68: Beta

September 29, 2014

Hello internet friends!

So, what’s the deal with Ello?

By now we know it’s some sort of new social network (getting excited about those seems to be so 2004) with some issues.

What do we want?

We want a free, ad-free, un-tracked, archived social network with privacy controls, outside of the sphere of influence of governments (except when that leads to behaviour we don’t condone. Can’t they do something about that?) and corporations. We want our own blog, de-centralized but simple.
And surely not self-hosted, ugh.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(And who are “we”?)

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Did you watch the Black-ish pilot? No? You might want to look into that, it’s a funny show. Certainly funnier than this weekend’s SNL.

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Empty cities are inherently creepy. At least this one has self-driving people-pods in them.

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If you have 56 minutes, you can spend them in worse ways than listening to/watching this talk by Merlin Mann about Advanced Tricycling. (You know it’s a metaphor. It is really about how we learn stuff and how to know what we need to learn.)

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Tinder, ugh. AirBNB, ugh. Instagram, ugh.

Oh well. At least this might be useful.

67: Glancicle

September 22, 2014

Hello internet friends!

I seem to have settled in that habit of only writing these on mondays – mainly to wake myself up, which seems to work in some way.
Does this work for you? Or do you really need more email?

It is not even that I have much to say lately, but hey – that didn’t stop me before.

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So, links!

I quite like Ian Bogost’s essay on Future Ennui at The Atlantic.

I’m less interested in accepting wearables given the right technological conditions as I am prospectively exhausted at the idea of dealing with that future’s existence. Just think about it. All those people staring at their watches in the parking structure, in the elevator. Tapping and stroking them, nearly spilling their coffee as they swivel their hands to spin the watch’s tiny crown control.
[…]
The emergence of a new, laborious media creation and consumption ecosystem built for glancing. The rise of the “glancicle,” which will replace the listicle. The PR emails and the B2B adverts and the business consulting conference promotions all asking, is your brand glance-aware?

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Timothy B. Lee writes about Digg and how Betaworks is rebuilding it.
I personally quite like the new Digg. (Don’t click on it, though. It’s where I get most of my links.)

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It has been ten years since Lost? Adam Epstein writes for Quartz about How “Lost” changed the way the world watches TV.

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Do you like aviation videos? I do. So here is a fancy video to watch.

Have a good week!

66: Ditch

September 15, 2014

Hello internet friends!

Another monday, another week.

Chongqing City has set up China’s 1st "exclusive sidewalk for mobile phone users ” to avoid possible crashes.

This is a great idea. It’s also a very 2014 idea.

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What is a U2 and why is it on my phone??!

Related:

Apple ‘gifting’ each user with a U2 album downloaded into iTunes. At least one of my friends reported that he had wireless synching of his phone disabled; Apple overrode his express preferences in order to add the album to his music collection. The expected ‘surprise and delight’ was really more like ‘surprise and delete’. I suspect that the strong negative response (in some quarters, at least) had less to do with a dislike of U2 and everything to do with the album as a metonym for this widespread culture of nonconsensual behaviour in technology.

– Metafoundry 6: Accident Blackspot

And still related: The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User

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Erin Kissane on why Twitter is not as enjoyable as it used to be and what she does about it: Ditching Twitter

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Have a good start into the week, with or without the Twitter.

65: Soul

September 8, 2014

Hello internet friends!

Boom!

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A link to TechCrunch: (sorry) There’s Something Rotten In The State Of Social Media
Of course we all know. Oh, how we know.

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Why German newspapers are publishing in English – saving you a click: Because they want to reach people outside the German-speaking countries, which is not easy, because nobody speaks German.

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Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul
Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul

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This might be enough for today?

64: Write Failed, Broken Pipe

September 5, 2014

Hello internet friends!

Twitter did something bad last night – again. And everybody is grumpy and angry and wants to go to laconi… appdot… ello…?

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WordPress 4.0 is out. So enjoy updating all your blogs that you randomly started at some point and never really got around to fill with words.
Or is that just me?

(Totally unrelated: I bought two more domains yesterday.)

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Read this profile of Rhianna Pratchett over on Polygon – it is good and it includes this important information:

she, too, is quite fond of badgers.

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Friday!

Dominik

63: For The Articles

September 3, 2014

Hello internet friends!

Everything you need to know about the celebrity image hack is over here at Playboy.com.[1]

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Remember how I stopped using Facebook? Yeah? Good times. In my quest to find the magic that the “early”[2] web was to me, I also decided to quit Twi… wait, no. But I decided to finally – finally – deactivate all the emails that Twitter keeps sending me. Of course there would be a lot less of those if I didn’t have a whole bunch of one-joke joke accounts.

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Alan Jacobs claims that Big Twitter is over. His article is a lot smarter than “Big Twitter is over” so if you’re into that sort of thing, it’s worth reading. And so are the articles he links to. And those that they link to.
Wow, it’s almost as if this blog thing is not such a bad idea after all.

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In case you were wondering, here are the articles he links to:

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And in case you were really wondering: Twitter is still very much “my internet porch” and I am still pretty happy when I see that people I meet somewhere are active on it. A lot of this has to do with Tweetbot, though. Without its mute feature and the fact that it is just running there on my desktop, acting as a sort-of but-not-really chat room and window into the world, it might just not be all that interesting.

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Anyway, wednesday!

Have a good one.

Dominik

  1. If you don’t want to click on a link to Playboy.com: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  ↩

  2. I already felt that I was late to the party when I got there, tbh.  ↩

62: Oh-hoh-hoh-hoah.

September 1, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

Now that it’s September, summer is over! Get used to dark, grey, cold and rainy days again. Opposed to dark, grey, rainy and not quite so cold days that were our summer.
I write this as if everyone of you is in the same geographic region as I am, which is of course a bit silly. Maybe you had a lovely summer.
And I hope you all have a great fall. Colorful trees, a stiff breeze from the south that keeps the clouds at bay. You know – the works.

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(Lazy newsletter request: does someone have the time to go through the UTF–8 charts and find a smiling version of that little dude?)

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I deleted the Facebook app from all my devices and things are good. I also logged out of FB in my main browser and deleted all their cookies. Not because I was making A Point but because it just got a bit annoying. I don’t need a push notification when someone shares a link. Especially not when I explicitely switched off all the notification.
Now I get about three emails from FB per day, which is okay – I can filter my email inbox automatically – unlike push notifications.

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Dee dee dee dee duh duh dee dee duh! How The ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ Melody Came To Represent Asia
And as usual, I quite like the MeFi discussion.

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Hang in there, Monday is only once a week.

Dominik