Posts

One of the nice things about USB-C is its simplicity, right? No more figuring out which side is up to plug into a device. The connector is super-friendly. But… that’s where the simplicity stops.

Clearly nobody taught Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the establishment GOP the lesson of the frog and the scorpion. It would be funny if it was a plot on a modern West Wing, but it just seems like a harbinger of more problems to come. After 11 tries, the U.S. House of Representatives has failed to appoint a speaker, due to in-fighting and extortion from the most extreme wing of an already extreme party. ...

After a few tries to put Fedora on the MacBook Pro 2015, I auditioned a number of other Linux distros and wound up going with Pop!_OS. I gave Chrome OS Flex a brief spin, but it wasn’t quite my jam. If you like Chrome OS and have an old PC or Mac you’d like to give a little more life to, I give it a thumbs up. I was able to install some regular Linux apps on it as well as the standard Chrome apps, but found Firefox to be sluggish and generally just didn’t click with Chrome OS.

Tonight, not for the first time, I learned about a “breaking news” item from Mastodon. That’s been happening more often over the past few weeks, whereas this time last year I’d have gotten this kind of thing via Twitter first. This seems significant to me because Mastodon is making the leap from “a small group of people talking about the service itself a lot” to “several of my friends are here and there’s some community” to “a news source” rather quickly. It took Twitter a long time to cross that chasm. And it’s one of the things that made Twitter valuable, if also a primary source of doom scrolling. ...

Here it is, finally, the last day of 2022. None too soon. As the meme says, I’m going into 2023 real quiet-like and hoping for a better year. I’ve set aside the idea that a new year means a new me, or that I have the ability to embark on a massive self-improvement campaign just because the odometer has rolled over on another year. But I like to reflect on some things I’d like to have done come this time next year. ...

Home from a great visit with my brothers. Enjoy some cat pics! Bubby looking dignified Willow giving side-eye

Apple has decided that my 2015 MacBook Pro isn’t deserving of the latest macOS, so I’m looking to run Linux on it to get a few more years out of it. My first plan was to put Fedora on it, but Fedora 36 and 37 have failed to " set a new efi boot target." Chrome OS Flex installed just fine, but I don’t know if I want to stick with Chrome OS long-term. It’ll do if all I use it for is couch surfing, but I might like to turn this machine into a home server running a few VMs or similar. ...

Long day, let’s hit the links. Great post from Cat Valente about the continual ruination of online social communities by corporations and malicious actors. (My words.) " Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media." From Cat, “It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control. Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.” ...

Bit of a rant here, so be warned… Caught two threads today with the general gist of “why don’t people just…” –specifically, why haven’t people learned from Twitter or just sucked it up and started using 2FA, no matter what level of computer literacy they might be at. Why don’t open source projects just stand up Mattermost instead of Discord? Why haven’t users finally learned and started adopting 2FA? In the first instance, I think people just imagine standing up a service and don’t think about the long-term implications of offering a service like Mattermost for a project. There’s a ton of work, and potentially a fair amount of money, involved in offering up a service that’s going to be used by a lot of users 24/7. ...

This strikes me as more wishful thinking than likely, but Nikki Usher over on NeimanLab is predicting " the year of the RSS reader" to replace Twitter and curb the deluge of newsletters in our inboxes.