Dave's linkblog feed

We all try to lead a parade, with a big viral idea, if only everyone would follow me, it might just work. Instead, find a parade you can join, and add your energy, talent and experience to it.

2025-03-28T17:42:25.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

DOGE can't explain why it wants sensitive government data. Isn’t it obvious. He has his own LLM and he’s loading it up with all this info, to be used to suck all the money he can out of the country. We’re sitting ducks.

2025-03-26T17:37:29.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I love this, they look at protocols for news (I guess) and this guy leaves out RSS. It's amazing, leaving it out is the only way they can justify the existence of their protocol.

2025-03-25T19:09:03.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A very tasty title for today's Daily podcast, and it lives up to the promise. I keep wishing we had done something to prevent Twitter from being bought by a billionaire, same as I think now re Bluesky. Or if it's going to be bought, let a friendly billionaire buy it.

2025-03-25T16:32:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Before I moved to the mountains I lived near Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with a walkability score of 99, a transit score of 100, and 87 for bike riding. I didn't even own a car.

2025-03-25T11:11:02.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had accidentally been added to a Signal group chat in which the Principals Committee – the heads of the top American national security agencies — debated how and whether to strike the Houthis earlier this month

2025-03-24T18:03:57.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had accidentally been added to a Signal group chat in which the Principals Committee – the heads of the top American national security agencies — debated how and whether to strike the Houthis earlier this month

2025-03-24T18:03:57.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Reading this fresh post from Ken Smith, I thought a good slogan for Bernie's new party (maybe they should call it that) is Build Back Better, stolen from Biden. That's going to be a popular message because everyone is quickly figuring out that we're getting the shit kicked out of us, and there's a lot of rebuilding in our future no matter what.

2025-03-22T16:44:28.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

In December I wrote about "listening lists" for podcasts. I believe it's coming into fruition soon, from at least one major podcast vendor. It's not only going to be nice to have imho but it's something the open web does better than the podcast silos, that in itself is important.

2025-03-22T14:16:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

It's remarkable how some of the rich of Silicon Valley want to do to the world what they did to the web! If you extrapolate, we'll go from a world with great potential, to a lot of grunting and snorting and not much else.

2025-03-21T00:42:14.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Judging by what’s in the press I’d say there’s a journalist movement to remove Schumer, as they did with Biden. They aren’t reporting his theory of why he voted as he did. Heard him last night on msnbc and it made sense. At least they let him speak.

2025-03-19T11:50:02.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Remember when Obama said to the bankers that his “administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back and this time they want everything.

2025-03-19T08:35:58.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Remember when Obama said this to the bankers that his “administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” These are the same people. They’re back and this time they want everything.

2025-03-19T08:35:58.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I’m interested in seeing what Ghost-written activitypub posts look like in other systems. If you have such a site could you reply with a link? I asked at the link below, but my comment of congratulations hasn’t appeared yet. Thanks in advance.

2025-03-19T01:34:30.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

i am sure Ezra Klein is wrong. The reason trump won is the Dems ran the country and campaign with the same weak approach Schumer demonstrated so well last week. If there were a supportable choice, I would’ve voted against them too. Sometimes people get left behind. That’s the leadership of the Dems, and it isn’t about age, Jeffries had the disease too.

2025-03-18T09:36:40.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

John Palfrey who is president of the MacArthur foundation, and a former colleague and friend from Berkman, and a legal scholar, writes about a crisis in the rule of law. It’s puzzling to me because I try to be informed, but don’t know what the crisis is? We need better info flow.

2025-03-17T01:39:04.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I asked people to write a blog post about what the "writer's web" means to them. We've had some great contributions, like this one. Small pieces loosely joined, both in terms of content and software. Podcasting is a SPLJ technology. I want to do the same with blogging.

2025-03-16T22:10:06.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tell WIRED they’re struggling to protect the US while the administration dismisses their colleagues and poisons their partnerships.

2025-03-16T16:25:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

If you think Twitter/X is too conflicted to trust as a way to share news, then I don't think you've arrived at the answer with Bluesky, yet a lot of people appear to think they have. Listen to Cory Doctorow if you don't believe me.

2025-03-16T13:53:08.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

There was a time, 1999 specifically, when writing for the web in a web browser was a strange and new idea. That era lasted until 2006 when Twitter emerged, removing almost all the features of writing and adding character limits. That had enormous impact on the political and creative worlds. The era of wood chipping people and ideas.

2025-03-16T09:26:02.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

AOC: "American people, whether they are Republicans, independents, Democrats, are up in arms about Elon Musk and the actual gutting of federal agencies across the board." It’s the people, dummy.

2025-03-14T00:13:25.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

AOC: "American people, whether they are Republicans, independents, Democrats, are up in arms about Elon Musk and the actual gutting of federal agencies across the board." It’s the people, dummy.

2025-03-14T00:13:25.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

No response from either TechCrunch or the company, as before. Bluesky is doing great, it’s time they drop the pretense that they’re “billionaire-proof.” They obviously don’t respect this blogger, perhaps a journalist could ask about their claim.

2025-03-13T09:58:51.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

"Mail Pages" were a feature of my blog in 1997 and 1998. People could send email in response to a post, I read them all and published the most interesting ones, by my subjective criteria, to the current mail page. I think something like this could work in 2025 and beyond.

2025-03-12T17:13:52.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The Lives of Others (2006), a drama and political thriller set in East Berlin before the wall came down. How secret police kept watch on the people. It foretells what's sure to come in the US, and it's also a fantastic movie.

2025-03-12T17:01:49.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

People who believe there is magic that makes Bluesky billionaire-proof are misled. If they sold out you and I would have no place to turn. It would be a replay of the mess with Twitter.

2025-03-11T16:31:40.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

She is full of it. Who could fork it off, how long would it take. And your friends wouldn’t follow, and the longer there is no clone the more locked in they get. This is one of the biggest cons ever in tech. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we are all totally locked in here. We can’t move.

2025-03-10T20:11:35.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The shit is going to hit the fan when the Repubs cancel Medicare. Look at the picture in this post by Maddow on Bluesky. Yeah they're all on Medicare. They're already going to town hall meetings. They're boomers. We're not done yet folks.

2025-03-10T12:34:08.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

“Nobody voted for Elon Musk,” protestors chanted at a Tesla dealership in Manhattan yesterday in one of the many protests at the dealerships associated with Musk’s cars.

2025-03-10T08:23:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I dream of getting reviews like this for my software. This time we’re making blog writing as fluid as tweeting. When it’s done we’ll be using our Wordpress blogs the way you write in twitter, but without the limits.

2025-03-10T00:31:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Wired is enjoying a moment, with lots of new subscribers, including myself. They should do what a lot of paywalled sites do, allow a certain number of shared posts per month where people can get through the paywall aka “gift links.”

2025-03-08T11:27:46.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Reading this story about the deportation of Ukrainian refugees from the US, I hear in clear terms we are no longer a democratic country, no longer have a representative government. We're not just supporting Russia we are Russia, its 51st state. Very weird and unacceptable.

2025-03-07T18:03:10.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

ActivityPub is not going to rock the world. Emulating Twitter is not how to do decentralization. Every decision made in the design of Twitter was based on being centralized. It's going to require more brain work to crack this. WTF Markoff.

2025-03-07T17:11:07.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

But the Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it's trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: stop trying to reinvent Twitter, it wasn't a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.

2025-03-07T13:03:49.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

2017: What if TWTR is bought by a Repub? The problems were foreseeable in 2017, after Trump won the election by tweeting. At that time TWTR's value was about $12B. I tried to imagine a tech entrepreneur who had just bought the United States. We're now living that nightmare.

2025-03-06T14:33:22.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

You may think the Dems looked weak with their signs last night, but I think at least they were representing their voters’ interests, unlike the Repubs. If I were there I would have held a sign too. Too much Monday Morning Quarterbacking. They did something — that’s a start.

2025-03-05T19:48:20.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

My blog, scripting.com, has been a democracy blog since inception in 1994. All blogs have democracy as their foundation, imho. The idea of the “unedited voice of a person,” is revolutionary, esp for the times we live in.

2025-03-05T09:13:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

𝗬𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 you can get bold or italic text in your social media posts even though the software doesn't theoretically support styles in text.

2025-03-03T21:05:03.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Ukrainian drones strike deep into Russia, hitting Ufa refinery. Interesting, now that the deal with the US is off they can go as far into Russia as they want. Ironically, Biden was protecting Putin better than The One With the Gaudy Hooker Makeup can.

2025-03-03T17:53:46.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

“The White House has become an arm of the Kremlin. Every single day you hear from the National Security Advisor, from the President of the United States, from his entire national security team, Kremlin talking points.”

2025-03-02T18:49:05.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

An idea for our answer to MAGA: "One America Together."

Purple baseball caps. Ideally worn by everyone at the SOTU address, and chanted for every applause line.

Kind of the way Knicks fans say Doooooce when Deuce McBride gets a score.

2025-03-02T15:25:28.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and more established standards would work just as well.

2025-03-02T13:32:25.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Heather Cox Richardson: “Today, President Donald Trump ambushed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in an attack that seemed designed to give the White House an excuse for siding with Russia in its war on Ukraine.”

2025-03-01T12:35:23.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ushering in a new age of bribery, graft, and corruption to American politics. (Yes, that's the big picture. They're recreating Russia, where all the functions of the state are being "sold" to oligarchs.)

2025-02-27T15:54:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Would have preferred if, when replacing Joy Reid, MSNBC had hired someone in Detroit or Miami, or St Louis or even for crying out loud Dallas. Or a different city each day. Put yourself where the people we have to convince are. We need to convince them of this: Enough is enough.

2025-02-24T14:44:51.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Sanders gets it. Everyone should be out on the road like it's a campaign, because it is. It's no more or less an election season than any future election. We're in deep trouble in the US, let's start acting like it!

2025-02-23T22:28:41.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

On this day last year I had a motto for the Biden campaign: "Old enough to know better." They blew the #1 rule of marketing. Own your weakness and turn it into a positive. You can't avoid it. Might as well own it.

2025-02-23T17:01:40.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Yosemite National Park workers hung an upside-down American flag — traditionally a symbol of distress or a national threat — thousands of feet off the ground on the side of El Capitan.

2025-02-23T14:46:10.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

“We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, where anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.” (Honestly this is BS. If you want to be like the web, then BE the web.)

2025-02-22T10:56:47.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Something you hear from Democratic politicians and MSNBC hosts. "We know why Musk is cutting so much, it's to fund a huge tax cut for billionaires." They don't actually know that and I doubt it's true.

2025-02-21T13:42:49.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Lots of good ideas from Rahm Emanuel on Kara Swisher's podcast. First, why is Musk downloading all the info from govt computers into his AI database? Now his AI will know everything about everyone. Want to find out who's not loyal to Trump? Easy. Now you know who the Stasi should arrest.

2025-02-20T18:51:57.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

It sounds like Bluesky may have added a feature I was asking for — now you can limit replies to people you follow, and can set that as the default. If so that should cut down spam and abuse dramatically.

2025-02-19T09:20:56.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I’ve been a developer for over 50 years, so my experience predates AI by a lot, and this guy is wrong. I get much more complete answers from AI than I got from StackExchange, and thus write better software. You could always be a shitty developer, but now it’s easier to be excellent.

2025-02-17T11:26:46.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

We have no leadership, no coaching, no simple ideas to bring it home. That's the main reason we continue to lose, and now we're not just losing elections, we're losing our world.

2025-02-15T10:33:32.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Elon Musk’s DOGE activities trigger protests, vandalism for Tesla. Vandalism is a bad idea, that's going to get the police involved. Peaceful noisy protest, hand out leaflets asking potential buyers to buy another car or get a used Tesla. It would help if $TSLA kept going down.

2025-02-13T13:09:50.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

It’s time to include RSS in the list of technologies the open social web is built on. To the extent that there's interop betw the two competing uber-protocols, it's coming from feeds. And it will be more so in the future.

2025-02-12T12:09:54.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Cancel culture was inhumane. The question of whether it succeeded or not is just more cluelessness. It was just retribution, no more righteous than Trumpian retribution. Now we reap what you all sowed.

2025-02-12T08:16:10.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I now have turned Bluesky into a feed reader. This is new. Pretty sure it wasn't ever done on Twitter either. Here's the first one. It might be fun if this post turned up over there. It could (that part is somewhat random).

2025-02-09T14:34:00.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I subscribed to Wired yesterday. Their coverage of the Musk coup is unparalleled, and I am a Wired alum, having written for them in the early days of the web. It was only $10 for a year.

2025-02-09T13:25:54.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Recommend listening to the segment of this week's On The Media about what's going on at the DoJ. I know you don't need more to be depressed about, but something big is changing there, and you should know. Begins at 12:51.

2025-02-09T13:22:22.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

To remove ourselves from the World Health Organization, and for him to refuse to let the CDC tell us how many Americans are contracting this deadly virus, the results will be the potential deaths of millions of people.

2025-02-08T18:15:38.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The Apple SuperBowl ad from 1984. It changed our culture. Gave us an ideal to hold tech companies to. Reminder that the generation before the Musks and Thiels had ideals that have been lost.

2025-02-07T14:40:25.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

“We started off with a network of writers, and ended up with business models of oligarchs. It's time to start building webs like we mean it and damn all the wannabe-billionaires.”

2025-02-07T13:23:42.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

This is a very important must-read piece by Jamelle Bouie in the NYT, but I disagree with his description of Trump. He's not in charge. He's weak. He would be unable to muster the courage to shut down Musk. He's not Hitler, he's the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz.

2025-02-05T15:55:06.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

All the lunacy happening now is just a continuation of Jan 6. It’s what would have happened if the attempted coup in 2021 had been successful. And in that sense it was successful.

2025-02-04T13:47:22.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Slate: Disruption may have become a badge of honor among tech bros. But when it comes to the nation’s food security, transit safety, market stability, access to electricity, and preservation of civil rights, disruption for the sake of disruption is dangerous.

2025-02-03T19:07:20.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

My "Little Feed Reader" on Bluesky using ATProto is a good mix of hard news and creative writing. Only the best stuff. Fairly well randomized. Give it a try. I'm going to try out some new ideas there soon.

2025-02-03T18:44:16.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

We are lost, and now we have some unelected people who represent absolutely no one, who have taken control of our government, without our permission. And we are not happy with what our elected representatives are doing about it. This goes equally for reps from both major parties.

2025-02-03T10:01:47.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I'm 99.9% sure, as crazy as it sounds, when Musk is finished with his software project, you will have to use X for everything related to the government. To pay taxes, to receive health care, to renew your passport. And if you try to arrest him, he'll stop paying interest on the US debt, and that will be the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. He won't just control the US government, he will control the world economy

2025-02-02T20:05:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson, Timothy Snyder, David Frum for fantastic pieces posted in the middle of last night. We are having a fresh awakening in this country and in the end we may come to thank Musk and Trump for facilitating this.

2025-02-02T19:08:02.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The time for the Dems to arrive at a "coherent message" to combat Trump was on Inauguration Day in 2021. We slept our way through four years when we should have been dismantling the movement he started. Now they're dismantling the United States.

2025-02-02T13:43:15.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Donald Trump vows retribution at first 2024 presidential rally in Waco. A lot of us didn't listen because we didn't want to believe he could win. Now it's worth another listen. Read this article first.

2025-01-31T23:15:36.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

2016: "But there are technologies that went a different way. My favorite example is Manhattan's relationship to Central Park. The apartment buildings around the park are the money, and the creativity is in the park. The buildings are exclusive, the most expensive real estate in the world. The park is open to anyone, rich or poor, from anywhere in the world. "

2025-01-31T22:50:12.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Developers if they have had experience with platform vendors, assume that at some point the platform vendor will kill them. The question is can you find a way to get most of what you want before you are killed. ;-)

2025-01-31T17:39:58.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

He’s the same asshole who lied about Covid testing in 2020, and masks, and lockdowns, then vaccines, even though he and his family were vaccinated. We had a four year reprieve, and surprise, he’s still a huge asshole.

2025-01-31T12:39:03.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I have a better question for the author of this article about how men "seem" to him (and thus holding them responsible for how they seem). Would you so publicly ask similar questions of women for their collective seeming personality flaws and expect to get away with it?

2025-01-30T13:40:38.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

BTW, the problem with apps like this is they have to find a common subset of functionality between the various platforms and in some important ways there is no intersection and the product can't work. We got there around 2017 and gave up. Nothing has changed here. This kind of interop has to come between the platforms themselves.

2025-01-29T16:20:57.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Automattic and others back Openvibe, an app that's unifying the open social web. (It's ridiculous that they call it the open social web. The fact that such an app is needed says everything you need to know about how open this supposed web is.)

2025-01-29T15:45:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Donald Trump on Mt Rushmore. Donald Trump on the $20 bill. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial renamed Trump. Kennedy airport in NYC renamed Trump International. In the future the US will have one founding father: Donald J. Trump.

2025-01-29T02:28:10.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Krugman: "For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts."

2025-01-28T22:34:08.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Highly recommend episode 6 of season 2 of the Long Shadow podcast. It's about the rise of Trump as a political figure. I had forgotten the sequence of events, and there were parts of the story I didn't know. Begins with Trayvon Martin and #BLM.

2025-01-28T20:13:14.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Cory Doctorow on Bluesky’s conundrum. They are in a tight spot. I don’t think accepting AT Proto as an open protocol is a good bet for users and other devs. The only good bet is still RSS. And forget about federation, only the really shitty features need it.

2025-01-26T22:23:05.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Before the election, Heritage Foundation staffers flooded federal agencies with records requests, looking for employees whose emails and messages contained terms like “climate change" or “DEI,” so they could be purged by a second Trump administration.

2025-01-25T15:02:18.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Before declaring democracy over, as our major news orgs and tech companies seem to have, remember there are still 50 states, most of whom still seem to accept that votes must be counted, and the winner is who gets the most, not the one who sends in a mob to trash the Capitol.

2025-01-24T19:51:09.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Krugman on why he left the Times. If you want to understand how the NYT became so awful, read this piece. He really spells it out in a way I've never seen before. Thank you PK for leaving and for telling the tale of why. We (readers) are getting a much better deal now.

2025-01-24T17:21:56.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

As a Tesla Model Y owner, I've had enough. I'm also a child of Holocaust survivors. Musk doing a Nazi salute behind the seal of the president is too much. In memory of my parents and grandparents, I have to do something.

2025-01-22T13:28:08.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Elon Musk is playing Hitler. We're not idiots. Next time he'll have a swastika armband and will complain about people saying he's Hitler. Not sure what we can do about it right now, but this is also not a controversy, it's fact.

2025-01-21T13:31:01.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Outcast upgrade notes: "Playback begins after the download completes, not after a portion of it is buffered." That was the initial design of podcasting, and its justification, at a time when networks were comparatively much slower.

2024-07-16T15:21:12.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I wanted to see if my browser supports the element from the ancient web. It does.

2024-07-13T13:43:12.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Today's Countdown is worth a listen. Takeaway -- why doesn't Biden run against the Supreme Court. And how about endorsing the call to investigate Thomas' bribes. Action man. Show us you have some life in you. Defend the USA.

2024-07-10T17:32:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation.

2024-07-08T14:26:37.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

AG Sulzberger (born August 5, 1980) is an American journalist serving as the chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper, The New York Times.

2024-07-06T18:08:03.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I searched the NYT website for how to cancel my subscription, I've had enough of this bullshit. Time for us to part ways. Unfortunately the search did not get me any closer to cancelling.

2024-07-06T13:04:04.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Heather Cox Richardson: “Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness.”

2024-07-06T08:29:36.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. On Netflix, highly recommended, esp the episode on end of the USSR and East Germany. If you think what we need is a dictator, see what it's like when it's over.

2024-07-03T11:30:14.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

This is the only RSS 2.0 spec. Anyone who claims to have the real one is basically not telling the truth. And anyone who says the spec has changed since 2002 is also not telling the truth.

2024-07-02T15:04:20.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

“I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

2024-07-02T10:32:26.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Why vote for Biden? Feel free to copy it or create your own list. When people get all fancy about reasons not to support Biden, I find it helpful to have this list to refer to.

2024-06-30T20:52:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The fediverse has the same problem as RSS, subscription is too hard. The only way we avoid the domination of tech giants is to work together. 12 minute podcast on a Sunday, worth it, imho.

2024-06-30T13:39:25.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

To people who say you get wrong answers from ChatGPT, if I wanted my car to kill me I could drive into oncoming traffic. That's the problem with reporters discovering ChatGPT gives incorrect answers. So does Google. As do reporters.

2024-06-22T16:55:23.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

There are 2 kinds of people: Those who find AI absolutely revolutionary and indispensable and integral to their workflows, and those who haven't learned how to use it yet. #amen

2024-06-22T16:46:38.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Wikipedia is essential, but it hallucinates as does journalism as does ChatGPT. Tim Bray, who I’ve known many years, defends Wikipedia, and quotes me, unfortunately without a link.

2024-06-20T08:15:16.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The great thing about outlining is that you can reorganize. That's why people invented index cards. But they are one-level outlines. Not nearly as useful as the multi-level reorganizable outlines on a computer.

2024-06-18T19:02:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

You may not like Facebook the company, but they do great APIs and docs and example code. I haven't started reviewing this yet, but it looks like they've done an excellent job of laying down a crumb trail for developers to follow.

2024-06-18T15:49:29.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

DW's Podcast0 feed: My second podcast on Apple Podcasts. For some reason I'm kind of proud to conform to Apple's podcast rules. But of course the feed is available without help from Apple, as always.

2024-06-18T11:31:48.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I watched The Matrix, The Devil’s advocate and Fight Club and loved all three. So I asked ChatGPT for five suggestions of movies I might watch next and it came up with some interesting ideas.

2024-06-16T17:26:07.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

This is what we don't do in software -- study each others' creations.

You can barely get anyone to even look at the simplest stuff.

Amazing how people bet their whole careers and businesses without any information on what other people are creating. No wonder new generations of software knock out previous generations. No one has any curiosity, respect.

2024-06-14T02:46:04.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Trump voters want revenge. It doesn't have much to do with inflation or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no one is happy with this arrangement.

2024-06-11T19:00:30.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Netscape and blogging got together with Salon, Wired, Red Herring and Motley Fool, and eventually brought the NYT and NPR on board, and that created a powerful standard supported by the entire publishing industry, that led to social media and podcasting.

2024-06-10T09:27:37.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

When ChatGPT can read my blog. This is what I've wanted since long before ChatGPT existed. I can't imagine what the privacy concerns are. Everything on my blog is by definition public.

2024-06-04T20:13:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

In 1996 I served on a jury in Redwood City, Calif, all the way to a verdict. One of the best experiences of my life. When you ask people to make a serious decision, they rise to the occasion, just like the Trump jury did in today's verdict.

2024-05-31T01:43:49.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Microsoft and Google are putting AI chat into all their apps everywhere you can enter text, which imho is as pointless as embedding web browsers in all of the Office apps in 1994. ChatGPT is the Netscape of this generation. Compete with that, create the best environment for the kind of work we do there. That’s the game, from a UI standpoint.

2024-05-30T02:40:42.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Sotomayor admits some Supreme court decisions have driven her to tears. I hope she does more than that. How about agreeing to testify openly in the Senate about what exactly drove her to tears.

2024-05-25T21:10:11.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

2016: The point of the First Amendment is that it protects the most offensive speech. If there weren't any offensive speech we wouldn't need protection. And some thin-skinned billionaires find anything but fawning praise to be offensive.

2024-05-25T11:37:05.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The disturbing truth is that there’s probably more sincerity than not in American politics. We may not want to believe it, but most of the people in charge say what they mean and mean what they say.

2024-05-21T10:52:34.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Yes Apple is a soul crushing tech monopoly. And some group inside Apple did something creative that inspired debate and for some revulsion, and in the name of uniformity in artistic expression, the creativity was crushed. And Steve Jobs would’ve loved it, btw, imho.

2024-05-20T08:56:19.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Despite being defeated, the Knicks received a standing ovation in the game’s final seconds — a token of appreciation from a loyal fanbase that enjoyed one of the most memorable playoff runs in team history.

2024-05-19T23:00:27.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Stephen Wolfram on chatgpt. Why it's good at conversation but not at science. The agrees with what I've seen. But it's very useful at telling you what other humans do in situations like the one you describe.

2024-05-18T17:11:35.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I was really angry when the NYT fired Donald McNeil, who had done so much to keep us informed about Covid. If that's what the NYT isn't going to do, going forward, I'm all for it.

2024-05-17T17:25:16.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A friend from Calif is visiting NYC in July. I used ChatGPT for ideas about where to stay and where to visit for food and entertainment. This is far in advance of what we had before AI.

2024-05-15T12:47:49.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A Georgia appeals court on Wednesday delayed Donald Trump’s criminal case in that state, agreeing to hear an appeal from the former president that may foreclose a trial taking place this year.

2024-05-09T12:22:39.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Steve Albini, Storied Producer and Icon of the Rock Underground, Dies at 61. We learned a lot from him in Napster days about how little money actually gets to music performers.

2024-05-08T19:03:18.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I was asked on Threads what NY restaurant I miss the most. There are lots. But Ratner's is #1. Their food was fantastic, the ambience even better, and the waiters were wonderfully NY-grouchy.

2024-05-07T12:14:26.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

RSS > ActivityPub. I agree with this. And RSS is not exclusively polling based. If you support rssCloud protocol, as WordPress does, you can have instant news with RSS. It's built into FeedLand of course.

2024-05-03T12:41:59.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The worst thing about horse race reporting is that the election isn’t a horse race. The race actually won’t start until six months at which point the votes will be cast by mail and in person and then once you start counting, you could think of it as a race, but even then it’s not a race.

2024-05-01T21:03:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I asked ChatGPT to write a report, and got back a good list with background info, never could have gotten it from a journalist (too conflicted, too lazy, often outright corrupt) or Wikipedia (controlled by trolls).

2024-04-25T17:05:24.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.

2024-04-22T14:30:54.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.

2024-04-22T14:30:54.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.

2024-04-22T14:30:54.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Ghost announces it will support ActivityPub and "become part of the largest open publishing network in the world." I don't think that's true. Just sayin. And size isn't the only thing that matters, btw. 😀

2024-04-22T15:24:58.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.

2024-04-22T14:30:54.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

And similarly, over on Feedland.com, due to necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 6101 are no longer getting updates with my new writing on the Old School blog. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 10029 . . . So be it.

2024-04-22T14:30:54.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

I see that due to early changes to Feedland.org, necessary and understandable steps in the evolution of the product, those who subscribed to aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 556405 are no longer getting updates with my new writing. The new feed is aka Ken Smith / Feed id: 549368 . . . So it goes.

2024-04-22T14:23:33.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The eight best bagels in NYC, according to the city's Bagel Ambassador. (They got the #1 bagel place right, it's in the neighborhood in Queens I grew up in, Utopia Bagels. They are the best in NYC these days imho.)

2024-04-14T13:11:41.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

So this ticking time bomb was sitting there all the time the journalists were talking about how Biden is too old to win the election with Trump. Biden was never the issue, the issue was the freaking supreme freaking court.

2024-04-11T10:23:52.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Great map of Total Solar Eclipse of 2024 Apr 08. I've been looking for this for weeks. I still wasn't going to drive to see the eclipse. I've seen a total eclipse. Imho its not magical. We have an eclipse every night at sunset. YMMV of course.

2024-04-08T03:58:01.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

House Republicans Are Amplifying Russian Propaganda. (This is hardly news. All the polling they do, wouldn't their time be better spent focusing on facts today, and forget about magic thinking and polling.)

2024-04-07T20:17:15.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Ted Turner: I bet you’re all wondering what it feels like to be a billionaire. It’s disappointing really. I’ve learned that great wealth isn’t nearly as good as average sex.

2024-04-07T18:28:04.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

"blueskyreader" is a simple little app I put together last year, it still works, nicely, and it's an interesting idea imho. I'm not going to get to do this myself anytime soon.

2024-04-05T17:04:37.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

Yes, Britannica, you can write it this way, softening the focus, blurring the details in that decade of mounting atrocities: "Because she was Jewish, she left Nazi Germany in the summer of 1938 to settle in Sweden." It's not as though she trotted over to a travel agent on her lunch break and casually booked her travel across international borders to safety.

2024-04-02T10:21:37.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I thought it might be useful to watch a NOVA documentary about AI, but it was just the usual very very old scare story, when the truth of what's happening today is much weirder. It's one thing to imagine the future, another to live it. Too bad they didn't accept the challenge.

2024-03-31T03:48:14.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I had to do a little work on the XML-RPC site and stumbled across this page of links into the 1998 version of the site. The text is all the same, but the style is very 1998. 😍

2024-03-24T22:56:22.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

If the Repubs lose the house before 2025, the Dems could in my dreams nuke the filibuster and change the number of Supreme Court justices to 256 (a nice power of 2). Overturn Dobbs, reinstate Roe and 14th Amendment.

2024-03-23T03:58:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

If they lose the house before 2025, the Dems could in my dreams nuke the filibuster and change the number of Supreme Court justices to 256 (a nice power of 2). Overturn Dobbs, reinstate Roe and 14th Amendment.

2024-03-23T03:58:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

If they lose the house before 2025, the Dems could in my dreams nuke the filibuster and change the number of Supreme Court justices to 256:(a nice power if 2). Overturn Dobbs, reinstate Roe and 14th Amendment.

2024-03-23T03:58:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Media entities have this ludicrous trend of disclosing that they have used “AI” on some article or the other. If that is the case, they should disclose they used Google Docs or Microsoft Office and their built-in “grammar” and “spelling” and other features.

2024-03-20T01:20:16.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I was glad to hear that Om Malik, one of the (original) ur-bloggers, has a blogroll on his site. I was almost going to say "still" but blogrolls are now officially on their way back.

2024-03-13T15:46:37.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

" . . . and to overturn the online world being dictated by profit to one that is dictated by the needs of humanity. It is only then that the online ecosystem we all live in will reach its full potential and provide the foundations for creativity, collaboration and compassion."

2024-03-13T12:49:18.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

My friend Guy Kawasaki has a new book out, right now, which you can buy. If you want a great read from a person who knows how to develop and market ideas with humor, wisdom, love and integrity, this is the one to get.

2024-03-05T23:37:32.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

If you're into reading code in outlines, this is the database-level code in FeedLand. The link opens in Drummer. There are comments at the head of the big routines, listing blog-like changes in the code and the thinking behind them.

2024-03-04T22:31:09.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Journos seem to think Americans can't understand the basics of world politics, but somehow we understand the rules and history of the NBA, NFL and MLB. The functioning of politics isn't really any more complicated.

2024-03-04T12:23:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

There’s a lot of history here. Google Reader insisted posts must have titles, and at the same time twitter said posts may not have titles, so they could never interop. Truth is some ideas are so simple a title is inconceivable.

2024-03-04T12:19:48.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

There's a rule in covering elections that they don't make projections or even analyze results on TV until all the polls are closed. We need an analogous rule that says there should be no reporting on polls until after the election, to allow the people to form their own opinions, for the same reason.

2024-03-03T12:37:12.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Have a look at the webcams at the local Belleayre ski area where it's raining and in the 50s. Sad sight. It will get cold again and they will make snow. It's not quite over yet.

2024-02-28T20:45:33.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Variety: "Biden has long lacked the ability to bend the medium of TV to his ends." That's true of Democrats as a group. In contrast, the Repubs do this very well. It's the only thing they do well.

2024-02-27T16:54:23.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

This story ought to wake up our journalists. This is the same guy who ordered the rioters to attack the US Capitol. Think about that, and take these threats very very very seriously.

2024-02-25T20:05:37.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

An increasingly detailed picture of former President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda is emerging — one that would make the near-daily shocks of his norm-shattering first White House tenure look tame.

2024-02-25T19:09:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The truth about trump is that while he might claim a huge net worth, it’s all mortgaged, many times, fraudulently, so the banks could repossess all of it, but haven’t for fear of having it all crash, and them getting pennies on the dollar.

2024-02-23T11:51:05.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Logseq, a company I thought so much of I invested, had a blog but hasn't updated since August last year. How does such a young entrepreneurial excellent company keep in touch with their users and friends?

2024-02-21T22:34:17.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Another blog that hasn't updated in quite some time, JOHO the Blog by David Weinberger, a Cluetrain author and longtime friend. If the blogosphere is to reboot, we'll need some love from Dr Dave.

2024-02-21T22:32:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I'm trimming my subscription list, removing feeds that haven't updated since last summer, and noticed that Joel On Software is one. He's one of the prolific influential bloggers.

2024-02-21T22:24:19.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I've been wanting to teach ChatGPT how I work, as I would an developer partner, so we can get more efficient over time and tackle more ambitious projects. Eventually I'd like to work with it on porting Frontier to Linux. It's not something any of my human colleagues have been able to help with, but I don't doubt that ChatGPT could do it.

2024-02-17T14:27:42.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Seeing the headline of this op-ed in the Washington Post, I wondered who the author was responding to. You have to wade thru a lot of other stuff before you get to the point, only Repub loony birds, of course, say Trump is America’s Navalny. Does this bs really deserve a response from the WP?

2024-02-17T09:16:54.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Warriors reportedly tried to unite LeBron James and Stephen Curry at NBA trade deadline. That would have been amazing. Flush both teams out of the system in one move. It's about time.

2024-02-14T18:14:52.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

2014: Interop means that I can give you a text file, and you will have a program that can open it. Interop means you can pull into any gas station and put fuel in your car. Interop means you can give me $100 and I'll give you my Knicks ticket, and when you go to the arena, they will let you in.

2024-02-07T13:33:06.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I'm reading Liz Cheney's book, and forgot something I had guessed during the insurrection. Trump was calling Congresspeople saying if you stop the count I'll call off the attack. In other words, your life for a vote. I suspected it before, but they have testimony that confirms it.

2024-02-05T21:18:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Thinking of buying an Apple Vision Pro, but when I went to the site, my iPhone 13 Pro wouldn't do anything when I clicked on the first image. Oh well. Not like any of this stuff works, right.

2024-02-05T20:47:02.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Keith Teare with a real benefit for the new Apple goggles: "No need for a standing desk or an office for that matter. The $3500 is cheaper than they would cost. Those living in smaller spaces and working from home should love it."

2024-02-05T16:10:31.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

“A public park with a small marketplace on one side is surrounded by a courthouse, a playing field, businesses, and a radio station. In the marketplace wander male and female reporters, some taking notes, some with cameras.”

2024-02-05T09:47:36.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I'm reading about discussion in Congress regarding exempting newspaper publishers from antitrust so they can address the threat of new technology. "Our chief interest is to keep newspapers alive," says the legislator. The date: 1963. The technology: television.

2024-02-05T00:15:16.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I would much prefer if Apple had poured their vast resources and creativity into making mass transport work in the Bay Area instead, as a prototype for what might be possible in the rest of the world.

2024-02-03T22:17:54.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I asked ChatGPT to design a full-featured feed reader using MySQL, and it got it right. Transcript attached. Remarkable. I wonder what else it could do. I have an idea of using it, eventually, with some work, to port software from Mac to Linux.

2024-02-03T17:20:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

People who get my blog via nightly email, there are new requirements from Google and Yahoo, and I have no freaking idea wtf they're talking about. If you have an idea, tell me what I have to do. Thanks.

2024-01-31T23:40:15.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

It won't be long before he has an idea for how spreadsheets should work, or a writing tool, and getting ChatGPT to write it for him. It'll be ready to download before he can load the page.

2024-01-26T23:47:47.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

He is like King Lear, who trashed everything in his family and his nation. "Self-awareness isn’t among the former president’s strong suits."

"Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself."

2024-01-25T12:16:14.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

An innovation in FeedLand. This is the list of feeds I'm subscribed to. See the wedge in the left of each feed? When you click it, it reveals the five most recent items in the feed, with links. It's a different kind of feed reader.

2024-01-23T16:20:32.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, the wife of a guffawing, rubber-limbed sewer worker forever mired in a blowhard neighbor’s get-rich-quick schemes and other hazards of life on the classic 1950s sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.

2024-01-14T18:59:08.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I still believe tech companies can play a very important role in the open internet, as long as they are willing to treat users as customers and sell a product that has value without the usual michegas.

2024-01-13T18:06:08.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Say I had a reading list with my favorite podcasts and my podcasting client could subscribe to it. Then when I add a feed to that list on my desktop computer, the podcast client would automatically be subscribed to it.

2024-01-11T21:42:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Services like Substack can make it easy to move to another platform, but of course they don't. I warned everyone about it, got some rude responses from writers who thought they knew better. If we work together we can have better than what we have and not have to compromise. As writers.

2024-01-06T18:00:40.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Michael Cohen Used Fake Cases Cited by A.I. to Seek an End to Court Supervision. (And journalists write fictitious stories based on Wikipedia as a source. All the time. And they don't care, btw.)

2023-12-29T23:24:39.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The Amazon Music Web API is a new, simplified API allowing quick retrieval of meta-data about albums, tracks, artists, playlists, podcasts, and more from the Amazon Music catalog’s millions of songs.

2023-12-25T14:27:00.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

Ron, I loved reading your post about YouTube searching, keep it up! (Testing, first time to try to update post 4) (New edit of this post) Another new edit - Yet another new edit - One more time edit - Let's do it again! - One more time! - I think I have it now - trying to edit the main file now - working on part 3 now - had a problem with new code - trying replaceAll change - trying use of var keyword - trying exact copy of example - that worked, now trying my string - that worked, trying to remove slashes - got the first slash - added another line for second slash, switching to new function name - added a calling argument - added second argument for post text - creating directory path - creating rendering - trying final step - updated base URL - making a tweak - last change

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 23:09:29 GMT
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I need to look through my books for a good reference on Thai customs and culture.  We now have a trained expert in the family who could translate such a book to native Thai and to Chinese!

2023-12-22T22:04:09.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Wikipedia is a complete mess when it comes to RSS. No mention of the NY Times and Martin Nisenholtz. They talk about versions after 2.0, but the format was frozen at 2.0. Makes me wonder when I rely on it as an authority on other subjects.

2023-12-22T16:58:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Wikipedia is a complete utter mess when it comes to RSS. No mention of the NY Times and Martin Nisenholtz. They talk about versions after 2.0, but the format was frozen at 2.0. Makes me wonder when I rely on it as an authority on other subjects.

2023-12-22T16:58:55.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Spent the morning tracing double entry back to the year 1300, when the merchants of Venice  were already using it in business.  Pacioli didn't publish the details of the system until 1494 but the merchants had already been using it for 200 years!  

2023-12-21T18:34:54.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

You can tell Doc is a blogger because he has a post from 2007 where he lists all the cars he's ever owned. I do not have such a page myself, btw. Not sure what that says about me. 😀

2023-12-20T17:43:37.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I read Brent's piece on Mastodon and NetNewsWire, holding my breath hoping he'd arrive at the same answer I did and the answer is yes -- he did. RSS is perfect for Mastodon, and it supports RSS, as does NNW (of course), and that's exactly the right way to connect the two. That's how we're doing it in FeedLand.

2023-12-18T03:36:39.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

You may hope the big company has good intentions, but they're a big company and they honestly don't have very much respect for us. I've had my nose rubbed in this for my whole career. It was amazing how much better they listened when I had a Harvard business card. 😀

2023-12-17T21:47:27.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Andrew Hickey is using Bluesky as a blogging platform, and because we're connected via RSS, you can read it in FeedLand. The power of standards. Just a bit more interop betw these systems and we'll have broken free of the possibility of being dominated by bigco's. This is how bootstraps work and they're super-important to progress.

2023-12-13T15:53:06.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I asked ChatGPT who won the 2020 election and if there was fraud, and why do some people say the election was stolen. There's no "they both do it" to the answer, it's clear and correct. Maybe we could give the AI credit for giving clearer correct answers than the journalists who attack it.

2023-12-13T14:40:19.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The best I’ve read so far about the immorality of the Webb decision is the chapter on abortion in Elie Mystal’s book. I wish we could buy it from his publisher so everyone could read it. Basically the law is as immoral as slavery for pregnant women.

2023-12-12T21:32:59.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

To all the people who clicked on a link to a FeedLand page on a phone in the past, I am sorry to have put you through that. Now that it works on phones, I can see how nice it is to be able to skim the news while you're out and about.

2023-12-10T20:24:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

One thing ChatGPT is great for is a simple Explainer document that gets to the point and covers different contexts, and doesn't waste too much time with bullshit. Like this explanation of "The Resistance." Google sucks at that, with all kinds of garbage in the way.

2023-12-08T14:49:42.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Twitter poisoned our minds with the idea that by taking away the basic features of writing on the web they were encouraging people to write shorter, better, more to-the-point posts and that would make communication on the web like poetry.

2023-12-07T13:46:58.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The idea of posting on your blog and cross-posting to lots of place is the right idea, no argument there, the problem is that the places you can actually cross-post to are few and far-between.

2023-12-06T21:39:22.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

In 2006, @AlanRusbridger described the current threat to newspapers as a threat to society. As AI innovation undermines new industries, this will also be a composition played in two registers.

2023-12-04T14:37:41.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

This was a red letter morning.  I stumbled onto how to most easily find all the recordings posted on YouTube by any given contributor.  This will make it easy to gather a large collection of Bob's performances.  However there is one danger in this, which is that one must be very careful not to become a completist in making such a collection. Being a completist might be okay in some cases, but with Bob it could be a giant curse because there is such a gigantic quantity of material that one could find the collecting turning into an obsession to find it all and record it all.  This could become a mind numbing activity that could kill off the joy of finding and saving a large number of treasures.  It is very important to capture the joy and spontaneity in his work. 

2023-12-03T16:41:15.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 20:16:42 GMT
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 20:02:31 GMT
Ken Smith's linkblog

I asked the Bing AI tool just now to search the web for examples of how humorists and satirists have portrayed Henry Kissinger. It was merrily typing away joke after joke, anecdote after anecdote, and as I watched the words appear I saw that HK had just been described as lewdly using the f-word while speaking with a casual acquaintance in a social setting. Almost instantly, the whole thread vanished, replaced by this sentence: "My mistake, I can’t give a response to that right now. Let’s try a different topic."

2023-12-01T16:09:14.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

&lt;p&gt;Did some work on &lt;a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/"&gt;MyStatusTool &lt;/a&gt;today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...&lt;/p&gt;

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 20:58:35 GMT
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

<p>Did some work on <a href="https://andy.mystatustool.com/">MyStatusTool </a>today, having trouble figuring out how to pass a string into the medium-editor, seems like I may have to clean up the text first...</p>

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 20:17:05 GMT
Dave's linkblog feed

Some things take so long, but how do I explain. When not too many people, can see we're all the same. And because of all their tears, their eyes can't hope to see the beauty that surrounds them. Isn't it a pity.

2023-11-28T22:57:32.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

If memory serves me: John Deere managed for many years to prevent farmers from having anyone but John Deere repair the tractors they had purchased from John Deere. And Monsanto didn't let farmers collect seeds from Monsanto-bred plants to use in their own fields next year. And Disney went to Washington to extend the copyright on Mickey Mouse. So, quick question: What new move roughly of this kind will AI technology make possible? What new kinds of enclosures and silos are probably on the horizon?

2023-11-28T15:09:03.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We've had some frost on the grass in recent mornings, as winter approaches.   I need to get in the swing of it again in working folks around the world with CW, my favorite international language.

2023-11-25T19:12:36.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A couple of WordPress blocks that use the FeedLand API to show your latest feed items on a WordPress site. Written by Fernando Fernandes, a developer at Automattic who I'm working with.

2023-11-23T17:52:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A couple of WordPress blocks that use the FeedLand API to show your latest feed items on a WordPress site. Written by Fernando Fernandes, a developer at Automattic that I'm working with.

2023-11-23T17:52:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A New Yorker article I'd definitely pay $1 to read. I would say this, understanding what's possible with computers will be the human contribution for a while at least. We'll have to work harder to be competitive. And that's a good thing imho because programmers have become lazy and inefficient. Also I never thought of myself as a "coder," I find it overly diminutive.

2023-11-14T20:36:15.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

We don't think of social media apps like Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, etc as part of a content management system. But if they are textcasting oriented, and have feeds that are properly configured, then yes -- you can have people write for publication using such a well-equipped social network.

2023-11-11T18:17:59.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Evan Osnos wrote the first and only piece in the runup to the 2016 election that tried to paint a picture of the Trump presidency in advance of the election. This should be an artform by now imho.

2023-11-09T16:48:35.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

24 October 2023 was the day my doctor informed me that I have a very young heart, rather unexpected, but pleasant. This was his experience from his actual inspection of my heart, not an extrapolation from other measures. He estimated my heart is about ten years younger than the rest of my body, when the heart is more often seven years older than the rest of the body for men and four years for women. This is the birth of a new tag line for me: Youngheart.

2023-10-29T16:55:02.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I woke up in the middle of the night after dreaming about cats being the people of New York City. So I got out my iPad, launched ChatGPT and asked it to instruct DALL-E to help me visualize the dream.

2023-10-27T20:01:59.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The great thing about the new version of DALL-E is even if you can’t draw, you can create visualizations of abstractions you work with, like the inhumanity of JavaScript for complex programming work.

2023-10-26T12:22:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The great thing about the new version of DALLAS-E is even if you can’t draw, you can create visualizations of abstractions you work with, like the inhumanity of JavaScript for complex programming work.

2023-10-26T12:22:53.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Too bad Pebble is closing, I had just started using it. I wonder if it might’ve worked better if they took a textcasting approach, ie made it so it supported the basic features of web writing instead of imposing the same limits as twitter.

2023-10-25T10:49:56.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The moment in 2017 when I decided to stop trying to cross-posting from my blog to everywhere. "I used to have a better blog. It accommodated and focused my thinking instead of limiting and scattering it. I want my old blog back. I liked the freedom. My ideas flowed better."

2023-10-24T02:27:33.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

“Anybody who studies history learns two things: They learn to do research and they learn to write. What history will give you is the ability to pivot into the different ideas, the different fields, the different careers as they arise.”

2023-10-22T23:20:03.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

U.S. scientist Robert Sapolsky says humans have no free will. That's what I think, and all the pretense that we're intelligent and machines aren't is ridiculous given the experiences we're having communicating with machines.

2023-10-22T02:19:45.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

People talk about the early idealism of the web. I confess, I was one of the idealists, and I still am, amazingly. Here's a piece I wrote in 1996 called Holding Hands in Cyberspace.

2023-10-21T14:38:13.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

This is what I was saying about Kyrie Irving and the NBA. No players in the NBA stood up for the Jewish people. The best was LeBron James who said Irving shouldn't have said it, not that what he was saying was heinous. Silence from everyone else.

2023-10-20T15:37:55.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

The barbarous murders last weekend of more than 1,300 Israelis by the highly organized and ruthless death squads of Hamas killers bear the stamp of institutional Jew hatred on a vast scale.

2023-10-20T11:50:15.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

In July 2003, two fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, journalist Christopher Lydon and software engineer Dave Winer, sat down for an interview together. This gave way to arguably the very first modern podcast.

2023-10-18T21:10:58.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

In the Planning Ahead department, now that tax season has ended, it's a good time to get stuff done for the future.  I start with a bush that claims to have purple berries the Northern Cardinals are said to love to eat.  Plant this bush and the Cardinals will flock to your yard!  Next trip to the nursery will include a search for American native beautyberry (Callicarpa americana).   

2023-10-18T15:42:55.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

The first in my new series on Irrelevant Postings, this one about the Johann Sebastian Bach - "Coffee Cantata" BWV 211, complete with full lyrics, as well as the video of a performance of the piece by a string orchestra and two vocalists.  How irrelevant is this for me?  Well, I don't drink coffee, never have, probably never will, so it's totally irrelevant for me.  But I sent the link to my brother, who is an opera fanatic, so it might be quite relevant, or at least a little bit interesting, for him.

2023-10-16T14:04:28.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand between 1970 and 2002.

2023-10-14T14:43:46.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Dr Dobbs interview with me in 1991 on among other things calling Apple's bluff, which turned out to be a freaking disaster. We had a far better product, but that didn't matter very much. Should have gone to Unix then, but I liked the Mac better.

2023-10-09T15:19:31.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

It's an honor to be quoted by Philip Bump in his Washington Post column, but -- the exact quote is -- "People come back to places that send them away." The sentiment is right. MuskCo is breaking that rule bigtime.

2023-10-08T12:18:12.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I was very fortunate to be a student at Oberlin College in the Spring of 1964 when the Oberlin College Choir did a historic two month tour of Russia with their amazing chorale performances. It was a super successful way to win over the hearts of the Russians and was so characteristic of how my generation used to win people over with love and beauty.  

2023-10-02T01:26:27.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I asked ChatGPT if my blogs, and work with feeds and podcasting and other tech qualifies as "IndieWeb." Also asked whether "open web" and IndieWeb are more or less the same thing. It said yes to pretty much all of it. To which I add, of course.

2023-09-30T00:21:30.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021.

2023-09-27T19:31:30.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

Trump is cornered, under indictment, facing the deprivation of his liberty if convicted – and winning the presidency is his only way out. He will stop at nothing, do anything, and tear down everything to protect himself.

2023-09-26T14:48:49.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

In the late 90s and into the 00s, we needed the term Sources Go Direct to focus our reporter friends on the role bloggers were playing. They jumped to the conclusion that we were trying to be reporters. Most of us were not.

2023-09-24T21:46:32.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

A suggestion to friends investing in local news, it might be good to invest also in giving the sources of news better means to reach users of news. There's more to news than intermediaries.

2023-09-24T18:25:21.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

I watched Barbie and my god what an AWFUL travesty of a plot and waste of talent. Made my stomach ache. A freaking commercial. Got an 80 on Metacritic. What is wrong with everyone! It was probably the worst movie ever made.

2023-09-24T13:58:53.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"As late as 1939, London supplier Charles Roberson & Co. was unashamedly advertising mummy in its Catalogue of Artists’ Materials, where it was described as '[a] pigment prepared by grinding together the Bitumen and Bones of an Egyptian Mummy.'”

2023-09-22T15:16:53.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We managed to order Amtrak train tickets to Chicago with my mobile phone.  It took two of us 45 mins to navigate their website order form.  I used to just call Amtrak and do it over the landline. Much easier, but I guess those good times are over.  We're still looking forward to the train ride!  

2023-09-21T17:27:11.000Z
Dave's linkblog feed

It should have been simple for New York to set up its legal weed market: You put out a call for entrepreneurs, evaluate their pitches and let the best qualified folks set up weed dispensaries.

2023-09-21T15:50:40.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it." --Pete Townshend

2023-09-19T15:45:02.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I managed to find a help page that told me how to find the pw for my phone.  I tried it and it worked!  For the first time I can now hear voicemail messages that people leave for me.  Hooray!!

2023-09-19T01:48:52.000Z
My Feed

Olbermann suggests we all tune into Maddow tonight to see if she excoriates NBC for their ridiculous interview of the fascist insurrectionist.

2023-09-18T20:54:50.000Z
My Feed

Olbermann suggests we all tune into Maddow tonight to see if she calls out NBC for their ridiculous interview of the fascist insurrectionist.

2023-09-18T20:54:50.000Z
My Feed

"Romney was, not unlike the colleagues he criticizes, willing to say whatever it took to win power, even if it meant smearing nearly half the country as essentially unproductive and opening the door to some of the most corrosive forces in American political life."

2023-09-18T00:48:03.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.

2023-09-17T21:53:38.000Z
My Feed

Excellent version of Yer Blues from 1968, led by John Lennon with Keith Richards and Eric Clapton on guitar. Better than the Beatles original! Wow.

2023-09-17T16:55:38.000Z
My Feed

This change in Chrome in 2020 is the likely source of the end of the referer header value on the web. Something that sounds so esoteric is actually removing an important feature of the web, and it got little or no notice.

2023-09-17T15:33:30.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

In an excellent clip from the Sopranos TV series, a therapist tells Tony Soprano’s spouse Carmela that she’s fooling herself if she believes that she’s not helping Tony live a violent life as a Mafia gangster. She believes she’s merely living a private life, without public consequences, which the therapist blows past as a delusion or excuse. "One thing you can never say is that you haven't been told," he says. The private life is a powerful part of American mythology, the U.S. being, as we all recall, the owner and frequent user of the world’s most powerful military. (Via T.D.)

2023-09-14T13:13:09.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Today Andy posted a long Status Update (2023-09-11) that shows our little updates can be pretty extensive and awesome!  I've experimented with this some too. For example my 2023-09-09 Update reaches all the way back to a very early posting (May 1994) on rec.music.dylan, which I then included on the cover page of my first ever website, a Dylan bibliography from 1999-29-05 which is still alive in its original form today and likely one of the oldest sites still in its original form on the web, more than 24 years after it was first created. The bibliography was built with the encouragement of the great Dylan master, CJ, and it was first posted as a surprise to him.  You may notice that I indexed the site using Alta Vista, which was considered to be a powerful search engine at the time.  Google searches had not yet been invented, so that's old, like me!    

2023-09-12T04:34:06.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Ken Smith writes again on this topic, referring again to the need to organize to be successful in activism or other group projects. I recently finished listening to a podcast called "Panther: Blueprint for Black Power". The podcast tells the story of fighting for voting rights in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965 and 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The "blueprint" is not very specific, basically the community organized with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration and voting. The community also created a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, to provide an alternate slate of candidates to oppose white supremacy Democratic candidates. Their symbol was the Black Panther, and this was the inspiration for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

Ken Smith also brings up the topic of tools for organizing that were part of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign website. Thanks to Google, I found a site that collects presidential campaign websites, and saw there were several captures of the original Obama website. I looked at a page with the site after the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Reviewing the home page, there were ways for people to register with the site, to sign up for a newsletter, to find a local group where they could get involved, an area to volunteer to help, and (of course) a donation link. The bottom half of the page looked like a news blog where stories of interest could be posted and read. I assume that these "tools" are what Ken Smith is talking about.

All of these "tools" are pretty standard elements of website design for political websites (link is to collection of 2024 websites). I did a quick review of BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin that "helps you build any kind of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more." (from the home page). I found an example of a NGO using this application, as well as a collection of 20 other examples. On a broader note, the Action Network provides organizing tools for groups (at some cost). I mention these examples to demonstrate that there are tools and applications available at little to no cost to provide ways for people to organize, read, and write on a topic or issue, so I do not see the "tools" issue as a problem (they exist, but require time and effort to set up and use). The "problem" is that there needs to be a group of people sufficiently interested in an issue to want to organize, and to take the time to use available tools to support that organization. As I have written earlier, the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is a comprehensive set of tools/methods to help communities identify issues and organize to address them. I welcome Ken's input on if the examples in this post meet his expectations of what people need to organize and take action.

2023-09-11T15:49:59.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

The Niners won their opener against the Steelers, 30-7. Clearly no sophomore slump for Purdy, and the entire team did a great job, especially Aiyuk & McCaffrey. The offense moved at will and the defense stopped nearly everything, far exceeding their 2.5 pt advantage at the start of the game.

2023-09-10T21:26:10.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

No march on Washington is going to come of today's social media tools. But remember, as someone once said, the rich march on Washington every day. They march on Washington so often that they keep permanent offices there, on K Street. The rich and powerful certainly are organized.

2023-09-10T15:03:57.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

The most amazing thing in years has happened today.  I just found one of the most important people in my life, one of my classmates at Oberlin College, Lynn Bengston. She and our mutual friend, Steph, got me into Bob Dylan's music one night our senior year in 1966.  I eventually lost touch with both of them.  I started searching for them in the 1990's.  I was too late in locating Steph, she had already passed on.  But I never had even the slightest lead in finding Lynn, none of our friends had any idea what had happened with her.  But today I finally located her and we talked on the phone for 15 mins, with more to come soon.  We were both verrrrry happy to reconnect!!!

2023-09-09T20:23:54.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

The university institute "turned in a different direction, focusing on people who studied the internet, rather than people who made the internet," behaving as universities tend to do.

2023-09-08T12:43:10.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Every university should host an open source project. It should be a process that lasts decades, spans generations. The goal is two-fold: Add to our technology, and to develop better developers.

2023-09-07T20:14:46.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"A Secure and Lucrative One-Stop Replacement for Your Many Stupid Social Media Pages" -- discussed in the near-future sci-fi/nonfiction novel The Ministry for the Future, chapter 54.

2023-09-07T13:28:18.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Back in the 1970s when SQL was new, it was touted as an English-like database language. Now with ChatGPT you really can do database queries in actual English and it understands. Amazing. Whether the info is accurate or not (I suspect it is) is beside the point.

2023-09-05T15:55:06.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

I decided to look at my FeedLand news feed today (was on a tab I had not looked at recently) and saw the newsfeed problem that Dave Winer wrote about today. I am still blocked from commenting on his Github repos, so posting a comment here. I ended up opening a new tab and doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-R), and the page refreshed.

2023-09-03T21:36:07.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

Listening to Ross Gay read yesterday about not being in a hurry, I thought: like porch-sitting, the literary essay records one person's quest for things that can only be found while meandering in a manner discouraged or even disallowed by capitalism.

2023-09-02T18:31:07.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Spent time today confirming that our visiting beaver was actually a beaver (a broad flat tail FOR SURE) and NOT a groundhog, muskrat or gopher.  But we also have two new holes dug in our front garden.  We don't think beavers dig holes, so we might have two visitors, not one: a beaver plus a groundhog, muskrat or gopher.  Quite an interesting development. 

2023-09-02T01:36:54.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We saw the Super Blue Moon here and it was really fantastic.  I took a bunch of pictures, but none were as fantastic as seeing it with the naked eye.  It definitely looked blue to me.  My astronomer brother told me it's not really blue. I saw BLUE!

2023-08-31T05:15:10.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Great to hear a story by Heidi Roizen who I knew when the Mac was new. She was the entrepreneur's entrepreneur, and it's good to hear her sharing her experience with new entrepreneurs.

2023-08-30T16:31:17.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

BloggerCon: The idea that almost everyone at a certain kind of focused public meeting writes publicly. (At our city council meetings, only a handful of people do, which in some ways shifts political power out of their hands.)

2023-08-29T19:58:15.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Yesterday, I was able to use MyStatusTool, my minimal blogging tool, to capture URLs from a set of open tabs on my phone. I structured the posts with the website link, then the title of the post. I was able to post to my instance, all from my phone. The hardest part was selecting the text for the link. I use the Brave web browser, and another menu would pop up before the editor toolbar, so I had to tap several times to get to the link button. I think I will keep trying this as a way to capture links for later use/classification.

2023-08-29T00:35:19.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

Once upon a time a political campaign used web tools that made it easy for people to work together as activists where they lived. The tools helped someone get elected with great excitement to the U.S. Presidency. Upon arrival in the White House, they shut the thing down. Now it's a fading memory.

2023-08-27T13:47:26.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Ken Smith posted recently, continuing to riff on musical performances (here, being on Ed Sullivan) and also remembering his posts on Pete Seeger, and relating them to acts of activism. In the recent post, he notes how people go to concerts and are more disposed to spend money on things related to the concert/group they heard. As consumers, they already know how to spend money on things that they want. For a performance by a musical activist, there should be information/flyers/greeters at the end to communicate about "how to affiliate with others and help move the issue forward in our civic life" (my idea) (quote from Ken's recent post).

For any issue, there are people for it and against it. Attending a concert where an activist performs could be considered an act of activism, but (as Ken Smith says) if there is no follow-through, the momentum/energy of the event fades away. So - what to do about it? Here, I think some distinction should be drawn between the person who is already an activist and a person who thinks they want to be an activist, but are not sure what to do. If a person is an activist, and is not having much success in promoting an issue or cause, perhaps one of the ideas from my Activism in Atlanta post is appropriate (find the organization that is already working on that problem). Hillary Rettig, in her book "The Lifelong Activist", has an entire section on how to be more successful in pursuing activism ( the full text of the book is available as a free PDF). In a November 2022 post, Ken Smith lists 6 areas of what he calls the "activism toolkit" that could also apply here.

2023-08-26T23:47:25.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Our many day long heat wave broke last night.  A bit after 9 pm the temp dropped from 98 deg to 80 in half an hour and then 10 more degrees in another hour.  Along with that drop we had a lot of rain and plenty of thunder and lightning, with a severe thunderstorm warning coming from the Weather Service over the TV.   

2023-08-26T22:33:01.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Little girl to her mother: "Mommy, can we go eat at McDonald's?"  Mommy: of course we can, as long as you can spell McDonald's for me.  P A U S E   Little girl again: "Okay Mommy, let's go eat at KFC!"

2023-08-26T03:35:55.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"Taking liberal arts education away from the least privileged — implying that they are future laborers and nothing else — helps ensure that they develop a resentment of 'elites.' That’s an animus whose political consequences should be uncomfortably familiar by now." --Leif Weatherby

2023-08-23T23:51:56.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

well-known-feeds is an interesting idea from DanQ that facilitates the discovery of feeds, and yes that's a great thing. I can think of a few sites that would benefit from such a feature.

2023-08-23T21:55:31.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Two hot nights in a row, maybe two more to come.  We have good A/C downstairs, but not so good upstairs.  But we both slept okay in the heat. This is summer, not any special climate change.  Just a normal seasonal change for us.

2023-08-23T19:28:58.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"To prevent those who would hijack algorithms for power, we need a pro-choice movement for algorithms. We, the users, should be able to decide what we read at the newsstand." --@JuliaAngwin

2023-08-22T22:59:01.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I own a nice red baseball cap, but it's an official MLB St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, for the team I grew up listening to on the radio as a kid. They never made it to the World Series until I went off to college in Ohio.

2023-08-21T05:47:24.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

As we came out of the restaurant, we heard a loud siren in the distance coming our way. It was coming fast, blaring its siren and honking its horn, loud and fast, over and over and over. It was coming up a wide four lane road and cars were escaping to the shoulders fast along the way to give it room. They were soon upon us and then past us and going fast. It was verrrrry exciting!! We stood by our car and just watched, transfixed. Once it was gone, we both got in the car, very excited!! Wow, that was really exciting, terrific, no wonder kids want to be a fireman! As soon as we were settled in the car, Supattra said, "You'll never see that in Thailand!" Oh, really? Why not? "Because Thai people don't know what to do. They get flustered and don't know how to get out of the way. So it just becomes a big traffic snarl, with a fire engine stuck in a traffic jam." Wow, I never noticed that, but then again, I can't think of a single time I've seen a fire engine in Thailand. 

2023-08-20T05:00:12.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

I did a search for "activism 101" yesterday, and found an episode of the podcast While Black, recorded in 2019, interviewing an activist called City. City does activism in Atlanta, Georgia, with a current focus on police brutality. I listened to it today, and jotted down some notes when the interviewer asked for three things that someone who wants to get involved in activism should do (35-40 minutes into the podcast):

  • Find what problem that you are going to be passionate about
    • Half of the people only find problems that everyone is talking about, but are not passionate about it
  • Find your organization that is already working on that problem
    • You don't have to join them, but you can work along side them
  • Put yourself in a position where economically your problem can be fixed
    • Make sure that your livelihood is not affected
    • Have something or someone that can take care of you/family
  • Everyone is needed - even social media activists
  • You need goals
    • If you don't have that, you will be running around with your head cut off

2023-08-19T22:44:40.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

“He never listens to his lawyers. But he listened this time, didn’t he? Why? Because he’s scared. He is scared he’s just a couple of steps away from that jail cell closing behind him.”

2023-08-19T17:18:11.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one's home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken's post title is "Essential Local Politics"). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.

In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called "Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference - Quick Tech Guide". I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken's input on this.

2023-08-18T23:13:48.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

My Elmer (from 1959-1960) discovered two great Bob Dylan CD's in his Jeep that have been in there for a long time. One had been played once, the other had never been played at all.  Then again he has one of the highest standings of all the thousands of people on SKCC.  His main priority in his spare time is CW, obviously not Dylan. That's okay. To each his own. <br /> <br />

But tomorrow I'm gonna call him and ask him whether he has played the Blonde on Blonde album yet!  

2023-08-18T03:36:26.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Ken,

I am glad you took a look at the Americans of Conscience Checklist! I also enjoyed the two quotes from Pete Seeger today. From your posts, I get the sense that you are still searching or have a desire to find tools/techniques to support activism. Am I reading that correctly?

Did you ever look at this list I put together?

I have not spent hardly any time looking at this list I assembled, but I think this is a good place to look for tools/techniques for activism. I know we both have an interest in activism, but it seems like I am having a problem breaking out of "consumption mode"...

Is there a topic in your local community you are interested in? I remember you were on some county planning committee or board. I think I want to look into how elections are run in Oregon, but I have not been able to take any steps toward this. Maybe I need to refine what my interest is in this topic.

I am planning to explore a tool/app to be able to easily post items from a RSS feed or group of feeds to some readable page/site/something, like Radio UserLand had. I will be posting some workflow thoughts on this soon.

Let's keep the conversation going!

Andy

2023-08-16T22:54:04.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses "standing searches" for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.

The most common type of "standing search" I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).

So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool - I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.

Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts - to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post - to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes' OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse are excellent examples).

All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.

To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken's further thoughts on this topic.

2023-08-14T19:54:28.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

I am writing a post with some markdown text in it. Here's a list of places:

  1. Brazil
  2. Argentina
  3. Peru
  4. Venezuela

That should come out as a markdown list. And here are some bits of styled text.

2023-08-14T19:06:57.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

In really difficult times, it is important to keep one's eye on the ball and to follow the highest priorities in the correct order to ensure that a proper & sane resolution to the matters at hand is achieved without fail.  Do not waver, or be distracted.

2023-08-14T02:21:40.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation - I have a few comments.

From the engaging others post:

  • The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn't it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.

From the curation post:

  • Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.

These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to "party" and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!

2023-08-13T23:14:15.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"Donald J. Trump won 53.3 percent of Ohio’s votes in the 2020 presidential election. But Republicans control 67 percent of seats in the State House — and 79 percent in the State Senate. Last November, 85 percent of Ohio’s state legislative races were uncontested or were won by 10 percentage points or more . . ." @MiWine

2023-08-09T01:39:53.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I snagged a like new Chameleon LEFS 8010 with 50 ft of RG-58 coax.  I've found that Chameleon always uses the highest quality components in their antennas, but it's never cheap.  So it was good to find a like new antenna at a discount.  It should do 80m to 10m end fed, without a tuner, so a very handy antenna, especially for portable operating!

2023-08-09T00:56:57.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

From the NYT: "Gift articles can only be shared using the Gift button and the gift sharing options available. Articles can not be gifted or shared using non-gift social sharing options, or by copying and pasting the article URL into a web browser." (Seems like all my nopaywall posts are bogus?)

2023-08-06T15:58:58.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and your 15 would keep you informed about the daily or weekly writing of 150 people they respected.

2023-08-05T22:53:00.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

The new icon for the service formerly known as Twitter is so garish and glaringly ugly that I had to move it off its former place of practicality and honor on the iPad's Home Screen.

2023-08-05T22:27:04.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"It is hard to imagine a [prison] system more perfectly designed for failure than ours in the US, which in the name of 'corrections' helps perpetuate a cycle of poverty, crime, community dysfunction and despair." --Bill Keller

2023-08-05T16:17:09.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"It is hard to imagine a system more perfectly designed for failure than ours in the US, which in the name of 'corrections' helps perpetuate a cycle of poverty, crime, community dysfunction and despair." --Bill Keller

2023-08-05T16:15:09.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"Los residentes de Nuevo México fueron los primeros sujetos humanos de prueba del arma más poderosa del planeta. / The people of New Mexico were the first human test subjects of the world’s most powerful weapon."

2023-08-05T13:29:06.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"Presidential historian Michael Beschloss has argued that, given America’s fractured and distorting media lens, the trial of Donald Trump should be broadcast live on television so every voter can witness how no one, not even a president, is above the law."

2023-08-04T13:38:13.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

It's been a while since I looked at the "everything" timeline in FeedLand. A bunch of people have subscribed to Bluesky feeds, and they are the most active, and also support rssCloud (!) so the list is skewed toward Bluesky posts from people who are on now.

2023-08-03T15:42:12.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"Yet we become less employable as we climb the high end of the demographic ladder, but not because we can’t do the work. It’s mostly because we look old and our tolerance for bullshit is low. Even our own, which is another bonus." --Doc Searls

2023-07-30T01:23:16.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.

2023-07-30T00:15:48.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.

2023-07-30T00:15:51.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

When big tech companies say they love open formats and protocols, that means they're launching something new and they're just saying that so you relax about their intentions, which haven't actually changed at all.

2023-07-30T00:15:48.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"Doing human networks at mass scale isn’t a baby game, as the moral brine shrimp in charge of the big networks keep demonstrating." Erin Kissane sorts the reasons people give for leaving Mastodon.

2023-07-29T11:36:21.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We opened a new checking account at a bank right downtown, just 1-2 blocks from the post office and the library.  It's in a very nice bldg with excellent A/C on a super hot day.  They had sent me two ads in the mail, offering $400 cash bonus if we opened a checking account with direct deposit attached.  Hey, that's a lot better than a toaster, so we decided to give it a try. Free enterprise comes up with nice incentives!!

2023-07-28T04:19:58.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

A disempowered people not allowed to explain themselves in public in language of their own choosing, in words they see as adequate to their experiences--this happens to groups in the United States all the time. Other people's words and categories dominate the country's understanding of their lives.

2023-07-27T13:52:09.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

A disempowered people not allowed to explain themselves in public in language of their own choosing, in words they see as adequate to their experiences -- this happens to groups in the United States all the time. Other people's words and categories dominate the country's understanding of their lives.

2023-07-27T13:52:09.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it." --Pauline Kael, in a 1972 review of the film in the NYer that argues that Kubrick celebrates violence and the main character that carries it out.

2023-07-27T00:15:25.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

History will eventually show the the two IRS whistleblowers are American heroes. Their intervention may have saved the Dept of Justice from making some major blunders that might have made it very clear that Justice for All is NOT a reality in America.

2023-07-26T19:37:22.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I had a lovely 40 min chat with my childhood Elmer, who now lives in MI, on a lake in a town of 800 population.  He is happily retired, with a W0 call, from his time when he lived in Iowa in the same town as the Collins Radio factory.  He couldn't afford any Collins equipment, but I wish he could have taken a tour of the factory to see the great stuff being built.

2023-07-25T18:19:09.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

At the restaurant, in the outdoor seating, we were not far from a group of about a dozen at a large table. They were having a good time, and then after a while, they all stood up, walked fifteen feet out into the garden there, and had a brief wedding. Then they sat down for dessert!

2023-07-25T12:56:17.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I promised to post an episode from the Christopher Lyden podcast, which Dave Winer helped to originally get up and running. The Lyden podcast, Open Source, was the first ever podcast and it has always been one of the best.  I decided to link to one of my favorite episodes: when he had on Christopher Ricks, now Sir Christopher Ricks, to discuss Bob Dylan and his art. I had the good fortune of becoming friends with Ricks in 1998, when I hosted him as the Keynote Speaker at the Stanford International Conference on Bob Dylan.  Ricks was one of the first in academia to suggest that Bob was worthy of study as a great American song writer at the university level.  Many years later Ricks was asked to produce the most exhaustive Dylan lyrics book ever  (and there have been many) which was published by Simon & Schuster on 28 Oct 2014.  In the 7 Dec 2016 Open Source podcast, Ricks described Bob as the “greatest living user of the English language.”   Follow the previous link to see that podcast episode, or you can listen to the original audio of the episode by clicking here.  Not too long after that podcast, Bob was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 13 October 2017.  Yay!!

2023-07-25T03:18:09.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I browsed microblog for a bit this morning. I saw a LOT of negative postings, more than I usually expect.  Many seem to be mad at Musk. Why do they like to criticize him so much?  Maybe I will adopt a new policy. Count negative postings and leave the site when the count reaches a certain count, like 5.  I don't need to have negativity added to my life.  Starting Anti-Negativity Week now.

2023-07-24T18:04:25.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

This is how it can be when you're in your mid-seventies. I have a flashlight that is charged with a small flat solar panel on one side.  I bought it in a Kickstarter, before microblog came along.  They actually delivered on their Kickstarter promises!  It is called a Waka Waka Power.  I have two of them; one is yellow and the other is black. I put the black one on top of my lower sash window, so it was pointing east into the bright sun, to charge it up.  Fast forward a day or two and I realize I haven't taken it out of the window and surely it is done charging.  But now I can't find it in my window!  I ask my wife whether she moved it (Nope) and I looked and looked all over, but didn't find it.  I gave up, figuring it will turn up.  Fast forward another day and my wife calls me into the kitchen and points me to the window in the pantry area.  There is my black flashlight perched on top of the window, right where I had put it!!  I had been looking on the matching window in the bathroom, five feet or so down the hall from the pantry in the kitchen. (Red face)  And it had quite a good charge on it, of course.

2023-07-23T20:42:19.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

Seeing a good number of paintings by Van Gogh in Chicago Thursday that I've never seen images of in the past, I start thinking that art history teachers or articles often reduce a serious artist to a handful of points and ignore 90% of how the person arrived at the craft displayed in the most famous paintings. Reductive, flattening, sucking the spirit from the artist's journey.

2023-07-22T15:30:32.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

The Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago circles the space with a timeline that gives a great sense of the progress in innovation and collaboration among a group of painters.

2023-07-22T13:10:00.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Zachary Vance is looking for someone with a copy of MORE 2 or who knows how to read such files in MORE 3 or has some idea what to do with such a file? He's trying to extract the text from a book that was written with MORE 2 back in the day.

2023-07-22T12:58:40.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Dave Winer has declared today to be Journalism is Stupid Day on Scripting.com. He offers no prizes for playing along, but he DOES tell the complete origin story for the long running OpenSource Podcast with Christopher Lyden.  I don't think he meant the stupid part to apply to Lyden, as we know he has great respect for Lyden's long and great career as one of the best podcasters of all time. We will be posting a link to one of the great Open Source podcasts here in the near future. Don't even try to guess which one, just stay tuned to see which one.

2023-07-20T04:33:53.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

The New York Times reports that a target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/politics/trump-charges-civil-rights-law-voting-fraud.html

2023-07-20T02:04:52.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

The New York Times reports that a target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.

<br>

<br>

<a href= https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/politics/trump-charges-civil-rights-law-voting-fraud.html> Potential Trump Charges Include Civil Rights Law Used in Voting Fraud Cases</a>

2023-07-20T02:04:07.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

"The economic pressure on farmers today is such that most can’t even afford to practice crop rotation. And without that sort of care, we’re not farming. We’re mining the topsoil!"

2023-07-14T16:42:59.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Lisa Rubin of the MaddowBlog explains why Special Counsel Jack Smith is digging into the infamous Dec. 18, 2020 meeting at the White House where “White House aides and government officials” were “pushing back on claims of widespread election fraud and telling Trump in unambiguous terms that he lacked the authority to seize voting machines. “ Can you say “attempting to overthrow the 2020 election”?

Why this Dec. 2020 meeting is a focus of Jack Smith's Jan. 6 probe

2023-07-12T01:13:54.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Steve Benen reports on the Maddow blog on the ejection of Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) from the House Freedom Caucus for cursing at Lauren Boebert on the House floor and other reasons, and summarizes how House Republicans are fractured over almost every initiative they have pursued over the last 6 months.

How Marjorie Taylor Greene got booted out of the House Freedom Caucus as the House Republican caucus is fracturing into warring camps, blocking any progress on their agenda

2023-07-11T23:01:15.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Two grand juries sworn in for Fulton County, Georgia on July 11 could her testimony for charges against Donald Trump and his allies over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Per the CNN article, charges could include “solicitation of election fraud, making false statements to state and local government bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of an oath-of-office, and involvement in election-related threats.”

New Georgia grand juries will hear evidence to bring charges against Trump efforts to overturn 2020 elections

2023-07-11T22:54:20.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Special Jack Smith issues subpoenas for 2020 election fraud in Arizona

From ‘sore loser’ to prison? Trump nightmare deepens as Jack Smith hits AZ 2020 plot with subpoenas | Watch (msn.com)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/from-sore-loser-to-prison-trump-nightmare-deepens-as-jack-smith-hits-az-2020-plot-with-subpoenas/vi-AA1du1MQ?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=f847bd80b477480a9246131b8d45fb25&ei=16

2023-07-11T22:44:16.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Recently Dave Winer wrote about one of his most worthy accomplishments, which was when he helped href="http://scripting.com/2023/07/09.html?title=odeToMaryAndChris">Christopher Lyden in 2003 with the mechanics to broadcast his first ever podcast. That podcast, Open Source, has now run for decades, the longest run for a podcast ever produced.

In December 2016, I was thrilled when I heard that Open Source was going to be having Sir Christopher Ricks as a guest, in celebration of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Bob Dylan. It is a href="https://radioopensource.org/bob-dylan-poet/">terrific episode, with Lyden and Ricks discussing Dylan's life work, capped off with a recording of Bob giving his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Quite marvelous!!

2023-07-11T20:09:01.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We had a nice productive day today, with the temp not going higher than 80 deg and blue skies all day long. I've been researching small affordable solar power sources and backup battery charging systems for our phones and other devices. We don't need a full blown solar power system on our gorgeous black roof. I'd rather just keep the handsome look of our house as the architect originally designed it. We will need to hire some tree guys to come in and tidy up some trees and remove a few dead trees. Because of our recent storm, the city will be carting off all tree limbs that came down during the storm, at no cost to us.

2023-07-11T18:34:28.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

With all the hoopla about the Threads app from Instagram/Facebook, I was reminded of a post from Tantek Celik (Own Your Notes), bringing out these points (see this comic for context):

  • I am once again asking you to own your notes, rather than tweeting them into Big Chad’s garage.
  • Maybe you left the big garage and now toot in your neighborhood Chad’s garage. It’s still someone else’s garage.

I have also written about owning your content (here, here and here). Of course, posting this on my Old School blog goes against this (although I have an OPML backup that I could render somehow), which is why I am also posting this on my main blog (WordPress self-hosted). People may feel that what they post on services like Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, et al, is more like conversations that do not need to be "owned". However, if there is a way to pipe your conversation into a flow where you still own the content (like MyStatusTool), why not do it?

2023-07-10T03:27:13.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence. I recorded an ode to Chris and his producer, Mary McGrath, on my blog today.

2023-07-09T15:39:22.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Supattra made Tom Kha Ghai for dinner tonight, a delicious Thai soup with chicken in it, as well as fresh lime juice. Of course she made one version for me (low on spice) and another for her (no shortage of spicy). The more I ate, the more delicious it was. I'm soooo lucky to have a Thai wife!

2023-07-09T02:30:11.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

Our next door neighbor has been helping us with yard cleanup today. We also went to Menard's to get battery operated garden trimming tools: a 6" pruning chainsaw & a 20" hedge trimmer. We love these new battery operated tools. We've been using a battery operated lawn mower for at least two years now. Our gardening tools are all switching to battery powered now, no cords on any of them.

2023-07-09T01:25:30.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Users aren't on their own that adventurous. They like to use what everyone else is using, which makes the bootstrap hard. But the platform vendor can provide the magic that gets it going.

2023-07-08T21:00:08.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Krugman: "The craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets." #nopaywall

2023-07-08T13:12:07.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We had a nice productive day today, with the temp not going higher than 80 deg and blue skies all day long. I've been researching small affordable solar power sources and backup battery charging systems for our phones and other devices. We don't need a full blown solar power system on our gorgeous black roof. I'd rather just keep the handsome look of our house as the architect originally designed it. We will need to hire some tree guys to come in and tidy up some trees and remove a few dead trees. Because of our recent storm, the city will be carting off all tree limbs that came down during the storm, at no cost to us.

2023-07-07T02:00:10.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah - Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation - I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!

2023-07-06T16:52:08.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah - Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation - I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 16:50:51 GMT
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

We finally got our power back on after 52.5 hrs with no power. One day was cool, so not too bad. Second day was in the 80's, so a nightmare. I am working on having alternate ways to charge my phone. Also beginning to think about some solar choices, but don't tell anyone, as I don't want a phone book worth of regs to follow, if I do that. I'd really like to have a simple life.

2023-07-02T16:02:50.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Bloomberg reports that a “standing order” that former President Donald Trump has claimed authorized him to instantly declassify documents removed from the Oval Office could not be found by either the Justice Department or Office of Director of National Intelligence.

The disclosure by the agencies was made in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed last August by Bloomberg News, which sued ODNI and the Justice Department’s national security division for a copy of Trump’s so-called standing order — if one existed.

Trump ‘Standing Order’ to Declassify Not Found by DOJ, Intelligence Agency

2023-06-30T18:32:29.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

It is easy to fall into a "consumption" mode of life, where most if not all free time is spent taking in news and information about things, but not producing anything with that news/information, or not producing anything at all. Similarly, it is easier to comment on the current state of affairs in the world than it is to take action to make something happen. It is easier to complain about your job, or neighbors, or other people or events, than to make some change (get a different job, find new friends, move).

To me it comes down to three things: (1) what do you want?, (2) what do you need to do to get what you want?, and (3) what are you doing about it? I have problems with the first one, for sure. Trying to make a decision about what to do with my free time, or what thing I want to change in my life, can be a difficult process - there are so many choices, and only so much time. If I do not decide what I want, I can't move on to items 2 and 3.

Here is an excerpt from a post by Gary North (paywalled), writing on "What Do You Really Want to Achieve?":

  • Here are the three inescapable questions: (1)What do I want to achieve? (2) How soon do I want to achieve it? (3) What am I willing to pay (do without)?
  • When you have this on paper, you are ready to develop a plan to achieve this. This plan must have time markers: quarterly, yearly, five years. It must have specific intermediate goals that will let you measure your progress.
  • This is psychologically difficult to do. Most people will not do it. Those few who do will not follow through with self-evaluations on time, which involve plan revisions. So, time dribbles away. Progress is catch-as-catch-can.

Finally, this post breaks down this method of making progress (even though it focuses on screenwriting, the advice is sound for any endeavor):

  • "A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true."

Time to get started figuring out what I want!

2023-06-30T00:11:43.000Z
Andy's Old School Blog

During the month of June, I noticed that items from Ken Smith's Old School Drummer blog were not showing up as part of the Old School Bloggers river. I checked the river file generated by the River5 feed reader, and saw that items from Ken Smith stopped after May 31st. I created a duplicate of the Old School Drummers list, but did not see any recent items from Ken Smith's feed after I created the list. I am going to install a fresh copy of River5 today for testing, but thought I would send out this word in case any other River5 users are seeing this issue. The strange thing to me is Ken's feed is the only one affected out of nine feeds. If you have seen this issue, let me know!

2023-06-29T22:52:48.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

I never saw podcasting as an "industry." It's a form of human expression. No problem with trying to make money from what you do, but it's also fine to do it because you have something important to say. Or you learn from doing it. Or whatever reason.

2023-06-29T02:03:50.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

Interestingly, Harvard's statement about the shutdown of the blogging server is on the blogging server itself. Did they think this through? What kind of university deliberately erases a record of its innovation? I don't get it.

2023-06-28T05:07:07.000Z
Dave's FeedLand Feed

All kinds of good stuff is going 404 when Harvard shuts down the original blogging server on Friday. It really shouldn't happen this way at a university widely known for being ancient and steady. I hoped for much better.

2023-06-28T05:05:05.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post reports that a new Senate committee report sharply criticizes the FBI and Department of Homeland Security for what it says were failures to believe the intelligence tips they were receiving in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — offering fresh examples, nearly 2½ years later, of warnings and information that went unheeded.

The report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s majority staff, titled “Planned in Plain Sight,” expands on previous findings, including reporting by The Washington Post, about red flags missed in the weeks leading up to the pro-Trump riot that delayed Joe Biden’s certification as president.

It also contains additional instances and context for what the authors describe as a failure by federal intelligence officials to believe the many warnings they received.

Senate Homeland Security panel finds more pre-Jan. 6 intelligence failures by FBI, DHS in a report released June 27, 2023

2023-06-28T00:27:06.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

Former Donald Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been interviewed by federal investigators as part of the special counsel’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, multiple sources familiar with the meeting told CNN.

The meeting between Giuliani, his attorney Robert Costello, and investigators took place in recent weeks. The sources declined to say what investigators’ questions focused on during the meeting, which has not been previously reported.

CNN Exclusive: Rudy Guiliani interviewed in special counsel’s 2020 election interference probe

2023-06-28T00:18:45.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

". . . small-size social networks . . . shouldn't just be an accidental thing . . ."

Question: Which of our existing online tools give clues about how best to support small network-building and the good work that can flow out of it?

2023-06-24T11:18:47.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

I see that if I enter both a title and a link for this item you are reading now in my personal feed that the title will become clickable for that link on FeedLand's individual page for this item. That seems like a sharp, streamlined setup. I'll link to Disney as an example.

2023-06-23T15:19:29.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

The impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Kex Paxton moves forward with adoption of the rules for the impeachment trial by the Texas Senate. The trial is now set to begin September 5. More details in the articles below by the Texas Tribune Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial will begin Sept. 5, with his attendance required House impeachment managers got most of what they wanted in trial rules adopted by the Texas Senate Texas Senate’s handling of Angela Paxton’s role gives small boost to her husband in pending impeachment trial

2023-06-23T02:37:26.000Z
Andre's MyStatusTool feed

CNN reports that “ Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.” Trump receives first batch of evidence against him in classified documents case, including audio tapes

2023-06-23T02:26:05.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

In the mid-1960s, Lowndes County, Alabama had zero registered Black voters despite an 80% Black population. A documentary of racism and activism available through the common public library film service Kanopy.

2023-06-22T13:49:09.000Z
Dave Winer's linkblog

The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General has launched a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Secret Service text messages that may have been relevant to inquiries about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

2023-06-22T02:31:25.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I've veered in two new directions: (1) Early books on very early crystal radio sets, as exemplified by the coverage of the Alfred P. Morgan books for boys, as posted on YouTube by @MIKROWAVE1, N2UD, Michael Murphy and

(2) A new top notch SWL receiver I have acquired, a Drake R8A receiver, not yet received, but it won't be too long.

2023-06-22T02:17:46.000Z
Dave Winer's linkblog

If you want to know the official moment that podcasting got its name, this is it. It wasn't in a story in the Guardian newspaper. Please. It was a show note for one of the first podcasts called Trade Secrets Radio. That's how shit like this happens.

2023-06-22T01:50:41.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

Greg Wilson: Eleven Tips for Organizational Change "This was a proposal for the US Research Software Engineer Association 2023 conference, but was rejected.... I recognize that they are incomplete—in particular, that they are strongly biased toward what works in affluent, democratic societies—but if you’re tired of rolling heavy rocks up steep hills over and over again, maybe they will help."

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:14:58 GMT
Dave Winer's linkblog

Yesterday I was playing with ideas, looking at a bunch of different people's collections, and I saw in John Naughton's feed list a reminder of a centerpiece of the early blogging world, weblogs.com.

2023-06-18T17:14:46.000Z
Dave Winer's linkblog

Yesterday I was playing with ideas, looking at a bunch of different people's collections, and I saw in John Naughton's feed list reminded me of a centerpiece of the early blogging world, weblogs.com.

2023-06-18T17:14:46.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

I found a four-part series on YouTube from Michael Murphy, WU2D

Morgan Revealed: Regen Fever - based on the books of Alfred P. Morgan
He tells the history of Morgan and shows two of his many books. Then he shows the regen receiver he built from the instructions in the books. My first shortwave receiver was a Knight Ocean Hopper, a classic regen kit that was hugely popular in the early 60's. I built the kit and then discovered a whole new world, as did many others who built the kit.
See the videos: Morgan Revealed #1 Morgan Revealed #2 Morgan Revealed #3 Morgan Revealed #4

2023-06-16T04:32:52.000Z
Dave Winer's linkblog

Linear thinking doesn't work. If I do X the other guy always does Y is not a good bet. Because the other person is sentient too, and knows you're expecting Y and one time, when it really makes a difference will do exactly what you don't expect because it's what you don't expect.

2023-06-15T23:33:44.000Z
Dave Winer's linkblog

If the non-Twitter networks want to compete, get rid of character limits. Here's a screen shot of a post to Twitter earlier today. 613 characters. I could not post that to Mastodon or Bluesky, their character limits are too restrictive.

2023-06-15T16:20:22.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

I saw Ken's Smith's recent post on group activities, and I agree that larger social media may not be the place for such groups to work together. I also think another recent post of Ken's (Choose to affiliate) also echoes this thought. To me, MyStatusTool could be the tool of communication for a small work group or organization, with the added plus of owning your content/work. Since it uses rssCloud as the notification service for new posts, real-time conversations can occur there.

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 03:04:28 GMT
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

The first major survey about Field Radios by Thomas (11 May 2023).
“What QRP radio do you tend to use the most in the field?“

#1 The Elecraft KX2: 131 votes
#2 The Yaesu FT-817 or FT-818: 105 votes
#3 The Icom IC-705: 101 votes
#4 The Elecraft KX3: 80 votes
#5 The Xiegu X6100: 40 votes
#6 The lab599 Discovery TX-500: 38 votes
#7 The (tr)uSDX: 29 votes
#8 The Xiegu G90: 27 votes
#9 The QRP Labs QCX-Mini: 15 votes
#10 Tie Between the Mountain Topper MTR-4 series & Venus SW-3B: 13 votes

All others below 1.7% in voting

2023-06-13T20:49:26.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

On 3 May 2023, Thomas reported on a survey he ran on FB about What Rig Folks Primarily Use in POTA Activity.
Here are the Rankings by Percentages:
1. Yaesu FT-891: 25%
2. Xiegu G90: 9%
3. Icom IC-7300 and IC-705: 7%
4. Yaesu FT-857D, FT-991A, FT-817/818: 4%
5. Xiegu 6100, Yaesu FT-897D, Elecraft K/KX series: 3%

2023-06-13T19:45:46.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

On 3 May 2023, Thomas reported on a survey he ran on FB about What Rig Folks Primarily Use in POTA Activity.
Here are the Rankings by Percentages: 1. Yaesu FT-891: 25%
2. Xiegu G90: 9%
3. Icom IC-7300 and IC-705: 7%
4. Yaesu FT-857D, FT-991A, FT-817/818: 4%
5. Xiegu 6100, Yaesu FT-897D, Elecraft K/KX series: 3%

2023-06-13T19:43:07.000Z
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

This posting is in memory of my longtime & loyal friend, Steve Porter, now SK*.
Today is his birthday, June 12. Decades ago I created an automated mailing list on the Internet for members of our church scattered around the country. Its purpose was to make it easy to distribute good news among our friends in the church and it became wildly popular with them. Steve and our mutual friend Rick helped manage this activity with me for a very long time. It was a huge amount of work, but we were all very dedicated to the activity because we wanted to do our best to help our church friends, who were not often recognized in the world at large for their good works.
*SK is a ham radio designation for Silent Key, someone who has passed on.

2023-06-12T17:49:30.000Z
Andy's MyStatusTool feed

Another user calling for a tool like MyStatusTool in 2008:

If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere. Case scenario: I have a twitter blog at dembot.com/twitter All of the friends I follow? How would we connect? You guessed it: RSS! Somebody get me a soda, Im feeling dizzy.

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 18:56:24 GMT
Ron's MyStatusTool feed

The Top Ten QRP Rigs of the 1970's & 1980's The Birthing of QRP as we Know It Today Rated by WU2D, Michael J Murphy in Manchester, NH #1 - Yaesu Musen FT-7 Superhet rig, 1979 - 50w SSB & CW, 12w AM - 80m - 10m #2 - Ten Tec Model 505 & 509 Argonaut superhet transceivers - SSB & CW #3 - Heathkit HW-7 (1972-75) & HW-8 (1976-83) - Direct conversion (DC) rigs #4 - Ten Tec Power Mite Transceiver, PM-3, 40m & 20m, 1968-1971 #5 - PW Severn by Rev G C Dobbs, G3RJV in Practical Wireless May 1983 #6 - Tuna Tin II by Doug DeMaw, W1FB - 1976 QST #7 - The Mountaineer by Wes Haywood, W7ZOI & Terry White, Aug 72 QST #8 - Ten Tec Century 21 Model 570 - 1st commercial rig, solid state 70 watts CW #9 - W1GAC The Mighty Mo - QST Dec 1951 #10 - Ameco AC-1 - Single tube

2023-06-10T01:58:33.000Z
Ken Smith's linkblog

How many times, in how many places, does society prohibit one marginalized group or another from being shown as regular people? From seeing positive images of themselves? From speaking and creating art that sees the light of day?

2023-06-09T13:08:16.000Z