Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Internet

  • Return to personal archiving

    A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…

  • App ad network malware

    My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…

  • WordPress and Mastodon

    Months ago, Automattic acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will publish on the Mastodon network as a federated instance through the ActivityPub protocol. The blog basically becomes a server of sorts in the fediverse. That sounded cool, so I installed the plugin. This post will serve as a test to see if it works.…

  • Short descriptions matter

    To me, the most important part of an email is the subject line. What it tells me factors into whether I read it immediately or get back to it later. Later might take months as I don’t really have the time to read my email. Same thing with tickets. Additionally, several times a week, someone…

  • Federated social media

    Back in April, I learned about Mastodon. I made an account, but never used it. I made another and started using it. People are leaving Twitter. Many of those to Mastodon, so I will find them. You can find me there as @ezrasf@mas.to , so connect with me. The concept is interesting. There are many…

  • The email hammer

    A retired coworker was fond of the saying: If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. A super cranky former coworker railed about the terribleness of email. Mainly that too much stuff tried to go into email when it should be better off in RSS feeds or other. My…

  • Feature request: unwatch

    Streaming services track what I have watched so I can see the progress. But only your first time through a series. If I start over, then it can be confusing where I am. I might start over because I didn’t finish and want to give it another chance. Or I want to watch a series…

  • Facebook discourages providing sources

    A friend posted an article about a political candidate. I wanted to find a related article and add it to that conversation. So, I opened the browser, got pulled into a couple offline things, found the article, got pulled in a couple other offline directions, and went back to the post. The app refreshed and…

  • Just Google It

    Saw a friend ask a question about how to setup a store for WordPress on Facebook. This seemed trivial. Just look on Google for the answer. But, then I had a thought: What if my working with WordPress for years yields me better results? First, I certainly have terminology that would give me better results.…