neil @neil@social.coop
Go slow and fix things.
Joined Sep 2017
Pinned toot
Spread good vibes and good info.
neil
boosted
An article about how Franz Fanon's ideas on decolonisation might give us ideas on how to free ourselves from the enslavement of digital media monopolies. The interesting bit to me is where it talks about how during the Algerian revolution the radio which had been a tool of oppression became a tool of liberation. By analogy, networks like Mastodon which have been designed with different priorities to the corporate networks, could be liberatory instead of exploitative.
Some kind of virtual assistant that helps you with your information strategy.
- Tom in Hyperland
- The Librarian in Snow Crash
- Huginn
Daemon in the computer sense, and maybe daemon in the His Dark Materials sense, too.
I'm sure that there's a lot of prior work on this - just need to look it up!
"Heritage Foundation met and came up with a wish list of “pro-free market” solutions to Katrina. We can be sure that exactly the same kinds of meetings will happen now— in fact, the person who chaired the Katrina group was Mike Pence."
Disaster capitalism is how private industries spring up to directly profit from a crisis. The article doesn’t really give much examples here, but a couple we’ve seen already are the attempt to profit from vaccine patents, and medical equipment manufacturers hiding behind patents to keep schematics closed.
Getting started with Ansible. Definitely enjoying it as a reproducible way of documenting all the steps involved in a server’s setup.
But… am I going to forget how to do all the actual underlying commands if everything is just an Ansible task in a yaml file? What if I need them in an emergency??
It’s a shame we haven’t invented the Metaverse yet, it would be quite handy during this lockdown.
(Although… I guess it didn’t go so well in Snow Crash when it comes to viruses).
Finally watched Hyperland, the documentary by Douglas Adams about hypermedia.
And... it's every bit as fantastic as you would expect.
They interview Ted Nelson, discuss Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Xanadu, Kurt Vonnegut, Guernica + the Spanish Civil War, the shape of stories and non-linearity... and lots more. It feels a bit like it was directed by Terry Gilliam.
And oh yeah - Tom Baker plays Douglas Adams' hypermedia software agent.
A bit like CloudTunes maybe, but embedded in a webpage
- https://github.com/jakubroztocil/cloudtunes
- https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Enabled_Applications
If you're missing live music right now, here's 5 days worth of livecoding on the way: http://equinox.eulerroom.com/
Couple of people have recommended https://odesli.co/
Kind of does it, although no option to play from local library.
neil
boosted
For all you Dune fans...
Honestly, this is probably the best way for me to remember proper handwashing procedure.
Is there some kind of web player or protocol or similar that you can put a link to a track, and if the person has some legit access to it, it'll play for them?
So like I link a few tracks. One is on archive.org, so that's fine for everyone. One is under copyright. If the viewer has it in their library on their machine somewhere, they can play it. If they've bought it on bandcamp, they can play it. If they have a Spotify account, they can play it.
As Kick’s wrote (https://www.kickscondor.com/stenos/we've-got-blog/):
"h0p3 has a home page entry point that is carefully curated and groomed, but which is several layers up from a complete chaos of link dumps, raw drafts and random introspections […] These layers run a spectrum of accessibility—there is always a learning curve before you hit the bottom. You start with a doorway before entering a maze."
I’ve been doing a bit of wiki gardening. Using org-roam, and reading a little about zettelkasten and building a second brain, is getting me a bit further along the path.
The front page is a bit less messy. Everything else is still all a bit overgrown and unkempt, but I’m fine with that. Parts of it always will be.
Anyone can recommend a libre place online to play Scrabble with remote friends?
Oh baby.
" An ultra-affordable and faithful homage to the iconic synthesizer that spawned house music, plus an all-new Distortion circuit, the TD-3-SR lets you conjure up virtually any sound with incredible finesse and ease."
A view of the Lake District from Lancaster. A little dusting of snow on the peaks.
Feels like Spring is *almost* here! Thank fuck. Think I was starting to get SAD.
Finished Dune off the other night. It was a bit Shakespearian, duelling families, noble characters, sweeping arcs of history and all that. Soliloquies. I did enjoy it and finished it off quickly. But on reflection I can’t say I really actually *liked* any of the characters very much. Interesting yes, do I care what happens to them, not so much.
On the plus side I can watch the David Lynch film now.
Go slow and fix things.
Joined Sep 2017
