Pages Tagged “Category: Tech”
Blog Posts
- Blog Moving to KVibber.com
Moving on from Hyperborea, the name I picked based on a 70s adventure movie back in 2000, and also fix some of the technical complexity from running this blog in a subdomain.
- ClassicPress Federation
I’ve been using the excellent ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress to connect this blog to the Fediverse for several years now, and it keeps getting better. The plugin makes any WordPress blog also work like a Mastodon server, so you can follow and interact from any site running Mastodon, Akkoma, Pixelfed (image posts only, of course), […]
- Marketing
In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the […]
- Eclipses and World Building
I can go with your scifi/fantasy story’s super-impossible thing being associated with an eclipse. It’s activating or deactivating people’s super-powers? Sure! Certain magic spells can only be cast during an eclipse? Sure! The moon transforms into cheese? OK, whatever. (pun not intended) But please, please get the basic mechanics right!
- Something Went Wrong
I really wish GNOME’s “Oh No! Something went wrong!” screen would let me restart just the crashed components instead of forcing me to log out completely. Or let me decide if I’m willing to continue without whatever crashed. If the audio broke, and I’m not doing anything that needs sound right now, it shouldn’t block […]
- Automattic to WordPress Community: Don’t Trust Us
Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things […]
- Migrated to ClassicPress
Migrating this 22-year-old 3000+ post behemoth of a blog from WordPress to ClassicPress turned out to be a lot faster and easier than I expected.
- Striking the Crowd
Today I found myself thinking of Terminator 3, specifically the plotline in which all kinds of random computer crashes are spreading across the internet. For obvious reasons. In today’s real world incident, it’s a bug in an auto-pushed update for widely-used security software by CrowdStrike, ironically used to protect mission-critical systems. In the two-decade-old movie […]
- Dillo Resurrected
The super-minimalist web browser Dillo has released a new version for the first time in almost a decade! (Now there’s a blast from the past!)
- SubdoMailing
Interesting spam/phish technique: Look for subdomains with CNAMEs or SPF records that point to abandoned domains that you can then register…and effectively take control of the subdomain or SPF. They haven’t seen any cases where it’s been used to host a phishing site at, say, an msn.com subdomain, but they’ve seen thousands of cases where […]
- The Firehose and the Jetpack
I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore. Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media It’s the kind of thing that […]
- Phish Training
The year is 2006. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks. The year is 2011. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks. The year is 2022. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for […]
- Ideas for Unifying a Fragmented Website
My website’s built with a mix of WordPress, hand-coded HTML, and multiple Eleventy instances, which means tags and search are fragmented.
- The Other Name Was A Little Sus
IEEE has finally renamed their sustainable tech conference. Now it’s IEEE SustainTech Expo.
- Last Tweets Standing
Popped over to Twitter to delete the last handful of posts I left there when I deleted most of them back in December. Decided to leave two for now, though I might still delete them before the new TOS takes effect. Oct 2008: If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, […]
- Asymptomatic Covid and Genetics
People with a particular variation of the HLA gene who had Covid were dramatically more likely to have had an asymptomatic case.
- Privacy and Trust: Threads, Twitter and the Fediverse
Privacy has many layers. Keeping cloud files from leaking to another account is one layer. Not data-mining those files is another entirely!
- Cis is Just A Description
Imagine a small village near a valley, so isolated that they just call themselves “the people.” One day they find out about another village on the other side of the valley, and they start calling them “the people across the valley.” They can keep talking about “the people,” but sometimes they need to make a […]
- Tired of Eventbrite Spam
Eventbrite has worked well for buying tickets to events I’ve attended… But over the last few months I keep getting spam for events that are not only not remotely interesting, they aren’t anywhere NEAR me. Sorry, but I’m not hopping on a plane for a pub crawl on the other side of the continent or […]
- Lost Cities and Alien Skies
You wouldn’t think that books about astronomy and archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities and Under Alien Skies pack some odd similarities.
- Blue Sunsets on Mars
One of many cool facts brought up in Phil Plait’s new book, Under Alien Skies is that Martian sunsets are blue! On Earth, nitrogen scatters light randomly, with bluer colors scattering more than redder colors, so the ambient sky is blue, but when you’re looking toward the sun at a shallow angle (like sunrise or […]
- That Blue Checkmark
Twitter Blue is what happens when you start treating a tool as a status symbol, so you throw the tools away and start selling gold-plated hammers made out of thin plastic.
- Venus and Jupiter Conjunction 2023
A photo of Venus and Jupiter close together in tonight’s sky, and a close-up that appears to have very blurry images of Jupiter’s moons.
- Detweeting (and More)
Not that I’ve been particularly active on Twitter for quite a while now, but the way things have gotten, especially under its new owner, I decided it was finally time to go. I haven’t deleted my main account (yet), but I’ve deleted most of my tweet history, and the accounts I used for side projects, […]
- It’s Crop!
Just cropping an image isn’t always enough to remove the data. Watch out for display-only crops, thumbnails in metadata, and even broken file saving!
- Fediverse: Beta to Production
The Twitter-to-Mastodon migration is like going from beta testing the Fediverse to production. Just like a public beta always turns up issues that were missed during development, when going to production you suddenly have a *huge* pool of new users who are going to use the system in ways you didn’t anticipate and haven’t already […]
- Must be Tuesday
“Update all the things!” the stick figure from Hyperbole and a Half shouts enthusiastically.
- Twitter: Amp Up the Noise
Making the blue check mark mean “This person can afford $20/month†instead of “This person is who they say they are†is only the latest way Twitter has downgraded its signal/noise ratio over the years.
- The 2022 Social Media Experience
The 2022 update: What it’s like to use Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Mastodon, Pixelfed and Instagram now.
- The Web Was Responsive From The Start
I’ve been meaning to write a post about email newsletters that still assume you’re reading on a desktop and send out layouts that rely on a wide screen size and end up with tiny 2-point type on a mobile phone — you know, where most people read their email these days. Then I stumbled on […]
- Electrical Breakdown (the other kind)
The “Today’s Outlook” section of the California electricity ISO shows detailed trends and breakdowns of how much electricity is available from which sources over the course of the day, and both actual and projected demand. You’d think demand would be highest during the hottest part of the day, but it’s early evening, when people are […]
- Remember Amazon Drive? No?
Amazon is shutting down their Drive service. You might not remember it. I didn’t. But you might have files on there you don’t remember. I did.
- Hi, We’re Your Bank! (Yeah, SURE you are.)
Phishers: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on this attachment for important information. Security experts: Never click on an unexpected attachment in an email even if you think you know who it’s from. It’s likely to be malware or a scam to steal your login credentials. Actual banks: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on […]
- Bad Design: Splitting Notification Preferences
Splitting notification preferences across the app UI and the system UI is a mess for usability. But if the goal is making you see more notifications?
- May I Have Your Attention Please. All of it. FOREVER.
One thing I like about the Fediverse is that it doesn’t constantly scream for your attention to keep you online as long as possible.
- Machine Translation LOCALLY on Your Computer!
Mozilla and Project Bergamot have released a translation tool that runs on your own device, not sending the data to the cloud.
- Subdomains vs Subdirectories, IndieWeb and Identity
In response to girrodocus’s question: #PersonalWebsite creators… what’s your rationale for deciding when to use a subdomain or a subdirectory? I usually prefer to put sections in subdirectories. That makes it possible to make the entire site portable (depending on authoring tools, anyway). Ideally, I want something that could be zipped up and moved. Or […]
- Impact Contrast (meteor impacts, that is)
One of the things I find fascinating about the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk impacts is that in one case it took decades of scientific research and multiple theories to settle on what probably caused it, while in the other we have video footage and the actual meteorite. But there were eyewitnesses to Tunguska despite its remoteness, […]
- Auto-Update Overload! (Or, Google Drive-ing me Crazy!)
Two hot takes (so to speak): Auto-updaters shouldn’t run when the system is really busy. And installers that check to see the whether the same or newer version is “already installed” should either be really thorough about what they’re checking, or offer to do a repair install anyway. Overheat! I’d fired up a game of […]
- Venting on Metadata Schemes
For human-readable HTML, I can write: <a href=”https://example.com”>Lois Lane</a> For machine-readable HTML: <a rel=”author” href=”https://example.com”>Lois Lane</a> For IndieWeb microformats: <a class=”p-author h-card” href=”https://example.com”>Lois Lane</a> But for inline Schema.org I have to write: <span property=”author” typeof=”person”><a property=”url” href=”https://example.com”><span property=”name”>Lois Lane</span></a> I’ve been grumbling about all the redundancy in putting multiple sets of metadata on a page: […]
- Using the Internet in the 1990s (and early 2000s)
A few weeks ago, Szczezuja asked the GeminiSpace community: How you were using the Internet in 1991-1995 and 1995-2005? This may be a bit longer than asked for, and I thought about breaking it into smaller pieces, but I decided it would be more appropriate for a Gemini post to be one single unit. 1991-1995: […]
- Overstuffed Websites
I’m not ready to give up on the flexibility of WordPress for my main blog yet, but holy crap are these pages heavy. Even with compression. There’s no reason it should take 450K (before compression) and 20 requests to display a 500-word post. And I don’t even do ads, popups, social sharing buttons or anything […]
- Overload the Cores
I finally got around to trying out No Man’s Sky a few weeks ago. I started on a super-hot planet, where you need to find shelter and/or resources to recharge your suit’s hazard protection system to keep cool. Got killed a few times trying to figure out what I was doing. And after about 20 […]
- Ya-who? Flickr and Tumblr Were Lucky!
Huh. Verizon has sold what remains of Yahoo! and AOL. For half of what they paid for them. 🤦♂️ To a private equity firm. 😬 Apparently the division formerly known as Oath and later as Verizon Media Group will be called Yahoo going forward, which is probably a good move. I’ve got to say, though: […]
- Farewell to Fry’s
I’m going to miss two things about Fry’s Electronics, which shut down this week: Being able to walk in and grab random parts immediately. The decor. And yeah, there’s nostalgia for the old days, but they’re already gone. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s they really were a one-stop shop for computers, software, appliances, […]
- Tech Giants’ Core Strategies
The Verge makes an interesting point about Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda: for the most part, Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you run their stuff on, they just want you to buy the software. So it’s less likely to be about trying to gain Xbox exclusives and more likely to be about getting more games for […]
- Mount Doomscrolling
The way the Palantir network compromises Saruman and Denethor shows the danger in who controls the algorithm that manages your newsfeed.
- Almost Got It
The kid has been watching a zillion teardown/repair/dismantling videos of various devices on YouTube, and wants to learn to repair phones. So I took the old phones and tablet that I’d set aside for e-waste collection, and the tools I used to do battery replacements on a couple of devices a while back, and let […]
- Get ’em while they’re hot!
The spammers who’ve made it as far as the junk mail folder have oddly consistent messaging lately: 🤔
- Don’t Disable Paste!
App and website developers: please do not disable paste on your login forms. Let people use password managers so they can keep a unique password for your site that’s resistant to both password-guessing and password-sharing attacks. Thank you.
- Online Permanence: Host Your Own or Use a Service?
What you put on Facebook or Twitter will die when they do (or sooner, at their whim). What you host yourself will stay…as long as YOU can keep it up.
- Instagram Getting Even More Hostile to the Web
Instagram is now requiring you to sign in to view public profiles. You can still look at (for example), my Instagram profile, but once you scroll down a few pages, it pops up a login form and you’re stuck. A spokesperson said, “This is to help people see photos on Instagram and then understand how […]
- Free Software and Failed Ideals
Once upon a time, the idea that “only the code mattered” was sold as a way to be inclusive. No one would be shut out if their code was good. But building software is more than code. It’s design. Planning. Discussion. It’s figuring out use cases, misuse cases, and failure modes. It’s interacting with people. […]
- Thoughts on Tumblr’s Escape from Verizon to WordPress
At least it’s going to a social media company and not another conglomerate. And one that’s more responsible than the big two!
- Dear Twitter: Please Ditch the Clutter
Have you ever been to a Las Vegas casino? The main floors tend toward sprawling layouts, with lots of shiny distractions to entice you to stay and spend more time and money on the slots instead of helping you get where you’re going. That’s what Twitter’s new layout feels like. When Twitter started out, the […]
- Preventing Notification Overload
To keep myself from getting distracted by too many notifications on my phone, I ask myself the following questions whenever a new category pops up: Will I need to act on it? (Likes/favorites are nice, but I don’t need to respond.) How time-sensitive is it? (“Your ride is here” is more time sensitive than planning […]
- Random Thoughts on Self-Hosting
I’ve been thinking about what it means to self-host a service, and that there are degrees even within that. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in the sense that I manage an installation of WordPress, but I run it on a VPS at a web host. It’s not as self-hosted as someone running a server […]
- Looping Around Orion
Photo by Andrew Klinger via Astronomy Picture of the Day The first time I saw a picture of Barnard’s Loop (the arc running through Orion), I was astonished at the scale of it in the sky. I always had it in my head that (aside from the Milky Way, anyway), most of the astronomical features […]
- Taking the Safety Off
Purism’s explanations for removing various safety features from Librem One’s social network sound like someone explaining why they removed the mirrors, brakes, horns, seat belts, airbags and signals from the cars they’re reselling, because they know those cars are only ever going to be driven on a track where they’ll never have to change lanes […]
- Verizon is Already Trying to Sell Tumblr
Wow, that shoe dropped sooner than I expected. Verizon is already shopping around to sell Tumblr. I figured it would be toward the end of the year, not the middle. After Tumblr’s ham-handed ban on adult content last fall purged a bunch of accounts, sparked a lack of confidence, and triggered an wave of users […]
- The Best Backups are Scheduled Backups
I’m thinking about social media backups again after Prismo lost all its data, and after one of my own test blogs crashed. I can and do automate backups on the VPS where I host my main blogs. I can manually backup my social media accounts, but IIRC none of them offer automatic scheduling. I have […]
- Shouting Into the Less Exploitative Void
Sometimes you choose which social app to open based on who you want to talk to who you want to hear what you want to talk about Sometimes you’re just shouting into the void. At those times, I figure I’ll choose the void that feels less exploitative. That’s part of why I still have a […]
- A Great Eye, Lidless, Wreathed in Flame
How cool is it that we now have an actual image of the event horizon of a black hole! More precisely: it’s the glowing accretion disc of matter falling into the black hole, and the event horizon’s silhouette. The Event Horizon Telescope, actually a worldwide array of telescopes, used interferometry to effectively create a planet-sized […]
- Minimum Viable Blog?
What’s the minimum viable blog feature set these days? Rich text posts (output; the source can be anything) Titles Permalinks Tags/categories Navigation RSS feed Images hosted locally Media embed (remote or local?) Author info for multi-author blogs I won’t back down on RSS/Atom, because there’s SO MUCH you and subscribers can do with it. I […]
- I made my final post on Google+ yesterday
“Babylon 5 was the last of the Babylon stations. There would never be another. It changed the future … and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future … or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, because if we […]
- Year of the Social Media Purge
Flickr and Tumblr have deleted content to fit new business models, MySpace lost 12 years of music, and Google+ is shutting down. Back up your accounts!
- Quick thoughts on Twitter’s prototype changes
As you’ve probably heard, Twitter is planning major changes, and is testing them in a prototype app. Threaded conversations are good, though I think the UI here still needs polish. Hiding the interaction buttons until you click on the post: Yeah, it might make people think a little more. Putting some friction into sharing can […]
- Weighing alternatives to Facebookified Instagram
Like many people, I’ve moved away from Facebook over the last couple of years. I haven’t deleted my account, but I only visit once or twice a month, and it’s been a long time since I’ve posted there. And like many people in that survey, I’ve come to prefer Instagram to Facebook. Friends and family […]
- Welcome to the Future!
We don’t have jet packs or flying cars, but we do have spam advertising remote-controlled robot birds that we can buy to entertain our cats.
- The Smartphone Paradox: Social Media vs. Actually Using the Damn Thing
This post I rescued from my Google+ archive in August 2011 really speaks to how quickly expectations for mobile computing were derailed by the social media feedback loop. Years ago, I wanted a smartphone so I could write down all the blog posts I compose in my head when I’m away from a computer. Now […]
- Hot Take: The Great Flickr Purge
Yahoo was never sure what to do with Flickr after they bought it. And when they realized they’d missed the smartphone revolution, they tried to make it into something it wasn’t suited for (an Instagram equivalent) and couldn’t sustain (cloud storage for ALL your photos!) I remember when they panicked over Instagram and the best […]
- Lunar Eclipse, January 2019
The evening was hectic, and I almost forgot. I had literally just put my son to bed when I remembered, “The eclipse!” We went out to see if the sky was clear. Clouds were rushing across the sky, but for the most part, it was clear, and we had a perfect view of the moon […]
- Earthquake Warning System: Now in Los Angeles!
Because seismic waves are slower than internet signals, it’s possible to send an alert after an earthquake starts, but before the shaking reaches you. A few seconds’ warning is enough to pull over to the side of the road, climb down from a ladder, step away from a high shelf or window, put down a […]
- Why I have more confidence in Flickr/SmugMug than Tumblr/Verizon
Last month, Tumblr and Flickr both announced policy changes that will impact a lot of users, and upset even more. Flickr announced that they’d be shrinking the storage offered to free accounts while adding features to paid accounts. Tumblr announced that all adult content was going to be banned, and immediately set about flagging posts […]
- The 2018 Social Network Experience
What it’s like to use Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Mastodon and Instagram in 2018.
- Internet Explorer Goes Chromium
Microsoft has confirmed: They’re building future versions of Edge on top of Chromium, bringing the web another step closer to monoculture.
- Who are phone notifications for?
Phone notifications aren’t notices, they’re alerts. They should serve your interests as the person using the phone, not the interests of the app or service.
- Trying to get at the features left out of the mobile app
If someone wants to use the functionality you’ve left out of your mobile site or app, and is willing to slog through the desktop site on their phone or tablet, you should at least let them get at it!
- Sort of Blogging on the Fediverse
Over at Key Smash!, I’ve been helping beta-test the Pterotype plugin to hook up a self-hosted WordPress to the Fediverse. It gives WordPress an ActivityPub presence, so new posts and comments can be seen in Mastodon, Pleroma, and other ActivityPub-powered networks, and replies from those networks can come back as comments. But Key Smash! is […]
- A Dynamite Approach
Working through a book on modding Minecraft with the kiddo. It knows its target audience: the first few lessons are all about explosions! It’s written for 1.8, which is a problem because a lot of the structure has changed between then and 1.12, but a decent IDE with auto complete and a sense of common […]
- Possibly Out-There Federation Idea
Now that Pixelfed federation and Pterotype are taking shape, I can hook up my photos and blogging directly into Mastodon and the Fediverse, but you know what would be even cooler? Connecting them to each other. A lot of my blog ideas grow out of photos or statuses that I’ve posted previously, as I find […]
- Delicious Irony
While looking up importers that I could use to move various third-party archives into something self-hosted, I found an add-on to pull Facebook posts into Keyring Social Importers, an extensible WordPress plugin. At the top of the list of built-in services: Delicious. “Hey, I used to have a ton of stuff on Del.icio.us! I don’t […]
- California Earthquake Alerts “Falling Into Place”
KQED reports: Pieces Finally Falling Into Place for Earthquake Warnings in California We still can’t predict them, but data is faster than seismic waves, so we can give people away from the epicenter a few seconds of warning. That’s enough to pull your car over, put down a scalpel, climb down from a ladder, get […]
- How I Use(d) Google+
With yesterday’s news that Google+ is shutting down next August, I found myself looking again at my exported archive from the network. This time I was less interested in the format (which has changed since January – you can export as JSON instead of HTML if you choose, and it includes media now), and more […]
- LOLSpam Returns as a Super-Simple Mastodon Bot
Back when I was comparing social media archives, I considered resurrecting my old LOLspam project as a Mastodon bot. I never quite got around to it, partly because I was able to do most of what I wanted to automate using IFTTT, so I stopped investigating that last 5%. Last night, I threw together a […]
- Upgrade Frustration
A few years back, we replaced our aging Windows PC with a newer system, figuring on using it mainly for office-type applications, casual games, and kids’ games. (Both of us had drifted out of playing the sort of game that really pushes a system’s specs, largely because there was a small person in the house […]
- Bird, Bird, Bird
They were everywhere. But at least most of them were out of the way.
- To the Limit
Kiddo’s been wanting to learn programming, with the ultimate goal of modding Minecraft. We’ve done some Ruby, but he’s impatient, so last night I we started Java with a simple program that repeats a println X times. He wanted to pass it the integer limit. After a few minutes, I suggested we watch a movie […]
- Mixed Feelings: Facebook Has Shut Down (Some) Auto-Posting
I have mixed feelings on Facebook closing down automated posts to personal* profiles. It might cut down on spam, and it will lead to better descriptions on link posts, but it also locks you further into their silo. You can still write elsewhere and link back to it on Facebook, but you can’t use WordPress […]
- Categorizing Social Networks
You can broadly categorize social networks by four factors: How replies are handled, whether you follow people or topics, is it broadcast by default, and is it one service or many?
- Long-Form Twitter: WHY OH WHY?
Twitter is suited for short statements and back-and-forth conversation. It’s terrible for anything long-form. Long Twitter threads* and images filled with text remind me of the old tech support days when users would paste screen shots of error messages into Microsoft Word documents and email me the document. It was a terrible tool for the […]
- GPS Navigation Options We Need
GPS navigation options we need: I know how to get to the freeway from home. I know how to get home from the freeway. Don’t send me down someone else’s narrow residential streets just to save two minutes. If I’m trying to get somewhere other than home after work, I’ll use GPS to get an […]
- Treat Passwords Like Driving: Separate Your Hazards.
The last time I set up a new computer, I was surprised to find that installing a password manager has become a critical part of getting the system ready to use. It used to be that you could pick a few unique passwords for critical services like your primary email and banking sites, and reuse […]
- It’s ALL the off-topic boards now.
Remember when we’d talk on topic-focused message boards? Flame wars got heated, but rarely spilled over. If you dared, you could also visit the off-topic boards, at the risk of seeing people at their worst. Social media dispenses with topics. It’s all the off-topic boards now.
- Flickr vs. Instagram / Who’s in Control?
If Twitter and Facebook are like shouting into the void, hoping someone will hear you, Flickr is like building a gallery and hoping someone will visit. When someone finally does, they’ll see it, and look around.
But that scream on Twitter is already fading on the wind.
- It’s not all here.
I talk about different things in different places. Just because I’m not talking about something on one site, doesn’t mean I’m not talking about it. Just because I’m not talking about something online doesn’t mean I’m not talking about it offline. Just because I’m not talking about something doesn’t mean I’m not learning about it […]
- More on Facebook Re-Engagement: Accidental Post by SMS!
Facebook has offered post-by-SMS for ages. They also offer 2FA-by-SMS…from the same number. And they’ve started sending re-engagement notices…from the same number. What could possibly go wrong?
- Link Sharing and Source Trails
I read a lot of articles in one of two ways: Open a bunch of tabs and then read them one at a time Save a bunch of interesting-looking stories to Pocket and then read them one at a time So by the time I’ve decided to share a link to the story on Facebook […]
- Still getting guest-post spam
I’m not opposed to relevant guest posts on a topic-based blog, but when it’s obvious that they didn’t even look at the site and are just robo-spamming blogs that maybe matched a keyword or something…? I mean, stuff like this: “I read your article https://speedforce.org/2017/11/crisis-earth-x-conclusion-review/. Your readers might be interested in checking out our resources […]
- Facebook Desperately Wants You Back!
Sometimes I’ll go a week or two without logging into Facebook. It doesn’t take very long before they start sending me reminders trying to bring me back. “See Alice’s message and other notifications you’ve missed” “Bob updated their status” “Carol posted a photo” It’s only been since the weekend and Facebook has sent me two […]
- Personas and Facets of Online Identity
Back in the day, @SpeedForceOrg was my comics fan persona on Twitter, as well as the newsfeed for the Flash blog. As more people joined me there, that seemed less appropriate and it became just the newsfeed/editorial voice. I find myself replying with my main account account to people I follow on the other. Which […]
- Super Blue Blood Moon Blur
I woke up way too early to see if the Super Blue Blood Moon* eclipse would be visible or blocked by clouds. (You never know, and I didn’t want to wake up the kiddo in the middle of a school night if there wasn’t anything to see.) I had a clear view, but the street […]
- How Link Shorteners Leave Holes in Your Social Media
Another problem I’ve noticed in my Twitter archive: Lots of URL shorteners and image hosts have shut down or purged their archives. Sure, bit.ly and is.gd and tinyurl and ow.ly are still around. But in the days before t.co, I used a lot of different Twitter apps that used different shorteners or image hosts. I […]
- Searching Your Twitter History: Case of the Missing Context
One of the problems with Twitter’s search capability is that the results are isolated. I’ve said before that one of the keys to making a social account feel like I own it is that I can find things in it if I want to go back later. You can search your old Twitter posts by […]
- SpaceX Rocket Launch Over LA
Yesterday’s Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB, seen across Southern California. I walked outside and saw a bright spot (presumably the rocket) moving across the sky, trailing an expanding shell of vapor. I ran back inside shouting “come see this, fast!” and grabbed the better camera, but it wouldn’t focus, so I snapped the […]
- How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT
Update October 2024: I’ve moved this article over to my troubleshooting site.
- Killing the Goose #NetNeutrality
Well, they did it. The FCC voted 3-2 on party lines to scrap Net Neutrality even though 83% of voters across the board want to keep it, even though scrapping it doesn’t help anyone except the giant cable & phone companies and those they decide to bless with their approval, even though it’s the only […]
- The Internet Needs Your Help
On Thursday, the FCC is planning to vote to allow your cable company to decide which news sites you get to access, which streaming sites you get to use, intercept your search queries, charge you extra for accessing specific sites (even if you already pay a subscription to the site in question), etc. Oh, they’re […]
- Groot, Guardian of the Internet
Groot reminds us that Net Neutrality is critical to internet freedom, and we should call Congress TODAY, before Thursday’s FCC vote to eliminate it.
- It’s amazing more email accounts weren’t hacked back in the 2000s
We’d walk into an internet cafe and rent time on one of their computers. Then we’d log into our primary email account over plain, unsecured HTTP.
- Deciding Where to Post Online
Things I think about when choosing where to post something original, once I’ve decided to post it. Audience. Who’s going to be interested in this? Family? Friends? Fans or hobbyists or people in my industry or some other shared-interest group? People looking for troubleshooting help? Do I just want to say something for the record? […]
- Ordering Photo Prints: Not Quite Interoperable
On the plus side: I was able to order photo prints while hundreds of miles from home on a business trip, and my wife was able to pick them up from the store the next day, which is pretty cool. On the minus side: It was a heck of a lot harder than it should […]
- DST Google Photos Fail
Google Photos is overcompensating for the Daylight Saving Time switch on yesterday’s pictures. Photos taken at 6:00pm are labeled as 7:00pm. Everything from this summer/early fall (which might as well have been summer) is off, in the app anyway (the website shows the right time in PDT), which at least makes more sense than if […]
- The Color out of Cyberspace
The Verge ponders: Has the internet been overtaken by the eldritch horror of Yog-Sothoth? We’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only […]
- Broadcasting “Likes”
I figured out exactly what bugs me about Twitter & Facebook putting friends’ Likes in the timeline.
- Why am I still blogging? (And why about this stuff?)
This blog has been around 15 years. Social media has mostly moved on, to silos like Facebook and Twitter. People don’t follow random personal blogs. Topic-focused sites are what people actually read, and even that mainly following links from silos. Meanwhile there are so many major things going on that make the things I post […]
- Achievement Unlocked: Total Solar Eclipse!
I’ve always wanted to see a total solar eclipse, but until now I never had the opportunity. I’ve caught a number of partial solar eclipses over the years, and quite a few lunar eclipses. This year’s “Great American Eclipse” was perfect: it passed close to Portland, where we have family, and we could visit friends […]
- Battle for the Net: Help Keep the Internet Open!
The FCC wants to eliminate net neutrality, the principle that ISPs should treat all traffic the same, and not block, throttle, or promote data based on what service you’re using or who you’re connecting to. But we can stop them. What’s Net Neutrality? Simple: your cable company shouldn’t decide where you get your news, what […]
- Photobucket Lockdown: Another Chunk of Internet History Dies
Back in the old days, before you could upload photos straight to Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, if you wanted to share pictures online you had to host them yourself. Or if you used something like LiveJournal, you could use their limited image galleries. But with space and bandwidth at a premium in those days, […]
- Why Net Neutrality Matters
The FCC wants to abolish “net neutrality”, which states that ISPs should treat all traffic the same, and not block, throttle, or promote data based on what service you’re using or who you’re connecting to. In short: Your cable company shouldn’t decide where you get your news, what businesses you buy from, which video chat […]
- Badgered Over HTTPS
I’ve been checking in on redirected & dead links lately, a few minutes here and there, updating, replacing, and removing where appropriate. And I’m happy to see that a lot of sites have moved to HTTPS. News sites, online stores, social networks, personal sites, publishers…. Not everyone, of course, but it’s a lot easier than […]
- Pixar, the Space Shuttle, and Kids’ Museum Memories
Went with the family to see Space Shuttle Endeavour and a Pixar-themed exhibit on computer animation at the California Science Center. The 6YO loved the Pixar exhibit, which broke down all the steps to creating a computer-animated movie into separate hands-on centers where you could do things like… Apply different textures and bump maps to […]
- Rogue One (Star Wars) and Imperial IT (SPOILERS!)
Spoilery thoughts on Star Wars’ IT practices and where the Rogue One characters actually find the Death Star plans.
- Science vs Magic–I Mean, Sufficiently-Advanced Technology
An odd contradiction: People are turning away from science as a way to understand the world, even though we keep using more and more advanced technology which is invented using that scientific knowledge.
What if it’s that, in terms of Clarke’s Third Law, the technology we use is sufficiently advanced that it might as well be magic?
- Finally pulled the HTTPS switch!
That took a lot longer than I intended. But I’ve finally made all of Hyperborea.org run over HTTPS. It’s been possible to view the whole site over HTTPS ever since I turned it on for the admin area of this blog years ago, but I left HTTP as the canonical URL and didn’t redirect anything […]
- Recursive Email Scam
I received a scam email claiming to be from the IMF, all about who to contact if you fell for an advance fee fraud scam claiming to be from the IMF. All you have to do to get your money back is send your info and $150 to Barrister so-and-so to set up an account, […]
- Split Opera, Hold the Viking Helmets
The reporting is a bit confusing, but it looks like the Opera web browser has been sold to a Chinese consortium. The group wanted to buy the Norwegian company outright, but the bid failed, and they fell back to an alternate deal. According to NewsWeb: The following business units of Opera will be included in […]
- Finally Upgraded!
After way too long, I finally upgraded the processor on my desktop. I’d held off because that always involves upgrading the motherboard, which is major surgery on the computer, and with a small child who wants to grab everything, that wasn’t really a good idea. Replacing phones and tablets, and replacing the Windows box, sure, […]
- Out with the old tech, in with the…slightly less old.
I finally removed the floppy disk drive from my desktop. I don’t know why it took me so long, except that it wasn’t in the way of anything. Living with a small, inquisitive child means either making hardware changes at night or keeping the work brief, and timing it so that he still has enough […]
- What makes online posts feel “permanent?”
Facebook is testing a feature to make their posts less permanent, but they already feel ephemeral (even though they aren’t). My thoughts on why that is.
- Remember Netbooks?
A few years back, I debated getting a netbook for trips. Improvements in mobile phones and tablets have resolved all the reasons I wanted a mini laptop.
- Adding the S in HTTPS
I finally moved the public side of this blog over to HTTPS last weekend. Traditionally I’ve preferred to put public info on HTTP and save HTTPS for things that need it – passwords, payment info, login tokens, anything that should be kept private — but between the movement to protect more and more of the […]
- Copy-Paste Comment Spam Returns
I woke up to ten or so first-time comments* in the moderation queue at Speed Force this morning. As I started reading them I was briefly confused: they were well-written, specific comments about comic books….that had nothing to do with the posts they were attached to. Complaining about Bendis’ writing on an interview with Paul […]
- Too Many Notifications
It takes forever to get a new phone’s alert settings just right. Every app is configured separately, and they all want your attention.
- I “Liked” Twitter Favorites
It shouldn’t make any difference that Twitter renamed Favorites★ as Likes♥. It’s a coat of paint. But labels do matter.
- Eclipse on the Hill
Neighbors gathered at the top of a hill to watch the eclipsed moon rise above the city, through a frustratingly cloudy sky.
- Battery Life: 1½ Days Doesn’t Matter
Interesting point on phone battery life in Wired’s article on the Google Nexus line: One and a half days doesn’t matter….In the morning you want your battery to look 100 percent when you leave for the day. So either somebody solves it for a week battery, or you have to give reliably one solid day […]
- Android Phone: Died and Reborn
The Android 5.1 OTA trashed my phone. I tried everything I could think of, and finally just installed CyanogenMod. It’s outdated, but it WORKS.
- Venus and Jupiter Conjunction: Three Views
On June 30 2015, Venus and Jupiter lined up more closely than the edges of the moon. Here’s what they looked like that night, 2 nights later, and 10 before.
- Ode to the Nexus 7
The Nexus 7 Android tablet has been discontinued in favor of the Nexus 9. (via Slashdot.) I’ve had a Nexus 7 (2012) almost since the beginning, and while it’s showing its age, I’ve been trying to stretch out its lifetime, because I actually do still use it on a regular basis. Most of what I […]
- 2014: Still Plugging Along
I’ve been making more of an effort to post here this year, though it’s been a long time since the site had many regular readers. I’d like to do more long-form writing, but that’s just not in the cards these days. Some highlights: Los Angeles/California: I’ve been following the demolition of a bridge near LAX to make way […]
- Spamfighting vs. Privacy
As a former email admin, I found this history of spamfighting from a former Gmailer fascinating. The implications of widespread encryption are sobering.
- Linkrot, Ten Years On
I found an old post about linkrot in which I wondered how many links would still be around ten years later. It’s been ten years, so I looked to find out.
- Working Around a Solar Eclipse (Oct 2014)
I couldn’t go anywhere special for this partial eclipse, but I did check in on a grove of trees near the office for a few minutes here and there.
- I’m Going to Miss the iPod Click Wheel
I prefer the older iPods for listening to music in the car, because a touch screen is a horrible interface for pause/play or skip while driving.
- Did Smartphones Make Watches Obsolete?
Smart watch announcements always lead to people saying phones make them obsolete. But phones aren’t the new wristwatch, they’re the new pocket watch.
- This Fan Used To Post Tons Of Comic-Con Coverage, Then Stopped. Can You Guess Why?
Social media has enabled fans to follow SDCC without setting foot in San Diego, but being part of the conversation has a cost for those at the con.
- Autogenerate THIS!
A new comment spam starts out telling me how great my articles are…and then says I should auto-generate them instead.
- Wi-Fi Sprouter (The Seeds Are All Right)
Some things to consider about the experiment with seeds and a wifi router. Plus, we tried a similar experiment ourselves and the seeds grew just fine.
- Lunar Eclipse = Front-Yard Astronomy (Photos)
One of the nice things about lunar eclipses is how easy they are to watch. No special equipment needed, just a clear view, even from the city.
- Reading, Online vs. Off…or is it Screen vs. Print?
We know people read differently online than offline, and now spillover effects are appearing. But do different types of screens have the same effect?
- Gray Moon Rising
A few nights ago I watched the moon rise. Normally it’s yellow or orange when it’s at the horizon, but to my surprise, this time it just looked gray.
- Pingback Problem: 162K WordPress Sites Tricked into DDoS
It’s always annoying when someone figures out a way to exploit intentional behavior, especially when it’s a key part of the design.
- Five Ways to Use a Smart Watch at Comic-Con
Reading up on wearable computing got me wondering: I probably wouldn’t use a smart watch every day, but would it help at special events like conventions?
- Saving Ideas from the Contracting Blogosphere
Special-purpose online communities have given way to spots on major hubs like Facebook. I’ve moved a lot of old content from those networks to this site.
- Mobile: Design for Offline
Mobile apps shouldn’t stop working in a dead zone.
- Somebody Hears You
Every time I listen to Vienna Teng’s “The Hymn of Acxiom,” it gets creepier. It’s beautiful, it’s haunting…and it’s all about how big data is tracking…
- Wrong Number (Email Edition)
Have you ever abandoned an email address? Did you make sure everyone switched to your new one? If your old provider has reissued the address to someone new, your old contacts could still be sending mail to someone else with your personal information. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but InformationWeek reports that Yahoo! users who’ve […]
- This Email Is Not Spam
Whenever you see “This email is not spam,” think of Obi-Wan Kenobi saying, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
- The Self as a Touchscreen
Interesting idea: The Human Body as Touchscreen Replacement. The downside to using a touchscreen over something with physical controls is that you lose that instant feedback of where the buttons are. (Skip a song on an old-school iPod while driving? Easy. Do the same on a touchscreen? That’s trickier.) Your own location sense plus knowing […]
- Apple opens dictionary, abandons lawsuit over “App store”
It’s about time common sense prevailed. “App store” describes a store for apps as generically as “book store” describes a store for books.
- Planetary Triangle
Last night I had a clear view of the Mercury, Venus and Jupiter conjunction, but no camera. Power lines crossed my view tonight, but at least I got a photo.
- Overloaded Cell Network? Send a Text
BoingBoing explains why SMS messages are more likely to get through than phone calls or mobile data during a large emergency. (Short version: They’re async, so the phone or tower can retry later, and they’re momentary, so they don’t tie up a channel like a call would.) The article doesn’t bring it up, but I’d […]
- Cassette…Now I Remember
I tried to explain what an audio cassette was to a two-year-old. It turned out to be trickier to demonstrate than I expected.
- St Patrick’s Day Moon and Jupiter
I almost missed this near-approach, but fortunately I had to make an early-evening grocery run and looked up at the sky.
- What’s Wrong With Facebook Updating Itself on Android?
Imagine a car recall, except instead of getting a notice from the manufacturer, you hear a noise in your garage and find someone messing with your car.
- Photos: Comet Watch LA
An evening watching the sun set above the clouds, a crescent moon pop into existence, Jupiter through a telescope, a red moonset, and of course a comet!
- Losing Opera to WebKit
Why I’m disappointed in Opera’s switch to WebKit, even though I’m a fan of open-source and Free-with-a-capital-F software.
- Tablets and the Geek Bubble (i.e. “Who uses THAT?”)
A lot of geeks don’t consider that someone else might have a different use case, workflow or need. Disdain for tablets is the latest expression of this.
- Backup Lesson from the Emerald City Comicon Hack
An attacker deleted not just their site, but their backups. Lesson learned: make sure that an attack on your server doesn’t have access to your backups as well.
- Earthquake Alerts
Interesting idea: We can’t predict earthquakes, but we can broadcast alerts faster than the shaking travels, giving people a few seconds to prepare. (Save your work, climb down off a ladder, etc.) Quake experts call for an advance-warning system for California (Originally posted on Google+)
- Moon and Jupiter Conjunction
Two views of the moon/Jupiter conjunction of January 21, 2013, one taken with a phone and the other with a somewhat better camera.
- Recent Links: Geography, Internet and Comics
Live wind patterns, historical travel times, reliability of social networking, the importance of web page weight, emergency gadget power, UNIX Daemons and Seurat’s Justice League.
- Top Posts of 2012
Troubleshooting, tablet devices, comic cons and a solar eclipse were the subjects of the top five most-read posts of the year.
- Who Owns Your Online Profile? Thoughts on Instagram, Facebook, and Blogging
When you live your online life through a social network, you give up control. If Facebook is no longer around 10 years from now, what happens to all your photos?
- Legitimate Spam Reports
Return Path says the majority of spam complaints relate to legitimate emails. There are two issues here: A lot of people don’t make a distinction between “email I don’t want anymore” and “email I didn’t want in the first place,” even though the appropriate responses are different. (One deserves an unsubscribe. The other deserves reporting, […]
- How I Actually Use My Nexus 7 Android Tablet
I prefer the tablet to the smartphone when I’m at home, or any time I want to do something for more than a few minutes. But what about the desktop/laptop?
- Visiting Endeavour on its Final Journey
Spotting the space shuttle from a mile away, then walking out to see it up close while it sat in a Los Angeles parking lot.
- Nexus 7 + USB Cable = Finally! Upload Photos Without a Laptop!
You can attach USB devices to a Nexus 7 Android tablet with a $1 cable adapter. Even thumb drives and cameras work, though you need an app to read them.
- Mobile Apps and Spotty Connections
Mobile connectivity varies a lot, even in an area with dense cellular coverage. Apps really shouldn’t rely on the connection to be perfect.
- End of the Blogroll
With blogrolls dropped from new installations of WordPress, it’s time to rethink the idea of global link lists on a modern blog.
- The Culture of *Now*
Are you sharing something about a current event online? It had better be really current, because the internet has a very short attention span.
- Watching Endeavour’s Final Flight Through LA
Half of the people at my office turned out to watch the space shuttle’s final flight around Los Angeles.
- 10-Year Blogaversary
When I set up a B2 site just for kicks in 2002, I didn’t really expect to still be posting to it ten years later.
- Yes, It’s Down
Wow. The GoDaddy outage took down downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
- Forgotten Edge
There’s nothing like finding an edge case, thinking “Oh no, I didn’t take that into account!”…then checking the code and realizing that you already did.
- Nexus 7: First Impressions from a Tablet Newbie
First impressions: Good performance, size well-balanced for reading, better than using my phone to type. Sort of regretting that it’s wifi-only.
- SEO Entitlement
SEO articles often make me cringe. The attitude is that Google owes them traffic because they jumped through all the right hoops, and how DARE they change those hoops!
- Celebrating Curiosity at Planetfest 2012
Timed for the Mars Curiosity landing, Planetfest featured mock-ups of capsules and landers, space art, meteorites, robots, speakers and of course a party.
- Not “Frictionless Sharing” Again…
Frictionless sharing is just a way to generate noise. I don’t want to know every article you read on some website. I want to know which articles you think are worth sharing.
- Facebook Sync Messes Up Users’ Address Books
Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books: Remember how Facebook sneakily changed your default email address to @facebook.com? … Some smartphone users…are reporting that their on-phone address books have been silently updated to make @facebook.com email addresses the default way to send a message to their contacts.Graham Cluley at Sophos The lesson: Whenever […]
- If you wish, charts and diagrams will be provided to show you precisely how wonderful your blog is to me
So I’ve been getting generic comment spams on Speed Force today, the kind that look like someone took a bunch of compliments and a thesaurus and stuck them in a salad shooter. I started reading. I started reading this one aloud: Thank you a lot for providing individuals with remarkably pleasant chance to discover important secrets from […]
- False Choices, Free Culture and Music.
It’s not just “pay for everything in this manner” vs. “take what you want.” Tech has transformed media distribution, so we need new compensation models.
- End of Opera Unite & Opera Widgets
Over the years, Opera has introduced many features that became standard across web browsers, but some just haven’t caught on. Opera Unite and widgets are being removed.
- Google+, Blogging and the 90-9-1 Rule
Activity on Google+ depends on where you’re looking, and participation rates follow the same patterns you’ll find elsewhere on the internet: many lurkers, fewer posters.
- Not Sure About a Laptop Phone Dock
Techcitement writes: The Universal Lapdock Is Coming: Enter the ClamBook, the first Android-compatible product by iPad keyboard-case maker ClamCase. Using a single MHL cable…the ClamBook provides an Android-laptop experience delivered by your phone. The problem I have with this idea is that it’s essentially a second device, but one that can’t be used without the […]
- Missed Transit
No luck catching the transit of Venus, but hey, at least I got to see the eclipse last month!
- Photos: Solar Eclipse from Los Angeles (May 2012)
I went up into the hills to view the eclipse and ran into dozens of other people with the same idea…and got to look through their telescopes, welding helmets and more.
- Delicious, Twitter, and Linkblogging
Link-sharing site Delicious had a feature to auto-bookmark everything you post publicly on Twitter. Convenient, especially if you use Twitter for link sharing.
- File Transfer
I just spent too long troubleshooting a failed file transfer by email. Appropriately enough, it turns out this cartoon is the top search result for “file transfer.”