Links
🔗 Hiss!
Seeing @Miraz’s post about the Morepork reminded me of this poem by C. J. Dennis that was read to us as a kid. It was in this beautifully illustrated picture book, with thick borders full of, I guess, the illustrations of the subject’s imagination.
On it, their producer was lamenting not having somewhere to post a link to something being spoken about. No mention of show notes because I’m not convinced “big podcast” even knows they exist.
I’ve complained about this before and I haven’t seen any improvements. It’s as if the concept of making show-notes or even a website containing the links you mention on your podcast never cross these producers minds. That it’s perfectly okay to read URLs aloud and expect people to remember. It’s such an odd phenomenon.
🔗 Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
A really great read.
I’ve never been on a cruise. This, plus the many jokes I’ve heard from comedians that have worked cruises, is probably the closest experience I’ll ever get to cruising. After reading it, it’s definitely not for me.
🔗 Insanity in the Air: The crash of Pakistan International Airlines flight 8303
A facinating post. One of those posts where you know the writer knows what they’re talking about, and has clearly done a lot of research for the piece. Will definitely take a look at their other posts.
This is probably worth trying. I know for myself that I get lost in the day-to-day activities of work that I loose a sense on what we’ve accomplished during the week. Besides, Confluence has got this blogging feature which never seems to get used.
🔗 The internet used to be ✨fun✨
Lot of interesting posts here about the personal web, both current and old school. I’ve been ducking in and out of this for a week now. Via the HV Discord.
Via A Learning a Day by Rohan. It resonated with me as well.
🔗 RS.S Joy
This was shared in the Hemispheric View Discord a few days ago. A lot of really good blogs listed (enrolled? As in blogroll?) there. I took a look at it yesterday and was just ducking in and out of blogs for ages.
🔗 Pika
Seeing this makes me want to try it. I think I have a problem: I want to try all of the blogging CMSes. But I have no need for it now, so I’ll just keep a link to it here for later.
🔗 The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more
Ingenuity has been an incrediable achievement. The engineers at NASA should be so proud of themselves. It’s sad to see this chopper grounded now, but seeing it fly for as long as it did has been a joy. Bravo!
🔗 Let’s make the indie web easier
Inspiring post. I will admit that while I was reading it I was thinking “what about this? What about that?” But I came away with the feeling (realisation?) that the appetite for these tools might be infinite and that one size doesn’t fit all. This might be a good thing.
All you have to do is dream up a good URL at your domain and redirect it to the feed’s URL provided by whatever service you use to host your stuff. And then that’s where you tell folks to subscribe.
It’s easy to forget (like I do) that there’s nothing magical about an RSS feed. It’s just one more thing served by HTTP at a URL. And thus, is useable with the real magic here which is HTTP redirects.
This is a brilliant idea. The only thing I’ll add is just to make those RSS feeds discoverable.
🔗 Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 Ban Takes Effect; Apple Appeals
The ITC’s ruling was subject to a potential veto by U.S. President Biden by December 25th, but today, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a statement that it has decided against vetoing the ITC ruling, meaning that the ruling is now final.
It seems odd to me that Apple was expecting a reprieve from the White House over this patient dispute with Masimo. Issuing a veto looks like choosing one US company over another. Doesn’t seem like good political optics to me. Maybe it seemed to Apple it was worth a shot. 🤷♂️
🔗 Hardcore Software: //build It and They Will Come (Hopefully) (paywall)
I remember this Build conference. I was using Windows 7 at the time and it was exciting to see Windows 8 previewed like this. It was a major departure from what I was used to, and I was eager awaiting the Ars Technica reviews of the OS, the apps, and how things like contracts will work for developers.
But… it was an excitement I had for others. I was less than excited about the idea of seeing the desktop take a backseat to this brand new world of Metro and touch based interactions. I guess I was not the only one.
It’s quite a shame really. The devs at Microsoft clearly put a lot of work into re-enginerring the entire OS.
It’s thoughtful posts like this that keeps me on Micro.blog.
Also, chalk me up as one who’d rather keep link previews out of the timeline. I posted a link in Discord and the preview was so obnoxious I wish I could hide it (really Discord? Why can’t I hide it?).
🔗 PlayStation is erasing 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customer libraries
The realization has forced people to more deeply scrutinize their digital media purchases and subscriptions and how they value digital content. It’s also leading to calls for investment in hard copies of media.
I still believe that it’s possible to have a (semi-)perminenant representation of media in the digital realm. You just need to make sure it’s in an open, non-DRMed, file that exists on your file system. I know, easier said than done. But it might be time for me to be better here than I have been.
🔗 Hardcore Software 065. SharePoint: Office Builds Our Own Server (link pay-walled)
Yes, believe it or not, I’m reading about how SharePoint was built. I never had a lot of experience with SharePoint myself: although I did work at places which used it, I tried to stay away from Office documents as much as I could, sticking to things like wikis. And yes, I can understand why others may find it pretty crummy (the post gives a few examples of how crummy). But I did find some ideas SharePoint had quite interesting, such as the “everything is a list” concept. I do appreciate this consistent through-line in the product design, much like Unix’s “everything is a file” philosophy. I also like the fact that this extends to user-defined lists, like a very simple database.
Anyway, this paragraph caught my eye:
The idea of Office extended by a website for each Office user and team was incredibly important simply because it made using Office better. It was also a vision we had from the time we acquired FrontPage—everyone should have their own place on the web where it is easy to keep their work and share it with others. We were clearly too early. As we will see it was not just that the world was not ready, the world was anti-ready. SPS fit with the products of the era that remained top-down, complex, and under the full control of IT.
I yearn for the day when organisations make it easy for any employee to whip up an internal webpage for their team. Documents and wikis are nice, but they’re just so limiting in how they show information. The freedom to use real web technologies to present something as best you think you can, while also keeping the data “in house” (password protected, stored on servers the company controls, etc) is just an area on office tech that’s missing.
Case in point: I would love to be able to build a website showing the the status of backlog items that I can share with my team. I don’t want to manage the raw data myself: that’s all being tracked in Jira anyway. But Jira sucks, and it’s really difficult to show an overview of work, especially when they span multiple epics. Having something like a simple dashboard which will pull Jira ticket status and display them as maybe progress bars would be great.
But where am I to host this? Probably not best to do so on the open web.
See also the idea of small databases.
🔗 DOS_deck
Experience classic games with modern convenience at DOS_deck. With full controller support and a carefully curated game collection, enjoy timeless classics and hidden gems, readily available for instant play in your web browser on devices you already own.
Filing this away to try later. Also interesting to see they’re using JS-Dos for this, the same thing being used by F5 To Run, which is cool.
Via Ars Technica.
Seeing everyone blog (yes, actually blog) about their default apps over the last two weeks has been absolutely wonderful. Robb has been doing a fantastic job maintaining an index of these posts, and has now added a network graph showing the links between them. Works great.
100% this!
It was only a year or so ago that I found out that RSS discovery was a thing (coincidentally-but-probably-not-really it was also a year or so ago when I first read Manton’s book which mentions this).
Before that, if there was a site I wanted to subscribe to, and there was no RSS link on the page itself, I wouldn’t bother. Apart from thinking that I needed the link to the RSS feed to subscribe, I also got burned so often by sites that didn’t even have RSS that I just defaulted to assuming there was no way to read their site in my feed reader.
Browsers are getting better at surfacing this though. Vivaldi now shows an RSS indicator in the address bar when it detects that the site has one. But it’s small, and I’m usually not looking at the address bar after entering the URL, so it’s easy to miss. Really, nothing beats putting a link on the site itself.
Now, if you escuse me for a second, I just need to check that I’ve got a link to an RSS feed on my site…