Passing clouds of inconsequential observations
So you are filling in your address and have a drop down menu to select your country. You scroll towards the end of the list to find the United Kingdom but it is not there. Perhaps they used Great Britain instead. So you scroll back up to find…
So you select the misplaced United Kingdom and it adds GB to the end of your address.
Day 3 of #100DaysToOffload.
100 days you say?
That takes us to the 3rd of August – one can only hope that by August some kind of new normal will have been established. Meanwhile one hundred days should be more than enough time to offload all the dead feeds from the three hundred and thirty something currently listed in NetNewsWire (other RSS readers are available for all platforms).
I tend to read on the iPad (where NetNewsWire works really nicely) and AirDrop pages back to the Mac when that is where they need to be. Most of the feeds come from a self hosted, but alas now defunct but still functioning, Fever. The feeds range from Astronomy to Bread Baking to Local (and not so local) History to Music and Arts to Programming and Synthesisers and numerous other eclectic points in-between. Which is all part of the joy of the Interwebs and where I heard about #100DaysToOffload.
This is day 1 of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting the 100 days to offload site.
In days of yore (just after they invented the wheel) the web was the web (or the Information Superhighway or something) but then the distorting mirrors of Facebook, Google and Twitter came along and started to break things. So these days the trend is towards something called the IndieWeb which helps individuals be individual outside the labyrinth of the social media silos.
This does require some hoop jumping – like:
Now we just need to see if linking out to other blogs/people actually gets picked up – in a socially distanced kind of way.
Once again, following a pronouncement by the IMF, the quote:
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
is being posted across the Internet and being attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith. Astrology sometimes being replaced with Meteorology.Â
Of course it is a simple matter to verify the source of the quote – but why bother when you can just cut and paste from the first link that pops up on Google?
It belongs to the economist Ezra Solomon.
Etc.
Because…. The Web We Lost
Because….
Because…. Stop Using Facebook
Because… Tech and Liberty
Etc Etc.
Once upon a time I had the whole Internet to myself. Then I found another Duncan Moran and we exchanged emails and said “Hi” to ourselves and contemplated the existential ramifications of just being a Duncan Moran rather than the Duncan Moran. Today I do not get a look in as you cannot move for us…
I must remember to check out my acting career.
But as a father of a Haydn I was surprised to find a Duncan Moran who seems to have a Hayden…
Although probably not that significant in the big picture.
Who does not love the Internet? I know I do apart from all the advertising that people keep sticking on it. Fortunately one can be spared the worse excesses with a range of Ad Blockers (link for extensions to Safari on a Mac but there are similar offerings for all browsers/systems). But now sites are detecting the Ad Blockers and asking you to turn them off.
If this is a site that you particularly want to support then disabling the Ad Blocker may be good choice but for most sites the same content can be found elsewhere and we do not particularly need it regurgitated from here and so can just leave.
It is not a one way thing as the delivery of the advertisements cost us money as they are consuming the bandwidth of our Internet connection. On mobile network this can start to add up. A recent survey found that at its worse to load 4 megabytes of actual content you had to download 15.4 megabytes of advertising at a cost of $0.32 rather than the $0.08 you planned to read.
Factor in that the sites usually have no control over what advertising is displayed as advertisers bid for your attention in instant auctions so leaving the whole system open to be exploited as a delivery mechanism for malware and there is little reason not to block the ads.
If asked to Disable your Ad Blocker – Just Say No!
Free Bonus D: In my catalogue D is also for De La Soul. Who doesn’t etc….
Audio Player
In 2005 Poe’s law established that on the Internet an extreme point of view is indistinguishable from a parody of that point of view if the parody lacks any identifying smilies or other indicators.
Today amidst the never ending background noise of the Internet it becomes increasingly difficult to verify what is real and what is parody.
Pupinia Stewart (this may or may not be her name) at 16 years old (this may or may not be her age) took on the whole world… and won. Slam dunk (as I believe they say in Americanish).
Beyond satire which stands apart and points a finger, beyond Absurdist and Dadaist she holds a mirror up to the Internet. Who is the stupid one here?
While some spent November eating treats and occasionally writing a few words others spent it manfully holding back a flood of spam. Admittedly this is all taken care of by the wonderful Akismet plugin, without which many a blog would vanish under the ever growing spam problem, but even their servers occasionally struggled with the weight of it all.
Apparently some people still use the Windows operating system but it is increasingly hard to understand why they think that is a sensible or acceptable option when even that which claims to protect them from their own stupidity is part of the problem.
There are better alternatives to the piss-poor abomination that is Windows.
Inevitably…
While Apple’s maps may not be perfect they will at least get you home along Hawthorn road when it becomes a cycle/foot path…
unlike the dead end that Google maps will lead you down…
Surely it is unfair to compare a mapping system that has only been live for a day and one that has had several years to become ever more refined. We live in hope that Google will get it right one day