First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here is a hand-curated archive of fictional brands that appear in media. Here is a man who invented his own set of workouts based on wielding a nerfed sledgehammer, called the shovelglove.
Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here’s mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here’s mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That’s nice. I don’t believe it’s really going to be that simple, though.
On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That’s a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The Z-lib archive is not lost; some brave souls are maintaining the underlying archive. Here are some older, less illegally shared files including an account of the fall of the Berlin wall shared in 2001.
TL;DR I’m switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code).
I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it’s owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult. But for a long time, Goodreads has dominated. I think the main reason is social inertia: people are on Goodreads because other people are on Goodreads. If you really want to see what your friends are reading, and most people are on Goodreads, you had better be on Goodreads too. For that reason, any challenger to Goodreads had better be a lot better, not just a little.
Many who participate in the IETF are most comfortable making what we believe to be purely technical decisions; our process favors technical merit through our well-known mantra of “rough consensus and running code.”
Nevertheless, the running code that results from our process (when things work well) inevitably has an impact beyond technical considerations, because the underlying decisions afford some uses while discouraging others. While we believe we are making only technical decisions, in reality, we are defining (in some degree) what is possible on the Internet itself.
This impact has become significant. As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments, revolutionize social orders, swing elections, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying that of others.
Nowadays when everyone is on lockdown and there are days with nothing but spaces of time to pass, nights too, and you can make a hot tea or a coffee and sit down but when you look there’s nothing to read. You can’t access those unique voices writing about the things they care about, that are happening to them.
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week.
I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of “build minutes” on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the “Photo” part of my site to compress and resize them. So, in the short term those have been removed; I wasn’t really presenting them very well anyway.
Note: There’s a follow up to this because I’ve since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more.
I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following:
My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and playing with this Hugo site, but really it would work just fine without much work at all.