(Yes, I am misquoting the lyric, but that’s to be technically correct–the best kind of correct!)
Specifically, I scanned the CBC News site. Did I leave better informed? Marginally. Did it make me feel better? Absolutely not.
I’ve learned my lesson. Next time, I’ll be more careful when I let me attention slip and go wandering websites.
Here is frantically typing cat, which I will aspire not to be when I’m surfing the net, as one does.
(Also, any excuse to post this gif.)
A toot is what some people call posts on Mastodon, the federated, decentralized social media service (and the only social media I check in on anymore). I saw this today, found it delightful and I am sharing it here, as the tenets of social media dictate:
Oh, and a link, too:
My favorite kinds of toots:
– I thought this was interesting.
– I went outside, this is what I saw.
– I’m making something.
– I’m trying something new.
– This is my jam. (Any kind of jam.)
– I made a thing and I’m proud!
– I’m bad at it a thing, but I’m sharing anyway!
– This is my important animal or person.
– Whimsical shitpost.
– Real life mundane thing.— Steven Hoefer (@troublewithwords@wandering.shop)
I still have Apple Music (my partner uses it and his CD collection was lost years ago), but I’ve recently started purchasing albums again, so far digitally, but I’m also thinking about going to local indie stores hunting down CDs like it was 1995.
Today, I bought Supertramp’s 1977 Album, Even in the Quietest Moments. I used a digital service I’d never heard of before today–7Digital–which I found on this site after a search: Digital Music – Music Canada. The service seems fine. I got a zip file with the MP3 files contained within. Not as seamless as iTunes, but it also didn’t require me to install software first to grab the album.
Most of the music I listen to is stuff I already own, anyway, so all I’m really doing is just adding to my library after an extended break. I like that this music is mine and it won’t suddenly disappear or get replaced by some alternate version I may not prefer.
And even though I’m going old school with music purchases like in days gone by, this doesn’t mean I’m ready to embrace the 8-track again.
I now have 40 apps waiting to be updated on my iPhone 12. They must suspect something is up.
Bonus: Banks are now so bad they expect you to travel back in time to get better service:
And since I’m grousing about Apple stuff again, here’s Matt Gemmell (who I’ve linked before) on Apple’s decline:
EDIT: Here’s are some more good takes (the number is increasing):
Macalope on Macworld: If Apple is richer than ever, why does it feel so broke?
Kevin Renskers: Tim Cook sold Apple’s soul
When I went jogging today, I opted to listen to the 1991 R.E.M. album Out of Time. I have this album on CD and had ripped it many years ago for my music-listening pleasure.
Apple Music doesn’t care about that on an iPhone, because it installs its own version of the album. Fine, same music, what’s the difference?
Except today when I go to play the album I see this:
Curious! There are two versions listed, mine and a 2016 remaster.
I check mine:
The first track, “Radio Song” is strangely absent. I check the other version of the album (reader, I knew what I was going to see):
Oh, there’s “Radio Song”, all by itself in its own album. Why did this happen? I don’t know. I know it’s happened before and I’ve seen others report similar issues. The thing to note here is that you have no ultimate control over what happens in Apple Music–Apple does, along with the record labels. This wasn’t a licensing issue where the album got pulled, though–and even if it was, I actually own the album outright, anyway.
Instead, Apple Music apparently got “confused” and took a perfectly working album and split the songs between two different versions. How do you then reconcile this?
The fix was to delete both albums, then add the 2016 remaster to my library. The version on my PC is unaffected and works the same way it has for the past million years. Well, at least the past 20.
I ended up listening to Green1I have downloads over cellular disabled (1988), which Apple Music has so far chosen not to mangle. I should probably go check now, though.
The only social media I use regularly these days is Mastodon, which is part of the Fediverse, a loose collection of sites and services that are federated (connected) but are still independent of each other. Its central feature is probably that it is not centralized. There’s no single server, no giant tech company controlling it and there are no algorithms.
It tends to attract somewhat nerdy people because no one shows up to “go viral” or be showered in likes. And among those nerdy folks are inevitably the “Well, actually…” people who have a need to argue about everything and drive people away. The “I hate to be that guy” guys who delight in being That Guy.
Someone on Mastodon today outlined, in convenient list form, all the wrong ways to interact with others there. It’s a very good bad list.
Remember, you’re on the Fediverse, so your job is to
– Make people feel bad for using other social media
– Guilt-trip anyone who uses AI in any way
– Attack people who don’t include alt text
– Argue with anyone in tech because they must be tech bros
– Oppose anyone with entrepreneurial or for-profit interests
– Shame those who use GitHub or any corporate-owned or American product
– Nitpick even the good things just because you can
– Be morally superior and overly aggressive about supposed data privacy issues in tools that handle public postsAlright, sarcasm over. Seriously, stop it.— Roni Rolle Laukkarinen (@rolle@mementomori.social)
The last smartphone I got was five years ago, in January 2021. I picked up a base iPhone 12 with 128 GB of storage, which was double the default at the time.
The phone has mostly done what I need a phone to do, and my phone use has narrowed down to just a few tasks since I got it. I am old school, so some things people do on their phones I still prefer to do on my PC, with its nice big monitor and full-size, clicky keyboard. Also, no one will ever convince me that typing on a smartphone is fun, or that editing text on the same is anything but a special kind of techno-hell.
But the reason I am writing this now is that while I’m content to use a five-year-old smartphone, my iPhone 12 is getting more, let’s call it eccentric. Most notably, it no longer accepts phone calls, which is an important part of being a phone. Instead, it shunts every call immediately to voicemail. In a way, it’s nice, but it’s gotten increasingly troublesome. I don’t know if switching to a new phone will fix this, but I’d still rather try a new phone than wipe my current phone, set everything up again, find out it fixed nothing and now be stuck with iOS 26 and “liquid glass.” So a new phone it is.
It’s not only my phone use that has changed since 2021, the major tech companies have pretty much given up on the idea of being good or decent and now they just compete on being various levels of awful. This puts me in a quandary, because if I want to jump from the iPhone because Apple is no good, switching to Google-controlled Android is not really better. It’s like someone offering you a dirt pie or mud pie for dinner.
I could get an Android phone and run a third-party OS like Graphene, but my desire to experiment has limits and I have a suspicion that fiddling around getting a phone to do the few tasks I want it to is not an area where I’m interested in exploring those limits.
But I’ve surprised myself before with how far down rabbit holes I’ve been willing to go. I mean, I never tried Linux before and I came close to making my new PC Linux-only. I might still!
Another aspect is I no longer have a desire or requirements for a flagship phone. I just don’t need the latest, best thing out there, so I’m willing to consider mid-tier phones from brands like Motorola. This is as close to exciting as getting a new phone will be for me.
I will provide further updates once I start perusing various models and brands.
I am tickled that Microsoft, one of the leading proponents of this mad push to shove AI (or “AI”) into everything, is now being referred to as Microslop. Normally, I think these names are a bit childish (Micro$oft, anyone?) but this one works for me. It even has a “nice” logo:
I bide my time waiting for the AI bubble to burst, deflate, implode, explode or whatever it is that will cause it to finally come to an end.
Or at least the website is, now. I’ve changed up the colour scheme again, going with an icy blue theme to reflect our wintry cold. Mostly, I just wanted a change.
For future reference, it looks like this:
Also, if John Gruber was dead, he’d be spinning in his grave because the header font is Aptos. Yes, Aptos! (I was lazy and just grabbed a font that was handy. I may change it later.)
The next experiment in design might be to go with some kind of dark mode style. I wish WordPress had a built-in way to switch between light and dark themes (you have to use a plugin). It seems like an obvious thing to add, vs. whatever AI nonsense they’re planning to shove in.
First, Werdmuller is a great name for a writer or someone who writes.
Second, Ben is an incredibly decent and thoughtful person working in tech and media, and he wrote 47 lessons for his 47th birthday. They are worth a read.