Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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Screenshot of a context menu of Twitter.com when clicking on the three dots at the top-right of an ad you want to remove. At the bottom is a new option ‘Report EU illegal content’.

Twitter (yeah, I know, but whatever) has added a reporting feature as a visible part of their European Digital Services Act (DSA) compliance efforts. There’s more interesting bits to the DSA to comply with for Twitter, and I wonder how many of ‘the DSA is thought police!*!$!?!!!’-types will submit false reports.

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Bookmarked The 100 Year Plan (by Automattic/WordPress)

WordPress is offering a century of managed hosting for 38.000USD, I presume upfront.

In reply to I’d love to understand what prompted Automattic to offer a hosting plan for $38K. by Ben Werdmuller

I don’t think this is a serious proposition by Automattic / WordPress.

  1. Who is in a position to put 38.000USD on the table right now, that they can’t use more usefully elsewhere? (even if in terms of monthly rates it’s not a large sum)
  2. Who believes Automattic, or any company, is likely to be around anno 2123 (unless they pivot to brewing or banking)? Or that they or their successor will honor such century old commitments (State guaranteed Russian railway shares are now just over 100 years old)?

I think it’s a way of getting attention for the last part of Matt’s quote at the end:

I hope this plan gets people and other companies thinking about building for the long term.

Matt Mullenweg

That is a relevant thing to talk about. People’s digital estates after they pass are becoming more important. I know how much time it took me to deal with it after my parents died, even with their tiny digital footprint, and even when it wasn’t about digital preservation mostly. Building code, hardware and systems to last is a valuable topic.

However if I want to ensure my blog can still be read in 100 years there is an easy fix: I would submit it to the national library. I don’t think my blog is in the subset of sites the Dutch Royal Library already automatically tracks and archives, even though at 20+ years it’s one of the oldest still existing blogs (at the same url too). However I can register an ISBN number for my collected postings. Anything published in the Netherlands that has an ISBN number will be added to the national library’s collection and one can submit it digitally (preferably even).

I think I just saved myself 38.000 USD in exchange for betting the Royal Library will still exist in 2123! Its founding was in 1798, 225 years ago, so the Lindy effect suggests it’s likely a good bet to give it another century or two.

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Oh great, LinkedIn! Of course I want you to ‘suggest’ postings in my timeline concerning conspiracy delusions about the fires in Hawaii, a disfigured street cat ‘nevertheless’ feeding its young and thus commended for its nurturing instincts (is animal ableism a separate category in your data model?), an autoplaying video of a woman removing mobiles from her family’s hands at the dinner table in a very funny (hahaha!) way, and something about a leopard. Enshittification ftw! I unfollowed every one on my contact list two years ago just for you to have more space to play Facebook and TikTok all by yourself. And I am also very pleased you always make me set the timeline to ‘most recent’ and then put it back to ‘most relevant’ (I do wonder about LinkedIn’s definition of ‘relevant’) so I don’t miss any of your suggestions. I think I need to use a different way of going to LinkedIn to find the details of someone in my network than the default /feed LinkedIn steers you to. I’ll add the direct path to the network search page as bookmark. And continuously strengthen my personal notes-as-rolodex.

Such a great day for the Digital Services Act to come into effect for ‘VLOPS’ like LinkedIn!

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Bookmarked Wildlife surveys using ‘DNA vacuums’! by Dr. Christina Lynggaard

Environmental DNA sampling sounds very cool: capturing DNA from the air (or other environments), and not needing to sample DNA directly from organisms. Dr. Christina Lynggaard says in three days she captured DNA from the air from dozens of animals in a natural setting. Downloaded the cited paper to read (DOI). I wonder if something like this is within reach of citizen science group’s capabilities? Perhaps just the sampling, or maybe even the sequencing and determination?

This was our first exploration of airborne eDNA in a natural setting and we were especially surprised by the high number of bird taxa detected

Christina Lynggaard

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Today I was at De WAR, the Amersfoort FabLab and much more, for Koppelting, a yearly local conference (where I will be presenting later this week). They have moved to new premises with more space and when I explored the building I also found a silk screen printing workshop. Diana, who is co-initiator of De WAR, walked in and when I said I liked one of the t-shirts on display she asked me shall we make one? So we did.

I now have two newly printed shirts at home.

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Last weekend during our vacation camping along the Loire, while I was reading and flipping a page on my Kindle it somehow got stuck on the cover page. It seemed to be still on (backlights working), but didn’t respond to anything I did, nor to a reset. As the battery drained sometime after, it looked like the photo shows.

The book I was reading, upon David Weinberger’s advice, was Cheap Complex Devices by John Sundman. I was deep enough into the novella that I can’t somehow shake the notion that the book itself has had an influence on this Kindle flop. Or maybe it was the humidity after a rainy day on the campground, with gallons of….

RESET.

^^xxx^x

A new device should be delivered tomorrow.