Alex

They/Them/Theirs pronouns. Youth Services Librarian. I play games (poorly), do technology and FLOSS things (non-optimally), and have Opinions (frequently). Often seen wearing floral print shirts.

Website: https://heofhishirts.neocities.org

Public Key

npub1cmtdxget55829ar7j4lu8feqymskwx6rq7wr4faaw8fekp05a37qgdmd7f

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsvd4knyv462r4z73lf2l7r5uszdct8rdps08p6577hr5umqh6wclqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds29mg8r

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relay.snort.social

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1cmtdxget55829ar7j4lu8feqymskwx6rq7wr4faaw8fekp05a37qgdmd7f

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Last Notes

2026-07-27 17:25:44 UTC

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Yep. These are often the same people who sign into a computer and expect to see all the documents and things they have on their personal computers, and then they look at me sideways when I explain to them that no, we don't have access to those things, even if we are signed in to the same accounts. (Negative points to Google Chrome, blithely assuming you want to sign into the browser if you sign in to a Google service, and presents it as "Do you want to continue as yourself?")

2026-07-27 02:10:24 UTC

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Exactly so. I help many people regularly on topics that are about how to download, how to print, how to scan completed paper. Even today, I was helping a coworker with the official "and here's how you download your stuff from iCloud, and also, here's the biggest thing that Apple does to you to prevent that from being easy." And showing the wonders of how to get a captive portal to play nice by using NeverSSL. (Because Windows broke launching Opera to do it the semi-automated way.)

2026-07-26 23:02:53 UTC

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...and, you know, *confabulation*, if we could do classes on getting the slop off our devices and on teaching people how to use their devices, since that's very clearly a need for our populations.
I had someone today saying they don't have a password for their Gmail account and they've never been prompted for one. Their conclusion: our computers were broken, because they claimed this password prompt behavior had never happened before, despite my gentle attempts to dissuade this conclusion.

2026-07-26 22:57:42 UTC

Welp, either I'm a hero, or I'm leaning very heavily on the fact that I have significant system seniority to escape the worst consequences.
MPOW prompted us to send in questions related to AI, technology, and info literacy.
So I asked if they would commit to avoiding (and minimizing where unavoidable) the use of generative "AI" and "AI" that perverts LLMs, if they would declare stuff about how to use those programs better officially off-limits to staff because training data set ethics...

2026-06-27 16:44:18 UTC

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Yep, and these weren't paid apps, but it was still someone who didn't really have an understanding of the notification drawers, or home screen launchers, or how to get rid of ads. They were going to need an all-day intensive just to get the ads cleared out and a device that would theoretically do what was wanted. An hour or so to uninstall all the muck, and then the rest of the day to show someone how to actually use their devices. We need more of this, everywhere.

2026-06-26 06:53:08 UTC

Today I had an appointment that I suspect @npub1prs…eh8y understands all too well - a person coming in with multiple devices, and questions about strange things seen or the presence of notifications that don't go away if you skip the related task, and the device is very full of all kinds of programs flooding it with ads, and also occasionally doing what they're supposed to, and also that this person doesn't have a person to teach how to use and clean up any of the devices. Did what I could, but...

2026-04-21 03:04:06 UTC

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The must difficult part about fighting off the national coordinated campaigns is that they're very good at astroturfing, and they can often find a local willing to do their dirty work for them, which defeats all the work that's been done to tighten up processes so that only locals and cardholders can initiate the procedures.
There are ways that we can match their contempt for us with contempt of our own, but it requires the entire chain to be on board with it.

2026-04-20 22:43:06 UTC

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Both of them equipped with the finest cherry-picking, proof-texting arguments they can share, software to speed the process, and sympathetic ears that believe children are nothing more than accessories of their parents and should not be permitted full personhood until it's guaranteed that they won't do or say anything that the censors disapprove of.

2026-04-20 22:23:46 UTC

ALA just put out their State of Libraries report, and with it, the top 11 challenged books of 2005. (https://www.ala.org/news/2026/04/american-library-association-releases-2025-most-challenged-books-list-national-library)
What are the likely objections to these books?
Trafficking of girls, queer (gay), queer (gender), too sexy for the teenagers, queer (lesbian), betrayal and bad decisions by teenagers, too sexy for teens (same series), rape and ultra-violence, incest+terrible parenting+fallout from, the impact of a life, and too sexy for the teens (different series).

2026-03-09 22:55:58 UTC

In re: https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-stop-cop-city-protestor/
I see people in here being smug about an OPSEC failure, and other people pointing out that "we only respond to local law enforcement requests" is a much bigger set than you might think, but it's all focused on what the individual can do to protect their privacy and anonymity against nosy state actors.
Most of the solutions proposed are either very insecure (mailing cash) or sufficiently technically complex to be out of the skill set of the average computer user.

2026-02-14 17:05:47 UTC

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You would think, by now, they would understand that whatever their highest estimate is, they need to triple it, and then triple again, to have a chance at having enough supply.

2025-11-07 01:46:50 UTC

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Although the CREW manual is now part of the Internet Archive, since the person responsible for "retiring" it from the Texas library association that had it available has not been pilloried for it, it does an excellent job of explaining the weeding side and providing a method of making sure you don't get into the position where someone starts shrieking about mass discards unless there's real political bullshit afoot.
Jessamyn's still right, good comms on weeding are necessary.

2025-11-07 01:14:09 UTC

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(All of this is from being a grunt on the weeding side and hearing horror stories from the K-12 librarians having to juggle all of these things and more in a stringent environment very unlike public or academic libraries. So, as mentioned elsewhere, something about how the library environment you're going into will strongly shape the strategy you deploy.)

2025-11-07 01:06:38 UTC

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- How the idea of "a good library has something to offend everyone" is a crock of shit, and how to do more targeted development.
- Popular objections to good development practice (e.g. "neutrality") and how to defend your decision against them to your bosses and the public.
- How to properly weed a collection proportionate to the topic it covers and the amount of acquisition budget you have.
- Sourcing and weeding materials in languages other than English and cultures other than U.S.

2025-11-07 01:01:13 UTC

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- The importance of "browsing collections", which might not be the right term - items that will get leafed through and never checked out, because of high stigma, unsafe home environments, or other reasons. These items often have high correlation with material that gets censored by users or demanded to be censored by users, politicians, or administrators/boards.
- How most software tools that claim to help with collection development are facile at best and actively hindering at worst.

2025-10-25 05:36:06 UTC

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Absolutely not. There are no age gates to himbodom.

2025-10-11 06:06:48 UTC

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Yeah, they learned it in school, but it was probably taught as things like "business," "leadership," and similar subjects. The sorts of things that have wide application when you get your first VC $100 million and then buy something with the family fortune to declare yourself a profitable and successful person of business.

2025-09-06 14:35:18 UTC

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Felicitations on another year done. Hopefully this upcoming year is the best year you've had so far.

2025-08-15 04:05:06 UTC

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Nuts! Apple hardware often goes out of its way to be incompatible with everything other than macOS, so I can imagine the standard Mint installer is going to have some issues with it.
If you do find a compatible installer that can boot to a live session, I'll be interested to hear about it.

2025-08-07 23:26:16 UTC

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In so, so many ways, yes, yes they are.
I also wonder how many people and organizations that have them don't connect the dots between their frustrations at keeping their space organized and what their local librarians must be feeling on a grander scale.

2025-07-26 23:59:04 UTC

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I usually try to put the line at "can I discover information about this that I would consider credible?" If so, I'll pursue, but there are times where I have to go "okay, everything that I can find suggests that we'll have to visit websites /publishers that I can't vouch for. I can give you the pointers and explain ILL, but that's as far as my higher-ups will let me go."
Surprisingly, most people are okay with that, even as I worry they're headed into Wonderland.

2025-07-26 18:44:10 UTC

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Ooh, I'll bet that was a delightful dump through all kinds of things until you found out what they were actually looking for.

2025-07-26 16:36:53 UTC

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This is without mentioning the large fiverr logos on some of the pictures, and the parts including ChastGPT logs for scripts probably meant things were not going to go well for the person trying to register and protect their work they created from these bits. Because sometimes you know that the person is focused solely on the task in front of them and will discard extraneous input.
So, the person is asking about compressing files, accurately, but that's not really what they need to succeed.

2025-07-26 16:31:53 UTC

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Plan C, at this point, is to take the 84MB PDF and "Print to PDF" only the most essential parts of it, in separate files, each underneath the 10MB limit, and then sequentially upload/attach them to get the material in place. I have no idea whether this will work, but we did it.
I tried to explain that to meet the limits, the best thing would be to have whoever created the original PDF lower the quality until it met the criterion needed, but I suspect all they heard was [arcane incantations].

2025-07-26 16:27:47 UTC

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I learn this as I talk with them about what they're looking for and with a portable archiver working in the background. It could only get 6GB to about 4.5, so the archiver refused because the resulting file was too big.
With more questions, it's that they're trying to register and protect a work, and what they really need is an 84MB PDF to compress to 10MB so it can be attached/uploaded. That also isn't going to happen, so we're on Plan C right now, well past what I would expect others to know.

2025-07-26 16:24:06 UTC

One if the first things you learn in library school is how to conduct a "reference interview", because most people do not actually know how to describe what they want, but will reveal it after the application of guiding questions.
So, when someone asks if we know how to compress files, I can say yes, because I do know how to do that, and Windows has a built-in method of doing so.
However, the person asking doesn't just want to create archives, they want to compress 6GB of files to 10MB.

2025-07-23 22:44:35 UTC

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Ooh boy, that story had potential to turn out way worse than it did. And 1,000 poxes and better hackers on the scammer that tried to take Pablo for his money.

2025-07-10 16:47:14 UTC

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Oh, that's an entire nightmare of things happening. Glad that the results worked, but oh my goodness, it should never be that difficult.

2025-06-25 16:58:33 UTC

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That doesn't sound encouraging at all. Organizations in search of projects often find one, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it well be a good fit or something that they would be well-suited toward taking up. Guess we'll have to wait and see whether anything interesting comes out of them.

2025-06-24 22:44:25 UTC

Folks who are more knowledgeable than me, is the DPLA getting out of the Palace Project and turning it over completely to Lyrasis (as noted in https://dp.la/news/library-driven-app-changes-ownership-expanding-access-to-ebooks) appropriately reacted to with HomerSimpson_Woohoo.wav or HomerSimpson_AnnoyedGrunt[echo].wav ?
I suspect it's the latter, but I don't know.

2025-04-11 18:45:21 UTC

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Definitely not. He probably has alerts set so that when someone invokes him, usually to criticize him, he can go right there to engage in harassment (or continue engaging in such, since he seems to be the kind of person who will absolutely persist long after being told to go away.

2025-04-11 18:41:36 UTC

The next session at #wla2025 that I'm going to be listening to is "Creating a Supportive, Safe & Secure Library" from folks at https://www.saferlibraries.com , which, as far as I know, has nothing to do with that other guy who thinks he's on a moral crusade against libraries peddling adult materials to the underage who also uses Safe Libraries or Safer Libraries in his crusade. Not naming him because he tends to show up when summoned by name, even in places you wouldn't normally expect him to be.

2025-01-10 22:48:23 UTC

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Aie! What a set of issues to have to deal with, and way too many of them related to the ways that technology and its administration has become a nightmare scenario for so many people.
I hope you can get more machines for your area and there's someone, somewhere, that has an image you can replicate. (And that you don't somehow end up as the sysadmin for your system without a serious salary boost.)

2024-11-12 19:03:45 UTC

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It is a job to continue to fight, yes, but effectively fighting is going to mean having to confront and discard many of the sacred pillars of the institution and the organization, and figuring out ways to ensure that our actions are in accord with our communities' needs.

2024-11-09 00:47:54 UTC

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Which answers the question - the user is ultimately the arbiter of what the requirements are for any given piece of code.
Some maintainers and creators try to restrict those choices by closing down the range of available requirements, either by establishing a floor or a ceiling of what they will accept.
Lockfiles get used to try and match the user to the developer's environment, but they only work if the user and the developer agree that that environment is the correct one to use.

2024-11-09 00:43:20 UTC

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Requirements are determined by the task at hand, and the environment those tasks are run in. Build requirements need to have their requirements in the code themselves (abstractly). Project requirements are the metadata that distributions apply to packages to make sure the code can be installed correctly. (Still, abstract, but usually according to a range.) Execution requirements are specific - they will use the exact library and version that is installed and available to the user.

2024-11-09 00:38:35 UTC

Next-to-last session for Friday at #seagl2024 is @npub1zl2…shy8 looking to answer who chooses the requirements of a program, but to do so, we have to iterate through what requirements are and where they are recorded, (sometimes in multiple places depending on the system or the packager), which allows for not just the resources needed to run code, but potentially to build it and possibly as underlying architecture for the code to run upon or write its data to.

2024-10-14 19:28:55 UTC

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The actual solution was "sign in on a desktop computer and print that way instead of using the mobile printing software." Which worked flawlessly. I haven't a clue why the mobile system sending the thing silently failed and didn't print any other pages after the fifth, even though it claimed to understand it was a 28-page document. It didn't even print an error page or anything else I could use to figure out the issue.

2024-10-14 19:20:56 UTC

Yesterday at work involved a fair amount of troubleshooting problems that were definitely going to agitate people if they couldn't get resolved. One was that our state unemployment system apparently put some of our IP addresses on a denylist. Another was our printing system recognizing the total number of pages in a document but then silently falling to print after 5, even though it charged for the full amount.
I found solutions for both of these situations, but I went through my progressions.

2024-09-05 22:24:11 UTC

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The other thing requested was that we "keep the focus positive," which itself spawned another eminently predictable "WTF? Book banning is not positive!" response that had to be explained. The explanation also should have gone out first, and the person who was left at the end of the plank shouldn't have been involved in the announcement at all.
I can see why they're doing it this way, because I've looked at some of the "effective communication" webinars that I think are influencing the decision.

2024-09-05 22:19:33 UTC

Sometimes my organization can't communicate the rite to take, even when they have a map and step-by-step directions.
They decided to have someone not on the admin level remind us that our anti-censorship material is "Freedom to Read," and that we are avoiding "Banned Books Week."
Cue entirely predictable "WTF? Have you all gone censorious?" response, necessitating more bullet points about the justification for the decision was made from admin folk, which should have gone out before, not after.

2024-09-05 17:46:41 UTC

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It's older, from the days of programming over the Internet, but I still like how this came out. It's probably a lot cliché to have used Bashō, but I had a sprig of plant and needed to make some art with it.
https://cdn.masto.host/glammrus/media_attachments/files/113/086/132/949/429/189/original/232fccef00cf18ae.jpg

2024-09-05 04:57:32 UTC

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I am glad for research that confirms my daily work activities and the ways that the problems I help people with often mean I have to resort to ever-more arcane methods to achieve things that should be easier to do, but have been made difficult or have been made forbidden because people were committing Felony Contempt of Business Model.
And I cheerily blame the machines, the software, and the corporations for all of it.

2024-08-28 19:24:32 UTC

I was also reminded of the presence of a long-running, still eminently laughable entity who has been harassing librarians about the supposed porn on their shelves for decades at this point, long before the current pearl-clutching. Someone at it long enough to have dropped in on Livejournals of library folk to spout nonsense at them. Has apparently adopted the language of the current panic to update the accusations made against library workers, so is now slanderous/libelous as well as a fool.

2024-08-28 17:36:46 UTC

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I have yet to see any such person or hear about them that isn't immediately "I'm going into the library to see just how much of an ass I can be while still not giving the library a substantive reason to throw me out and ban me." As best I can tell, such things are substantively the same person who comes to the library and wants to find the most visible place they can watch porn, claiming they have three legal right to view it in the library.

2024-08-05 20:08:35 UTC

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The kind of tagline that shows that OCLC doesn't talk between departments, or that they know full well what they're saying and are learning hard into it.

2024-08-04 00:02:38 UTC

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Wonder if it came from Mount Prospect. Very good replica.

2024-07-31 23:42:10 UTC

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Not a thing, apparently. I get that they want to expand the places they can hold big meetings, but perhaps do a bit of surface-level work before accepting a bid for consideration?