Following up on what seems a metablogging fashionable thing this spring, I added a /feeds page that provides an overview of all the various feeds you can subscribe to, to follow (parts of) my site’s content.
Category: Day to Day
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That was the oddest phone call glitch. I phoned someone in the UK, after the first minute or so, I heard the ringing sound again while the connection was still up, and it seemed my counterpart picked up again, however it was a full playback of their side of the conversation. Then I hung up, and rang my counterpart back. They said they stopped hearing me, but the connection persisted (apparently while I got the play back from the ringing and their half of the previous parts of the conversation). Can’t come up with a simple tech explanation that does not involve capturing and storing the entire phonecall.
Ian Forrester over at Cubic Garden has submitted a GDPR request to ClearView AI, the alt-right linked company that is hawking their facial recognition database (based on scraped online images) to law enforcement as well as commercial outfits. Should be interesting to follow along. Recently IBM stopped facial recognition work (they previously showed not being up to speed with CC licensing it seemed to me), and others like Amazon and MicroSoft did too when it comes to law enforcement. Facial recognition is extremely sensitive to bias.
Facial recognition 1, by EFF, license CC BY
It sounds like a good and easy enough experiment, getting your own simple e-book out in the market. My eye fell first on Reinier Ladan’s Dutch language video on making zines (everything old is new again), via Frank’s newsletter. Today Robin Rendle’s post Volume A popped up in my feeds as an experiment to learn how to publish an e-book in a way that just gets something out there. Those two small nudges coalesce into the idea that it should be very doable to collect a few connected blogposts and turn them into a slightly more coherent whole, for publication as a separate artefact. A decade ago I already reworked my closing SHiFT keynote Maker Households into something of an e-book draft at the suggestion and with advice of Henriette, and my Networked Agency or information strategies material would lend itself to it as well. The second nudge was the realisation that the e-book Elmine and I created in 2011(!) on How To Unconference Your Birthday (get the PDF in the sidebar on the right) is already zine like, and has both digital and physical form. An update after a decade makes sense as we already concluded after visiting Peter’s unconference and doing a short video session at Lane’s, and could be part of such an experiment in publishing e-books.
Everything old is new again. I think I should pick up some of the things where I left off decade ago. But this time not as some big scheme, my grand theory of everything all at once, but just as a small thing. As then it might actually happen.
Interesting pattern: in a client online discussion with 250 people, many seem to equate ‘digital working’ with videocalls. Their IT department sees that other tools are underused (e.g. Slack-like chats etc., asynchronous tools other than email)
“Tell me forty-two thousand people haven’t watched this shit!” “Yep.” Veneza goes back to the search results and points out other horrifically large numbers. “That was one of their higher-count vids, but still. And, like, there’s a whole industry of dudes like this. The more inflammatory they are, the more people watch them, and the more money they make.” “White dude whining as a growth industry,”
White dude whining as a growth industry,
(from The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin)