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Month: February 2017

For Nextdoor, Eliminating Racism Is No Quick Fix

Jason Tate

Jessi Hempel, writing at Backchannel:

Tolia was dining with his communications director, Kelsey Grady, when her iPhone alerted them to the story’s publication. They read the lengthy feature together. It alleged that white Oakland residents were using the “crime and safety” category of Nextdoor to report suspicious activity about their black neighbors. “Rather than bridging gaps between neighbors, Nextdoor can become a forum for paranoid racialism — the equivalent of the nosy Neighborhood Watch appointee in a gated community,” wrote Pendarvis Harshaw.

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Sponsor: Bitter Pills Release ‘Night Season’ EP

Bitter Pills
Sponsored Post

After coming up as rivals in the Nashville music scene, Jordan Dickerson and Kyle Adams came together to form Bitter Pills. After years of touring in their own bands, as well as in bands such as From Indian Lakes, Artifex Pereo, and Settings, they settled into an old house just outside of Music City to write Night Season — an EP as dark as it is hopeful, and as heavy is it is catchy. The five song collection is the sum of two lifetimes worth of musical iteration. Drawing inspiration from mainstream heavy-hitters like Incubus and Nine Inch Nails, as well as beloved bands such as Thrice and Anberlin, the EP is a healthy balance of familiar sounds and boundary bending ambition.

The EP is out right now on iTunes, Apple Music, and Spotify.

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New $5 Linodes Are Great Learning Tools

Jason Tate

Linode, which is where this website is hosted, has launched a new $5 per month plan:

We’re also introducing the Linode 1GB, our lowest priced instance ever at only $5 per month. We believe this will add a great deal of utility to our service.

I have one of these that I use for testing and to run a few basic maintenance tasks (reports, stat checking, things like that), and it’s great. If you’re at all interested in learning about servers, Linux, and basic web administration, I highly recommend Linode. You can jump in, try things out, and it’s a simple and inexpensive way to learn (they also have good tutorials). If you mess something up, it’s easy to restore and reset and keep playing around. I’m a big “learn by doing” person, and if you’re like me, take the plunge and give it a shot!

As Marco Arment once wrote:

Modern Linux server administration is much easier than you think. If you can write a halfway decent app, you can manage a Linux VPS in your sleep.

You don’t need to compile kernels, build anything from source code, partition any disks, or deal with iptables in most cases. The defaults of good distributions and packages are almost always very secure. And once you set everything up, you can leave it running largely untouched indefinitely. You’ll probably never be woken up at 3 AM to reboot anything or delete log files.

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