• Notes

    ,

    Books

    Sherlock Holmes giving serious Nardwuar vibes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle📚:

    My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.

    This particular quote, for nerds who know, is from adventure number seven, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

    A quote shot of Sherlock Holmes, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
    Sunday August 20, 2023
  • 😠 I’m looking at the Be Our Guest dinner as my wife and I finalize our plans for #Disney World and I need someone to tell me why the menu at one of their top restaurant experiences is so vegetarian-hostile.

    Pan-roasted zucchini?

    Really?

    Disappointing.

    Saturday August 19, 2023
  • Law

    ,

    Notes

    ,

    Status

    ⚖ From a report at Law Dork by its proprietor, Chris Geidner:

    Starr issued an “administrative stay” on Thursday that will last for 30 days while he considers the airline’s request for a stay of the order pending its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

    Judge Starr is having a good think about whether he’s willing to endure the near-certain reversal, and the more-likely-than-not searing bench slap that will accompany it


    Thursday August 17, 2023
  • Projects

    Introducing Quicklinks.lol

    The other day, er, morning, er, very early morning, I posted about a little project I did instead of sleeping called Quicklinks.

    It’s essentially just a list links I visit whenever I take a break or have some downtime. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I published it for my personal use and testing at joeross.dev/quicklinks and joeross.dev/quicklinks.

    But where there’s a new random webpage, there’s a geek running domain name searches…

    So, in keeping with my recent run of unnecessary but fun domain names, I hereby present:

    quicklinks.lol

    I have Big Dreamsℱ of adding:

    • Sidebar installation instructions for browsers that support sidebars;
    • A dynamic new/same tab checkbox (a la Techmeme); and
    • An integrated way to customize the links.

    But Quicklinks is mostly for me, so it comes without promises. Most people who can code up something like this can do it far better than I can, and most who can’t will still be able to name two or three ways of doing the same thing without writing a single line of HTML.

    That’s fine. You, as the kids say, do you.

    And feel free to fork it.

    Wednesday August 16, 2023
  • 😑 So if one had, hypothetically, selected all of the files in the .txt/.markdown notes folder in their iCloud Files all, and mistaken the “duplicate” button for a “copy” button, is there an app or solution to de-dupe the folder from iOS?

    Tuesday August 15, 2023
  • Essays

    The Web Worth Paying For

    I was listening to Celeste Headlee interview Anil Dash on the latest episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD, and Dash said something about the kind of web communities we should build, and encourage, to combat the rise of white supremacy among wealthy and influential tech leaders and the communities they fund:

    How do we make there be a community that has its own recipes and how many of the apps you use every day are home cooked meals made by somebody you love in a community that you’re from? It can be that, it’s happening again.

    This immediately struck me as a perfect description of what I like about Micro.blog and Omg.lol. Each is made by a person or a small team who are constantly involved in the community, who we can report bugs to, suggest features to, or just chat with, and who greet criticism head-on with clear explanations of why they hold their positions, and who maintain a willingness to change their minds.

    I’m not saying they’re perfect – after all, like you and I, they’re people, so of course they’re not perfect. But that’s just it: they’re people, and they treat their users like they’re people, too.

    We get all of this because we pay a really, really reasonable fee to join these communities, relieving them of the need to pursue increasingly questionable methods of revenue generation.

    That’s the web worth paying for, and I’m happy to be here.

    Tuesday August 15, 2023
  • Checkins

    Grounds For Sculpture.

    Sunday August 13, 2023
  • Checkins

    Rat’s Restaurant.

    Sunday August 13, 2023
  • Notes

    So, 40 commits later, you can star my insomnia on GitHub. I should have been cleaning, or sleeping. Instead, I made a webpage. Then I made a second webpage, identical to the first, except links open in the same tab, for all the weirdos out there who like that sort of thing.

    Thursday August 10, 2023
  • đŸ’» The MacBook Air I'm posting this from is older than I'll admit in polite company, so I've been eyeing the new 15-inch Air, and today Amazon is selling the base configuration - in all colorways - at a $200 discount.

    Tuesday August 8, 2023
  • Status

    👍 Apropos of my earlier post about considering migration to a different Mastodon server: Notes from a Mastodon migration - Erin Kissane's small internet website

    Monday August 7, 2023
  • Status

    🚆 Right now I do ActivityPubs primarily from mastodon.social. But I’m researching migration and reading about other folks’ experiences. I love omg.lol as a whole and social.lol is where I probably belong, but it’s daunting to move. If you decided to migrate here from another server when social.lol launched, let me know if you have any tips or tricks for someone considering the move!

    Monday August 7, 2023
  • Status

    💬 So the Gummi Bears show from 1985-1991 was both something I think I saw in its entirety during its original run (I was born in 1983), and something I completely forgot had ever existed.

    Sunday August 6, 2023
  • Checkins

    Avon-by-the-Sea Beach.

    Saturday August 5, 2023
  • Author and actor Miranda Keeling posted this on Mastodon, where she frequently posts interesting fragments of conversation she overhears in everyday life:

    Woman in a supermarket: Fake it til you can’t be bothered anymore, and then just be yourself.

    This has been one of my core experiences of aging. A lot of faking/masking/figuring stuff out for the first 30 years, then the last ten years steadily moving toward where I am now: how could I possibly be bothered to be anything but myself?

    I originally posted this to my Mastodon account.

    Friday August 4, 2023
  • Notes

    I saw The Toaster Museum linked to over at Hacker News and immediately thought of John Siracusa (@siracusa).

    Here’s some great context for why I immediately thought of him, by his friend and Accidental Tech Podcast (@atp.fm) co-host Casey Liss (@caseyliss).

    Friday August 4, 2023
  • Checkins

    Associated Humane Societies.

    Monday July 31, 2023
  • Notes

    I have some more Bluesky invite codes.

    But I’m 40 and married, so I don’t just hand a code to the first internet user that smiles at me.

    Bluesky servers can use the invite tree in moderation decisions, so I do at least some vetting of folks before I send them a code. No hate/harassment/anti-vax etc.

    Text shot from Bluesky’s F.A.Q. about their policy on using invite code trees in moderatiom efforts: Question: How does the Bluesky server use the invite tree? Answer: We reference the invite tree to track behavior on the social graph. For example, if we take action to moderate an account, we may revoke invite codes from other accounts in the same invite tree.
    Sunday July 30, 2023
  • Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

    This review may contain spoilers.

    Sure, it’s a couple hours of Tom Cruise being paid millions of dollars to do stunts literally everyone else in the world would have to pay millions of dollars to do. But nails the fan service, the tech, and the physics.

    And it’s fun.

    Also, it includes an appearance by the Ice Man himself, though anyone who has seen Val Kilmer’s autobiographical documentary Val will instantly notice that Kilmer basically just walked onto the Maverick set dressed as he always dresses to greet company these days.

    Tuesday July 25, 2023
  • Notes

    Threatening to take away your customers’ fake merit badges if they don’t pay more isn’t a business.

    It’s barely a grift.

    It’s how a lonely bully enforces the closest thing to social relationships he can possibly attain.

    But at least we can call the post-mortem when this all explodes “the X-Files.”

    Tuesday July 25, 2023
  • Notes

    Obviously this is incredible, full stop. But if you’re trained in the craft and the composers, this must be one of the most delightful things you’ve seen in a long, long time. And those animations!

    youtu.be/WRfsibwR5…

    The kicker? The performer, Joseph Castanyer Alonso, is the cellist of the Royal Stockholm Philaharmonic Orchestra. Piano isn’t even his primary instrument. Wild.

    (Via kottke & Erikmitk)

    Friday July 21, 2023
  • Watched

    🍿 Prey, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

    This review may contain spoilers.

    A Predator movie is only as good as its protagonist. 

    The dialogue can mostly suck, as it does here. 

    The CG effects can look like trash, as they too often do here. 

    The plot can be an early colonial-American choose-your-own-adventure story, as it (mostly) is here. 
      
    But if you have 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger, or 2022 Amber Midthunder, you will have a movie worth your time, and worthy of a theater run. 

    That Prey didn't get the latter is an affront to Midthunder's performance. 

    She carries the movie, together with the skilled eye of Philadelphia's own Dan Trachtenberg. 

    And you can't help but notice, as the movie progresses toward a climax that thrills in spite of its predictability, that only she and the Predator get any character development. They're growing in parallel: she coming into her power, and it learning that its power may, for the first time, not be enough to ensure its survival.

    (And yes, the dog lives.)

    Friday July 21, 2023
  • Notes

    One bit of Casey Newton’s latest Platformer piece, on how Threads can survive the calm after the storm, must have many social media pros searching their feelings.

    I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of social media managers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

    Casey Newton wrote in his newsletter Platformer about how Threads can survive its initial explosion in user base: "the best version of Threads is an app where people go to learn about and discuss what’s happening in the moment, news included, and absent that the feed is going to feel like one more overstuffed shopping mall for a company that already has plenty of those. (The earliest days of Threads, when the timeline was dominated by brands posting cringey engagement-bait, offer a good roadmap for what the company should avoid.)"&10;&10;https://www.platformer.news/p/five-reasons-threads-could-still
    Monday July 17, 2023
  • Notes

    I need Mrs. Meyers to answer for the fact that her “Compassion Flower” handsoap scent has me routinely smelling like I think Axe body spray is a legitimate thing for a 40-year-old person to smell like.

    A photo of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day hand soap, Compassion Flower scent
    Saturday July 15, 2023
  • Checkins

    Kaya’s Kitchen.

    Saturday July 15, 2023

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