Hitchhiker

June 16, 2014

Dear internet friends,

first a quick note to my male internet friends, who also happen to use the Secret app: I sure hope it’s just one of you guys who keeps posting those whiny borderline-MRA-type posts. Honestly, I had a better opinion of you.

◔̯◔

Now on to follow-up! I got a little analog kitchen scale and a measuring cup, so if for some reason I get too much sun again and decide to bake something, I am prepared!
And talking about prepared – of course I was not left alone, scared and coffee-less after I broke my French Press. Thanks to my ever-growing collection of coffee making utensils, I managed to only be alone and scared.

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And now, a bunch of links!

The Baffling Genius of Jason Derulo – well, I learned about Balkan Beat Box that way and might have scared and/or confused my neighbors by listening to that on a rather loud level yesterday afternoon.

Well, that’s one way to promote your service: Uber is offering helicopter rides over Mumbai and Bangalore for $85 – hey, for that price, I’d take a helicopter for a trip once or twice a month, nbd.

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Here, have a baby hippo and a good Monday.

Dominik

41: Far Far Away

June 13, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

Today I learned that when you folks send me a nice reply to these emails and insert some nice attachment, (maybe a GIF of a baby hippo?) these files will be removed for some reason. So… I don’t even know if it was a GIF of a baby hippo.
Please send me GIFs of baby hippos.

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Plazes, Brightkite, Gowalla, Dopplr… FourSquare?

I am a big fan of these check-in and “hello, here I am” services. But ever since FourSquare changed into Swarm, it just leaves me cold. And mostly because it usually looks like this:

Uhm, yeah. Even though I use it more for myself, this is a bit depressing.

Also, I miss the game aspects of the whole thing. Why would I want to check-in if I can’t be the mayor of something? Or get (completely meaningless) points in exchange for my location data?
And why can’t I be “off the grid” anymore?

Gah, FourSquare. Seriously.

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It also doesn’t help that it is highly unlikely that I have working mobile internet at any point here.

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Erm, sorry. I am being a bit negative here – of course everything is great, the sun is shining, it’s warm and lovely outside.
Now where are my GIFs of baby hippos? Don’t reply to this email to send them to me. Unless it’s just links to them, I guess.

Have a nice weekend!

Dominik

40: Open Sesame!

June 11, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

I am sure you guys missed me already – it has been a few days. Mostly it has been a few pretty warm days, which had the nice result of me basically shutting down all my systems and just sort of stay above consciousness for a while.
Did I mention that I like it when it’s that warm? I really do.

Well, while I dared to not do anything, PSY (Psy?) released “Hangover” – together with Snoop Dogg. I watched the video and by now, I have already forgotten how the music goes. I do remember a lot of drinking, though. A lot! Now I’m waiting for the GIFs to pop up.

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On the weekend I did what everybody seems to be doing these days: experiment around my with my coffee consumption. Specifically, since it is warm outside, I wanted to try cold brewing coffee. Since I have no way of measuring anything I just shoveled ground coffee beans in a pitcher, filled the pitcher with water and put it in the fridge for a night. On Sunday morning I french-pressed them and voila – had cold and pretty weak cold coffee.
The second experiment was with double the ground beans and the result was not pretty – I broke my French Press, because the coffee was that thick.

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I also tried to bake tortas de aceite. Once again – I have nothing to measure anything, so I sort of guessed. “Yeah, that looks like 360g of flour.” I also replaced a bunch of ingredients.
Ehm.
So I ended up with weird cookies, that looked and tasted nothing like proper tortas.

How are you guys doing?

Dominik

39: Mesh

June 5, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

Sometimes, when I am bored or when I like to watch things packed neatly, I watch those videos where people pack clothes “for weeks” in a carry-on luggage. This is always pretty amazing and of course they manage to fit so many things in these convenient backpacks or trolleys.
I just wonder – don’t these people smell?
Maybe I am overdoing it, but I tend to change my underwear and my t-shirt daily. So just a week-long trip means filling up any kind of luggage with seven of each of those, which will take up quite some space, no matter how well I fold and stuff and compress my clothes.

In a bit unrelated thoughts – remember when I tried to order something online from a small-ish webshop and it was a bit of an ordeal?
Turns out – that seems to be a repeating pattern. And maybe it’s a repeating pattern because Amazon has messed so badly with my brain with their hyper-optimized logistics. By now I have been trained to think of “online shopping” as something immediate: I order something today and if I don’t get it the day after tomorrow, something must be broken.
This is not the norm and it’s certainly not something most companies can offer and even less so when it’s on scale – I doubt most of these small to medium sized companies have the capacity to react if there is a sudden high demand on their goods. Ah, well – I’ll cut them some slack – the small ones. But if your company was a mail order business even before the internet, you better get good.

I’ll probably have nothing to say tomorrow, so: have a nice weekend! Go hug a tree or whatever it is you guys do with your spare time.

Dominik

38: Sparkle

June 3, 2014

Hello, internet friends!
I have mentioned my new-ish experimental web-log (this is the origin of the word blog, kids!) in Monday’s email and I noticed something funny about using wordpress.com as a platform.

Even though I have not linked to or in any way promoted that blog, I suddenly began getting followers and likes. Quite a lot, in fact. I am sure, most of them came through some way of tag-tracking and maybe there is a page for new blogs – I did not really poke around more.
And while one or two of them were pretty normal bloggers, most of them follow a pretty predictable pattern: Premium users with their own domain, usually selling some kind of marketing book or lifestyle idea. These people are trying to *growth-hack* – which is the most gentle way I can say that they “follow” and “like” mostly to gently nudge people to their own blogs.
I don’t mind, really – maybe those people actually do enjoy my links to sparkly bat poop?
Anyway.
Sparkly bat poop.

Have a nice day,
Dominik

37: Input

June 2, 2014

Hello, internet friends!1
I am back again after a four day hiking weekend.

If I do that again – go to a weird and foreign country, especially with some time to waste in between activities, I now know not to think that “eh, those couple of MB of roaming data will be enough, right? Just the fact that I had to actively think of how much data I was spending made me grumpy at times.
Also: podcasts are huge beasts. Just downloading that one episode of IRLTalk would have easily cost me twice what the roaming would have given me.

Anyway, let’s get on with the show. I came home to about three thousand unread feed items, not quite as many unread emails and the nagging feeling that I missed a whole bunch of half-day micro internet scandals.
So, interesting links I have seen so far while playing catch-up:
Upcoming.org is coming back! This is, as they say, good news. The articles on The Verge and Engadget are worth reading, too. So is probably the CMD+Space interview, but I did not listen to it, yet.
This is kind of depressing. So why not listen to Chris Gethard how to overcome your programming and become a better man? If that’s not helping, how about Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds? Yeah, I’m learning a lot, lately.
In nerdier news(?) – I am tempted to build my own version of Jeremy Keith’s POSSE implementation. (You can click this link even if you have no clue, what a POSSE is – I don’t, really, but it seems doable.) Having an input field on top of a web page is really a “game changer” (ugh.) and I have been experimenting with that a bit over on my wordpress.com blog.

Thanks for reading, survive your monday!
Dominik

  1. Don’t feel bad about the “internet” part. It makes things better, not worse! ↩

36: Poodle

May 28, 2014

Hi! Hello! Hello, you!
You, yes, you. Dear, lovely newsletter reader.

I forgot to take my meds this morning, so this is going to be fun.
Maciej Cegłowski gave a talk at a conference in Düsseldorf last week, which works great as an essay, too: The Internet With A Human Face.
Talking about faces that are not quite human: Google has their own self-driving car now. It looks like the cartoon version of a Smart and will probably hunt down and destroy all of us some day. But hey:

To head off any concerns of malfunctioning robots hurtling you toward imminent doom, Google has made the car look cute and cuddly from the outset.

Yepp, that’s going to help.
~
Ugh, writing on Medium. What a sell-out.
‘Selling Out’ Is Meaningless 

I’ll be in a weird foreign country the next couple of days, one that I never stepped foot in before, with a strange, incomprehensible language and probably no internet.1
Peace out2
Dominik

  1. Nah, just kidding. There’s always roaming. And yes, I know – a prepaid SIM card might be cheaper, but not necessarily so. It’s only four days and as far as I can figure, they have the same public holiday as we have tomorrow, so acquiring one of those might be a bit of a hassle. I also don’t really plan to return to that country all that soon again. ↩
  2. Where’s “Toodles” on this list? ↩

35: Ducks

May 25, 2014

It helps immensly to listen to this weird remix of 90s hits as trap music. I am not sure what it helps with, but it does help.
Today the internet (and by internet, I mean Twitter) exploded in #YesAllWomen. #YesAllWomen? An explainer. At the same time, my Secret feed filled up with a whole bunch of “Mimimi, I can’t get a date.” messages. I can’t even.
Talking about not even being able to can anymore: I actually managed to read two whole sentences of the MRA-type Santa Barbara shooter. What a mess. The best discussion about the whole situation is (where else?) over on MetaFilter.
Speaking of MetaFilter (Yes, again. Sorry.) – there is now a fundraiser going on. It’s actually pretty interesting to see who else linked and tweeted about that, very often people I would not have taken as the typical MeFi reader.
I’d pretty much prefer if the MeFi-people would not pester Caitlin Dewey. She writes a pretty good newsletter that I enjoy a lot. That being said, “hapless gibbering app-fondling touchscreen cretin” is a pretty funny insult. Of course I immediately had to immediately turn into my twitter bio.
In news that probably surprise nobody: people are taking selfies during the coup in Thailand. Because honestly – who wouldn’t?
And finally, here are some ducklings trying to climb stairs.

Be nice.
Dominik

34: Did you hear…?

May 22, 2014

1.0 Secret

Secret finally reached Germany and the first evening was huge fun. Complete with backchannel chatter about who might be behind which message.
If you care to join me and the other secret-havers: my email address is dschwind@lostfocus.de – you might want to add me to your address book before you join up. (Yes, they use the address book to connect people, which is a bit iffy.)

Related: this article by Mat Honan over on Wired: Anonymous Apps Are So Scary, They May Just Help Us Discover Ourselves
Now we only need to figure out how to become online famous with that thing.

2.0 MetaFilter

I am still bummed out about the MetaFilter story. Here is Matt Haughey on the Future of MetaFilter. It’s all rather sad.
On the Future of MetaFilter

3.0 Netflix

Apparently Netflix will come to Germany. Everybody on Twitter goes nuts. It will probably not be any better than the other local streaming services with content mostly in German and a year too late.
I am willing to be surprised, though.

It’s the middle of the week and according to my Withings app, I have reached 50% of my weight loss goal for this week. Well, that’s neat.
Dominik