in Politics

tagged conlaw, mastodon-archive, microblog

14th Amendment

Originally posted on mastodon.technology.

After taking a constitutional law class for a week, I feel that every class I've taken before this one has severely underplayed the importance of the 14th amendment.

For example, in Gitlow v. US, the court relied on the due process clause of the 14th amendment to expand freedom of speech and expression protection to state laws or actions. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitlow_v)

Imagine a US in which state governments were allowed to infringe upon freedom of speech. Thanks #14.

in Tech

tagged fedora, freedom, journalism

My back to school free software toolkit

The 2018 spring semester started last Wednesday. I think I've set up a pretty good free software toolkit for a successful year:

  • Operating system: Fedora - latest software with stable releases
  • Browser: Firefox - what else? :-) Note that our school and most California universities and colleges have adopted the AGPL licensed Canvas learning management system, so usually my browser is running free JavaScript code too!
  • Documents/notes: LibreOffice - nearly all professors are fine with assignments being submitted as plain text or PDF, only a few want docx specifically. For professors that insist you need to use Times New Roman or fail the assignment - not a single one has noticed my usage of Liberation Serif.
  • Cloud storage: Nextcloud - I self-host a nextcloud instance that all my school documents are saved to. Additionally I have the Android app on my phone for convenient reading of notes while I'm on the train.
  • Photos: Shotwell - very simple photo organizer, though I would also like to become more proficient at darktable soon.
  • Email: Thunderbird - I have filters set up so all my school email gets filtered into a folder that I normally read first.

Total software cost: $0