Daily Journal 📓

• Thanks to a tip from Jacob, I’m registered for my first dose of vaccine using TeleHippo.

• Apparently they partnered with BC Pharmacies and got this done.

• The form filling worked and got me a booking, so I’m glad it exists. But I shook my head at the “phone numbers only no spaces or dashes” and the two incompatible ways of entering in birthdates.

• Along with limited open data and collection timing by the PHO here in BC after 13 months, I really do wish we could have better government digital services.

• Meanwhile in California, a volunteer team is working to pull together vaccine availability. Simon Willison just joined the team and talked about porting from Airtable to Django. 40M population vs our little 4M population province. Volunteers doing a great job. But still — volunteers!

• Wardley doesn’t think that Telesat’s LEO space Internet is going to work. Canadian company, big investment from Canadian government.

• Peter Clark @plc asks:

  I really want a simple, thoughtfully private, not owned by a tech conglomerate, photo sharing app that is really nicely designed. like instagram in 2010. does this exist?

  • I answered with links to Micro.blog and the Sunlit client and ActivityPub powered Pixelfed.
  • I think Pixelfed is probably the strongest foundation, with the bonus that you could pull in Mastodon and other ActivityPub content that included photos for a broader network.
  • I’ve talked to some artists and for them it’s about other inspiring artists on the platform and… people who buy the work they post.
  • Some social networks — like art or styles of photos — simply aren’t niche, so where do network effects come from? How do we get started?

• Many are more familiar with the Chrome DevTools console than they are with a Unix command-line prompt. More familiar with WebSockets than BSD sockets, MDN than man pages. Bash and Zsh scripts calling into native code will never go away. But JavaScript and TypeScript scripts calling into WebAssembly code will be increasingly common. Many developers, we think, prefer web-first abstraction layers.

  — Announcing the Deno Company

• The people behind the Deno programming language announce a commercial company with venture investment.

• Not pursuing open core, full MIT License for the language.

• People noticed the NodeJS bashing going on.

• Also Deno Deploy:

• Deno Deploy is a distributed system that runs JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly at the edge, worldwide. The service deeply integrates the V8 JavaScript runtime with a high performance asynchronous web server to provide optimal performance without unnecessary intermediate abstractions.

• @levelsio writes about how you can’t really contact him, on purpose.

• Reading public tweets sent to me, and replying. People behave much better in public messages than in direct messages, so that’s also nice. And the message length limit really helps keep things efficient.

• This is really not how I’m wired. I like meeting people and getting on calls with them. But, I already do mostly answer things publicly, work on my digital garden here, and blog so I can share the same answer multiple times.

• Also makes me think about Derek Sivers You Don’t Have to Be Local https://sive.rs/local

• I have been in global mode again for a couple of years, and I see that continuing … except I do go “local” when I travel, eg the folks I know in Berlin.

• Ari’s Garden Electronic Cookbook App

• Open source ElmLang and NodeJS app for recipes, with actual helpers in the app to help during cooking.

• The main site is at https://arisgarden.theiceshelf.com/

• Looking at #recipe formats again because @icidasset was asking what the best apps are. I’ve never found one I like for a variety of reasons.

• Paprika Recipe Manager was the one that most people recommended.

• Google has this JSON-LD format for structured recipe data. As well as rich search results, it can be used by “assistants” to read out by voice.

• I’m finding it pleasant to flesh out Moa Party pages on the website.

• It’s small, and it’s a constrained area of knowledge. The notes graph is fun to look at.

• I worked on the Pleroma and ActivityPub pages, which was fun learning a bit more about those two things and gathering links and descriptions.

• Kevin Drum: Why have blog audiences declined over the past decade? #blogging

• Short (theoretical) answer: RSS impacts the insertion of advertising.

• You can’t separate the software from the community that built it. Therefore, true openness must dictate how that community is formed and run. We are what we choose to tolerate; in the same way that free software communities do not tolerate proprietary lock-in, they should not tolerate exclusionary social practices that lock people out.

— Ben Werdmuller Equitable Community Software

• Computers and Creativity, Molly Mielke:

• “Computers and Creativity” asks: How can we utilize the full potential of creative thought and computational actualization to enable human innovation?

In fewer words: How can we make computers better bicycles of the creative mind? — @mollyfmielke

• via @Dylan_Steck

• https://github.com/knadh/tg-archive

• A tool for exporting Telegram group chats into static websites, preserving chat history like mailing list archives.

• Run #Python locally, syncs to SQLite local DB and then lets you generate a static site. Uses Telethon library.

• Single file Jinja HTML template for generating the static site. RSS feed created.

• Internet Connectivity Working Group at the Bowen Island Municipality from 2016.

• There’s a discussion about community economic development on Bowen Island going on, and I submitted the suggestion of a Community ISP.

• I think this could be done via a mix of 5G towers and wireless.

• The American Dream is Going Digital

• Naturally, the mom-and-pop businesses of today are YouTubers, Twitch streamers, Shopify dropshippers, webcomic artists, podcast hosts, Tik Tok stars, OnlyFans creators, indie game developers, streetwear resellers, Etsy store owners, Clubhouse hosts, Substack writers, and many, many more. Deploying on top of the distribution railroad tracks that have been competitively laid by internet platforms over the past decades, addressable online customers have never been more abundant.

• via (and by) @cpaik

• The High Blogging Era, defined by Robin Sloan as mid-2000s. Hmmm. I was there and was a part of it, and RSS and blogs was all there was, before Twitter and Facebook etcetera that then became labeled as social media.
• Google Reader removed social features in 2011, and was shut down in 2013. I think the “high” era more properly is the mid 2000s until the fall of Reader. When many people were blogging, not just the early few. Maybe 8 years? A good run.
• But everyone will have their own nostalgia tinged view.
• Are we at the beginning of digital gardens and Second Brains? Will this be looked back on as the High Era? I’m more interested in getting it into the hands of everyone. Hmmm. Has Nora Young done a segment on Spark yet? I should attempt to get on a CBC Radio morning or afternoon show to talk about it.
• via Robin Rendle, Blogging and Dimly Lit Bars.
• via @jamescham, need to read The Man Who Lied to his Laptop #HCI

• Today was a team activity day at Fission. Two RPG sessions playing DnD over Zoom. A new experience, I think everyone enjoyed it.
• A good excuse to use our new TiddlyWiki app to write down notes on my character.

• Community-curated knowledge networks @sariazout

• We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks 

(a thread on why)

• Set up #Gitlab Service Desk for Moa Party, including forwarding email from Google Domains.

• It’s really interesting to have a shared email inbox included in the service for free. Will be interesting to see how many people use it.

• The presentation I gave to the #IPFS Local Offline Collab group is on Hackernews

• I find most of the tension between the recently labeled content web vs app web.
• The people who complain about unreadable pages bloated with JS to read a blog post are right.
• The people who want to build local first, browser-centric apps are right.
• From a discussion in the wikilinks Matrix channel with @karlicoss

• Micro.blog just moved their help site to Discourse: New help center using Discourse.
• Great to see. It has SSO with your existing Micro.blog account.

• Just learning more about Google’s third party cookie replacement, FLoC, Federated Learning of Cohorts. The EFF says: Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea.

• Just prepaid for a year of Beeper. This is letting me “jump the line” and get into the beta. Plus, I reserved my username as @boris there. It is supposed to connect all your messaging apps in one “app” — even iMessage on non-Apple systems, through a jail broken iPhone.

• I really do have the need for a unified messaging app. I’m not super interested in a proprietary paid service to do it, but I’d like to try it out.

• @acroll is posting on Substack. I don’t understand why he’s posting somewhere without mapping it to his own domain name.

• His latest is Nothing in the middle, about the creator economy. Good read.

• I got invited to Simon Wardley’s every two week “interesting people” video chat. Lots of discussion around Wardley Maps, a bit of serverless thrown in. An interesting group of people. Some have tracked me down on either LinkedIn or Twitter.
• For the next call, the suggested topic is to look at applying mapping to health / healthcare.
• This connects directly to @tonzylstra’s recent post It’s more logical to host an event than attend one.
• Someone day I will publish the extensive chat notes and article links between @hitsmachines and I, talking about NFTs and art.
• The answer to some of your questions currently are xDai Chain and Nifty.Ink.
• I posted the Back to IndieKit blog to Mastodon.
• I’m thinking about automating posts from this journal to Mastodon. The people there are likely interested in the type of stuff I post about. I would need to build a JSON Feed and then I can use my existing Micro.blog subscription to cross post.
• Hmmm. Since the Revue newsletter builder is part of Twitter now, and I looked at using it for Fission, maybe I’ll put the Journal feed into there, that could be interesting.