Losing the all-important male stripper customer base.

Obligatory:

Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.

Firefly

Sheesh. How often do you need to reach for the power button? It’s got solid state storage. Just flip it on its damn side and stop whinging.

Yup. Techie, but with other interests. There are dozens of us.

Edit: gave up on Twitter and Reddit after being early adopter of both. Moved over to Fediverse and not regretting it one bit. All good.

I’m feeling attacked.

The car I had the most trouble with wasn’t because it was a bad car, but because it kept getting trashed. VW Cabriolet convertible. Bought it when I got my first real job out of school.

One week after driving it off the lot, parked on a busy city street, someone slashed the roof and tore out the stereo. Fixed it all up. Insurance rate went up. Six months later, knife through the roof AND a smashed window. Stereo gone. Switched to a removable, pull-out stereo. Still got broken into.

Had dozens of slashes/smashes. At one point, just left the door locks open. Nothing to take. Someone slept in the back seat (left food wrappers) and pilfered through the ashtray where I kept loose change.

Loved driving it with the top down, but what a pain it was to fix.

It’s the Gellert Thermal baths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gellért_Baths

Still around, if anyone visits Budapest.

Thrice, all a long time ago:

• Driving back alone from a group camping trip. Got stuck in a freak snowstorm in the mountains, without chains. Stalled and started sliding back towards a really deep ravine. Hit the brakes, but it kept skidding through the sleet. Had the car door open, ready to bail. The car came to a stop, barely inches from the edge.

• Walked out of the shower in a towel. Faced a tweaker with a gun standing in my apartment. Demanded my wallet. Took out the cash. Wasn’t much. He paused, trying to decide what to do next. I really wasn’t sure which way it would go. He left.

• Flight instructor had checked off on doing a solo, then left town. Was nervous, but he had told me to put in the flight hours in his absence. Practicing short take-off/landings and go-arounds. Little single-engine trainer. On the first touch-and-go, I forgot to take off full flaps, which meant maximum drag on the wings. Got barely 1000 ft above ground, then the engine began to sputter. The plane stalled, and started a slow-mo, nose-down spin toward the ground. I remember stopping breathing. Then the brain kicked in. Figured it out. Recovered from the spin way too close to the ground. The most sphincter-clenching, stupidest moment of my life.

Show saved items in order they were saved, not original post date. If I come across and save something from 6 months ago, when I go back into saved items, it’s sorted way back i stead of being the first item in the sort list.

This was supposed to be fixed in a server update, but doesn’t seem to be.

Have an older early 5th-Gen one, with the touch gestures starting to flake out, requiring reboots every day or two. The mini form-factor is perfect for reading, browsing, and watching video. It’s large enough to show two ebook pages, but light enough to hold up when lying in bed and not worry about it smashing your face if you nod off.

Voyager. It’s a very near approximation of Apollo’s UI.

Guarantee someone’s going to generate a bubbly podcast of Mein Kampf or Project 2025.

Ed is getting good at lobbing these darts at hype bubbles.

The thing that this writeup ignores is that the object isn’t to show short-term revenue, but to put all competitors out of business, be the last one standing, and create a monopoly. Either that or get bought out so the investors can move on to the next thing. But at $150B valuation, only MSFT or Nvidia can afford to buy them outright.

Google, Meta, and Amazon burned through cash for years, but they eventually outran all competition and then monetized the users who had nowhere else to go.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/

Lot of people saying they don’t give internet access to their TVs.

Fine, but that doesn’t work for cord-cutters who opted out of cable to go with streaming. And if you keep your TV away from internet but have a cable box, it will be doing all the tracking in this paper (and worse) then sending it to the cable provider.

So short of sticking with DVD/Bluray (unconnected) or over-the-air broadcast TV, there’s no way to stop from getting tracked.

The paper also lists domains where the data is being sent. You could always try blocking the destination addresses at the router level.

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment