Information wants to be free.
Data wants to be dirty.
Duplicated data wants to skew.
Introducing Baffle
A while back, I wrote up a design for bridging Microsub clients to traditional feed reader backends. Fast forward to a few weeks ago: I hacked together a bare bones prototype at IndieWebCamp 2018. Fast forward to now: I’m launching Baffle!
Baffle lets you use Microsub reader apps like Together, Indigenous, and Monocle with traditional feed readers like NewsBlur and maybe eventually Feedly and more.
Right now, it only supports viewing channels and timelines. If there’s enough interest and usage, I can add channel management, muting, and blocking. I’d also consider adding Feedly if I hear enough desire.
Happy reading!
But there was no corresponding sunshine in Bertram Wooster’s soul and no answering Twitter in his heart as he sat up in bed…
💯😂
- PG Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves
Our culture is very big on freedom and responsibility. I pride myself on making as few decisions as possible in a quarter. We’re getting better at that; sometimes I can go a whole quarter without making any decisions.
Tree, trunk, branch, crown
Climbing up and sitting down
Morning sun becomes noon-blue
All the world is old and new
Road, street, track, path
Ship, boat, wooden raft
Nest, bird, feather, fly
All the world has got its sky
Spreading shadows, setting sun
Crickets, curtains, day is done
A fire takes away the chill
All the world can hold quite still
- All the World, Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee
Beautiful homespun poem, and my favorite book to read to Brooke, bar none. Happy Fathers Day.
Men have been viewed as the default. So therefore, if you understand males, you understand females.
…but even down to the cellular level, that is not the case. The NIH has started to recognize that.
- Martie Haselton, via Edge 👏👏👏
The web, and Google, are the world’s worst doctors.
The problem is, they’re also now everyone’s first doctor.
Turning off Facebook for Bridgy
I announced recently that Bridgy Publish for Facebook would shut down soon. Facebook’s moves to restrict its API to improve privacy and security are laudable, and arguably the right idea, but also mean that users can no longer use third party apps like Bridgy to create posts.
I didn’t realize it at first, but similar API restrictions hit the backfeed (aka listen) feature, which sends comments and likes back to your web site. Bridgy can still see comments and likes by Bridgy users, but that’s a tiny fraction of the Facebook comments and likes that it used to see.
I spent a while looking for a workaround, and even looked into scraping HTML, but you have to be logged into Facebook to see even public posts, on both www and m, so no luck there. [Insert silo snark here.]
So with a heavy heart, I’m shutting down Facebook on Bridgy entirely. Publish will still work until August 1, but listen largely stopped working on May 24, so I turned it off altogether and disabled new user signup a few days ago.
An engineering degree from a top tier university does not qualify you to operate consumer electronics.
Interesting unintended consequence of federated social networks: when you post a link, thousands of different nodes all fetch it at the same time to render a link preview, which results in a small DDoS.
Anyone else excited about this bit of the Emacs 26 release notes?
Emacs now provides a limited form of concurrency with Lisp threads.