Photos for Mac isn’t a long term photo library option – Colin Devroe
Perhaps you’re not worried about moving from Mac to Windows or from Photos to another library manager, but you should be. Apple has already killed iPhoto in favor of Photos for Mac and lost a lot of functionality when they did. Who is to say they won’t do that again? Or discontinue the Mac altogether some day?
The Old Reader: behind the scenes - Thanks, Google!
While there is good stuff in there about #RSS, this is the bit that, to me, matters more:
But online publishing isn’t supposed to be easy. And being an informed citizen isn’t supposed to be easy, either. The idea that we just casually check our phone every hour or so and Google, Twitter, or Facebook would give us a quick dose of everything we need to read is a fantasy.
"David Simon | Fare thee well, scrotelicks."
PESOS from Reading.am.
These are not threats, you gutless wonder…
they are insults.
"That Helsinki ‘summit’ | Memex 1.1"
PESOS from Reading.am.
"Language Log » Menefreghismo"
PESOS from Reading.am.
"David Simon | Tony"
PESOS from Reading.am.
"Thermidor - Part 1"
PESOS from Reading.am.
FUEGO “Did you even READ the piece?”
I'm not convinced. I'd also like to know what happens to my data. As usual, am I the customer or the product?
The business model of the Internet is surveillance contd.
The moral is, in a way, obvious: it’s a confirmation of Bruce Schneier’s original observation that “surveillance is the business model of the Internet”. Being a pedant, I would have said “of the Web”, but since many people can’t distinguish between the two, we’ll leave Bruce’s formulation stand.
IndieWeb generation 4 and hosted domains | Manton Reece
Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names.
Cannot say this often enough.
Why I cannot post bookmarks to Known automatically | Jeremy Cherfas
I've set out in as much detail as I can understand what is happening when I try to POST a Bookmark with a Description to WithKnown.
And to add insult to injury, I'm adding this Description by hand, so I can include a blockquote:
[I]f you try to POST anything other than the URL of the bookmark, it simply never appears. With the help of good IndieWeb people, especially and , we worked out what was happening.
Lifetime achievement award for the man who invented the webcam
So interesting to see this, not only as a piece of history but also as a personal reminder.
Back when the web was young and shiny, an otherwise extremely intelligent BBC television producer, a friend at the time, asked my help in understanding the promise of the new shinyness, especially in visual terms. I told him about the famous coffee pot web cam (and maybe, also, about the link to the Coke machine).
"Isn't that great," I said, "that you can see whether there's coffee in the pot without having to leave your computer."
"But you could just get up and look."
"Well yes, but the coffee pot could be anywhere in the world."
"What's the point of that? You can't go and get a cup of coffee there."
"True. But it doesn't have to be a coffee pot. It could be, oh, anything."
"I just don't see the point."
Of couse he went on to produce a highly acclaimed series, and much else besides.
Language Log: Just press Pay
The simplest way to describe the attitude of software engineers and companies to linguistic interfacing with their customers would be to say that they do not give a monkey's fart about such matters. Not only do they never have a linguist check the use of language in the programs they expect us to use (that'll be the day), they don't have anybody at all checking it.
If they program interfaces this carelessly, just how likely is it that robots are going to respect the Three Laws of Robotics?
Not just software engineers.
Practical Ways To Use QR Codes
This is just so astonishingly cool and Jetson-like.
Aquaponics, high-tech swill, GMOs and robots: context is all
Sunk costs rears its ugly head again:
Little Boy cost, well, a bomb. It seemed a shame after all that effort not to drop on somebody.
Audiosear.ch is shutting down
Can't say I am too surprised. But I wish I were.
Google’s early warning of the rise of Trump | CultureBy – Grant McCracken
Effectively, Google’s autocomplete function is working as my “desktop dashboard,” a flow of messages from the deep space of the Google data sphere.
Note to Self: Transcribing Podcasts – India, Ink.
Just by accident found this piece on transcribing podcasts with IBM's Watson. I wonder how it compares with SwiftScribe? Need to give it a try, because as I attempt more complex stories it certainly helps to have a bit of text in addition to notes and markers on the audio.
Trump, authenticity and the Tory succession
Interesting piece on, among other things, Jacob Rees-Mogg
[H]e’s authentic all right, but that will never make him a populist hero — because he’s not faking it.
I suppose things really have come to this.
At Vespertine, Jonathan Gold makes contact with otherworldly cooking. Is dinner for two worth $1,000?
[T]he sort of dining rooms that tend to do better on the World’s Top 50 Restaurants list than they do in the Michelin guide; the kitchens where the artistic imperatives of the chef tend to outweigh any questions of what a customer might want to eat; the meals after which a cynical diner, confronted with 20-plus courses of kelp, hemp and tree shoots, makes jokes about stopping for tacos on the way home.
Yeah. No.