On Linux I use cmus as my music player. This post isnât about why to use cmus, others have written about that. I started a new job recently where I was issued a MacBook Pro and wanted to access my music collection (on a USB drive, soon to be on NAS) the same way I do on my Ubuntu laptop. This post is how to set up cmus on your Mac.
Installing cmus
I used Homebrew to install cmus. If youâre using Homebrew to install other packages, you might as well take advantage of it.
Thwarting Music.app
The media controls on the Macâs keyboard will start Music.app if itâs not running. This will be an annoyance if youâre trying to control the volume of your music or connecting headphones over Bluetooth. To avoid this, install and run the NoTunes app.
Install the menubar version if you want to toggle NoTunesâ behavior, and make sure itâs a startup item.
Polish
The cmus-osx app on pypy adds media key and notifications support for cmus. Youâll need pip3 or pipx to install. I recommend using pipx, which adds npx-like functionality. The first time you play music with cmus, youâll get a notification asking if Python has permission to create notifications.
These steps and programs will get you up and running with cmus on your Mac.
Sometime in the future, weâll be attending science fiction conventions again. Badge ribbons are a fun part of convention culture and hereâs some which Cynthia and I have thought about or overheard.
âFeminist Vengeance Systems Constellationâ
âDemand better of civilization.â
âIf brute force isnât working, youâre obviously not using enough of it.â
âI need to stab something, might as well be yarn.â
âstabbitydeathâ
âMagic has a price but equal pay and guarantees of bodily autonomy would be a good down payment.â
âSocial Justice Forward Air Controllerâ
âMy yarn stash has an event horizonâ
âYou mortals keep forgetting; weâre capricious by nature.â
Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty.
âŚ
When viewed through this lens, the problems above have clear answers. The antisocial member of the group, who harms other people in the group on a regular basis, need not be accepted; the purpose of your groupâs acceptance is to let people feel that they have a home, and someone who actively tries to thwart this is incompatible with the broader purpose of that acceptance.
Tolerance means that when one breaks the rules through (for example) homophobic, racist, or misogynistic behavior, the administrators of the community can use proportionate responses to oneâs behavior such as deleting content, suspending or banning accounts.
Some ways to implement that:
Donât fight in hostile terrain like Twitter and FB
Post, but donât argue with people responding in bad faith
Donât hesitate to block them
Twitter and FB rarely ban bad actors, so use platforms where you can ban abusive users
This is Instagram keeping you on the app, instead of using a post as an invitation to see more about someoneâs work or cause. If you want to directly convert a view into a sale, youâre forced to use Instagramâs checkout and fulfillment. It encourages inaccessible text in images. And because for many people, Instagram is the web, unless you follow a person or org on Instagram, you miss out on calls to action.
When I talk with artists and creators, theyâd love to have their own blogs so their careers and livelihoods arenât at the whim of Instagramâs policies or algorithms. Enabling linking will free many people and organizations to consider the rest of the web as a place to publish.
RSS in and out
You used to be able to link your personal Facebook account to a RSS feed from your blog or other source. Facebook would pick up new posts from your RSS feed and people who followed you on Facebook would see them. Other than creating an account setting up the feed, you didnât have to engage with Facebook, but your friends could follow you there. It was one of many ideas that Facebook borrowed from Live Journal.
You could also follow your friendsâ public posts through RSS. Now you have to write constantly shifting code to attempt to scrape Facebook and Instagram.
Make links real on mobile
On Facebook, as well as Twitter, when you click a link in a post or a tweet on mobile apps you stay within the app and the site is rendered in a web view. You might even get a warning that youâre leaving Facebook in order to keep you on the app.
Those web views wonât have the same set of features, including tracking protection, which viewing a page on mobile Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.
Treat a link as a link, and have it open in the userâs default browser.
Break the wall, close the company store
The common theme of these proposals is to break the walled garden that Facebook built around itself and Instagram for the sake of engagement and monetization. None of these will destroy it. Itâll make them less valuable, but we as the people, not Facebook can prioritize healthy, independent and diverse media over the portfolios of a few.
Iâve been wanting to change the default branch for some projects on GitHub from master to main but until recently I could only publish GitHub Pages projects from master or a GitHub Pages branch. GitHub recently removed that limitation so you can publish from an arbitrary branch.
