Technology

The Culling, 2024 summary

It feels like more, but the total amount of culling this year has been relatively small, though a few major sites/services are included:

  • Instagram. The platform is garbage, the company is worse, and I stopped posting more than a year ago. This one was easy.
  • LinkedIn. I barely used LinkedIn at all, so nuking it was also easy.
  • Substack. Their stance on actual Nazis made me move my newsletter (which then died of neglect) and also unsubscribe to about half a dozen newsletters, including several I paid for. The platform is also clearly working to entrap writers into their “ecosystem”. Those that stay may ultimately regret it, Nazis or not.
  • verge.com. I normally wouldn’t include a mere website, but The Verge decided to offer an optional subscription, but also decided to just arbitrarily block content at random (?), which annoyed me enough to just remove the bookmark. I’ll miss David Pierce’s gushing over every terrible tech company’s latest thing.
  • Posthaven. In my quest to find a WordPress alternative, Postahaven was a finalist. But if you don’t pay for a full year (month by month) they nuke your site, which was enough for me to give it a pass.

Dumping Substack and The Verge have saved me the most time, purging LinkedIn also provided some relief for my inbox.

What will get culled in 2025? We’ll know soon!

Experimenting with Ghost. Spooky!

UPDATE, December 22, 2024: Corrected a few things based on a reply from the person who hosts Magic.Pages!

MagicPages.co is a Ghost hosting site, and they offer both reasonable pricing, plus a 14-day free trial. Today, I signed up for the trial and created a mock version of this very blog. I tweaked the default theme a bit, made a post, then duplicated an existing post from here to see how easy it was or wasn’t, and how it looked vs. WP.

Here are my initial takes.

Pro:

  • Clean, simple interface. WP has a ton of cruft and junk I never use, and the thing I do most often–post–is not made particularly easy or accessible. Ghost streamlines everything down to a minimalist UI that makes it simple to write posts.
  • More options are always close by. It’s only a click away to do more complex formatting or access other features. Again, the UI feels honed, and focused.
  • It has a nice selection of themes, and you can create your own (though it’s not that simple).
  • No plugins needed! It has image-handling options that are much nicer than WP’s, and they’re just there.
  • If you want to have members/subscriptions, it’s easy to set up.
  • ActivityPub integration is being worked on, meaning I could blog and share easily to Mastodon, the one social media site I haven’t completely abandoned (yet).
  • I can use all emojis, to excess. Always to excess.

Con:

  • Most themes are locked behind a higher-priced tier, as are custom themes. Wrong! The head of Magic.Pages, Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, wrote to me to let me know all of Ghost’s official themes are supported in the Starter plan. The Pro plan is required for custom themes.
  • The number of fonts is limited. I’m not sure how easy it is to add more (edit: It looks like it requires haxing the backend to a degree).
  • While the UI is great, the overall level of customization seems lower overall. I love tweaking, but maybe too much, so this isn’t necessarily a con.
  • How do I turn off the copious subscribe buttons? One is enough.
  • No easy way to import my WP site, which begs the question, what would I do with the old site? I am not going to manually copy over 5,400+ posts. Probably. (Note: Ghost.org does offer importing, but only with their even-more-expensive tiers.) UPDATE: Yearly plans do get support for importing, so I was basically wrong here, too.
  • The two cards it supports are for the worst social media platforms: Facebook and X.

Overall, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I am fussy and unsure. I have about two weeks to make up my mind about this specific host, though.

The web has trained me not to click

Why? Because so much linked content (on social media, particularly, but not exclusively) is now paywalled, instantly pops-up SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER RIGHT NOW, has a cascading series of cookie warnings/options, and basically just a lot of clutter and nonsense to sift through before, possibly, getting to what you were actually interested in.

And you know what? I’m actually ok with that! By not clicking, and maybe by other people not clicking, we silently send a message, however vague, to maybe change things on the web to make them less awful, invasive, intrusive and annoying.

One can always hope.

Once again, saved by lack of information

I’ll never play this apparently addictive game!

The post, on Mastodon:

I realize the image of the game is rather small, but all you need to know is:

  • The author admits he is “annoyingly quite hooked” on it.
  • The author, other than providing a generic-looking screenshot that suggests it’s a phone app, does not in any way name or hint at what the game actually is.
  • There is no way, short of investigating the screenshot via reverse image search or something, or directly asking the author in reply, to risk getting annoyingly quite hooked on this game, because there’s no way to determine what game it actually is.

All of which to say this is one of my social media pet peeves, though to be fair, the same would apply in a non-social media setting, such as an online forum. And that pet peeve is talking about something neat/shiny/addictive/whatever, but without providing any context, so people don’t know what you’re actually talking about. I mean, sure, if you’re going to post a shot from the latest Mario game, with Mario in it and doing Mario things, people will probably be able to suss out what game it is, but something like the above? I can’t decide if people are being lazy, forgetful, or think everyone else just plays or enjoys the exact same things they do.

But, you know, it’s not like having my hair on fire (if such a thing were possible, given what currently remains), so it’s a minor complaint in the overall scheme of things.

The Culling: Instagram – update!

As of tonight, my Instagram account has been “deleted”. I put that in quotes for a few reasons:

  • I can cancel the process by logging in within the next 30 days, which could happen accidentally if I am very dumb.
  • I would not be surprised to learn that Meta does not actually delete user data, but just “hides” it while still keeping the sweet, precious bits and bytes for harvesting.
  • They say it can take up to 90 days before the account is truly gone, which means we could be on the verge of spring and it might still be hanging around in the ether.

Regardless of all that, I have purged the account and do not intend to go back.

I will never deliberately use another Meta product again. There are only a few companies I deem vile enough to warrant a total boycott, and Meta is probably #1 on the list. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg will be crying himself to sleep tonight. In his bed made entirely of money, in his giant money house.

This, of course, came into my inbox moments later:

Tom Scott on online communication, December 2024

In his current newsletter, Tom Scott talks about people playing around with Bluesky’s “fire hose of data” then ultimately comes to this conclusion:

The world’s communication seems to have moved on to group chats and Discords and other private groups; the days of “tell everything to everyone, what could go wrong” are past, and perhaps that’s for the best.

And I feel this is pretty much right. A lot of people are comparing Bluesky to early Twitter, but early Twitter was more than a decade ago and online communication has drastically changed since then–in most ways, for the worst. I think it’s great people are having fun and enjoying Bluesky, but we would all be wise to remember what has happened with bot armies, scams and the increased polarization of “open” online communities. Scott further makes the point by linking to Hank Green’s video on bots disagreeing with everything:

Reading is (now) hard

I came across this video (linked below) by Jared Henderson (BTW, he totally looks like a Jared and no, I can’t explain why, he just does. He also has a great Jared voice. I wish I had his voice. I still kind of sound like a teenager, which would be handy if I wanted to impersonate a teenager on the phone or something) in which he talks about how we’ve lost our focus. The culprits are exactly what you’d expect–first, TV, and now the internet, smartphones, TikTok and the rest.

The chief consequence of losing focus is that we can no longer engage in activities that require concentrated, sustained thought, like…reading.

A few years ago, when my book reading began to trail off, I thought it was because I’d lost my “reading time”. When I worked at Langara, I had two SkyTrain routes for my route, with the Expo Line portion being about half an hour long–a solid hour every day, five days a week, that I ended up devoting to reading books. One year I read 40 books. It almost seems surreal now. And they weren’t all short books! When I left Langara, I lost this structured reading time, and I filled it with other things–nothing in particular, just stuff. I tried reading at night, but it never stuck. Again, I thought it was just failing to find the right “time” to read. But I think this video nails the real cause: I just can’t focus like I used to. And it’s because of the internet. And I don’t even watch TikTok.

I am making some changes going forward, and one of them is to limit my “brainlessly graze the internet to passively entertain me” time. We’ll see how it goes. I’m not making an actual resolution or anything yet, but it’s an option.

Here’s the video:

Me and U

UPDATE, later that day: Somehow I managed to set the keyboard backlight to a searing white instead of the usual soothing green, and it is no longer allowing me to change the colour now. Another attempt to update the firmware failed.

I have plugged in my CTRL keyboard while I ponder what to do next. I am now sans knob and a little sad, as one who is suddenly knobless might be.

So much for fixing my U problem! (lol)

The keyboard I’m using currently is generally very nice.

As per the order placed January 9, 2022, it’s a:

Keychron Q1 QMK Custom Mechanical Keyboard Knob Version - Fully Assembled Knob / Navy Blue / Gateron G Pro Blue

The knob is handy for adjusting volume. I am too lazy to program it to do anything else. The keyboard is built like a tank and could legit kill someone as a blunt force weapon (the body is metal and weighs about four pounds). The keys are lubed, so they feel extra silky smooth. But!

There is the U key. Although you never see it in my posts or other writing, the U key often acts as if it’s been double-pressed, like so:

I see what youu did there, youu nauughty U key.

A few other keys sometimes double up, though much more intermittently. Now, in theory, this means the switch below the U key may just be wigging out and needs to be replaced. I could even do a test by swapping out the switch for another key I rarely use, like the tilde (sorry, programmers, I am not one of you! I assume programmers use the tilde key a lot).

In fact, now that I’ve type this out, I should try it…right now!

FAKE EDIT: I have done this. We’ll see if this provides a workaround for my U issue. Also, taking the switches out was harder and more nerve-wracking than anticipated. The idea of doing it for an entire keyboard makes me want to pay a 17-year-old keyboard nerd to do it for me.

Also, my keyboard:

And for future reference, since I had some issues getting the backlight working again afterwards:

Fn + Tab = backlight on/off
Fn + Q = toggle lighting effect
Fn + D = Toggle colour
Fn + F = Change to white (and get keyboard stuck, so white is all you get)
Fn + W = increase brightness
Fn + S = decrease brightness

The Culling: Posthaven

Posthaven was not bad and was a finalist in my “replace WordPress” quest/fool’s errand. But I just wasn’t using it, so even $5 a month was too much. It turns out if you stop paying before having made 12 monthly payments, they nuke your site, posts and account. But you get a thank-you message for trying them!

I assume they figure you won’t be back.

I guess I probably won’t be, if I have to commit to a full year to avoid starting all over from scratch again. I’m curious how well this model is working for them.

(And yes, this particular culling was inspired by the IG culling. It’s cullings all the way down.)

The Culling: Instagram

It turns out the last time I posted to Instagram was July 30, 2023, over 16 months ago. That seems to be a good indication of how much value IG brings to my life currently.

I downloaded my data–786 MB worth–then made a post today, announcing I would be nuking the account (more precisely, I used the metaphor of sending it into a black hole). Yes, I could just leave the account alone, “just in case” but I looked over the last few notifications and it appears that sexy bots with strange names are liking my posts. That makes me feel a bit icky. I’m pretty sure I do not need validation from sexy bots with strange names. I will not miss the site.

In a few days, I’ll go back and delete the account. I’m giving the handful of people I had “friended” there a little notice. Do I miss their posts? I mean, maybe a tiny bit, but not enough to keep me active and willing to post on a platform and through a company that sees genocide as a fair trade for engagement.

If I really want attention for my photos, there’s always Pixelfed or some other site or service. But I am finding a kind of unnameable pleasure in stripping away these sites and platforms that attract billions (of sexy bots). Maybe I’m regressing to my teen rebellion stage, pushing off the man, or the mainstream, or whatever. The mental headspace it clears up is nice, and the bonus is I no longer have that insufferable teen angst to go along with the rebellion. It’s just pure rebellion now, baby!

Here’s a photo of the sun-dappled Brunette River I took yesterday that you won’t find on Instagram:

The Verge subscription is now live

It’s $7 per month or $50 per year. That’s in US dollars, so add a healthy 35% more for Canadians.

The main site will be “freemium” now, with some stuff behind a paywall and some not. You can read all the details here: Here we go, The Verge now has a subscription

As noted before, I find The Verge wildly inconsistent, so they won’t get my money. But here’s another reason:

I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief

I mean, on the one hand, I admire that Nilay Patel could seriously write “vastly improved ad experience” and “high-quality ads” without his keyboard exploding, but here’s the thing: If I am paying you, the number of ads I want is zero. None! It’s how Ars Technica does it. They also don’t mention if paying gets you a track-free experience.

We’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Nilay Patel has a warning for people using adblock:

Make your own humidifier!

In the spirit of fictitious cartoon character1I make the distinction because certain presidents-elect seem unclear on which people are real or not. Grandpa Simpson, I tied an onion to my belt and made my own humidifier by boiling a pot of water on the stove.

Some stats for reference below. This is stuff that will be interesting to no one but me, so I will include a picture of a cat at the end. If you don’t like cats, pretend it’s a dog with funny ears.

  • Starting humidity in living room: 24% (low)1
  • Time for water to boil enough to change humidity: 15 minutes, rising to 25% (OK)
  • After 30 minutes: Humidity is 28% (OK) and about 2 cm of water has boiled away
  • After 45 minutes: Humidity is 31% (OK), about half the water has boiled away
  • After 60 minutes: Humidity is 35% (OK), water is down to a few cm
  • I shut the boiling water off just over one hour in

Our ex-humidifier was cool air and used a wick/filter design. I am wondering now if warm air might be better. Things to ponder.

And now, a cat I saw on Mastodon:

Ready for a hug! Or to attack you. Who can say? Cats!

  1. This appears to be the threshold for when it slips from being OK to Low. ↩︎