looked at to calm myself. It’s my sense of comfort, even today when I’m overwhelmed by things,” she said. “It’s like a driving force.”

Written by Elizabeth Landau
NASA Headquarters

Rose does have a web site! You can find it at www.rosedf.space. Hopefully she can maintain her web presence, as we have no control over social media companies owned by Billionaires and corporations, and we’re seeing that elected officials cannot be trusted and can turn against the people they are supposed to serve and do them great harm.

It looks like dowsingfordivinity.com also mirrored the original article. Awesome. We need to keep doing things like this.

Update: Another good post – The Attacks on Science.