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.
As if there is not enough to worry about these days NASA’s Climate website provides data from satellites that are monitoring the current status of the Earth’s climatic conditions.
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.
While it is fairly easy to drop the likes of Facebook Google presents a more insidious challenge….
And will need to remove players such as the SoundCloud one which links out to ScoreCard Research 
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.
A very short micro blog test.
Apparently in Waitrose world we celebrate something called Thanksgiving (whatever that is)
And you can order your Sunday paper…
If only The Observer was called The Sunday Observer it would be easier to find…
But to be fair it has only been a Sunday paper since 1791 so we may need to leave it awhile while the database refreshes.