Links 2 September 2023

Large organizations using open source AI should wonder what they are really adopting. I think large institutions like (benevolent) governments, banks, energy companies, banks, … – I probably mean those companies that have a lot of money and the capacity to change the system – should develop a more sophisticated and progressive open source agenda to create a human-oriented framework. Read Cory Doctorow’s Open AI isn’t.

This is so good: 100 things I know – Mari Andrew

Kevin Kelly: the best magazine articles ever

Into Linda Barry. Great video of her drawing workshop. I am reading What Is It.

Tried fixing the battery my iPhone 8 through iFixit. Broke a display cable doing that. My fault I did not read the instuction well enough. Great tools though. Fix everything.

Apple announced Apple self repair. Probably anticipating Right to Repair directions by the EU. I wonder why these kind of laws never comes from the US.

Days of rain

In Japan we experienced days of rain. In the Netherlands we can have similar experiences. Mostly accompanied by lots of wind. For me it’s in the end the wind that gets on my nerves. The rain has a fresh touch, but the continuous noise of the storm I find hard to bear.

Last week we have a couple oof storm-free Japanese-type rainy days. Between showers I managed to take a nice walk with the dog, an umbrella, and my camera.

Een handvol stof – Evelyn Waugh

een handvol stof

Nooit Waugh gelezen, met het idee dat het nogal saai zou zijn. Ik vond dit boek, Een handvol stof van Evelyn Waugh, in de nalatenschap van mijn vader die een betere smaak had. Dit moois heb ik dan dus bijna moeten missen.

Een jong Engels upper class gezin met een kind leidt een gezapig leven. Gepamperd door butlers, tuinmannen en ander huishoudelijk personeel slepen de dagen voorbij. Men gaat vroegtijdig aan de drank, gebruikt lunches en diners buiten de deur bij clubs waar je gezien moet worden.

Als zijn vrouw Brenda vreemd gaat, en van hem wil scheiden en hem kaal wil plukken, lijkt Tony pas wakker te worden. Hij weigert verdere medewerking aan de echtscheiding en vertrekt op ontdekkingsreis naar Midden-Amerika.

In Londen wordt het diner om 2100 opgediend, zit Tony middenin het oerwoud van Brazilië. eerst drinkt hij nog chocolademelk voor het slapengaan, maar langzaamaan voltrekt zich een catastrofe. Hij en dr. Messinger, zijn compagnon tijdens de reis, worden verlaten door de lokale begeleiders.

Ook de affaire van Brenda loopt niet goed af.

Tony wordt ziek en hallucineert een stroom trivialiteiten uit zijn vroegere gezapige leventje. Al hallucinerend bereikt hij de stad die het doel was van de tocht door de jungle. Maar ook de stad blijkt een hallucinatie. Hij wordt opgepikt door een in de jungle achtergebleven blanke man. Deze man gijzelt hem en wil dat Tony hem voor altijd blijft voorlezen uit de boeken van Dickens die hij zelf niet kan

Evelyn Waugh

lezen.

In Engeland heeft de neef van Tony zijn grote huis Hetton geërfd hij zet het gezapige leventje van Tony door.

Links Thursday 24 August

Tech: backing up this site with BackwpUp plugin.

Markdown cheat sheet.

Trying to get my daughter’s Kobo reader working again. She let it sit for a while and missed an apparent crucial update. The normal Kobo update process does not work anymore. So I looked around and found that Kobo reader is open source and therefore there is a community helping with questions such as mine.

https://cheat.readthedocs.io/en/latest/kobo.html
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=145177

These worked like a charm. Does require some tech skills.
I like my Kindle, but this feels much better then the locked in Amazon device

How to get new ideas by Paul Graham.

The site brr about life on the South Pole is fantastic.

New bike or train more

A friend (not a proverbial one this time) loves riding his racing bike. He also loves riding the newest models with the newest technology, preferably expensive lightweigth ascesories. He has a busy family life as well. The argument that wins his wife over to acquire the latest fancy bike is:

‘Shall I buy a this new bike, or shall I train more hours?’

It’s not the bike, it’s the ride.

Wandeling Verlaat, Terdiek, Nieuwe Niedorp

Zeer uneventful, zoals je het wilt, deze wandeling van Verlaat naar Nieuwe Niedorp en terug. Ik passeer het plaatsje Terdiek, waar ik nog nooit van gehoord had, ondanks dat ik hier toch in de buurt ben opgegroeid. Mooi stuk langs het Kanaal Alkmaar-Kolhorn.

wandelroute

Links of the past few days

Transcribe text safely with mygoodtape.

Read old books without having to own them on open library.

Substack CEO kills Substack. For me at least. All the things you fear when using someone else’s platform to create content become real. Read an perfect analysis of an interview with him
on techdirt here.

Run your own WordPress instead, or other web tool. When on your self-hosted WordPress (not wordpress.com), use their WordPress newsletter tool.

Paul Graham (from Y Combinator, not the photographer) on how to do great work.

In this issue from David Perell’s newletter I read

Many Silicon Valley investors say that fast response times for important messages correlate highly with a founder’s long-term success.

Gets me going, because such a sentence lacks reason and humility:

  • Who are the Sillicon Valley investors, and why are they attributed any general wisdom?
  • Who are these successful founders?
  • Correlation is something else then causation.
  • Fast response times for important messages likely also correlate to early death by stress.

Learned a new word for an interesting phenomenon, skeuomorphic, via The Wippet.

skeuomorphic wall
Nikko, Japan

RSS Reader adventure

I ran out of max feeds on Feedly. I like the tool, but since I do not want to any more subscription-based software, so I looked for an alternative RSS reader.

Newsblur came up as best

It is a service but based on open source.

Tried to install in on my laptop.

  • Install Docker Desktop
  • Clone Newsblur repo
  • Install cygwin – I am running on Windows here – need to make newsblur
  • make nb

Runs for a while, tries to run a sudo. That won’t work on Windows… 🙁

Immediately gave up. Considered for a minute running it on my Linux server, but I am actually looking for something simple.

Then tried RSS owl

Install, needs Java. Installed Java.

Needs Java 1.5. That is a very old version.

Gave up.

Tried QuiteRSS

QuiteRSS screenshot RSS reader

Installed like a charm.

Unfortunately no OPML import. So took some time to copy from the OMPL export from feedly into this tool.

Now trying this out.

Lovely old-style interface.

Reminds me of the old RSS reader I had years ago.

Links friday 18 aug 2023

Good to know these hand made USB cables with hidden implant exist.

I am all in favor of editing flat files. They are portable, easy to change editors, platform independent, and very easy to search across, just using your Linux, Windows or MacOS search capabilities. All my notes are in simplified markdown. When I need to generated html from it, this service is so easy: markdowntohtml.

Craid Mod’s article about what I would call the Zen of Coding.

Alan Jacobs’s article on why he doesn’t use Canvas specifically, and warn for data harvesting and ‘surveillance capitalism’. Instead, as I do, he prefers open source en open web technologies instead. Plus some wise words on ChatGTP and how it will not help his students any more than other tools.