2022 December
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Even when writing for third-party sites, you should still archive your writings somewhere else when possible.
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As I mentioned in the most recent weeknotes, my desktop PC has been having crashing issues during the past couple of weeks, with increasing frequency. Since most of this PC was put together 7 years ago, I was already planning on putting together a new one early next year, but the recent problems forwarded the timetable a bit, so I ended up going to my nearby computer store already last weekend. When I say "putting together", I don't mean buying the parts and assembling the PC myself, the time when I was into that is long past, these days I
2022 November
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If you prefer text, there is an accompanying article: https://sabrinas.space/
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Alexis Madrigal writes on Twitter: Something I’ve been thinking about Twitter: for those of us who are word people, this was once our place. “Words with Friends” as @kathrynschulz once put it. TikTok may be exciting and engaging, but it’s not about words. The whole thread is pretty good, go read it. Local backup here in case birdsite goes kaput. Only somewhat related, Meg Hourihan wrote (in the year 2000!!) about web persons: And I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they
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Great article that discusses a lot of the challenges in moderating a community, probably applicable to other things and not just Mastodon
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Recently: Elon Musk bought Twitter and seems intent on running it into the ground in record time. This has sent many people seeking alternatives, and one of the beneficiaries of that is Mastodon, which has seen record growth over the past week or so. I've been on Mastodon since 2018, currently at @roytang@indieweb.social, feel free to give me a follow! What follows is a rambling stream of thoughts about the platform. Mastodon has a completely different vibe compared to Twitter, a much more small-town, homespun vibe. The signal to noise ratio is definitely higher, and there are very few "influencers"
2022 September
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When it comes to technology, my knowledge largely comes from my lack of fear over trying new things and pressing buttons just to see what they do. My consulting clients ask me where I learned how fix that thing that they called me in for – even if I may not have encountered their specific issue before. I explain that the main thing is my lack of fear. That I’m willing to just try things to see if I can figure it out. Push buttons just to see what they do. And, in doing so, I can now fix that -
A couple of months ago I got access to the DALL-E, an AI/machine learning model that lets you generate images from natural language descriptions. Basically they have a server they run and you get some limited number of credits per month (?) to generate images. I only got around to trying it last week and posted some of my samples in the most recent weeknotes. Since then, I feel like there's a spike in the number of AI image generation-related news and articles I encounter. (More likely than not, I just notice them more now that I've actually played with
2022 August
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Via Kev Quirk: this great article by Florens Verschelde about SSGs (Aside: I already shared this via the links page, but I had more to say, so now there's a blog post about it too.) I agree with a lot of things mentioned in this article, but what really hit home for me was the complaint about limitations in how content hierarchies and partial content are handled in SSGs. "...But the nail in the coffin was always that it’s either impossible or way too hard to build a single page from several pieces of content." This relates to something that
2022 June
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I finally updated my long-unmaintained blogroll page. The contents of this page are only one category in my feedreader. Typically when I find a new blog that seems interesting to follow, I first put in a category called "tentative". After some time of following, I'll decide whether I want it to be in my public blogroll. Reviewing the public blogroll also means removing blogs that are no longer current or updated. I will typically move those into a feedreader category called "defunct". I'll highlight new/added blogs in a future "Follow Friday" post (a series which I have neglected to follow-up
2022 May
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My Android didn't have the "delete advertising ID" option, but had an "Opt out of ads personalization" toggle.
2022 April
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More blogs to check out and more things to add to the ever-growing backlog of things I want to add to my own blog.
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Some great ideas here, and making me think about some of the stuff I've wanted to do on my own site for a while.
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Related: Mobile games have a short shelf life https://roytang.net/2019/04/mobile-games/
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An essay on how the internet changed our daily lives