What an excellent personal website!
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
After I made some Nostr improvements in M.b the other day, I caught up on a few conference videos to see what the community has been up to. Fascinated by this video of Jack explaining Nostr. It’s like a reset, going from a powerful social media CEO to just a dude hanging out at conferences again.
Podcast: Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere.
Last minute
I went along to this year’s State Of The Browser conference on Saturday. It was great!
Technically I wasn’t just an attendee. I was on the substitution bench. Dave asked if I’d be able to jump in and give my talk on declarative design should any of the speakers have to drop...
I theorized why Jack Dorsey is disappointed with Bluesky on Bluesky. I did the same on Threads and heard people say ugly personal things about Dorsey. This really pissed me off, because he's a human being who made a large contribution to the technology we use, and I think hi...
I look forward to the day when I can link to a topic I've written about on my blog without having to depend on Google. I don't think they know I have a blog or have any respect for it. Actually I know they don't have any respect for it. That's why depending on them for access to it seems too flimsy to build on.
I look forward to the day when I can ask a question on my blog and get an answer, on the blog, from a trusted member of my karass.
When will ChatGPT be able to do a transcript of an audio file?
With a new iPhone coming this week, seems a good time to post my latest home screen. Same layout as before, but now using iOS 18 instead of blank spacer icons. In the dock: Hey, Epilogue, Strata, and Micro.blog.
Teen Accounts on Instagram sounds like a very good change. Of course those of us with kids who were teens years ago were just guinea pigs for social media that prioritized ads over safety, but better late than never.
PENGUIN SERIES DESIGN – the art of Penguin book covers
Exploring the graphic design history of Penguin books:
The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched.
You should go to conferences - localghost
Obviously I’m biased, but I very much agree with Sophie.
A short note on AI – Me, Robin
I hope to make something that could only exist because I made it. Something that is the one thing that it is. Not an average sentence. Not a visual approximation of other people’s work. Not a stolen concept that boils lakes and uses more electricity than anything in my household.
To remember, or to forget?
What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?
Nobody wants to use any software — Character
I do not want any software
I believe that this mindset is the healthiest way to design and build things that people will use and not hate us for building. For me, it’s a way to remind myself that all humans have a whole rich, challenging life outside of the little screens I’m making for them. So that even when I’m focused on user needs and user problems, I can keep it just out of the corner of my eye: the person I’m making this for doesn’t actually want to be here, and that’s OK.
We want speedy internet and fast-loading services because we want to stop pushing buttons and opening accordions as quickly as possible.
I mentioned recently that I was considering removing trial accounts on Micro.blog until after the election, to minimize auto-created junk accounts. I’ve rolled out the first phase of that with some internal changes, and adjusted the 30-day trial down to 10 days for new accounts.
Love this metaphor from Dave Winer about how Micro.blog handles feeds and cross-posting:
It’s sort of a Grand Central station for moving stuff around among the twitter-like systems.
I've been re-watching The Bear and am now totally thinking of my job as a chef. I started out that way 40+ years ago, and somewhere along the line I stopped thinking that way. If you can, watch S02 E07 to see what I mean. It's about service, the connection between the staff and the people who come to eat, and the medium is the food. It's the same idea. There's so much cynicism around tech, and I hate that. We've rarely seen it as a human thing both by the people who make the meals and the people who love great food. The world thinks of it as billionaires and influencers and lying fascist politicians. But it should be much more than that.
John Gruber’s article about last week’s iPhone event also compares Tim Cook’s Apple with what might’ve been. I agree with this part:
I feel confident that if Steve Jobs were alive and still leading Apple product development, there would have been no iPhone-like mind-blown-the-moment-you-first-saw-it new product in the intervening years.
What we would have is a more interesting Apple. As John says, products that are more quirky, more risky. It’s also a bit tragic that we’ll never know what Steve Jobs would’ve made of AI.
Has it ever been suggested that journalists take an oath, similar to the one the President takes to: "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Could be voluntary. Sports reporters might take a different oath.