AppImage and Gear Lever are good ways to install Linux software.

AppImage is a portable application format. You download a single executable file that has everything needed to build a little environment to run the program. Shared libraries, data files, the executable, etc all invisibly accounted for. It’s remarkably old technology, dating to 2004. It works great.

Gear Lever is a tool for managing AppImages. I use it under KDE Plasma, when I download a new AppImage I open it with Gear Lever. That installs it somewhere permanent and creates shortcuts to launch it in my KDE environment. It’s quite usable, the only complexity in the GUI is stuff to manage autoupdates. Those work great but can be a little complicated to configure manually. (You shouldn’t have to, the AppImage can specify its own update mechanism.)

There’s several other approaches to portable, distribution-agnostic Linux software. Flatpak is quite popular but I’m not a fan. Mostly because Flatpak wants to run the binaries in a sandbox and that causes a lot of friction. (See Flatseal for a tool for that). Also Bazaar, the Flatpak management GUI I use, is really buggy. The Flathub app repo / store is also very slow.

Gear Lever + AppImage is a really nice experience. It’s now my primary choice when installing complex new apps that I don’t want to just install with Fedora’s RPM/DNF.

The Steam Machine is good hardware. It works remarkably well as an appliance, not a fussy PC. Gaming is great on it. It just feels like a gaming console. And compared to PS5 or Xbox, Steam has access to a huge variety of interesting little games, the whole indie gaming scene.

The important thing is that the Steam Machine just works. I’d feel entirely comfortable giving an ordinary person one to use, there’s no need for any Linux hackery. I’ve been using Linux in earnest for awhile now, including a mini PC plugged in to my TV before I got the Steam Machine. It works but has a lot of rough edges. Valve has sanded off all those rough edges on the Gabecube. They’ve had a couple of years with the Steam Deck to get the experience right.

I’m not as sold on the Steam Controller. It works great as a normal gamepad. But the extra stuff, the two touchpads and the gyros and the extra buttons and all… I only interact with those for games that don’t have good gamepad support. And despite their best efforts to substitute as a mouse it is very clumsy. The controller mapping software is also a little awkward. I find myself only playing games that have gamepad support as a first class feature and don’t much use the extra Steam Controller features.

There was a lot of disappointment when the price came in at $1100. At $700 it would have been a no-brainer, $1100 seems like a lot. But given electronics shortages it’s a fair price. It’s well built hardware. Also thoughtfully designed, the GPU is nicely beefy and can run most any game well at 1080p.

The Steam Machine can do more than just Steam. It’s pretty easy to add alternate game launchers, emulation… There’s a whole desktop mode to use it as a general Linux system (with limitations). But I think its real strength is as a simple game console running Steam and PC games. It does that very well.

PS: 512GB models are available pretty much right away in the US. There’s still a long wait for the 2TB. There’s various options for external storage so 512GB is not too limiting.

ntfy.sh is a good service. It’s a tool for sending small notifications. I use it for phone alerts of server outages.

The key thing is sending notifications is very easy. It’s as simple as curl -d message ntfy.sh/topicname. On the other end you have a mobile app subscribed to topicname and the message shows up immediately on your phone. Easy-peasy.

There’s extra features too. Notifications are Markdown and can contain attachments and images and links. There’s a good web client and PWA for reading them. There’s fancy clients for sending notifications too but sending them is so easy, I haven’t bothered.

The catch is it’s only this easy (and free) if you use a public topic. There’s no guarantee of privacy with public topics. Also there are some generous rate limits for free usage. If you pick an obscure topic name probably no one will ever see it. I use one for my server notifications, like when a backup has failed.

If you want privacy you can self host a server. I did that briefly but it wasn’t worth the bother. You can also pay for the hosted service. $5/mo gets you three reserved topics which optionally require authentication before someone can read or write to them. That then requires HTTP basic auth or a token to use.

In past elections I’ve given substantial money to congressional candidates, mostly for close races. I didn’t donate to politicians much this year. Just one local race and one in Texas after Talarico won the primary.

I stopped because of overwhelming cynicism. The crushing awfulness of the corruption of the Trump era. The industrialized grift of Democratic fundraising. (Over 80% of donations to the aggressive PACs goes to fundraising expenses.) My reward for donating is overwhelming spam on my email and my phone. With the stupidest and most petty requests.

I’m not proud of sitting this one out. The 2026 election is very important, I’d like to pay a part (sic). It’s bad that white supremacist Elon Musk has spent nearly half a billion dollars on this election, I’d like to counterbalance that a little. But the role of money in US elections is so cynical and corrupt I just couldn’t get myself to participate this time.

PS: evergreen advice, never give your phone number or email address to a political campaign. There is no legal requirement you do.

Goodreads is a bad social network.

The new problem this week is they’ve disabled RSS feeds. This on the back a change six months ago that requires you be logged in to read a review. Goodreads seems to think it owns the words I write for them and allow them to show. Or at least they’ve stopped the bargain of publishing those words for me.

I’ve taken control back and am now hosting my own book reviews (yes, with a feed). A simpler option for most people is to use a competitor. The StoryGraph is the best established but has ~5M users compared to GoodReads 150M. The other alternatives are even smaller. And for a social network user size is very important, it’s a natural monopoly.

That monopoly is why Amazon should never have been allowed to buy Goodreads. And they’ve been a terrible steward. They invest just enough in the platform to keep it alive to make sure no competitor can grow in its shadow. The most innovation we’ve seen from them is finding new ways to jealously lock up the reviews we donate to them. (Not that they keep user data safe, mind you.)