FeedCity

📗 Want to read Texture and 3D Effects by Amber Hards ISBN: 9780719842382

Tim Berners-Lee is the guest on the latest episode of Decoder:

You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days, the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. So that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for, and in fact, we need to rebuild.

Now that Cory Doctorow has put enshitified into our vocabulary, I find myself looking for evidence of it in AI, and finding it everywhere. There is a common thread. Amazon Alexa has a really nasty habit of finishing a song by asking me if I want to listen to some other version of it. I'm sure that seems like a nice friendly thing to the product people at Amazon, but please -- I'm grooving on the energy of the song, and the last thing I'm thinking about is some asshole robot interfering with my train of thought with a question so stupid only a machine could think of it. Okay I think that qualifies for enshitification right there. Can we have a rule that AI bots must by defalt behave like a computer. I, your human overlord, the one who is paying the bills, will ask the questions. And you will not speak until you are spoken to.

Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was going to write a short post about how I never thought about how good Credence Clearwater is, until Andrew Hickey did a whole longish episode on them. The story isn't that interesting, but the music is great, lots of fun. Never realized it. Right now I'm listening to Born on the Bayou, lovin it.

I figured since I'm out there asking everyone (nicely I hope) to add source:markdown to their feeds, it kind of sucks that my own feed didn't support it. Now it does. I've started a thread on GitHub to report problems, and I can see that there will be some. If your feed reader prefers markdown, you will see the problems right off, I think.

Starting to roll out the new Micro.blog Studio subscription plan. I blogged last week with an overview. I just created a help page with a few more technical details.

There will be tweaks and improvements as we go, based on feedback.

"I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time."

Good morning sports fans!

Cold morning in Austin. Lots to do. Working at the coffee shop but accidentally left my headphones at home! I know, life is hard. 🤪

"You have some serious thinking to do about what you intend to trust to the Apple stack altogether going forward, even things like passwords."

Started watching: The Diplomat Season 3. Good first two episodes. Also great to see both Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford on the show, gives it even more of a West Wing vibe. 📺

I’ve been following this cool open source project called Meshtastic, which is “An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.” I finally got some time to set it up tonight. It was super easy; you just flash the Meshtastic firmware in your browser to any of the compatible devices. … Continue reading Meshtastic →

WordLand is one of the few products that works hard to make sure that it has effective competition. It lays out a welcome mat for competitors. That's what DemoLand is all about. I think I finished it today, have to do another review, maybe two, before making it public. It is the opposite of a product that's meant to dominate. It's more like MacWrite, to fill a niche as an invitation to others to come play. Remember in the web, all parts are replaceable.

Watching Edge of Tomorrow. Love this movie. We put it on randomly sometimes, have seen it dozens of times. Still holding out hope for a sequel. 🍿

I didn’t know about subway surfing. Tragic. From a story in The New Yorker:

We blame the digital platforms, and deride these kids as idiot stuntmen, addicts—even as the savviest adults among us exhibit a similar dependence on platforms to tell them who to be.

I’m traveling but that doesn’t mean I’m not machine knitting! I am so grateful to Cristina Talpa for her make-a-scarf workshop. Amy found it via the Makery and we thought it seemed too good to pass up. And it was! While the workshop is geared for total beginners to machine knitting, Cristina smoothly adjusted to work around things I already knew. She taught me some great new techniques and helped me improve some less-than-optimal techniques I came to the workshop with. Plus, this scarf! I love it! Amy enjoyed posing me on an outing in Berlin today to snap a few photos. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to meet an expert (and experimental!) machine knitter, work on a garment together, and chat about the state of the craft. Thanks so much, Cristina!

Working on video improvements ahead of tomorrow’s launch. One thing I like about the automatic cross-posting is that for videos less than 3 minutes, Micro.blog copies them natively to Bluesky, reassembling from HLS to a single file. You can see this in this Bluesky post.

Lily Allen’s West End Girl feels like a complete album, meant to be listened to in track order. Really good. (Not safe for work!) Queued it up this morning on my walk to find coffee and wi-fi. 🎶

WordLand is one of the few products that works hard to make sure that it has effective competition. My goal is Working Together. That means, here, laying out a welcome mat for WordLand's competitors.