Nerdy but fun, this option in Wikipedia that leads you to random wikipedia articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The link will get you to a random articles every time you follow it.
A healthy alternative to doom-scrolling.
Watched Un P’tit Truc En plus. Seen in the Filmhuis Alkmaar. It is a very funny and sensitive movie by Artus about a group of people with disabilities with two bank robbers hiding amongst them.
We are planning our holiday to Uzbekistan, and this amazing documentary on YouTube is better than many travel books.
Enjoyed Robert Rodriguez – Ten Minute Film School
Liked this documentary about Cindy Sherman.
Cool article on what the internet looked like in 1994.
That is about the time I started dialing into the internet, I guess. Maybe I was somewhat earlier. Using an old IBM desktop and a 9600 baud modem.
The Indexed blog by Jessica Hagy just just freaking great!
I mean, this can only be created by a beautiful mind:
I can not resist sharing this Boing Boing article about Ray Bradbury and how he wrote on a coin-operated typewriter.
The iHeart radio podcast company creates podcast enshittification with A.J. Jacobs very nice podcast The Puzzler. Of the 14 minutes a podcast lasts, 5 minutes are filled with ads, that is 35%.
Yes, Tim Ferriss, arguably the best podcaster out there, preambles and postambles his podcasts with 5 minutes of ads; also annoying, but at least his podcasts are between 1 and 2 hours long!
As European users, we can opt out of Instagram and Facebook using our posts for AI training. I’ve exercised this control, as I am the product of Facebook and Instagram, but I strive to limit their use of me as such.
Opting out on Instagram looks deliberately cumbersome. However, from Facebook, which is also owned by Meta, I received an email with very simple instructions.
Now, I am curious if they can prove they are not using my data for AI.
Earlier I wrote that today there are excellent search engines as an alternative to Google search. To repeat the argument against Google search use: with Google search, in addition to being an Internet user, you are also part of the commercial product a product of Google, with all the consequences for reliability of results.
Another way to consume content from the Internet is through RSS feeds. Google doesn’t like that either, because with that, they can’t show you ads either. I switched to Newsblur after using locally installed QuietRSS for a while. I was missing the shared nature of the web, so I switched back to a tool with a web interface. Newsblur is good and has a fair price, but there are excellent other alternatives out there.
About two weeks ago, I wrote that I haven’t used Google for quite some time now, and I am missing nothing. Incidentally, Seth Godin writes this week how he uses Perplexity as an alternative to Google. Perplexity was not on my list; I haven’t researched Perplexity thoroughly yet, but I trust Seth’s words.
There is no good reason why you should still rely on Google search for your search engine. Read this excellent article on Google’s practices, and Big Tech chills run down your spine. There are ample good alternative search engines these days that do have integrity:
Bing (though also Big Tech and historically suspect)
And there are more.
Lately, I’ve been using Ecosia and DuckDuckGo side by side. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything about Google.