“Keep your head up high” when things get tough. But sometimes it’s better keeping stooped down. Don’t face adverse circumstances head-on. Don’t look at how little you have progressed or how far you still need to go. Keep plowing on, one step at a time. You will get there.
Extra measures will be in effect today at 10 PM to limit the spread of COVID in our country. I do wonder if we are getting closer to the end or still only near the beginning. But this open-ended crisis forces every country in a constant balancing act so much is clear.
Only looking at the millions of dollars spent on Facebook this year by both the republicans and democrats, the scale of the Presidential elections of the United States of America never fails to astonish me.
November 3 will be a decisive moment for the political future of the USA.
Currently reading: The age of surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff 📚
November, Autumn season. The transition from summer to winter is my favorite time of year. The vibrant fall colours are great for landscape photography and I enjoy my early morning walks even on cold and rainy days. Getting outside helps me concentrate, think and focus.
For quite some time I was thinking about writing more often, so Microblogvember 2020 came at a great time. It will also help with some of the more dreary days during this strange times. Looking forward to the challenge.
Moved some domains to Cloudflare Domain Registar (currently in early access). Migration went smooth and Cloudflare’s policy on pricing is great.
“We promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges.” … While Cloudflare Registrar will not charge more for the privilege of registering domain ownership, the service will also enable two-factor authentication for all domain registration accounts, lock domain registrations to prevent transfers by default, and automatically enable services such as Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and WHOIS privacy—things registrars frequently charge for.
Count me a fan1!
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P.S. I am in no way affiliated with Cloudflare. This is just meant to be a honest recommendation. ↩︎
How to batch export from Ulysses to plain Markdown
This is a small guide to help moving files from Ulysses native file format (.ulysses files) to plain Markdown. Having your writing in plain Markdown is necessary when you want to move to a different writing app or just for backup purposes1.
This guide works for files without images and Ulysses specific bells and whistles
- Create a temporary folder on your Mac for the exported Markdown files e.g. “Ulysses export”;
- Open Ulysses on your Mac and add the “Ulysses export” folder to the library (bottom of the left sidebar) → Add External Folder;
- Select the files you would like to export from Ulysses to standard Markdown;
- Move the files, within Ulysses, to the “Ulysses export” folder;
- Open the “Ulysses export” folder in the Finder and move/import to where ever you would like.
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Just trying to backup the .ulysses files isn’t very useful as the .ulysses files have a hash for a name and contain two files (Content.xml and Text.txt). To get your writing out of the files you have to open all of them manually. If you use an iCloud-stored library the files are hardly reachable at all. ↩︎
Got my photoblog maintainingfocus running on @blot, so far so good (after straightening out some DNS issues). Although cross-posting images isn’t working at the moment, will have to look in to this tomorrow.
After seeing quite a few people posting about Blot, I took the plunge and will be trying it for my photography blog.
A good leader show which road to travel, a great leader helps others to see the road they want to travel on.
The beauty within
I like words. I like plain and simple thoughts and stories written down. For as long as the internet existed it has been a great place to read and write.
But while the web has been ever increasingly gaining advancements in design and complexity, I value… no, I crave, simplicity.
Almost all of the web today is geared toward gaining attention and eyeballs. Every year, with every advancement, I feel we distance ourselves more and more from what is really valuable for these mere eyeballs (also known as humans).
At most websites, you have to click through a jungle of stuff which only distracts from their main objective (just to name a few: Medium, Youtube and almost all news outlets on the web). And although I fully understand the business objectives driving these decisions, I feel there is a quality to simplicity and not being over-designed. In my opinion, it adds character.
Most of the time your message will not be more clearly expressed when surrounded by fancy stuff let alone a bombardment of ads and messages.
Plain words on a plain website are in my opinion just like a vinyl record. And just like for people enjoy listening to a vinyl record, it’s not about audio perfection or having all bells and whistles. It’s completely the opposite.
To take the music analogy a step future. A super clean production of a mediocre song can become a hit (with the right number of infuencers and paid-airtime), but be all forgotten about in a year or so. “Perfection” gets boring most often. The song that an artist (possibly with less vocal quality or marketing budget) just had to put out there has the potential to become legendary. Because it has meaning and its roughness only adds to its quality.
With words, like music, it’s also not about perfection but about meaning.
When writing we should feel like an artist making a song. Making a song, not because it will show our vocal capabilities best, but because it’s a song that has to be made, has to be heard.
The same goes for words, the beauty is in meaning. Just feel free to write.
This post is as much reminding myself that my writing doesn’t have to be perfect as supporting everyone reading this to just write down what you feel you have to say!
∞ Sorry Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook isn’t a “positive force”
In a Tuesday interview with CNN, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s handling of recent scandals and his own leadership of the company. He flatly rejected calls to give up his position as the chairman of Facebook’s board and said he had no plans to fire his top deputy, Sheryl Sandberg.
People like to mock Google’s “don’t be evil” slogan, but the company really has made difficult calls in the past—like pulling out of China over pressure to build a censored search engine.
By contrast, Facebook only seems to care about promoting the continued growth of Facebook.
The inability of Facebook to change after an increasing number of incedents and scandals is shocking. Although Google shouldn’t be presented as a poster boy, the differences does show. Talk the talk … walk the walk
Dark mode support for the Marfa theme done! You can take a look using Safari Technology Preview 68 with Dark mode enabled in OSx. Marfa theme wil switch dark/light depending on your system prefs.
Working on enabling Safari dark mode support on the Micro.blog Marfa theme, almost done:
P.s. I will write a micro guide, but a word of warning: it will require quite some tinkering for Micro.blog themes besides Marfa.
∞ Computers have learned to make us jump through hoops
The other day I had to log in to a service I hadn’t used before. Since I was a new user, the website decided that it needed to check that I wasn’t a robot and so set me a Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This is a challenge-response test to enable a computer to determine whether the user is a person rather than a machine.
But note also the delicious additional irony that the Captcha is described as an “automated Turing test”. The Turing test was conceived, you may recall, as a way of enabling humans to determine whether a machine could respond in such a way that one couldn’t tell whether it was a human or a robot. So we have wandered into a topsy-turvy world in which machines make us jump through hoops to prove that we are humans!
Although it’s clearly human ingenuity transforming us to unpaid “click workers” training A.I, but regardless it’s still a very interesting case.
It makes you wonder what could happen if an A.I. would learn and deploy this on its own. And although I don’t think this would happen in the very near future, we should think about unforeseen consequences (as almost all technology and legislations bring in there wake).
P.S. Personally I find the types of CAPTCHAs presented to us very interesting. It gives insight in the current focus of developments in machine learning and A.I. Will be very interesting to see what will be next after road signs and store fronts.
Computers have learned to make us jump through hoops - The Guardian
∞ To www or not to www
For 20 years or so, there has been the debate over whether you should use www or not in your web site’s canonical hostname. So should you use www or not?
If you’re concerned about the security of whatever you have on “example.com”, make sure you slap a “www”- in front of it. If that doesn’t help you choosing whether you should use www or not, I’m not sure what will.
To www or not to www – Should you use www or not in your domain? by Bjørn Johansen
Great read on the pro’s (prettier and easier) vs cons (security regarding cookies) of using www. For my own domain I don’t use cookies (besides one Cloudflare load balancing cookie), so using the origin domain without www. is perfectly safe. But still I wonder, should I switch just to support proper and safe web techniques?
Micro guide: Getting your hosted Microblog IPv6 ready
This is a small guide (hence the category “micro guide”) to enable IPv61 for your hosted microblog2.
disclaimer: please make sure that you know what you are doing with your DNS settings. Although it isn’t really difficult or complex you can really mess up access to your website if the settings are incorrect. Please make note of the original settings before changing anything.
Setting up IPv6
To start, you should go to your domain registrar or system to manage DNS (personally I use Cloudflare and have written another micro guide with recommendations on how-to enable Cloudflare for your microblog).
Now you can create an AAAA record (a record is an instruction for the browser to which server to connect and the AAAA version is used for IPv6 addresses).
Make sure that the AAAA record is pointing to:
2600:3c00:1::68c8:16d6
This is the IPv6 address for hosted microblogs. Leave the A record (address for IPv4) and other records like CNAME unaltered. Based on you DNS provider it should look somewhat like:
Save the settings and after a few minutes you can check if your website has support for IPv6.
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What IPv6 is and why it is beneficial will get technical very quickly, if your interested you could start reading Wikipedia or look in to this tutorial ↩︎
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hosted with micro.blog ↩︎