The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.
Link: This Conversation Is Being Recorded. They All Are., by Katherine Bindley at the Wall Street JournalI’ve been thinking about this story for days.“A Zoom call isn’t complete without an artificial-intelligence note taker. Phones are out at meetings, capturing every word. During impromptu conversations with co-workers, someone might turn on the Granola transcription app, which can turn the interactions into one-page summaries or a list of action items. Even at bars and on dates, people are…
Done By HumansQuoting from their website:We envision a future where human-made work is clearly recognizable, universally understood, and meaningfully valued.As AI-generated content becomes increasingly widespread and indistinguishable from human creation, society will need trusted standards that bring transparency to authorship and production.Done By Humans aims to become a globally recognized label for significantly human-created work — empowering creators and organizations to openly…
The #WSocial mess is about more than one failed platform, it exposes a deeper problem with the EU’s approach to digital sovereignty. If Europe is serious about sovereignty, it needs to stop confusing European ownership with digital freedom. A platform hosted in Europe built as a proprietary, venture-capital project recreates the same #dotcons model under a European flag. Changing the server location doesn’t change the underlying power relationships. This matters because the European Commission…
Last edited 2 minutes ago. Considering how much anything costs right now (bc of AI, blockchain, mining, or whatever the fuck is going on in tech), I have come to a point in life where I realized I can afford nothing. Add to that the fact that my main computer died and I'm struggling financially... well, what's a girl to do? Use older tech and forget about the modern world is the answer, apparently. GamingMy old ass laptop can barely handle multiple tabs open on a browser, let alone a modern…
A COUPLE OF WEEKS ago, I wrote on A Working Library about James C. Scott’s concept of anarchist calisthenics, and I want to expand on it a bit here, because I think it is a very useful—even existentially necessary—skill to be practicing in our workplaces these days. Scott describes living in Germany in 1990 and noticing that the locals seem scandalized by his casual jaywalking—even when crossing a road where there obviously aren’t any cars for miles. Perplexed by this response, he writes: As a…
You've probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management. This isn't that article. My personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier. There is a saying (which I can't locate, so I'll paraphrase) that a system should only be as complicated as needed,…
I stopped by a Filipino/Hawaiian (mostly filipino) restaurant/bar that was recommended to me a few months ago by someone I met at an AANHPI event. One of my friends that was eating with us had gone many times before and said they enjoyed the menu. We looked up the menu before heading over. As a Filipino-American I always get curious about Filipino restaurants because a lot of our dishes are family-style/comfort food, so it’s always interesting to see what foods will be on the menu. To our…
I found grumpywelshman this week, via https://bubbles.town – a good place to go to read somewhat interesting things. His stuff is very funny, an acidic takedown of the internet as we find it, the side hustle EARN $10,000 A WEEK WITH THIS FREE METHOD (costs $499), the algo, all of that. I recommend it all, good stuff, worth subscribing to. This piece – we are all rankers now: or why the internet has turned to shit – has some stuff in it which made me think a bit more about a thought at the back…
This time it’ll be different, they say. This time it’ll be about the people, they say. This time it’ll be a change for the better, they say. This time the system won’t win, they say. Colour me apathetic. Another PM we didn’t vote for —I know, we vote for the party not the person— in a system that feels increasingly broken. But what choice do we have? It’s this or the right wing. Right? Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.
In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design is "Don't Make Me Think". Every time a service forces the user into making a decision, it is placing a…
A retro-styled wristwatch, a Timex T-80 Digital watch, Pelikan, Waterman and Conklin Fountain Pens. I've posited elsewhere that I have become something of a “techno curmudgeon” — that is someone who has serious reservations about technology, and therefore has adopted older technology. And yes, that is one possible connection between Fountain Pens and Wristwatches, but there is something else that I feel connects them, and other things that I am interested in. So, I am not certain if this will…
Earlier this month, I talked about a rotation button in photos that behaved really nicely in iOS, and not so great on the Nothing Phone. Here’s a story of a similar fumble iOS once made that might bring the point home even more. The calculator app has been preinstalled on iPhones ever since their debut in 2007. For the longest time it hasn’t been anything more than a standard four-function calculator with a decades-old feature set. If you’re not careful, however, you can mess up even that. Ten…
Camera focus adventures with a super rad insect There's this metal corrugated awning that covers a patio in my backyard right outside the living room window; birds love it because it catches a bunch of the oak tree's acorns and like, win/win - I look out a window and there's a goddamn buffet for creatures both avian and squirrel-adjacent that I can regularly photograph. Like, a year ago we had this wild wind storm while it was below freezing and our oak tree took a BIT of a beating (it was…
I love reading. I caught the bug as a middle-schooler when I got caught skipping school, and as punishment, I had to read The Chronicles of Amber and do a book report about it. Even today, opening a book and fanning the pages to get the paper smell activates very fond memories and emotions. I remember a time before e-readers came out. I always thought reading on one seemed very futuristic. In military sci-fi books, characters are reading on their data pads, and reading on an e-reader makes me…
Yesterday, omg.lol founder (and overall wonderful person) Adam Newbold posted a guide titled "Hardcore IndieWeb", where he went over how anybody can start their own fully independent website for only $0.01 USD per day thanks to the hosting solution NearlyFreeSpeech provides. (The guide doesn't even touch IndieWeb Standards which are commonly pointed to when this topic is brought up, which I personally appreciate it.) I think a lot of people see a tension between making things accessible and…
Throughout my life, I've ran across three movies that I just could not understand the appeal of: The Big Lebowski The Lord of the Rings Franchise Blade Runner Now, normally it wouldn't be a big deal if I didn't like a movie, but all three of these films seemed like something I should like. I always felt like I was just missing something. So, over the past few decades, I've revisited these films over and over again... waiting for something to click. The Big Lebowski clicked first. It took three…
The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I've had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this “improvement” it's been a downhill slide…
Ishmael caught my attention because it takes one of iA Writer’s best qualities–an editor that disappears while I am writing–and applies it to an entire manuscript, with chapters, outlines, bookmarks, notes and export to Word, EPUB, HTML and Markdown. I usually begin long pieces in iA Writer and finish them in VS Code, with folders, filenames and scripts holding everything together, so I am curious to see how much of that clutter Ishmael can replace. It was created by the genius Will McGugan,…
After seeing Ian’s plea to Don’t Forget to Share the Posts You Love recently, I decided to get off my arse and do something I've been meaning to since I resurrected this blog back in October. I’ve had a few links I wanted to share, but not necessarily devote an entire blog post to. So here’s a little collection of them all together. I'm going to start with Terence's post This Blog is Written in en-GB because it resonated with me. I always write in my natural language and yes that means I often…
Another wee while has passed, and I've been reading more and more books. Especially with my XTEInk reader, it's so easy to squeeze in a few paragraphs here and there!
Reading through an RSS feed can dull the experience of enjoying a blog's unique style—try visiting the site directly for the full effect.
Why is this an “app”? This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. Fuck that noise. This should have been a webpage. Why do you want me to install a(nother) shitty app just to tell me something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more…
A yearbook page from the 1970s rarely looks like a fashion statement at first glance, yet look closer and the hemlines tell their own story. Row after row of young women pose in skirts several inches above the knee, a length that had been considered scandalous barely a decade earlier. These photographs, tucked away in […]
Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0 I read Brennan Kenneth Brown's What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan's article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes. Any good piece of writing should undertake to…
I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again. Photoshop used to be a joy to use. Whenever I got access to an upgraded version, I’d always have fun exploring the new features. I got really good at using it. When Adobe launched the Creative…
This is the companion to I own my books, where I made the case for stripping DRM and actually owning what I buy. This post is the machinery overview: how I store, serve, and read all of it from my own homelab. My books workflow # When I find a book I want to buy, I go to eBooks.com and search for it. They have most titles, but occasionally I will have to go to Kobo to find it; regardless, I purchase the book. Note: This is just an overview of how this works and is not a technical, step-by-step…
I'm somebody who writes a lot—half a million words and 200 blog posts in the past 8 months. I'm also someone with an unrelenting curiosity to better understand our world. Beyond that, I also graduated with a degree in English literature with honours, with a 3.8 GPA. So, it should be no surprise I've done extensive research on how best to do research, which resulted in me diving into the world of personal knowledge management systems. These are the systems and methods of keeping track and…
I just miss doing art. Don’t you? Naomi Kritzer, Better Living Through Algorithms i bought myself some presents. i like them. they're nice.
A journey into the labyrinth of the City of London. Once this idea popped into my head one night in the pub I had to do it. To navigate the City of London just using the ancient alleyways, passageways, lanes and courts. What city would emerge from such a journey. Created a document listing the route in a rough order that would wind through the grand facade of the Square Mile. Whalebone Court, Great Swan Alley, Honey Lane, Fye Foot Lane, Change Alley and on and on. It really was a remarkable…
