I didn’t intend today to be poking around in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine nor duct taping together a bookmarklet tool. But that’s where the afternoon took me as I am trying to get over a nasty cold. Cutting first to the end, try this out. If you know where to put them (the bookmarks […]

Even with the frenzy panic of PHP running the web site and the mostly departure of folks who bother to make their own digital art, the DS106 Daily Create still marches on every single day, non-stop since 2012. Open on the web. No paywalls. No tracking do-hickeys. No ads. I still do them fairly regularly […]

I might miss the train to the shiny AI generated future. Oh well. So much is being gushed over because it looks so good, it feels right, it has all the appeal of truthiness. Yet I have these encounters, which may be edge cases or that Mike Caulfield if he ever would speak to me […]

As a younger Alan, I could never forecast a future where I might be writing about enjoying cooking. That’s for other people! While I always haved loved food and eating it, strangely I am now at a point where the process, especially the inventiveness of it, is rather exciting. I mean to go from a […]

I have no hopes to convince anyone of my point that may or may not surface in this post, but heck this is my blog home, and here I am right! Or welcome to be told how I am wrong, Just visit, ok? So I came across this post — er newsletter thing by a […]

There’s something about October 15, indeed, it being the “approximate” date of my grandmother’s birthday… in 1905. I have pretty much blogged this same story before so more or less a repost, but the way she tells it in her own voice is something special. The featured photo are scans of old images, on the […]

Reclaim Hosting (you know they are the best web hosts in the universe) published a new case study on the massive use of WordPress blogs at Baruch College in New York City. Big as in 10,000 sites for 60,000 users over 20 some years. I have great memories of the years I got the invitation […]

Indeed with a lack of real words to rhyme with ninth, needing to keep the patterns for this year’s posts, I resorted to a chap who just cheerfully makes stuff up to define “grinth” as “the peculiar little feeling of having noticed something nobody else did.” Clever? More importantly after last month thrashing through a […]

I’l dial back my mockery of the email newsletter being the new definition of a web site (not here), but the Wayback Web Machine that is in my head went to remembering how a big effort/motivation the first year I set up a web server (what do I win for it being in 1993?) was […]

The wheels sort of came off the daily photo bus, given the last report was end of April. I mean photos were taken, but somewhere I got off track catching up to the editing, titling, tagging, publishing as May, June, July, and August rolled over. The hole gets deeper the more you spend time staring […]

Hah! I had forgotten one of my blog obsessions, pursuit started in 2012 to track down and obliterate a never substantiated claim of “research showing people process visual information 60000 times faster than text.” It’s funny how I just circled back, I spotted in Mastodon a reference to Maginalia Search. An open source search engine […]

Not that anybody is knocking on my door asking for life advice, but here it is dispensed anyhow. Do yourself a future favor, and record by any means possible the people who carry your family stories. I could not be more thankful for the voices I have digitally preserved, my grandmother, my mom. Last week […]

In the “As Much as I Loathe AI I Cannot Escape It” department, I’ve been accumulating some stray experiences with technologies that analyze, interpret information from photos, likely somewhere inside lurks what we lump as AI. And indeed, it’s useful. And interesting. Here’s a buffet of tidbit experiences and no grand conclusion. Carbs and Nutrition […]

I am on a roll with an exciting new income stream – payouts from class action law suits! The cash has been flowing in and I’m rolling in settlement moohlah. Milking the legal system and then some! The Big One: Blue Cross Blue Shield Subscribers Settlement My email trail indicates I heard about this lawsuit […]

This has been one of those low level thoughts that bobs up from the neural surface (the Little Limited Machine in my skull). The bemoaning of web search devolving from the list of ranked blue links to something that zeroes on on what some machine language thing suggest. And what gets portrayed in the Everything […]

40 cents or a very long time? Today is the marker the day my Dad passed away 25 years ago, nabbed by Cancer. Then ten years later to the day, the morning where I called Mom from my road trip across Canada. We laughed and talked about the sadness of missing Dad, then 10 years […]

Perhaps a bit inspired having just listened to Jim Groom’s edupunk presentation in Hamburg and his retelling of the ds106 ethos, I realize it’s been a while since I blog narrated the making of a digital remix. This seems poignant given what passes for making digital images is not manipulating pixels and layers but typing […]

Perhaps a bit inspired having just listened to Jim Groom’s edupunk presentation in Hamburg and his retelling of the ds106 ethos, I realize it’s been a while since I blog narrated the making of a digital remix. This seems poignant given what passes for making digital images is not manipulating pixels and layers but typing […]

In a word, the ride was rough. Red Dog, my trusty and well used 1998 Ford F-150 had lately been getting harder and harder start, it took more effort to turn over. I feared the end of the line. I managed to get her to Andy’s Transmission in Moose Jaw, a trusty mechanic who previously […]

I’m thrilled to see that Reclaim Hosting still runs the DS106 Radio Summer Camp as a light, low threshold way to gather online about as far from a wall of zoom faces as you can get. It was 12 hours of programming you could just spin the dial to over to https://listen.reclaimed.tech/summer-camp and tune in. […]

Sniff. Sniff. Cautiously peeking out of the CogDogBlog that seems to be back in working operation after a broken period. The on switch is on, as if anyone noticed. It was an extended period of seeing the trusty old blog respond with “Error Establishing Database Connection.” I started to write out all the steps I […]

You might not be able to read this. Apparantly ye old CogDogBlog has been crashing much this past week with Error Establishing Database Connection errors. Oh no, Mr Bill! One or two folks notified me (thanks Brian B and JR), but it hardly seems to have created havoc on the internet. I was on a […]

Way out here on the marginal reaches of the withering web, the connections that weave together are of statistical aberration, where no language model of any size would draw a path. As thus it was following the adventures of Stephen Downes as he bicycles around Iceland that got me thinking of places I saw there […]

As often, what begins as a simple question or small need spins out a series of digging, experimenting, and ultimately spending more time remixing a featured image (by hand) and writing a blog post that 4 people may read. Ahhh, 2026. That’s another grumbly post. But here it is, I was rather taken by this […]

My wandering down into Web Rabbit Holes of interest happend much more frequently than the rate of blog posts. It’s where I find the most sanity in the pile of poop much (but not all) of the web is piled with. It started with a Mastodon post by Bonni Stachowiak referencing her own post on […]

Amongst the many blog post drafts still bouncing around upstairs is one about being the last person ever to vibe code anything but of more interest is writing about what is my major project at the moment over at Open Education Global, the Open Education Awards for Excellence. Aince I end up doing what one […]

Indeed the golden dreamy soft gel focused ideal of the leisurely retirement lifestyle, you know, out there shopping for vinyl or sitting at cafes writing novels (hee hee, that pingback is for you, Martin). Nope not me, I am still at full time work at Open Education Global and the real work of blogging here […]

I always did this as a kid on the beaches of Ocean City, Maryland. I would use my shovels and plastic containers to build some kind of sand castle with big walls and a deep moat. I would place them just out of reach of the water in low tide, and the game was to […]

CogDogBlog awakes from a case of the techno-flu. It got into the server and the database requests were coughing for 2 weeks — no just the tired blog operator. The only way out of not blogging is picking the thing up (old story). In that flu fog many key dates were missed – the date […]

It’s easily taken the 20+ years I have known Dean Shareski to figure out the secret to be on his podcast — I had to be a Canadian, which is something I finally accomplished in September 2019. The big moment for my fame happened April 22, when we met at the Hive Coffee Shop on […]