Tech#1
Computers and gadgets has been a big part of my life. I grew up with a Commodore 64 nearby, so my interest in technology of all kinds shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who snuck a peak through my bedroom window when I was a kid.
-
Kill the Newsletter
If you’re fed up with all those newsletters clogging up your inbox, and you don’t want to pony up for Feedbin or Feedly, then Kill the Newsletter is for you. It’s a clever little service that lets you create a unique email address for signing up to a newsletter, and then converts its issues to an Atom feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite feed reader app or service. You could even add it to Feedly in the free tier…
I love these one thing well apps and services.
-
The weird webring
Remember webrings? Of course not… It was a web 1.0 phenomenon where sites linked to each other in a ring-like fashion, usually with an ugly graphic somewhere. The blogroll was the natural evolution of webrings.
There’s a webring, called the Weird Wide Webring, that I love, and would join if it didn’t mean sticking yet another JavaScript on my site. Do check it out though, it’s made by Jack McDade, known for the Statamic CMS and his own wacky website. Fun times.
-
Craigstarter
Congratulations are in order, because Craig Mod has launched a successful campaign for his new book, Kissa by Kissa. Yes, it’s about walking, as most things seem to be with Craig these days. He created something wonderful, the Craigstarter, for this project. It’s essentially a way to do crowdfunding with Shopify, with proper support for stretch goals and everything. I love the fact that something called Craigstarter exists, and released into the wild for everyone to use too.
Also, this resonated well with me, because Craig’s projects are funded by his Special Projects membership drive:
I see all members as voters, but Yearly Members are like mini-investors. As I wrote in Kickstartup: “I want to share with you a story about books, publishing, fundraising and seed capital.” Yearly Memberships are seed capital. I don’t mean that in the way of crude, spreadsheet driven, emotionless capital deployment, but in the freedom-unlocking, the opportunity-giving way. Obviously, members are not only “seed capital,” but the dollar amount of Yearly Memberships, in aggregate, become a kind of Kalman filter or linear quadratic estimation in a way that Monthly amounts aren’t. Yearly members say: Ya got a year, delight me! And if I fail to do so, the onus is on me. So, as a thanks to Yearly Supporters for that pledge of faith, I see the $50 coupon as a kind of financial dividend (beyond all the cultural dividends I hope the program inherently pays).
Read about the project in Roden 042, which – of course – is a newsletter.
-
The number of contactable alien civilizations: 36
File this one under how is this news, or maybe arbitrary number that makes headlines because someone said so, but still:
Under the strictest set of assumptions – where, as on Earth, life forms between 4.5bn and 5.5bn years after star formation – there are likely between four and 211 civilisations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. But Conselice noted that this figure is conservative, not least as it is based on how long our own civilisation has been sending out signals into space – a period of just 100 years so far.
Want to chat with said alien civilizations? Then we’d look at 6,120 years for a reply… Yeah, technology’s not really there yet.
-
Hey, Bye
Basecamp’s hyped email service Hey, which is invite-only and costs at least $99/year (because shorter messages carry a premium price), has a very manifesto-like website. Check it out.
Now, if you – like me – are pissed off about not getting an invite yet, there’s always Bye instead. Bye takes a slightly different approach:
Hey everyone—
It’s 2020 and we need to talk about email.
Fuck it.
Bye is the first email service to automatically respond with an insult, and then delete every email sent to you.
Bye is our erotic letter to email, and we’re sending it to you on the Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, McDonald’s kiosks and Android.
I love things like this. Hat-tip to my buddy Alexander for sharing this gem with me.
-
Another reason not to use Zoom
If you needed yet another reason not use hyped videoconferencing service Zoom, then this is it. They’re launching end-to-end encryption for calls (yay!), but only for paying users, whom are all criminals it seems.
From the Wired story:
“Free users for sure we don’t want to give that,” Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a company earnings call on Tuesday referring to end-to-end encryption, “because we also want to work together with FBI, with local law enforcement in case some people use Zoom for a bad purpose.”
This is stupid in so many ways. Good riddance, Zoom.
Alternatives for your online conversation needs: Jitsi (open source and free videoconferencing tool), Telegram and Signal works too. The latter has a nice blur feature, if you need that.
-
Twitter vs. Facebook
There’s a real difference between Twitter and Facebook, and I don’t mean in features, but in morals. Twitter, the smaller by far of the two, has (finally) applied its fact checking and terms-abiding features to the likes of US President Donald Trump, making him throw both a tantrum and an executive order (here dissected by The Verge). Facebook on the other hand doesn’t want to censor anything, which sounds nice but feels shady, especially since Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says:
We believe that if a post incites violence, it should be removed regardless of whether it is newsworthy, even if it comes from a politician.
That sort of clashes with Trump’s way of saying and doing things, and how his loyal fans have a tendency to harass and threaten. Facebook is in the wrong here, but Twitter is dangerously close to falling off their high horse. While it’s good to fact check and enforce policies on the US President, that now has to go for the whole platform. It’s unlikely any of this will end well.
⚡️ See also: My Socia Needia essay, and Services I’m Quitting.