Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx
Author Archives: Ali Reza Hayati
Please provide RSS feeds
I, personally, don’t read blogs that don’t provide RSS feeds. I think RSS is not still out of date and well, it’s still the best standard for subscribing to blogs.
RSS feeds make following a blog much easier. You just subscribe to a feed and it’s done. You open your favorite RSS reader and read your favorite blogs.
Please add a RSS feed to your blog. One of the reasons that social networks are popular now is that they provide a way of subscribing to people or topics. You can make your blog popular by providing such ability and that ability is for sure RSS.
I personally use Nextcloud News as my RSS reader but there’s a lot of popular and great tools. Mozilla Thunderbird, for example, is one of the bests I think.
Happy 12th birthday fediverse!
On this day, twelve years ago, Mr. Evan Prodromou published his first post on Identi.ca. Although that project now belongs to history, Fediverse lives on and by year 2020 it has become an incredibly creative, colorful and cozy place, with the potential to attract even more good people.
Let’s talk about the fediverse.
Continue readingOmar Khayyam’s commemoration day
In Iranian Jalali calendar, today, Ordibehesht 28, is Omar Khayyam’s commemoration day. Omar Khayyam was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet.
Khayyam was born in Nishabur, in northeastern Iran in May 18, 1048. As a mathematician, he is most notable for his work on the classification and solution of cubic equations, where he provided geometric solutions by the intersection of conics. Khayyam also contributed to the understanding of the parallel axiom. As an astronomer, he designed the Jalali calendar, a solar calendar with a very precise 33-year intercalation cycle.
Khayyam is one of the best known Persian poets in world where a lot of English readers are also attracted to his poems. His poetry became widely known to the English-reading world in a translation by Edward FitzGerald, which enjoyed great success in the Orientalism of the fin de siècle.
Yon rising Moon that looks for us again –
Omar Khayyam
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden – and for one in vain!
Free software alternatives for PDF
Humans tried their best to get rid of papers. We can do almost anything we did with papers, with our computers.
It’s uncommon for me to buy a printed book now. Since I started forcing myself to only buy digital books, I happen to read more digital books.
Having digital books is much better. Not only you can carry it everywhere with yourself, you can also help the nature. Nearly 4 billion trees worldwide are cut down each year for paper, representing about 35 percent of all harvested trees.
One of the best ways to read books, or any other type of document you read, is to have PDFs of them. PDFs are so useful now. PDF books, PDF articles, PDF statements, PDF presentations, etc. are now a big part of our lives.
Continue readingDomain change notice
I changed my main domain to alirezahayati.com. Previous domain now redirects to the new one. If you gave a link to this site or saved a note, please fix the URL change.
Anonymity is a right, being anonymous is a choice
Most of the times when I talk about privacy, people think I’m talking about the reasons of being anonymous. However, what I talk about is the right of being anonymous. There’s a difference between being anonymous and having the right of it.
Let me give you an example real quick. The difference between between being anonymous completely and having the right of being anonymous is talking about free speech and having the right to speak freely.
Continue readingYour privacy practices Are more important than services you use
Whenever a person asks me for a Riseup invitation, I ask them a simple question: “why?” If their answer is “privacy”, I’ll tell them that their privacy practices are more important than the service they use. It doesn’t mean that it’s good to use Gmail, it means that if they don’t meet the basic requirements of respect for their privacy, safe tools will not help them.
Continue readingGoogle knows enough, switch to libre search
It’s needless to say that Big Tech are tracking everything you do. They know what you like, what you dislike, what you need in life, where you come from, where are you going, and many other details. They probably know about you more than you yourself. One of the biggest parts of GMAFIA, is the G, Google.
Google is one of the biggest parts of our lifes. People are depending on Google more than anything. They use Google Search to find stuff, GMail for their email service, they use Googlized Android OS, Google Maps for navigation, Google Drive for cloud storage, and other privacy-violating stuff. This is wrong.
Continue readingNextcloud is even better than Google Drive
It’s not a long time that I’ve been using Nextcloud. Before that, I had to host everything locally on encrypted drives. Google Drive (and apps) were available all the time but I didn’t want to use them because not swimming at all is much better than swimming in pool full of shit.
The situation remained the same until I found out about Nextcloud. Nextcloud is a complete solution for people like me who are careful about the software they use and how their privacy is affected.
Continue reading