This morning I started putting together the notes from this week prior to writing the intro. I had so much content there’s no way I could share it all.
We have Ukraine, the continued effort by the GOP to destroy our nation, and the continued domination of the news by Elon Musk.
I got my COVID bivalent vaccine earlier in the week. I felt crummy the day after but have been fine since.
Next week I’ll be onsite at WillowTree meeting with my all remote group. Wish me luck. Last time we had this event I got COVID. I told my boss if that happened again I was never attending another one. He was OK with that. 😄
Enjoy your coffee and the links. ☕️
Wired: “A CUP OF coffee in the morning is not just about the caffeine (though that’s certainly important). It’s the ritual that starts the day. There’s the sound of beans grinding, the toasted smell of brewing coffee—even waiting for your brew to finish is a part of the fun. It’s a way to let yourself know that it’s time to start creeping toward wakefulness, like the sun peeking over the horizon in an old-timey Folgers commercial—all fuzzy and warm and full of promise.”
The first link had to be about coffee, right? I had to do it first! Charlottesville own Grit
is mentioned. It’s my favorite local shop.
Meson Stars: “A toaster-sized instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover is ‘reliably’ converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars at about the same rate as a small tree on Earth, a new study has revealed.”
YAY SCIENCE! 🥳
I will warn you, this whole terraforming idea can go really sideways.
Six Colors: “I get it. The iPad Pro isn’t ready for a complete hardware redesign, nor did Apple want to redesign the Magic Keyboard this year. But the result is that the leading iPad is missing innovations that the cheap iPad offers. It’s weird.”
I didn’t pay attention to the Apple announcement this week, but I can see how this would be extremely confusing.
What do you mean the low end model is better than the Pro model?
Puck.news: “Where we last left the Twitter saga, our reluctant hero Elon Musk had essentially made the difficult decision that he’d be better off forking over another $20 billion of his own cash rather than continue to fight Twitter in court and still end up paying a fine in the billions of dollars—perhaps double-digit billions—and have only a bunch of lawsuits to show for it.”
This guy. I’ll say it again, for being such a genius this was a dumb move.
Then again, he may make fools of us all. We can only hope. 🤔
Engadget: “On one hand, Musk has told prospective investors that he plans to axe 75 percent of the Twitter’s 7,500-member staff upon completion of the deal, a move that would likely cripple the site’s operations and kneecap its ability to moderate content and ensure users' security.”
Yeah! Let’s buy a company for $54.20 a share — it’s not worth nearly that much — and promptly run it in the ground.
Where is everybody going next? I’m still recommending Mastodon or Micro.blog.
Chris Coyier: “If you publish stuff on the web, you’re outputting HTML at URLs for people to read. And it’s good form to provide an RSS feed as well maybe JSON if you’re hip. That’s 2-3 formats for your content out of the gate, which is effort, but hey, that’s the job as a publisher: get your content out to as many people as possible. If syndicating into another format is where people are, it’s likely worth doing.”
Of course I’m biased but having an RSS or JSON Feed is important to the syndication of your weblog or web site.
Also, dear podcasters large and small, please add an RSS option to the list of places folks can get your podcast and make sure folks know it. Thank you.
Reuters: “Oct 17 (Reuters) - Parlement Technologies, the parent company of social media app Parler, said on Monday that it will be acquired by rapper Kanye West, who legally changed his name to simply Ye last year.”
Not to be outdone by his good buddy Elon Musk, Kanye West has been conned into purchasing white supremacist and conspiracist stronghold, Parler.
How long until it disappears?
Vice: “But either way, 5.7 million is a lot, and one of the elements managing it is an operating system that fell into obscurity a quarter-century ago: IBM’s OS/2.”
This is extremely cool. I know there are a lot of OS/2 fans in the world, lord knows I ran into a lot of them during my time at Visio. They’re rabid! 😄
I need to know more about this now and it’s nice to see a reliable system continue to do what it was intended to do.
If it were written today it would probably be some JavaScript monstrosity.
Politico: “In the early days of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Hill warned in an interview with POLITICO that what Putin was trying to do was not only seize Ukraine but destroy the current world order. And she recognized from the start that Putin would use the threat of nuclear conflict to try to get his way.”
Ah, yes, more Musk, the fragrance that lingers. Not only is he trying to destroy Twitter he’s trying to bring about the destruction of Ukraine and Democracy and set himself up to be ruler of the world.
Scary.
Be patient as you create your new Mastodon account. There are many different servers to choose from. If you have the means and feel adventurous start an instance all your own with some friends! I have one and I host it for $6US/month at Masto.host. They have amazing service, my site is always up, and upgraded to the latest versions of Mastodon so I don’t have to worry about a thing. They also scale up so you can have a small group, like I do, or you can have thousands of users.
