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.
Finally integrated my triptychs program into this site. Follow this link.
Or in an iframe, as below here:
Cars don’t interest me much, but this Hongqi is wonderfully ugly.
Carters Beach February 2023, I want to go back to.
Japan
Amazon makes us pay too much, which is friendly phrasing for Amazon rips off all off.
Don’t buy through Amazon anymore. I quit.
Reading comics digitally. On Windows I use SumatraPDF which is good in comic book reader formats. On my iPad I use Chunky. I use the excellent Calibre tool to manage my ebooks. It also has great tools to convert one ebook format to the other, transfer books to my ereader (currently an old Kindle Paperwhite 7th generation, I believe more than 5 years old. I like it despite its useless web browser).
Test your environmental footprint and how to better the world.
Here is the Dutch version I took. My usage result was 2.6 earths, which I did not really understand as a measure. But it is too high, yet somewhat below the average person in NL. This is the UK version of the footprint calculator. This has different questions, are a different measure as outcome. Most interesting is, of course, the advice about what you can do to reduce your footprint.
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.
Tech: backing up this site with BackwpUp plugin.
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.
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:
Learned a new word for an interesting phenomenon, skeuomorphic, via The Wippet.
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.
The website that photographer Elsa Dorfman (famous for her large scale Polaroid portraits) created is still such a lovely piece of work. I love Elsa’s writings. Some parts are thrilling. Like the NoHairDay project No Hair Day. Other parts are so casual about her acquaintance with famous people. Like Ginsberg and Dylan.
She was a beautiful human being.