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Thanks to severe train delays, I have a morning to spend in Paris. Last night I booked into a charming hotel in Saint-Paul, and just met some of its extraordinarily friendly staff at breakfast. Going by previous experiences, I didn’t think any of this was possible! Paris might be growing on me.

Originally posted to the WebSanDiego mailing list on January 14, 2005. This is just barely on-topic. So these days of still-not-moved in, waiting for my new abode to start, waiting for a new gig to happen, turns out I’ve discovered my new mobile office. It’s not Starbucks (t-mobile doesn’t offer reasonable month-to-month plans), but rather,...

This month’s IndieWeb Movie Club is for The Wild Robot. It’s hosted by Zachary Kai. I liked the film. It has a great setting. An innocent and appealingly designed robot. And forest creatures on an island without people on it. The robot is forced to adapt. It takes a role in the ecosystem. It learns...

Monday session

I watched Alien: Earth to the end, didn't like it, it was Noah Hawley, got great ratings. But I was wary going in. I don't like horror. I don't like seeing human bodies opened up, esp brains and guts. For those reasons I have never been a fan of the original Alien movie, I w...

From the “this would be a good blog post” department, Kevin Rose has thoughts about ChatGPT Pulse that he posted on Twitter / X:

It’s an agent that continuously researches on your behalf, building on topics from your recent conversations. I’m really having a hard time wrapping my head around this paradigm, because it’s truly unlike anything we’ve seen before.

It’s like having a knowledge partner that follows you around, deepening your understanding of whatever you’re curious about.

I blogged over the weekend about Pulse. I’m a few more days in now and it’s still good.

Reading through this great 3-part blog post series from Stephanie Booth about rebooting the blogosphere:

from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication and start writing something new

A key point in Micro.blog from the beginning was to unify reading, blogging, and replying. A little-understood feature in Micro.blog is you can follow any blog, for example search “climbtothestars.org” to follow Stephanie’s blog. Need to keep improving that.

I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others. Om … Continue reading Om 59 →

"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." I didn't want to let that pass without notice. As the early blogosphere is co...

Please read Stephanie Booth's three-part report Rebooting the Blogosphere. She's doing great work organizing the ideas around what can we do better in the new blogosphere.

The New Yorker has a long profile of Tim Berners-Lee:

Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picnic on a Welsh mountain.

Wait, how did I not know that he loves model trains? 🚂 Looking forward to his memoir: This Is For Everyone. 📚

Here’s a photo of Henry taken in July 2021. And here’s a photo where Henry was the green in the background of a new bot day, from the beginning of COVID, April 2020. I knew Henry was old. I didn’t know how old. So I texted my ex and reported the death. Their response: We...

Clouds looming towards Brighton.

In an age where AI can generate an infinite amount of stuff, what matters? Some of the most interesting writing I’ve read on this comes from Will Manidis, who makes it biblical and says that Craft is the Antidote to Slop: From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional … Continue reading Craft vs Slop →

On September 21st, I picked up this vintage lamp for my desk. It was a steal at $14.99 from the local thrift shop which doesn’t often have lamps at all. The brown crinkle paint is a near perfect match for my 1955 Royal HH standard typewriter. While a bit dusty and covered in decades of … Continue reading

New book: Adventures in Animation. We were at Alamo recently and before the movie there were the usual shorts and old commercials. One struck me immediately and I thought: that looks like Richard Williams. It was.

Doing some more work with FFmpeg. It’s amazing how far video and audio tools have come. Ages ago when I was working on my app Wii Transfer, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. Although that was in the Flash days before HTML 5 video.

Enjoying the WNBA playoffs. Today is Aces / Fever game 4. And the NBA preseason starts on Thursday! 🏀

I think there should be a Hall of Fame for open software, formats and protocols that have stood the test of time, esp those that have taken a beating from commercializers. Not for the people who did it, that could be a separate thing, so there are no fights about who gets credit for what, but for the thing itself. It would be a way for the industry to say "Hey sorry we didn't accept you at first, and we just want to acknowledge that, after X years of doing something hard, it worked, we're all using it now." To which the open format would say, "Hey thanks for the call out, and let us know if you did something cool with it."