FeedCity

Good morning. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don't give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause.

Speaking of memorials, do you remember UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier. Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today's hardware and for today's web. He's documenting it on his blog. I can't wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He's basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it's running and I don't doubt that he will get it running, it'll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader.

"When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, [giving] rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities."

In “How I use my phone”, and in two prior blog posts about greyscale and night shift mode, I spoke about how I customise some of the software I use. I was inspired to write my phone in large part by discussions with friends. I then realised that such blog posts are a means to...

Every episode of the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast has a transcript. The first episode was transcribed by me; future episodes are being transcribed by Zachary from Lunaseeker Press. The transcript has links to the time at which each speaker starts speaking. For example, 0:19...

He blocks among us. 🏀

Western conference finals, game 4. 🏀

Looking at the Daylight computer again, so nice. I love that the “smooth video playback” section uses Steamboat Willie for the video clip. Public domain Disney. 🎉

Trying out the new Bluesky support in the WordPress reader. Very cool. Similar to what we’ve tried to do with Micro.blog, but totally different user experience, which is great.

Ran my 14th Bay to Breakers race in 1:57:12 this past Sunday.Almost 2min behind last year, from needing a 5min+ pitstop at the Panhandle.I skipped public transport (see previous years), and left at 7am to jog to the start. After ~3.5 miles I found my way to corral A and seren...

I asked ChatGPT for a list of FeedLand features that are new or distinctive. "FeedLand combines RSS, OPML, public curation, subscribable reading lists, rivers, categories, and realtime WebSocket updates in a way that is unusual among feed readers and points toward a web-native social network."

TechCrunch review of the Bee:

In a world where the average person is beset from all sides by constant digital surveillance, I appreciate any opportunity I can get to not be recorded. Therefore, the idea of walking around with an eavesdropping gizmo strapped to my wrist 24/7 was not particularly appealing.

None of these devices are quite right yet. Recording everything is too creepy. Recording too little (because of extra button clicks) isn’t as useful. I want something in between, that makes dictating thoughts effortless when I’m by myself. Maybe it shuts off when there are other voices.

Clicking around on Peter Steinberger’s release.bar. Interesting repo summaries. Because all the Micro.blog apps are open source, looking at my account provides a snapshot of recent changes.

People who believe in the web, stop dissing RSS, it’s an important part of our future.

Alexa has a terrible habit, when I ask for a song from the Echo on my desktop, it ends each song with a helpful message. There's a live version of this song, do you want to hear it. You have a message waiting, can I play it for you. I can't get it to stop. I have a bunch of them scattered around the house, and this is the only one that does it. I'm writing here, I asked for a song that fit in with my writing. Stop making me thinkg about your marketing messages. Where did you get the idea you can do this. A paying customer.

Love: I ask Claude for a list of names and values, it responds quickly with exactly what I asked for. Nothing more. Unconsciously I say "perfect" -- out loud.

I have a Mac laptop that I keep updated with the latest versions of Mac OS. I got a warning today saying that Electric Drummer won't run on the next release of the OS. Now I don't use it very much if at all on that machine, but I wonder. ED is an Electron app, otherwise it's wholly JavaScript. It does include some Node packages of course, but not that many IIRC. This was a thing I wasn't expecting.

Saturday was a busy day; I was on my feet for most of the day, and then came home to participate in the IndieWeb Zine meetup. Today, however, is comparatively quieter. I started my day reading manga in bed, and then had a slow start to the day – making breakfast, continuing t...