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See you at IRL Cyberdelia in September.

https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2021/09-17.html

 

 

Archive.org turns 25

I did a video version of the blog post I did for them a while back about Love, Loss and Archives.

http://anniversary.archive.org/

Consider donating and signing up for the 25th anniversary webcast, they do so much with such a small budget. Funny thing is that Google started out as a Library project. In some ways I wish we could go back to that simpler time.

 

Scale

With Covid (hopefully continuing) to decline there are some once in a lifetime opportunities to attend events at smaller scale.

I was just at the 30% capacity Disneyland last weekend. 16 rides in one day and just.. relaxed despite 40k steps walked.

I bought DEF-CON tickets.

I might go to the renegade Burning Man this year.

Socially distanced outdoor events mean I can bring my dog and dance.

Looking into doing a set of federated Decentralized Web camps.

Regional events instead of global ones.

Rethinking how things work...

 

Grammatics

Going to take some time to parse this one...

http://ceptr.org/whitepapers/grammatics

 

Great opportunity to hear Nathan Schneider talk about the intersection of cooperatives and technology at the Decentralized Web Meetup this Wednesday.

https://blog.archive.org/2021/05/27/distribute-commons-not-commodities/

cc @ntnsndr @internetarchive

 

It really feels like we're waking from the liminal dream state now. So much latent energy, ready to rush forth, ready for new possibilities.

https://twitter.com/NoraBateson/status/1244628138342125571

 

 

 

Remember when @amazon Delivered Dance and DJ

This email from 9-9-99 by @mikemcgonigal is nothing like what you'd see today. I remember @ezrakilty mentioning that he worked with @djkevincole in those early days!

https://1500wordmtu.com/pages/amazoncom-delivers-dance-and-dj


 

moot

That time I almost quit Google...

In retrospect it put me on a more thoughtful relationship with Google the company and where I put my efforts, both inside/outside the company.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/22/4chan-founder-chris-poole-moot-has-left-google.html

 

Don't let the relief of a guilty verdict stop the march towards systemic change.

 

Much thanks to the fine folks on /r/LongBeach

It's the internet doing what it does best.

https://www.reddit.com/r/longbeach/comments/mqme14/looking_for_help_identifying_the_building_near/

 

Caffleine has departed... Google is a lesser place

https://epitaphs.googleplex.com/caffleine





 

Lunch Ninja is still a thing..

https://lunch-ninja.googleplex.com/

Have had 2 so far, would recommend...





 

2008

For some reason I'm thinking of 2008 and this bounced into my head...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

 

Can't believe that Google Photos still does not have a way to find photos without location/face tags. :(

You'd think we'd want this for better quality data as inputs.. People are motivated to add this data to get better maps/timelines...

https://b.corp.google.com/issues/25692898 for context..





 

Thursday Earworm

[for those of a certain age...]

 

Perfect Strangers..

Sometimes I get jaded about the state of society on the internet..

Participating in Project Perfect Stranger / PlagueRound gives me renewed hope.

https://zu-uk.com/project/project-perfect-stranger-and-plagueround/

I now have a new friend in Sao Paulo who performs in a local theater group.

 

Through some intermediaries I'm trying to help a Saudi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loujain_al-Hathloul get access to her Google accounts. It's difficult since she was jailed and tortured for three years, doesn't have access to the recovery email address or phone numbers.

Sadly the Account Recovery process is proving to be its own form of pain.

If anyone wants to further escalate case 2-0838000031065 I'd really appreciate it.. I've gone back and forth for a few days already on this.

Apparently Twitter was very proactive about getting her back on. I'd love for us to outperform their customer service!!!!!





 

Power in Corpus Christi Texas

Only checking email a couple times per day.  Using Android extreme battery saver so use 4154251601 if you really need to contact me.

According to https://ercot.com/ the whole system has collapsed with cascading failures.  Auction rate for electricity is k/MWh instead of avg 8. Bonkers...  Water pumps offline or frozen.  Gasoline refineries offline so Gas supplies dipping.  Not enough power to even do the promised rolling blackouts.  At least the bridges to the island I'm on reopened..

Also another wrinkle in my situation.  Staying at friends place down south Texas, but the electronic lock jammed in the cold, so had to pack up to a temp place, which also has no power (and no food).  So no access to my laptop until power comes back so I can enter using the garage code (or a rock through a window)

It sounds worse in the place I was staying in Dallas which we fled from.  Power out there too and much much colder with lots of snow.

I wonder if fairness in power supply cuts is an area worth investigating.  Needs analysis could be interesting overlaid with circuit layout..

Will have a lot more to say when I'm online again....

 

New comment by lindner in "OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities"

Wrong answer.. This effort does not scale. You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in.

GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion.

 

New comment by lindner in "OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities"

One thing that someone might consider is working with Data Portability laws to allow for export of user contributed data to corporate map platforms.

I'd like to add my Google Maps contributions to OSM

I'm a Level 7 local guide there and was an active user of MapMaker back in the day..

 

What is this now? I just received a sketchy invite to my corp. address.. Hmm, the dark patterns are at play...


https://www.fishbowlapp.com/
https://www.fishbowlapp.com/






 

FiraCode + Ligatures -- so nice!

Better late than never I suppose :)

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode





 

I'm in Dallas for a few weeks. If there are any Googlers that want to say hi in a socially distant way I'm up for it!





 

I have a chromebook with a noisy fan, so it sounds like a truck engine..

Actually kind of fun as the fan revs and slows. Launching gmail is like pressing down on the gas pedal hard :-D





 

New comment by lindner in "OpenSocial Specification"

hi5 (RIP) was originally a dating site and Pivoted to a Social Network.

Most profiles fake? I can say for sure that's not true. I maintained Postgres/Memcache/Graph DBs and the write load was real.

That said hi5 did engage in address book scraping and other dark patterns that you'd rather not see these days.

Fun fact: hi5 had a featured photos/profiles section based on popularity. Folks that ended up there deleted their account by 5x or more due to the unwanted attention their 'popular' photos garnered....

 

Regretted Attrition

Google's loss. dwb@ was a good one.

 

New comment by lindner in "OpenSocial Specification"

So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5, LinkedIn and then Google.

Some little known facts about OpenSocial

- Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial containers.

- OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed on Joyent.

- Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...

- MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project

- The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a good organ donor.

Fun times...

 

 

 

Me building stuff with parts I find in google3...

https://youtu.be/18cW_yHo3PY





 

A must watch documentary on voting rights now on Prime Video. Was lucky enough to see this at the Drive in a couple weeks back.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08FRQQKD5

cc @westwinddrivein @primevideo

 

Please help a good friend give their little fella a life saving surgery. I'll match any contributions. https://t.co/QjZlI3f8QJ

 

Used my WFH budget to buy a 500W/520Wh battery pack.... (I already have solar panels with bypass circuit to recharge..)

https://twitter.com/sashaperigo/status/1303388835808595970





 

 

@lipsandskin Can someone tell me if this is the right way to summon the correct lindner? Bonus points if it sounds like you're summoning a demon =)

Heraufbeschwören den @c_lindner

 

Product Idea: Terraform for Teams using Google Calendar/GSuite.

Just let me put agendas and crontab lines in a text file and have it drive the whole thing. Right now it's all pointy-clicky and there's no way to rollback in a coordinated way.

Also would make it soooo easy to split a team into two or clone a team...





 

 

For those that haven't spent their 000 WFH budget.

https://www.winsted.com/





 

Guessing that lithold will be with me a while longer...

https://www.googleplusdatalitigation.com/





 

The known site I'm posting this from is finally back up after a few hours of fighting with podman networking, nftables and mysql unicode collation.

 

Income targeting seems.. problematic on a number of levels given the distribution of income by ethnicity and gender.. I probably don't want to know how we calculate rich vs poor traffic.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2580383?hl=en





 

Can't seem to find a way to get Desktop PWAs to work on a new laptop..

Currents/G+ isn't offering an install option and the PWA Anywhere app isn't really doing it's thing.

I seemed to have gotten some entries created but clicking on them opens a tab. Then I can go to the triple dot menu and click 'Open in Gmail' and the application window opens.





 

Sorry Chromebook, your screen lock timeout is way too short...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4mHPeMGTJM





 

"Police Reform" is the new "Cage Free Eggs"

We don't need more humane oppression. Replace the system with one that is focused solving on human needs, not in reinforcing broken organizations.


 

Google could refuse to work with Law Enforcement Agencies until they clean up their act. Minimum legal effort and that's it.

Not doing so puts people at risk.

Our time and assistance is valuable and a privilege so we should prioritize good actors over bad.





 

"The Purpose of a System is What it Does"

Change, or replace, the system to get better outcomes.

https://www.mpd150.com/resources/

 

Oz Turns 10

I didn't see any posts about it in my stream, so I'll mention that Oz turns 10 years old today.

Thank you Oz for inspiring Apps Framework and Boq.