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”?)

◔̯◔

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.

◔̯◔

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

◔̯◔

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.)

◔̯◔

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.

◔̯◔

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?

◔̯◔

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.)

◔̯◔

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

◔̯◔

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.

◔̯◔

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

◔̯◔

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

◔̯◔

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

65: Soul

September 8, 2014

Hello internet friends!

Boom!

~~

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

~~

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.

~~

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

~~

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…?

◔̯◔

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.)

◔̯◔

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.

~~

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]

◔̯◔

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.

◔̯◔

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.

~~

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

~~

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.

◔̯◔

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.

◔̯◔

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

◔̯◔

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.

◔̯◔

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.

~~

Hang in there, Monday is only once a week.

Dominik

61: YOLO

August 26, 2014

Hello internet friends!

There are quite a few new faces around – so I either caught the tail-end of that Techcrunch newsletter article or you’re all friends of Bob Sherron[1] who noticed that my newsletters look nice in Instapaper. My HTML game is strong, indeed.
Hello new readers! Have a cookie.

◔̯◔

Lately – and mostly because my friends and me are a bunch of soon to be middle-aged, just slightly too nerdy to be hipsters[2] who like to make fun of “youth culture” – the concept of YOLO has been part of conversations around me. That and the rather related topics of sleep and the comfort zone keeps creeping up and to end those discussions (“I can sleep when I’m dead!” “You will be dead pretty soon if you keep not sleeping.”) here we go:

Dominik’s unified theory of ramblings on YOLO, the comfort zone and sleep.

  • Yes. One probably does live only once. There are religions that claim otherwise and maybe they are right, but as far as I can tell, we have one run at being alive and once it’s over, it’s over.
  • Yes, if at all humanly possible, you should live your life to the fullest. Carpe diem.[3]
  • Sleep is pretty bloody awesome. It’s not like being dead because I don’t think I’ll be riding firebreathing dragons over futuristic battlefields once I am dead.
  • As far as I understand my older relatives, sleep is not all that easy to come by anymore once you get older. So – sleep while you can.
  • The comfort zone is called comfort zone because it is comfortable. A lot of evolutionary work has gone into creating comfort zones. I don’t see a single reason to leave them. We[4] worked hard to create them and it would be a waste of a good comfort zone to leave it.
  • That being said: every person has their own comfort zone. If your comfort zone includes not sleeping and/or jumping out of airplanes – go for it! If your comfort zone includes gardening – enjoy! If your comfort zones are PUA forums on the internet – get help. Please.
  • It’s always a good idea to nudge on the borders of one’s comfort zone. How else to make it a bit bigger and roomier?
  • I kind of forgot what I wanted to say. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ YOLO!

◔̯◔

WordPress plugins will soon have fancy icons. I know that some of you have mad crazy icon skills – anyone want to donate an icon or two for my plugins? I quite fancy those that look inappropriate once you have a dirty mind but innocent to those who don’t.

◔̯◔

Well, sorry about all that. Have a good day.

Dominik

  1. If not, you might want to consider subscribing to his newsletter Periodically, too. He doesn’t ramble as much as I do and he has a regular publishing pattern, which I don’t.  ↩

  2. Sorry.  ↩

  3. A fancy way to say YOLO and a slight tip of the hat to the late Robin Williams.  ↩

  4. We as in: Humanity. The generations before us. Not necessarily us who write and read stuff on the internet.  ↩

60: In The Cloud!

August 25, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

A new week ahead! That means we’re all a week older, yay.
So far today, I had one cup of coffee, a glass of water and a pretzel. You subscribed to these emails for this important information.

Onwards and upwards: the US west coast had an earthquake on the weekend and this is how it affected sleep in that area – according to Jawbone sleep data.

At the same time, I watched some pretty clouds moving around outside my living room window.
I posted that video with “TW: Boring” on Tumblr and it didn’t take very long until I got an angry message, that I shouldn’t make fun of trigger warnings and that I am The Problem.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Constant source of amusement: Cloud to Butt Plus.

That’s all, maybe you guys saw/found something intrigueing during the weekend? Hit reply and let me know. (That might now look like some silly social media manager trick to “drive engagement” but I’d seriously like to know: all I did this weekend was trying to find out how to make those time lapse videos, watch the F1 race and sleep. So… my brain is not only wide open but actually yearning for interesting stuff.)

Hang in there.

Dominik

59: #smooth #move

August 21, 2014

Hello, internet friends!

I hope you’re all doing well. It’s Monday for me today, which is pretty convenient since it is Friday tomorrow – it’s great how that works when you take three days off in a week.
Well, it still makes today a Monday.

◔̯◔

For no apparent reason[1] I travelled in First Class[2] yesterday.
At the time of booking it was not such a big difference but it was amazing what a hugely different experience I bought for less than what I sometimes spend on coffee. I got on the train in Köln and it was packed. Seats were all taken, people were sitting on the ground, crying babies – train travel business as usual, I figure. Not so much in the part of the train where I had my seat – basically nobody was in there, there were actually employees of the train company around and they were friendly and kept giving me[3] candy.
It wasn’t quite Snowpiercer, but it was a pretty strange experience.

Of course I used my leisurerly time in the couch-like leather seat mostly to complain on Twitter about how the high-speed wifi on the bullet train that took me halfway through Germany in under four hours wasn’t working flawlessly all the time.

◔̯◔

I don’t know what to say about Social Media raffles that are based on using company’s hashtags. I guess some person can then tell their #boss that the #brand #engagement went #through the #roof? Yeah, that will sell a couple of €100k cars. #hashtags.

◔̯◔

Yeah, a big bouquet of flowers is going to fix that problem, buddy.
(Seriously: WTF?)

◔̯◔

Be safe out there.

Dominik

  1. Which is the nice way of saying “YOLO” I guess.  ↩

  2. Deutsche Bahn doesn’t mess around with their naming scheme. You’re either a first class or a second class traveller. No ‘Economy’ euphemisms.  ↩

  3. Not just me. The old man using his Surface Pro and the Yuppie family with the little boy and his iPad also got some. Yes, I recognize these devices. Nerd alert.  ↩