April 22, 2021 at 4:59 pm
This is a post-it note for myself to a long list of free, self-hosted software solutions. Decentralization, independent internet, and all that jazz. If you’re looking for alternatives to siloed, subscription model, software-as-a-service (SaaS) — give it a look.
April 19, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Speaking of longevity on the web, here’s some nifty open source software for rolling your own Internet Archive. Archivebox saves URL snapshots in several formats: HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC, and more. It can extract a wide variety of content to preserve — article text, audio/video, git repos, etc. You can feed it URLs one at a time, schedule regular imports from browser bookmarks or history, use feeds from RSS, connect bookmark services like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. Take that link rot!
The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful. I don’t think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion–making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about.
April 19, 2021 at 12:42 pm
I recently re-upped my site hosting for another year. *plug* Bluehost for the win. *end plug* That of course had me thinking about impact and legacy. These ramblings only continue to exist because I put in varying degrees of effort and money each year. Blogs (like life) are not a set-and-done thing but a constant, continuous, tending-to that must be fed to stay survive. Having dead blogs litter my RSS library, I know the tendency to entropy is always lurking. URLs and site structures sometimes change; a technology stack might be upgraded and feed functions don’t make the cut. Link rot is real and surprisingly fast.
My first post — in all its infantile ick — is still here. The feed has continued to work for ten years even through hiatus. Those are some minor accomplishments that I’m going to be proud of today. It’s not much and it doesn’t have to be. We should be celebrating the zero victories when all we do is stave off the heat death of decay. That’s more sustainable than overproducing for the simple sake of consumption. Now, time to tend some weeds both in my digital and physical garden.
March 15, 2021 at 2:50 pm
Since I mentioned NFTs earlier, I want to link two other articles worth reading on the subject. Seth Godin weighed in on the traps involved. He also linked to a more in-depth breakdown of crypto’s environmental problems by Everest Pipkin. Here I was worrying about web hosting being problematic while other people were creating carbon bombs to light up the atmosphere.
Abstraction. Speculation. Competition. So much of our world in 2021 is geared towards individual profit over collective good. It’s been that way for a long time — really forever. The innate biological imperative of survival continues to hold grasp even after layers of conscience. Sure, some cultures that value the group have emerged, but we need some species level evolution. We need to find ways to make it easier for us to think about everyone instead of our self.
Screw NFTs. Screw infinite growth. Screw unpriced, negative external costs.
December 1, 2020 at 2:00 pm
I’ve been trying to reconcile the environmental impact of working on the computer and Internet. Hosting this site means I should be accepting responsibility of the electricity required to store, transmit, and work on it. Correct?
I’m not the only one coming to grips with this realization. Mozilla recently released a greenhouse gas baseline. They estimate that people using their browser in 2019 amounts to 785,474 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (mtCO2e). That’s equal to the yearly energy use for 90,639 homes in the United States.
Apple has also made a bold promise to be totally carbon neutral by 2030. That includes “the energy used to power our customers’ devices.” They would not be counting the energy my iMac is using right now since it is nine years old. The fine print states, “Apple assumes a three- or four-year period for power use by first owners based on the product type. Product use scenarios are based on historical customer use data for similar products.”
Closer to my original thought, Eric Bailey came along and asked, “So you wanna create an eco-friendly website.” His take included some good performance improvements for minimizing impact but still came to the same conclusion I’m running into. Outside of deleting your website and not participating in energy use, you’re going to need carbon credits and offsets.
Luckily, there are some resources to help with this process.
October 15, 2015 at 10:05 pm
I’ve been running the new 10.11 for a couple of weeks and have been loving it. Performance seems a touch faster and better even on my ancient workhorse of a Late-2008 Macbook Pro. I’ve definitely noticed it running cooler and spinning up the fans less often. But three things have really stood out to me that were notable and worth remark.
December 11, 2014 at 9:44 pm
I’ve always wanted to build ASCII art headers for my CSS — and just for fun — but never had the patience to learn the techniques and tricks. Consider me super happy to run across Monodraw by Helftone. It’s a drag and draw text editor for Mac with ridiculously powerful features. I’ve added my name to the beta and can’t wait to give it a shot.
October 5, 2014 at 8:45 pm
Way Spurr-Chen built a Twitter bot that will take an image you tweet at it, do some processing, and tweet you back a distorted result. Here’s one I sent it.
https://twitter.com/pixelsorter/status/518404668989648896
The real fun started when Way Spurr-Chen sent @pixelsorter and another Twitter bot @badpng the same image.
https://twitter.com/wayspurrchen/status/514246071464521728
The two bots started tweeting back and forth, continually processing the results from the each other. After forty-two hand offs, the loop was broken so the two wouldn’t go on to infinity. Here’s what the two bots made together.
@pixelsorter pic.twitter.com/x4Ueb6ZJkP
— badpng bot (@badpng) September 23, 2014
I love the idea of robot art. And glitch art can be very cool. It’s very abstract and postmodern. Done right it’s all about appreciating color, technique, and process. People make the coolest stuff on the Internet.
(via The Verge)