I enjoyed this short recap of the final XOXO Festival which I attended in August. The way it highlights the vulnerability of the organizers, Andy and Andy, and emphasizes the way attendees were given a context to self-organize is something that has stuck with me, too. Read it: Lower Your Expectations
October 2024 Forty-three posts
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“Impact to wireless service”
Yesterday my phone went into “SOS Mode.”
I wondered if I had paid my bill. But my email receipts indicated I had.
I wondered if I was being subjected to some kind of spearphishing attack.
That seemed too an exotic answer to a simple question.
Kelly looked up “Verizon Outage” and found many results. Also: she uses AT&T.
And so, I didn’t have cellular coverage.
I missed it, but also, I didn’t. We were out and about. We got coffee in the morning and were going for a drive.
We listened to a cached Spotify playlist. A plenty long one, so we didn’t exhaust it.
It seemed as though GPS was working correctly. When I drove with a map open it kept track of my location with regards to the map. I entered a destination and it gave me correct directions. We were in our hometown–it seems iOS Maps.app used local maps.
I tried several times to restart my phone, but got no result.
Mashable created a “real time updating” blog post.
When we sat for coffee I used the coffeehouse Wi-Fi. The Verizon home page said:
Impact to wireless service
We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.
All told I had downtime of maybe 7 hours. I couldn’t make or receive phone calls. And I couldn’t make or receive text messages. I could message via iMessage, on Wi-Fi. And I could use other services.
I am not sure I have a takeaway from this.
I prefer it when things worked.
Verizon’s most effective communication tool was X aka Twitter: @VerizonNews. But that was 3 tweets over many hours. And no particular detail.
- 8:48AM:
- We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers. Our engineers are engaged and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.
- 2:04PM:
- Verizon engineers are making progress on our network issue and service has started to be restored. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience some of our customers experienced today. We continue to work around the clock to fully resolve this issue.
- 4:18PM:
- Verizon engineers have fully restored today’s network disruption that impacted some customers. Service has returned to normal levels. If you are still having issues, we recommend restarting your device. We know how much people rely on Verizon and apologize for any inconvenience. We appreciate your patience.
I think it started for me at about 7:45am and ended at 2:35pm. That’s about 7 hours without a fully functioning phone.
I think there’s a lot of resiliency in technology. But also computers are just not as good and as reliable as we might hope. They’re certainly not as good we movies and tv tell us they are. Computers solve crimes and save the world all the time on tv. In the real world they work… okay.
And that’s probably not good enough.
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Scam text message from +1 (561) 448-4346
MISSING VOTER REGISTRATION RECORD – Are you registered?
Voter registrations are public record, and we couldn’t find one for you.
This election is very close.
Trump needs your vote to win.Make sure you are registered today or get registered now if you aren’t. The deadline is just days away and it only takes two minutes online. Please use our secure link to get it done now:
go.djtfp24.com/[REDACTED PERMALINK]Sent by Jenna for Donald J. Trump for President 2024, Inc. Stop to End.
The domain
go.djtfp24.comredirects todonaldjtrump.comThis is the first text message with a Republican political message I can remember receiving. It seems more like a scam, it’s certainly misleading. It gives the impression they did some prior research on me before messaging me. I suspect that’s not the case.
For the advertising nerds:
utm_campaign:mci-nt-vreg-mms-c300015-cc200015-300045
utm_source:voterreg7
It lands on a page that looks like this:
Screenshot of Trump Vance 2024 Scam Vote Registration Page -
from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DA0_1nDvO6d/ via IFTTT
@gwenthegoblin likes to be clean and fluffy, but does not appreciate the pathway to getting clean and fluffy. ( Lead Dog Bather: @hellokellykuhl ) #corgisofinstagram #corgisofsandiego
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Hello from Linkedin! a scam
I’ve gotten a few generic emails with the subject “Hello from Linkedin!”. When the source email address looks like a throwaway one and there’s no more specific information about either me or the sender, it can’t really be anything but a scam. I will not pursue an interaction with this source. I imagine if I did I would be invited to part with money or take part in some exchange of value.
Here’s the entirety of the very plain email, minus a name at the end.
Hi there,
Your LinkedIn profile caught my attention – your charming photo and impressive experience make for a compelling combination.
I’d love to explore common interests and get to know you better. Would you be open to connecting and seeing where our conversation takes us?
Hope to read back from you.
Best regards,
[REMOVED FIRST NAME]
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Open Music Scrobbling: Libre.fm Updates
In July 2005 I sent an email to my friend Erin with this in the body.
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/artlung/
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/
i dont quite understand it yet
Those links are now at last.fm. You can “friend” me on that site. Here’s my profile: artlung.
I love nerding out about music!
I have enjoyed tracking my listening in the subsequent decades. I can see my history and trends. When I was a teenager, even more decades ago, I kept a spreadsheet of all my music. I included vinyl, cassette tapes. Including those I had recorded from the radio. I took to scrobbling immediately. I worked at Slacker Radio in the 2010s. I worked on the Web Scrobbler connector for Slacker music products. The source code is open. There are now browser add-ons for the major browsers, not just Chrome. And also, WS supports Libre.fm.
What’s Libre.fm?
I got to chat with Mattl at XOXO this year. I enjoy meeting people conversant with the web history I am. Matt has been working on libre.fm since 2009. When we chatted in Portland he was talking about reviving that software. Modernization. Improvements. He has active users scrobbling daily. Continuously even. It’s no small thing to revisit projects that “work.” He’s embraced indieweb-related technologies like rel=me and has a roadmap for improvements and this impresses me a great deal. It ain’t easy to work on running software.
He has detailed all of this in his recent blog post Bunch of updates to Libre.fm this week (2024/10/06). If tracking your music is of interest to you, and given the popularity of year-end lists every year, I think it’s more common than not, check it out.
Get a sense of the issues he’s tackling at the GitHub issues page for Libre.fm.
And for even more background, Libre.fm is notable enough to have a Wikipedia page.
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Cyberpunk at 40.
Joanna McNeil has a new piece up at Filmmaker. The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk. It’s a terrific appreciation for cyberpunk, and for William Gibson’s writing in particular. I’ve often wondered why cyberpunk tattooed itself into my brain the second I encountered it. This passage from her column sounds like “why” to me:
Gibson’s writing is always lucid, never surreal. Machines in his novels are plugged into something; things happen for a reason; alienation, rather than madness, is what animates his characters. They are users of software and hardware and data systems, in cities and networks of infrastructure, siloed before connecting with others through networked machines.
There’s a verisimilitude in Gibson that connects. He name-checks real brands: Braun makes a coffee maker and a hologram projector in Neuromancer. Somehow by not telling us every detail about how the computers work the prose lasts longer. I don’t recall any particular facts and figures about the computers and networks in the book. They describe global telecommunications without bogging down in poorly-aging technical details.
It was a total accident that I acquired a paperback copy of Neuromancer. I wrote a bit about it back in 2005. Cyberpunk Guy, 1988. I liked more anodyne and even innocent SF at that point in my life. Neuromancer had street gangs, curse words, killings and sex. I devoured it. The ubiquity of computers and the net was full of promise.
Back then, 1983, computers were in every department store. Largely unmonitored. I would be very wealthy if I had a dollar for every time I entered a Radio Shack, Sears, or JC Penney back then and wrote a computer program. It was as simple as walking up to that TI-99, Commodore, Timex Sinclair, Apple ][, or Atari 400 and typing out:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Adults considered me a genius because I could do that–and that I was unafraid to do that. It was not genius. The world knew computers were the future. In 1982 Time Magazine’s Person of the Year? The computer. We knew the future was on its way. Gibson’s writing made that future tangible and despite the horrors of the world he envisioned, it did seem like a “chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” In some ways, yes, we have created the Torment Nexus he warned us of. But we also got opportunity, and certainly we have adventure.In 1988 at a signing for Mona Lisa Overdrive at DG Wills Books in La Jolla, William Gibson, when asked (by me) for recommendations for other authors to read, animatedly walked over to “S” in the Science Fiction section and recommended Bruce Sterling without hesitation. It’s Sterling who I’ll cite as my favorite author, consistently, for the last few decades, but Gibson’s brilliance seldom leaves my thoughts.
In December last year I complained about the lack of a place to purchase old abridged audiobooks, particularly Gibson’s Virtual Light, a favorite orphaned audiobook of mine. Since then I was gifted audio recordings of that book courtesy Benji, an IndieWeb acquaintance. It’s not my place to make that available here, but know that the networks that surveil and seek to control us are also networks that connect us to friends and allies.
Via Mastodon, also via Benji, here’s another unique piece of media related to cyberpunk: Blade Runner Aquarelle Edition.
twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night.
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DA3hDujPgs0/ via IFTTT
1991. That’s me, thats my grandparents’ house, that’s Chris, that’s the Miramar Air Show.
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Raw Text to Speech
During the Homebrew Website Club – Writing Edition on October 8, 2024 I talked about using the default microphone on my iOS device to do first drafts of blog posts and writing. In talking about it I demonstrated the transcriber and here’s the raw output. It’s only my voice, not what others said during the meeting. Consider this an example of a “vomit draft” and can be a writing tool to facilitate more drafts, seldom an end to itself.
I can start talking and it will transcribe and you can kind of see that good enough. It says it’s as bad as it’s as bad or as good as a fast draft. If words are simple then it does a pretty good job and certainly when you’re walking around taking the recycling out, I want to remember this phrase that I just suddenly thought of I’ve done it with Trying to remember dreams in the morning like it just immediately try to type it in as it as a message to myself for an email to myself and that keyboard and it’s literally transcribing this whole thing as I talk, so maybe I can share that garbage I am not introspective enough to know, but I I tend to voice what I write in my head and so I don’t know that any of your particularly close readers of me and close listeners to me but most of my writing sounds like me like I will use the same vocabulary in the same tone and be the same smart Alec, California whatever the hell I am in my post is when I speak so it’s pretty similar pretty similar if I was writing something fiction. I don’t know how that would work, but I don’t. If I was really voice trying to voice someone’s you know vernacular that wasn’t really me that would be trickier. I know that you as as a writer of fiction I have different things me. I’m always just me.
Update, 2 hours later: A lot of today’s meetup on writing was about what tools can help.
Inspired by today’s conversation, James posted an audio monologue: A Monologue on Modality. He posted an
.m4afile. And later, a transcript. James continues to inspire as he experiments with his blog and website.
Audioblogger.com screenshot from 2003. The first I can remember bloggers being able to post video was 20 years ago with Blogger’s service, Audioblogger powered by “Audblog.” I used it a few times on this site. Posts tagged #audioblogger
It was simple to use. Connect your phone and it would drop an image of a play button with a link to an audio file. MP3 file. Primitive but effective. The
fonttags in the source code to that archived home page charm me. It really does feel often like everything old is new again right now on the web. Blogs are returning. Independent websites have renewed enthusiasm. And so an old fogey like me can try to remember what lessons we learned.Speaking into a recorder is not a new technique for writers. A World of His Own is an episode of The Twilight Zone from 1960. In the teleplay by Richard Matheson. a writer uses a dictaphone to write his thoughts, and in so doing makes them come true. It becomes a metaphor for creation and imagination itself. It also does something unusual, the protagonist interacts with Rod Serling, narrating, breaking the rules of the narrative in a comedic and yet also dark way.
Keenan Wynn and a dictaphone in A World of His Own Funny, I was pondering Serling before today’s Zoom call, and I’m pondering him after it too.
Related film: Ruby Sparks (2012), a film about a novelist who imagines a woman who comes to life, and hijinks ensue.
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Sunrise at Hospitality Point and Drawing Moo Deng
I started the day with a trip to the airport. Me and Gwen dropped Kelly off. Early.
After we dropped her off, half hour to sunup, we went to Hospitality Point.
It’s a bit tricky to get there. You can boat from there but I couldn’t (or rather wouldn’t) begin a swim from there. It’s kind of a lesser spot. It might be a nice place to watch fireworks from. It’s tipped by a jetty that points at the Mighty Pacific. It separates the San Diego River from Mission Bay. We watched the sun rise and light up the overcast.
Looking due West from Hospitality Point, to the left the mouth of the San Diego River and Dog Beach; to the right the inlet of Mission Bay The San Diego River is not what anyone from the Louisiana Purchase would recognize as a river. There’s a shopping mall parking lot in the river bottom which is designed to be filled with water when necessary. Usually it doesn’t need to be wet. But the river has ducks and terns and raccoons and reeds and marsh and eddies. It’s a gentle enough river that mostly you can live in it, if you’re, say, houseless. If you are stuck there during weather, it’s treacherous. Our lifeguard services are trained and get regular practice helping people out of it.
Mission Bay is a recreation area. The Spaniards who named the land of my birth “New Spain” several hundred years ago called it Bahia Falsa. False Bay. It’s only false in that if you were hoping to use the waters to anchor your boat. Sorry, tall shipped conquistadors: choose another spot to park. Attempt your landings south of Point Loma. And they did. And I have both Spanish and indigenous blood in me because of that.
In the 1940s the powers that be–the United States–started dredging it to create the water park it is now. Oh, sorry, I skipped over several hundred years of history, but that’s for another day. If you’ve been to San Diego and visited Sea World you’ve been to Mission Bay. If you’ve flown out of the San Diego airport you flew over Hospitality Point. Unless the weather was really really bad. Bad weather is famously unusual.
Mission Bay is as artificial as a green lawn. It can be thought of as the result of environmental violence. I am in favor of efforts to re-wild parts of the Bay. They continue good work to make the place a bit more “natural.” They don’t plan to return it to nature, that won’t happen. I suppose in 150 years all of it may be the intertidal zone as the seas rise. But for now it’s a haven open to all.
Rocket: “Of course I care about the planets, and the buildings, and all of the animals on the planets.”
Star-Lord: “And the people.”
Rocket: “Meh.”I’m glad this artificial thing exists. I’m glad I can visit it with Gwen after going to the airport. I’m glad it’s fit for human habitation and enjoyment.
Looking due west, with a corgi dog
Afterwards I came home and participated in a Zoom call. It’s called Zoom Zoom Drawing Club. One of the drawing inspirations presented was Moo Deng. Moo Deng is easily the most popular Hippopotamus amphibius I can think of. Today.
It was awfully nice to just sit and draw on a Zoom call. Long time since I’ve done that. I like a Zoom where one just hangs out. It’s hosted by MRSHAWNLIU and was put on under the aegis of Creative Mornings. One of their Field Trips.
I’ll leave you with the jam that I woke up thinking about. Lana Del Rey’s cover of Sublime’s Summertime. Her version is called Doin’ Time
Outbound links for the day:
Thanks for reading.
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DA7jYruJujB/ via IFTTT
Random passerby’s question: “What’s the water like?”Answer: “October”
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Ride Waves, it’s fun
I’ve got a few pairs of Yucca Fins and a few DaFin fins. I’m on a run of wearing the DaFins, mostly. But I keep a close eye on Yucca Fins. They make killer bodysurfing fins. They recently released a video with some folks wearing their fins riding in a Palm Springs wave pool. Some bodysurfers, bodyboarders, and matsurfers. Riding waves is fun.
The Bodysurf Blog quoted John Papa ‘Ī’ī a few months ago in their history of bodysurfing post:
Body surfers use their shoulders like surfboards. When the surf rises before breaking, it is time to slip onto the wave by kicking hard and working the arms. The contraction in the back of a surfer causes him to be lifted by the wave and carried ashore.
That quote is from 1870.
People still bodysurf. I do. Animals do too.
Every ocean wave is a sum. A sum of water and wind. It’s the shape of the sand and stone under the waves, that’s bathymetry. It’s the phase of the moons and the tides. It’s the sun, the sea and the results of forces that have travelled thousands of miles. Some places the waves break evenly and predictably because the tides are predictable, and reefs seldom chance. But I still don’t believe any two waves are the same. And they’re breaking right now. They’re breaking whether it’s day or night. They’ve been breaking for millennia and will break for millennia more. California won’t exactly tumble into the sea, but in thousands of years waves will have worn away more of our coastline.
A few weeks ago Kelly and I went down to La Jolla Cove. We sat a while, watching the waves break and watching the seals. Sometimes a sea lion rode a breaking wave. I’ve seen them do that at South Mission Beach just 20 yards away from me. It feels like cheating the universe. I should not be allowed this close to a sea lion having that much fun. I’ve seen dolphins do it even closer, and in groups. I am exceedingly lucky to have been in the water when they’re waveriding. I’ve also seen them just going by.
How lucky am I? From August 2022 I watched the sea lions in the same way I watch the BEEFS TV videos. With rapt attention. Watching a wave be ridden is mesmerizing. I know part of it is I am trying to learn from each wave. How does it work?
Two women, tourists I think, walked and paused to watch the sea lions too. They took a few photos but mostly quietly watched. Then they began noicing their behavior. The sea lions in La Jolla are fun to watch. They lay all over each other, snuggle, bark at each other, and do whatever they hell they want. They noticed the sea lions occasionally riding waves. I felt surprised. I thought as a wave-riding obsessing only I would notice that. I suddenly started to monologue at the tourists about waveriding.
We all ride waves! The sea lions are real good at it. Dolphins do it too. And of course we humans ride waves with and without boards. And in their way pelicans ride waves too, they fly just at the peaks of breaking waves and harness the air coming off the top of them. If there were any birds out here today you could see that. You can find good videos of dolphins from Blacks Beach on YouTube.
Whatever middle aged man pontification part of my brain had gone off. The tourists nodded, smiled politely.
I felt embarrassed for myself. Shut up, Crawford.
They were done watching the sea lions. They thanked me for my little speech. I told Kelly maybe I ought to come down here regularly and be a docent. Telling people about the wonders of waveriding and other ocean facts and opinions.
A few months ago my friend Al took a great photo of me riding a wave. And I’ve captured a few good photos too.
Photo by Al Abut alabut.com 
My bodysurfing friend @quantumprimordial 
Photo by Kelly Kuhl These look really cool. Bodysurfing doesn’t always feel cool. If you’ve been to a city you’ve probably seen skateboarders practicing street tricks. When you watch skateboarders you’ll see a lot of failures. They don’t land the trick. They do it over and over. Tony Hawk practices like mad to be excellent at what he does. Do a kick flip! Rodney Mullen, same deal. Bodysurfing feels like that looks to me. I don’t care if it looks great to you. For every wave I can tell you what I think I got wrong. Now, part of deep reflection is that I can probably also tell you what I got right. I could tell you how a year ago it would have been much worse. And two years ago, impossible. And that’s all part of the fun of it for me.
I said before I’ve seen birds do it. sea lions do it, even educated dolphins do it, ride waves. Those are rare to witness. More predictable? I often am present when young kids are taking surfing lessons. There have been times I have seen children stand up on their first wave. The sound they make. That sound is one of my favorite sounds in the world. It is the sound of that pure joy of discovery and success and accomplishment and relief. It’s an incredible sound. And I’ve heard it at least a dozen times in the past few years.
There’s no wrong way to ride a wave. I read that somewhere once. I can’t remember where. But I think it’s true.
Now I grew up before the Boogie board existed. It’s a bodyboard. The Morey Boogie Board was invented about a hundred miles from here. Before that we had inflatable rafts. They were made of canvas and tougher than the kind of mat you might have experience of meant for the pool. Anyway here’s my grandma riding one in about 1975:
At the end of the month there’ll be an event where folks ride surf mats. I plan to be there.
Follow @4thgearflyer, @packrattrecords, and @lowerpowered for more info on that event. It’ll be here at OB on October 26, 2024.
I’m mulling what kind of costume I might want to wear. I’ve never done cosplay in the water. At the last Meeting of the Mats I gave out some sparkly matsurfing California bear stickers. I still have some more left over.
Thanks for reading.
Now go surf.
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DBCIERVyZIQ/ via IFTTT
There is a defiant brazenness about some seagulls that take up residence at California beaches. They have learned human ways and habits. The summer before last Kelly and I watched a group of seagulls tear open a tied shut unattended plastic grocery bag. They ripped open closed bags of Doritos and taco chips. They know us humans and our stuff and exploit to the max possible.
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MAKE A MARK
“Hey make a mark with me.” This I request of the person across to me at the table. I am doodling in my sketchbook. Big blank pages. I’ve started drawing nothing in particular. It’s not a stranger across from me. Maybe I know them well. Maybe only a little. I’ve done this many times. I have a two dozen or so pens sprawled out next to the notebook.
“I can’t draw.”
“I don’t want to ruin your notebook.”
I use the enthusiasm I learned when trying to get stubborn patients to take the breathing treatment they just refused. Sometimes it works. I do not coerce, I encourage.
Some people take to it immediately. They grab a pen. The Curlicues play out in a corner of the page. Some people test each pen and marker. They examine the line and color and maybe how they mix. Many are skeptical. Their eyes communicate something like “is this a trick?” A few have answered the call by drawing a single dot. It’s a ver specific kind of minimum viable product in response to the prompt “make a mark.” It’s common enough I get to tell those folks they are not the first or second person to do that. But that’s cool! Thanks for playing! Some can’t be convinced, and that’s fine too.
“You did so well!” “I love the colors!” is what we tell kids about their drawings. I think we teach kids that the final product of drawing is what matters. We don’t praise them for going for it, for making a mistake. In sports we teach kids that “you win some / you lose some.” We don’t teach good sportsmanship in drawing. We don’t praise the process, or the practice.
What I see when I ask people to draw with me, my favorite icebreaker, is fear. I see suspicion. I say “no rules, no grades, no deadlines.” I say people, but I mean adults. Children need no reassurance. They leap to choose the most interesting marker. The boldest color (hot pink) or the weirdest pen (calligraphy pen) or the thickest marker (a sharpie, usually). They go for it. I think they know that drawing is fun. I think they know I’ve offered an invitation to play.
Those kids become adults. Parents of those kids are usually skeptical. My notebook is big. I’ve had as many as 6 people drawing in it at the same time. We all fit. But parents are harder sell. What happened to them?
I think we taught those kids “you may draw if you are good at drawing.” If your drawing is “correct” it is good. If your drawing is “wrong” it is bad. And if you traced it you cheated and it is “bad.” All of that is bullshit. When I ask people to make a mark I make that page a safe space.
Drawing is a way to speak. It’s a way to dance. I wish there was a phrase for drawing like the cliche “dance like no one’s watching.” Draw. Maybe just draw a feeling. Maybe draw with the same energy of a fidget tool during a Zoom call. Drawings express.
I love to draw. I think I was 18, working at the Central Library in Downtown San Diego. It was in a fancy and expensive art magazine the library had a subscription to. Thick glossy paper is what it is in my memory. Jean Michel-Basquiat had died and I was reading about him. The article used the term “mark making.”
“Mark making”–what a wonderful phrase. It put into words what I knew intuitively but has no way to verbalize. “Mark making” implicitly told me that work of artists I loved–from Bob McCall to Frank Miller, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Van Gogh, Georgia O’Keefe, Syd Mead, Da Vinci, Bill Sienkiewicz–that they were maybe not the same, but they were linked. They might be utterly different. They might not seem like they came from the same kind of creatures. But they’re linked. We all make marks. And in so doing we are linked back to the beasts on the walls at Lascaux. And the doodles in my physics notebook were too. And once you see the world that way graffiti at the bus stop is linked. And a kid with chalk and a street is linked too.
This past weekend I was talking with friends, one old, one new. We talked about the weight of the world and the difficulties of health and welfare on planet earth. Old men yelling at clouds. We stood around miserablizing.
I took an empty seat at a nearby picnic table. I got out my notebook. I opened my bag of pens. I bade them to come make a mark. Being artists, I knew it would be a hard sell. It was. “I don’t have any ideas.” “I don’t have anything prepared.” “I’m too tired.”
They didn’t want to suck.
But I started making marks. I pointed out some of my more interesting pens. I told them there were no rules. No grades. Zero expectations. Feel free to start and not finish.
They sat down and drew.
And misery became inspiration.
The conversation didn’t change, but we had a new ways to converse.
Make a mark.
A kid at XOXOFest drew this hero duck who says “QUANK” in my notebook. -
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History Rhyming (Flickr, Chumby, BarCamp…)
During today’s IndieWeb HWC Europe meeting the topic turned to old hardware and hardware hacking. I said “on the topic of old hardware…” and got out my Chumby with a few weeks ago took out of a storage box with the intent to… hack it? Sell it? Recycle it? It was a hit and fun to turn on and think about.
I started it up and it works. And the Chumby website at www.chumby.com works too. It’s at least a clock that can look like Star Trek.
I don’t remember Chumby having LCARS I first heard of Chumby in 2007, at the fourth BarCamp Los Angeles: BarCampLA 4. That was the first BarCamp I ever attended. And I attended 5. 5 was really great. I met Dan Kaminsky there. I remember asking him questions about security for community sites. I somehow got him talking about the security of uploaded files and he mentioned one thing most people underestimate was that image files could be a nasty vector for intrusive payloads onto systems. He was very nice about it. I also went to 6, and 7.
I have old blurry photos for both BarCampLA 7 and BarCampLA 6. Fun to see these old photos and energy.
BarCamp is probably why I’ve taken to IndieWeb events like the Front End Study Hall I host so well. And I’ve stuck with events like that. I went to one BeCamp (I only have tweets to show for that event, alas) in Charlottesville and I’ve been to a few UXCampDC events.
And London is having a new BarCamp next month. I didn’t notice they had one in 2023 as well. But I’m noticing now. I’m happy to see this returning. And in December I’ll help organize another IndieWeb Camp here in San Diego as I did in 2023.
Anyway, the Chumby. At BarCamp, the creators were showing off how it worked. It ran Flash Lite. I won that Chumby in 2008. I last fired it up was in 2012, when I did software updates on it. I took it into work at Slacker Radio. Here’s that blog post: Still Life from Dayjob
I have some emails related to Chumby saved, still. One is an email to myself, it has the subject like Chumby RSS Video Viewer and the body is a url,
http://www.youtube.com/rssls. Don’t bother visiting that url, it gives the status code410, which means “Gone.”At one time I used it to display tweets of people I followed on Twitter.:
Here’s one from Douglas Welch I have a lot of photos in Flickr that are not explicitly mentioned or copied to this website. But Flickr also provides the ability to search for photos with more open copyright licenses. That’s what the Flickr Foundation. Today I learned about two great free photo sites I’d not seen before: Unsplash and Openverse.
It’s good to see that the spirit of the open web still in action. That theme of slow web, small web, indie web lives on. And when the big silos are so frustrating to use it’s hard not to see the appeal.
But it does take some effort to homestead a personal website. To maintain it. It can be technical. There’s a real opportunity to make personal websites easier to do. It used to be every ISP gave you some hosting space along with your internet connectivity. I had a site under
users.aol.comand athome.earthlink.netback in the day. They provided pathways to imagine that website.And now we bitch about Instagram shadow bans and imagine we might get a million followers on YouTube.
Here’s 3 recent missives I saw from artists just trying to keep in touch with fans and follows related to this on social media apps I follow:
1.
The dystopian bs workarounds that these corporations put us through each time something changes or is discontinued.
2.
every minute i spend on this app is agonizing and yet i have to keep using it because people decided that this is the only way to contact me for music-related opportunities
i am begging you to just email me
3.
this is what my only real facebook fan page looks like
i heard there’s a weird fake one contacting people so please be aware that i will never message you on facebook. don’t get scammed
That’s in the last 10 days. I am inured to these now. I blogged about the Ken Klippenstein post I put up on Facebook getting removed last month. He was reinstated.
Man alive, the horrendous and bad decisions and bad moderation, inadequate customer support, capricious decision-making we take for granted.
There’s absolutely an opportunity for a better way to do this for people who want to learn a minimum amount and not be price-gouged.
I’m very glad to have a website I control myself and to have the skills to maintain and manage it.
That’s why I’m IndieWeb and I was IndieWeb even before I knew it existed.
I feel like we’re at a very interesting historical moment with history rhyming.
Time for some new stuff.
Update, 1 day later: The Verge has a huge package about 2004 being a pivotal year in culture, I am not alone in noticing!
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DBNKo-Ky6l7/ via IFTTT
Got asked about my double handplanes after the session this morning.
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I made a troll sign
I made a troll sign to hold up during Zoom meetings I have been known to say “Printers are terrible.” I have also been known to say that I will only do tech support on printers for people I love.
I later expanded my “Printers are terrible” to be a broader maxim: “Computers are terrible.” Which is something of a mantra for me.
Some say it is ironic, or possibly a troll, to say this given that for 25 years I’ve worked in computers. But it is neither. I am a subject-matter-expert on computers and I find them terrible.
I would say that my work in computers is to remediate the terribleness as much as possible.
Oh, why the sign? Well, the snark which I love so much from Matt in IndieWeb conversations I felt needed some subtle (not very subtle) comment.
The edges are rough because I used a boxcutter rather than a proper X-Acto knife. It was 5 minutes of fun.
I will refrain from overusing it to punctuate meetings. It could be (shock! horror!) taken as trolling behavior.
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Perhaps you want a PNG file of the old Dodgeball.com dude illustration?
In that case, I have you covered. Go read about Dodgeball (service) on ye olde Wikipedia.
Illustration recreated in Procreate.
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CSS Battle for October 21, 2024 on Video
I recorded myself doing the today’s CSS Battle for the day. I used OBS which was pretty straightforward to set up. And I’ve uploaded it to YouTube.
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Webmentions, explained.
A Non-Technical Intro to Webmentions can’t help but be a tiny bit technical. But it’s certainly approachable. Nice work Natalie!
Here’s how Natalie boiled them down:
Webmentions are a way to let a website know that you linked to it.
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Unfrozen Caveman Web Video
Do I hate and fear web video. Yes. Mostly.
Phil Hartman as the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer on SNL in the early 1990s. A slickster who claimed modern technology scares him. The first time I encountered video for the web I was capturing and processing videos of video gameplay down to postage-stamp size. This was for Jamison/Gold, a web agency in Marina Del Rey I worked for in the late 1990s. JG did websites for videogames. We worked with developers like Sony Computer Entertainment, Midway Games, and NAMCO. I worked as a “web integrator.” I worked with designers and producers would do usually do the playthroughs of games. Many of the games were on PlayStations. Captured footage would be processed into as few megabytes of video as possible, in as many formats as were necessary. I remember outputting video formats and sometimes zipping them up so that people who clicked on a webpage could download the file, then play it.
Processing video, converting it, downsampling it, outputting multiple sizes of formats: it was a lot of work. When I upload a video to YouTube, these are all things that must be done, and are being done for me. YouTube tells me to expect my video in 5 minutes, and with my knowledge of web tooling I am duly impressed and feel happy not to have to do any manual processing of video.
YouTube does exist now. And I don’t have to think about that old abysmal experience of web video. Of AVI files embedded in ZIP files that I would download to my Macintosh which then would not play and so then I’d have to download a CODEC and install it and restart my machine. IT WAS ABYSMAL. On the production side of things. On the consumption side of things. I’m not even bringing up RealPlayer and the inevitable need to update that software.
The time I was tasked with capturing and processing video of a speech from Mario-creator Shigeru Miyamoto at a game development banquet I didn’t mind. That made it worthwhile.
That’s not long after the era of the Dancing Baby, a bit of web folklore notable enough to have a Wikipedia page. That video is kind of brilliant, but also kind of insipid, and if you were on the internet of the time you probably got sick of downloading it and being told how cool it was. It was apex of video on The Internet. The way video was distributed was as BIG OL’ FILES attached to emails. Maybe you used your free webspace from Earthlink and put it there and then gave it out.
Video is ubiquitous. We share videos regularly and without thinking of how it works.It’s great! Useful. Fast. We carry it in our pocket.
I remember being thinking Vine was brilliantly funny. Creators used short segments of video to entertain and joke and it was wonderful. Snapchat made some sense to me at the time: sharing video that disappears and messaging pals. Even then, I knew it really wasn’t for me. I really do prefer permanence. My ex used Marco Polo to carry out asynchronous personal conversations. Skype used to be that. I don’t think I even remember Skype. FaceTime calls “just work.” FaceTime birthday calls are terrific. And with the pandemic came: Zoom. And Tik-Tok has so much cultural power the Congress considers banning it outright.
I have loved animation and cartoons since before I can remember. I love tv and film. But my tech-phobia and bad experiences with crashing programs has been the hot stove that burned me. I was taught to fear and loathe doing anything related to programming or operations for video.
It was movies that inspired my move back to California. In the 1990s I was inspired by the visual effects of things like Jurassic Park and thought “I need to go be involved with that.” I went to the Virginia Festival of American Film two years in a row and got very inspired. y I moved to Los Angeles from Charlottesville in the 1990s to “go do something with movies.” There I took classes and seminars at places like UCLA Extension for movies, movie-making, movie-marketing and such. I enjoyed all those classes, but it was multimedia and HTML that ended up inspiring me and I got into making web pages and quit my job working as a respiratory therapist.
30 or so years later, I put up a new CSS Battle video yesterday on YouTube. And the video processing was once again handled for me. It’s not fancy, it’s in fact somewhat boring except for using OBS to put my face, some titles, and screen on the video. But I’ve been thinking about ways to use video creatively. I’ve added overlays over video of me bodysurfing using Procreate Dreams and that’s been great for scratching this new itch to create video.
I have no idea what this all adds up to. I suppose it’s to express my vague intention to create more web video.
Thanks for reading!
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Dune and Colonialism
I’ve been doing maintenance. I’ve finished porting over all the RSS Feeds from one reader (Tiny Tiny RSS) to a new one (FreshRSS) and doing that has allowed me to revisit a lot of old feeds, friends and acquaintances who have died (Heather Armstrong and Jennifer Simpson, notably and shockingly, both died too young and with much more to write).
But the happy part of this is getting a fresh look at the feeds I follow. And I notice that Al has put up his post about Dune from 2021. It’s called Diving into Dune and in it he talks about his enjoyment of reading the books in advance of the then new film. He also mentions a favorite of mine: Jodorowsky’s Dune, which is an absolutely stunning and mindbending documentary. Not because his Dune was made, but because Jodorowsky is unhinged and visionary and unapologetically bonkers about his approach to the material. His movie could have been something really special.
Since Al’s 2021 post, the film came out. And the sequel.
But the thing for me that deserves consideration are the politics that went into Dune.
Empire of Dune: Indigeneity, U.S. Power and a Science Fiction Classic — A Talk by Daniel Immerwahr
Go watch it. If you have any knowledge of Dune, you will appreciate it.
Okay, now that you watch it I can recommend Immerwahr’s excellent book “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States” which is about the history of our sub-rosa, hidden, denied “Empire.”
Colonialism is fascinating. As a person with both European–which is to say Spanish–and American–which is to say indigenous–heritage, I would not exist without it. But it was also brutal and terrible and decimated so much.
Immerwahr’s history goes into the fact that we have outlying territories now that are not Countries, and not States, but are somehow part of our Hidden Empire. It’s rather mind-blowing and outrageous once one understands that Puerto Rico and Guam and many other places ought probably be US States, or something so that the people there might get all the rights and privileges of US Citizenship. Instead they are a gray area that we prefer not to talk about. And Dune certainly goes into heavy themes of Empire and Resistance and what a fraught mess it all is.
Do check it out.
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Another take on a semicircular border
Among the bounty of blog posts I’m reading in my new RSS reader that got my brain humming was this post on semicircular borders on a round element. I have of late been saying that every graphical problem looks like a nail I can solve by applying the hammer of a CSS Gradient. As such, here’s a failed attempt to replicate the Adhocracy’s Semicircular Borders in just gradients.
See the Pen
Attempt at pure gradient "semicircle borders" by Joe Crawford (@artlung)
on CodePen. -
Fractal Kitty’s Mathtober sketches
I think Fractal Kitty’s Mathtober sketches are just wonderful.
You owe it to yourself to look at the whole CodePen collection of the animated ones, this one, entitled dodecicosacron I really love:
See the Pen
dodecicosacron by Sophia (fractal kitty) (she/her) (@fractalkitty)
on CodePen.I had a clear glass puzzle when I was a pre-teen with this shape — or at least a shape I think of as close to it — which was so fun so I almost feel like this is a shape I can hold entirely in my head. I can almost comprehend it.
I first encountered Fractal Kitty’s work through XOXO Fest, just another wonderful discovery from that conference.
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How can you not be romantic about baseball?
The first professional baseball game I ever saw was at Dodger Stadium.
Just Dad and me in—I think—1976. But the memory is vague. Might’ve been 1975.
Steve Garvey was playing First.
But he did that in L.A. for a very long time.
I think I was in T-Ball.
Dad listened to Vin Scully calling games.
We brought a handheld AM/FM radio so we could listen to the most distinctive voice in baseball call the plays.
No better voice in baseball. Maybe just Susan Sarandon narrating Bull Durham.
We had peanuts and a hot dog.
First base side. Pretty high up. I think we sat on a blanket.
Dad was so happy. Not stressed. He included me. He let Vin Sculley talk.
Alhambra is 10 miles from Dodger Stadium. We went in the VW bug.
I don’t think Mom came with us. I don’t know why we had tickets. It’s just the one game.
I don’t think I saw another pro baseball game until the 80s: San Diego.
We also saw one Lakers game when we lived in L.A. and before we became expatriates.
Dad took me to see Star Wars at the Chinese Theater the afternoon of the first day.
He somehow knew each one would be special. And they are.
I love those L.A. memories.
San Diegans hate L.A.
“A nice place to visit.”
Such rude people. Such horrible traffic. The smog.
But I’m a San Diegan who loves Los Angeles unironically, unreservedly.
Perhaps I’m an expatriate Angeleno born in San Diego.
When I worked for Slacker the company had season tickets. I’d see a game every year. Since I’ve been with Kelly we go every year when the Padres play her Cubbies.
I haven’t seen another game at Dodger Stadium since then.
The second time I saw Steve Garvey play he was a Padre, a decade later. In a World Series game.
I’m so happy for The Dodgers today in Game 1. Sure I wish it were the Padres.
But it’s okay.
I love L.A.
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Misc: Links and videos and commentary which may compel thee
I had not seen this repost of Mother Earth Mother Board, an article by Neal Stephenson from Eric Meyer and I’m glad to see it now.
It reminds me I put up a repost of Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was The Command Line in 1999 and it’s still up.
The notes from this past week’s Front End Study Hall #013 are rather good. If you like CSS, and want to learn more CSS, these events are good. I say this as the person who thought up this event. I hope I say it with a not-excessive dose of ego.
Even if Jeff Bezos is scared to let the Venerable Newspaper he bought endorse Kamala Harris for President, I am not. I do so endorse, and voted by mail, early. Here, watch Bobby Finger’s astounding and creepy and wonderful video about Jeff Bezos’ empty fat head being made into a rowboat.
Alan Moore in The Guardian waxing philosophical about the nature of and dangers of fandom? Yes please.
There are, of course, entirely benign fandoms, networks of cooperative individuals who quite like the same thing, can chat with others sharing the same pastime and, importantly, provide support for one another in difficult times. These healthy subcultures, however, are less likely to impact on society in the same way that the more strident and presumptuous fandoms have managed. Unnervingly rapidly, our culture has become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in. Our entertainments may be cancelled prematurely through an adverse fan reaction, and we may endure largely misogynist crusades such as Gamergate or Comicsgate from those who think “gate” means “conspiracy”, and that Nixon’s disgrace was predicated on a plot involving water, but this is hardly the full extent to which fan attitudes have toxified the world surrounding us, most obviously in our politics.
On a lighter note, Know Your Shits from Alex Kunz. Language, and English in particular, is some crazy shit.
If you said to me, or some random post said to me: “post the most recent meme in your camera roll” I would find none. I mostly don’t like memes. They are an entertainment. I seldom feel that they can express what’s in me. But I do like a meme that is funny or silly. And a few I find useful. “My Specialty is Roofing” I posted to this here site in 2011 and it still manages to make me laugh.
I made this one this week as I was thinking about billionaires. Which is rather less benign but also makes me laugh. I have less hope this will continue to make me laugh for many years.
SVG Repo looks to be a pretty great resource. For many of the icons on this site I am currently using Font Awesome which is absolutely unnecessarily heavy but works and I don’t have to think about it. I think about replacing them sometimes. What I might do is use some from SVG Repo. But I also have a certain amount of “not invented here” about this site and I also have an impulse to redraw logos myself. For now, inertia will probably win and I will do nothing.
The Substack to RSS OMPL worked well for me. It might interest you. By Les Orchard.
Anil Dash wrote It feels like 2004 again is along the lines of what I wrote not long ago about history rhyming. I’ve been thinking back a lot lately. Anil nails what’s exciting about the current moment:
Interestingly, most of the people who’ve heard me say this over the last year or so think that I’m complaining or lamenting the situation, but I’m actually excited about it. That malaise by the big players in tech a generation ago yielded an exciting and inspiring new wave of innovations. While much of the money in big tech was chasing distractions back in 2004, many communities of small, independent creators on the open web were making the new pillars of web culture — many of which are still standing to this day.
The past is compelling too, I was reminded by Pinguino of some photos from a BarCamp from back in the day:
Me at BarCamp, 2008. By Pinguino. She’s got a photo of me playing, I think, Rock Band.
Me at BarCamp, 2008. By Pinguino. I think it’s related somehow that I wrote a piece like MAKE A MARK–an explicit call to people to draw. I was crap as a tech evangelist and salesperson. But I do have some zeal to share. Go learn stuff. Tell people you like you like them. Call out injustice. Say what you mean. Don’t seethe in resentment. Get yer ya yas out.
While I’m banging a drum, I’ll namecheck my pal gRegor. His piece about Safer Events Workshop is on point. I love this quote:
“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”
I am very glad and gratified that gRegor is part of the team for IndieWeb events, and particularly that he’s enthused for and a contributor to how we will make IndieWeb Camp San Diego happen in December. It’s going to be great.
I’m so happy to see XOXO talks go out and have an impact. I liked Tracy’s take on Ed Yong’s talk. You should be reading Tracy Durnell, she’s got the digital garden thing wired.
All the talks are so good. I think the one with the most lasting impact on me is Cabel Sasser’s talk about Wes Cook and permanence and a lot of other things, though. We are lucky to live and we all die, we ought to have some fun with it and share of ourselves. Definitely in neighborhood of “MAKE A MARK.”
Thanks for reading. It’s rough out there. Stay strong.
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Something New
In 2007 I read a blog post and got applause at an event my ex created called LA Bloggers Live. That lasted less than a year but folks had fun at it. Public speaking was fun and terrifying in equal measure. Blogging has created for me so many distinct and peculiar opportunities! Things changed since then. But I genuinely think they’re changing back. If they’re not changing back, maybe they’re changing to something new.
Meme-style memory! Taken by whom? -
from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/DBsR1PBJ9RR/ via IFTTT
I’m so glad to be getting over a cold I don’t mind closeouts galore.
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The Election Looms
I do believe we’re all exhausted about the impending election in a week. And there’s so much to read. I find myself wanting to encase this moment in amber so I can remember it because it all has the feeling of intense emotion that I will suppress, later.
That the election is in 7 days. After that we’ll be deeply in it as we resolve what the heck happens next. We either get our first woman President in January, or we get back a President who lost the last election but fomented a coup d’état and says he’d like to execute a massive deportation of people living and working in the United States as his solution to the border. Or some third option that would be more chaotic and tricky and terrible.
It’s a fraught political moment in my country. I’m hoping for the best.
I am getting over a cold. I think I got it because I hung out with a bunch of older baby boomers and didn’t mask. I didn’t check whether it was COVID–not because I don’t care, but largely because it doesn’t matter how I would address it. I have rested and hydrated, taken DayQuil and NyQuil and cough drops. And now I am better.
Yesterday I went back in the water. I rode some waves and felt better about everything. I got back to nature. That makes it sound serene and calm. The 1954 version of A Star is Born has the character played James Mason walk into the ocean. It looks serene and calm and beautiful but it’s the characters suicide. Never mind there are not quite Malibu homes with beaches that look like this adjacent. Online sources indicate it’s Laguna Beach. I’m not sure but it’s a secluded pretty sedate beach. Nevertheless, the music swells and we see his abandoned comfortable white robe and we know that he is dead.
That still is from the second version of A Star is Born. The first, 1937. The third, 1976. The fourth, 2018. And in 1932 there was a film What Price Hollywood with the same overall: a young nobody meets an alcoholic has-been, becomes a star, and the has-been dies by his own hand. The intervals between each successive retelling are getting longer. I suspect the next one will be another 40 years from now.
In the meantime I’ll keep getting in the ocean with no intention whatsoever to drown. It may seem that it’s my intention, but I assure it you that it’s not. The trauma of experiencing the aftermath of my cousin Eddie’s demise was the vaccine that cured me of suicide. Here’s a photo from Surfline me getting in the ocean yesterday to ride waves.
In the meantime, let’s quote some things that I appreciated so far this week. The first is from Marc Maron: The Democratic Idea:
The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers. Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant. They are of the movement. Whether they see themselves as acolytes or just comics doesn’t matter. Whether they are driven by the idea that what they are fighting for is a free speech issue or whether they are truly morally bankrupt racists doesn’t matter. They are part of the public face of a fascist political movement that seeks to destroy the democratic idea.
When comedians with podcasts have shameless, self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show to joke around like they are just entertainers or even just politicians, all it does is humanize and normalize fascism. When someone uses their platform for that reason they are facilitating anti-American sentiment and promoting violent autocracy.
This, from Ed Zitron: You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman are not, despite their achievements, remarkable people. They are dull, and while they might be intelligent, they’re far from intellectual, appearing to lack any real interests, hobbies or joys, other than Zuckerberg’s brief dalliance with mixed martial arts. They all read the same shit, they talk the same way, they have the same faux-intellectualism that usually boils down to how they’re “big thinkers” that think about “big things” like “intelligence” and “consciousness,” when what they mostly do is dance around issues without adding anything substantive, because they don’t really believe anything.
From the largest newspaper in Puerto Rico: Puerto Ricans should vote for Kamala Harris
Just on Sunday, as insults rained down on Puerto Rico, the Democratic candidate offered a message of hope, promising to maintain the interagency group dedicated exclusively to strengthening and creating new opportunities. She addressed key issues such as encouraging investment in the industries of the future, boosting small business growth, improving the health care system and uplifting Puerto Ricans. It also emphasized the need to achieve parity with the states in access to federal programs for the disadvantaged and the elderly. Clearly, the Puerto Rico Opportunity Economy Task Force would be independent of the current one established by Biden’s executive order.
And this endorsement from The Verge: A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles
It is extremely frustrating that the Harris campaign keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy without explaining why his whole deal is so deeply incompatible with America, so here’s the short version: the radical founding principle of the United States of America is the idea that the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems comes from the consent of the governed. A clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might help each other reach better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in other words. It was a big bet, and so far, it’s paid off.
Enough politics. I mentioned the Meeting of the Mats before, but I missed it. As mentioned, I was sick. Check out the after-action report over on SURFMATTERS.
Happy Tuesday everyone. Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.
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Going to Concerts
Me, at the Grand Canyon, in my New Order t-shirt. 1989. I don’t have the shirt. I do have the hat. On Saturday, June 17, 1989 I saw the following bands play live in San Diego at SDSU.
- New Order
- Public Image Ltd
- The Sugarcubes
- De La Soul
In my memory this was a Lollapalooza lineup. But Lollapalooza was not until the ’90s. I bought the tickets at Tower Records. New Order (nee Joy Division) was neck and neck with Talking Heads as my Favorite Band Of All Time. It was Very Important to me to keep an ordered list of my favorite bands at the time. The lineup was part of X-Fest II. It was put on my 91X, I think the emcee was Steve West.
This advertisement appeared in The Reader on the Thursday before. I remember De La Soul doing the song Potholes in My Lawn and the stage performance included women driving lawnmowers around the stage. Pretty lame. I didn’t yet have much of a sense of whimsy about music, then. De La Soul as a live act could not possible match the brilliance of the recording of 3 Feet High and Rising which I was wearing out on cassette tape.
Public Image Limited was great, and they did play Rise and Disappointed. Public Image too. I think I was disappointed they did not play Order of Death. I love a dirge.
Internet Nerds have let me down, as setlists are only available for New Order from that day. I have mostly my memory to go by.
I was solitary by nature, and I was slow to cultivate friends. I have been to a fair number of concerts alone, but I went to that show with my friend Erin, I’ve been to some great shows. A concert is a communal event. It’s more satisfying to see and listen with other people. Ideally with people you like. I mostly didn’t know people with my tastes. My friend Erin changed that. I loved arguing about music. However insufferable you may find the characters in any version of High Fidelity; that’s about how insufferable you might’ve found me. It was good I met Erin when I did at the downtown San Diego Public Library. We are friends to this day.
Music has meant so much to me. It was great when I worked for Slacker Radio. I was contributing to a service actively playing music for people. It was also a glimpse at the painful realities of the music business: licensing, publishing, intellectual property. After a rebrand, we got business cards and were encouraged to put our favorite concert onto the front of our business cards. Mine said “Morrissey, 1992.”
Photo of that card from 2017. 
Screenshot of Blue Monday in the Slacker App. I implemented that blue on white design in HTML, later. Favorites are tricky things. They change. I think Morrissey was my favorite because I saw it with my sister. November 20, 1992 at the Performing Arts Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. She took the train up from Roanoke to stay with me. That was when a person needed to take a bus to Clifton Forge before getting on a train to Charlottesville. She was a teenager and my parents were in a tricky part of their marriage. Music was a respite. A setlist for the show is available. Moz was electric and charismatic and that guitar sound from the Your Arsenal days was so vivid. It still ranks high. Sharing that show with her meant so much.
I’ve quoted this bit of Frank Zappa before, and I will here now, again. A kind of aphorism. Maybe a poem. I had it on a t-shirt at one time.
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST. -
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Owning my own bookmarks over 20 years
When I worked as a respiratory therapist part of my responsibilities was to keep flowsheets for the mechanical ventilators I worked on. That’s a record of what the machine was doing with a time log. And when I gave a breathing treatment to an asthma patient I recorded the details of that treatment, the time, the before, the after, and anything noteworthy about it.
We keep logs and journals and captain’s logs to know what the heck happened in the past. They’re our memory. I started my blog in 2001, in February.
It turned out my website was a good way to remember things. When I blogged about a website, or a video I watched, or my own experiences, I remembered it. And because I’ve maintained the website over the years and not deleted many things, I still have them. There’s this idea of websites as “digital gardens,” written about by Maggie Appleton. I never quite thought of my website as a garden, though I do think about friendship as a kind of garden.
But the links add up. When I first started using web browsers, which would be back in the days of Netscape 2 and 3.
Here’s how my website looked 25 years ago in Netscape 3 I kept my bookmarks in Netscape 3, and then 4. And because most of my web browsing was at the same computer, my bookmarks were always there. I never had to worry much about losing links I had saved.
In 2004 I started using a service called del.icio.us and that was terrific for managing links. It used tags to organize links. It became an amazing way to learn about new stuff from the other users. I think that’s the first time I started moving things away from my own website and into a silo. I announced and pointed my users at my del.icio.us account in 2005. I could bookmark things to delicious and view them on any computer.
Today, in 2024, when you export your bookmarks from the Safari browser on a Mac, and you read the code of the resulting file named
Safari Bookmarks.html, it begins like this:<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<HTML>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<Title>Bookmarks</Title>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
<DT><H3 FOLDED>Favorites</H3>Netscape was purchased by America Online. Netscape begat Mozilla and Firefox and Netscape Communications died. But that first line, that reads
<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>shows that Safari is haunted by the spirit of the Netscape Bookmarks file.I used del.icio.us for many years to store my bookmarks not in a bookmark file but “on the web.” In the “cloud” one might say now. Over a span between 2005 and 2006 I used PESOS to copy my bookmarks from that site and into mine. One can see this on my visualization page.
By 2010 Delicious has been acquired by Yahoo! and as often happens with clever small companies acquired by large ambitious ones, it was soon to be shuttered.
I used Pinboard for many years as a replacement. But my zeal for managing my bookmarks dwindled. Apple products allowed bookmarks to be shared across devices. Chrome bookmarks could sync to and from any browser you logged into. Wherever I used a browser, my computer, and my phone, and my tablet–it was simple to get at my bookmarks. Services like Dropbox magnified that capability with text files shared from place to place.
I find myself wishing for something more like Delicious. Since the services shut down I solved the problem of managing links with emails to myself, or with text files which include lists of links to share, or read. I used Instapaper to “Read Later.” I can push things to a Kindle. I can use apps like Pocket. In the days I read twitter I pushed the links I shared to Twitter into Pinboard. The problem of this link diaspora is when I want to find something, it’s increasingly difficult to find it. I become reliant on search tools, which means Google or DuckDuckGo.
And the search tools–particularly Google–are getting worse. It’s harder to find things as algorithmically generated synopses come before actual results. The tool corrects me: “no, you can’t possibly mean that word, let me correct that for you,” I imagine the search engine saying. No, I really do want to see results which include the specific string of characters in “
del.icio.us.”Link management is no longer an unscratched itch for me.
And so I’ve been very pleased to be using a tool called Linkding.
Linkding screenshot Linkding looks a lot like what Delicious looked like. It’s very plain, and it allows for tagging. Tagging is an old idea now, though we more commonly think of them as
#hashtagsnow. But originally it was a way for ideas to emerge. In one of my favorite talks: “Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories” by Clay Shirky, from 2005. I highly recommend the video. In the talk he speaks about how Flickr and Delicious used tags, or rather, how their users did, and about the genesis of tagging.This is the group mind modeling the group mind.
All that said, I am not making my instance of Linkding open to the web. I will not be sharing the 28,000 links I’ve put into it onto the web in a public manner. But I am already using it to look back at what has come before. I am able to search it and use it and am very pleased.
I wrote code (in PHP) to import my old bookmarks. And you didn’t misread that, it’s 28,000 links over the last 20 years. They come from my original links blog, and from Delicious, and from Instapaper, and from Twitter back when I backfilled those shared links into Pinboard, which I then backfilled into my link blog database. It’s a lot of things, but really, it’s straightforward from a programming point of view. It’s a simple
POSTto theREST APIwhich Linkding provides by default. I have shared most of the code I wrote as a Gist in GitHub. It includes code in PHP to convert exportedCSVfrom Instapaper to a JSON format that my poster code can use. And over the last 2 days and over many hours, every few seconds a link would be posted. And as of now, it’s finished.It’s already yielding dividends. There’s enough text in the urls and titles of these links that I can search for things I’d long forgotten but are still useful. And it’s not bound up in someone else’s service. It’s all under my control on an instance that I’m running on a service called PikaPods, which so far, I like. Rather than having to configure a server and worry about spinning up instances under Amazon Web Services I can run a Pod with Linkding on it. Here’s their pitch:
Run the finest Open Source web apps from just $1/month
- Start free with $5 welcome credit 🤗
- Fully managed, no servers to administer
- No tracking, no ads, no snooping
- EU and US locations available
- Use your own domain
So far I like it. And at about a buck and a half a month I’m pleased to have a digital brain again that includes everything. It is not ad-supported. I have it set to be private, so in theory my usage won’t be tracked. I appreciate a service under my own control, that’s the essence of why the #IndieWeb means so much to me.
I am not locked into Linkding. Not really. Built into the settings screens is an option to export all my bookmarks. It’s a large file, over 7 megabytes of links, text, and tags.
The format of the file? It’s a Netscape HTML file.
Linkding Import and Export That ancient format from a dead company means that I can take my links and do with them as I please.
