FeedCity

“The need is absolute.” I’m quoting Peter O’Toole playing T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Two incredibly interesting and problematic twentieth century people one filling in for the other to tell a story. That line, which O’Toole says in reaction to the question of the need of phones in a recently liberated town taken from...

Unfortunately picked today with an expected high of 100° as the day I should start taking long walks again.

Trump’s Gleichschaltung: The “Synchronization” of American society with its increasingly omnipresent government The intended conditioning is clear: before you do anything, check with the Dear Leader first because you can never be quite sure whether or not it passes or fails in his omnipotent judgment. And, yeah, that includes your sense of humor. This forced...

I’ve had a couple side conversations recently about centralized video. John Gruber makes a strong case today that this needs to be solved soon:

With YouTube, Google has a centralized chokehold on video. We need a way that’s as easy and scalable to host video content, independently, as it is for written content. I don’t know what the answer to that is, technically, but we ought to start working on it with urgency.

Oh jeez, just spend too many minutes wondering why this code wasn’t working until I realized I had typed “theme.opml” instead of “theme.toml”. 🤪

It happened so slowly that we didn't notice but Twitter wiped out the idea of the web developer. The platforms we were trying to make work together were programmed so they couldn't work together. As well-intentioned we may have been, it wasn't the web we were developing for. I know the term web developer has come to mean more than it means to me. But it's like saying someone is a Mac developer. A web developer creates apps for the web. Not for a specific service. For any service that supports the open formats that everyone else uses.

I clearly had a good time at the Irish fleadh in Cáceres.

The next FediForum is coming up in a couple weeks. I just registered.

Join us for two half-days of discussions, demos, presentations, teaching, learning and plotting next steps in moving the open social web, the Fediverse and social media based on open protocols forward!

FediForum https://mastodon.social/@fediforum/115254204842427492

Starting to get tempted by the iPhone Air, but still committed to keeping my old phone for a while. I listened to two shows this week that were really good: MKBHD’s review and today’s Dithering.

I did a podcast interview with Matthias Pfefferle last week. I wanted to introduce my ideas to the Fediverse world. I haven't listened to it yet, but I remember it being a very good discussion on basically all the things I am working on and with these days. It's all a continu...

Why textcasting? When Twitter came out in 2006 they left out most of the writing features of the web. Their competitors have copied the limits. Textcasting says writers don't want the limits. Add these features to your twitter-like social network and we are happy and will sing your praise. That's it. It's no more complicated than that. People ask questions about what it means. This is what it means.

Best churros in town

Reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Tonight it’s a double pairing: first it’s the 1955 Royal HHE typewriter and an Isle of Skye 18 year old Scotch whisky and an almost perfect pairing of the Royal HH with my new (to me) brown vintage (1940s?) desk lamp with art deco styling. 

It's not all machine knitting around here! Last week I took a screen printing class at NYC Resistor, a lovely hackerspace in Brooklyn. It was their first time teaching this class, and fittingly they taught a screen printing technique that was new to me! We were asked to brin...

The 4.7 earthquake definitely disturbed my sleep last night, so it’s nice to have a Cuzen Matcha shot and some Harney & Sons Paris tea to wake up and get me through the day. Speaking of spilling tea, I had a great conversation with Joubin Mirzadegan of the storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins where we … Continue reading Post-Earthquake Tea Grit →

I’m cracking up at this essay in The New Yorker:

A two-bedroom house with a front yard and a back yard? Psh. What do you need all that space for? Yoga? I’m from New York. I once paid two thousand dollars a month to live in the freight elevator of the former Filene’s Basement, in Union Square.

Monday night session in Madrid