Daily notes

I love markdown but using it for presentations might be pushing it a bit https://ia.net/presenter

"Why did Usenet fail?" https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/06/why-did-usenet-fail/

Log into twitter. Ooh! Notifications. 5 tweets in a row from someone called Elon Musk who I don’t follow. Log out again.

…and on that note, "Twitter Briefly Pretended To Take A Stand Against Hate, But Then Elon Admitted It Was All A Mistake (Or A Marketing Campaign?)" https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/02/twitter-briefly-took-a-stand-against-hate-but-then-elon-admitted-it-was-all-a-mistake/

A pleasant walk along the drain at lunchtime. Merlin enjoyed having a swim and a sprint.

“Redbridge Council launches digital housing repairs service” https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/redbridge-council-launches-digital-housing-repairs-service/

I spend most of my working day using a Windows all-in-one desktop thing, and less time on a Macbook. I use way more web based stuff in Windows, and way more native apps on the Mac.

https://12ft.io/ is a service that makes me nervous, as stealing is always wrong. However it’s also tempting. What solves this ethical conundrum for me is that it hasn’t ever worked when I have tried it.

To quote my favourite tech philosopher, Taylor Swift, I think I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending: “DWP, Home Office, MoJ and Defra launch £1bn tender for shared services tech providers”

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” James Joyce, Ulysses.

2 cracking posts from dxw on what service designers get up to during the beta phase of a project https://www.dxw.com/2023/05/what-do-service-designers-do-in-the-beta-phase-of-a-project-part-1/ (there’s a link at the bottom to part 2)

Videos from the 2022 Service Design in Gov conference: https://govservicedesign.net/videos

Fab stuff from Polly Thompson on helping "colleagues (who aren’t interested in tech) understand the health of an IT estate" https://medium.com/valleys-to-coast-design-tech-blog/the-state-were-in-c7549cb03938

Quite enjoying The Color of Nothing by ford. https://fordsounds.bandcamp.com/album/the-color-of-nothing

Have been a John Naughton fan for a loooooong time and his blog has been following a kind of daily note / commonplace book type approach for a while now. His follows a kind of structure I would find it impossible to stick to. https://memex.naughtons.org/

And one of John’s posts pointed me to "The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Thomas Pettitt on parallels between the pre-print era and our own Internet age" https://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/the-gutenberg-parenthesis-thomas-pettitt-on-parallels-between-the-pre-print-era-and-our-own-internet-age/

Cote gives his take on my blogging formats post from yesterday https://cote.io/2023/05/31/193136.html

Another good In Our Time, this time on the Dead Sea Scrolls https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001ljc0

Am going to try this note without bullets, just to see how that goes. Feedback welcome!

I’ve deleted all the social media apps from my phone as an experiment.

Cote has done a daynote: https://cote.io/2023/05/30/day-note.html

“We Need to Rethink ‘Digital’ in Most Public Services” – I am really not sure what this article is suggesting? Rethink from what, to what? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-rethink-digital-most-public-services/

I’ve just discovered (🤦) the ‘advanced’ view in Mastodon, which is more Tweetdeck like with columns. Makes things a bit easier. Wondering if I should start paying some money towards Mastodon too https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

“Lisa’s Final Act: how Apple invented its future by burying its past” https://www.theverge.com/23724804/lisa-computer-apple-steve-jobs-burial-utah-sun-remarketing-documentary

In Our Time about Walt Whitman https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l99w

I randomly wondered earlier what Marissa Mayer is doing these days. Turns out she’s running a startup trying to fix phone contacts, which is a worthy endeavour if not, if I am honest, a lucrative-sounding one https://sunshine.com/

• I’m playing again on Mastodon, mostly because Twitter is starting to feel more broken than ever. I’m not altogether happy about it, mind. I think a big part of it is that all the things that Mastodon wants to fix in Twitter, I don’t have a problem with. I just want Twitter, but not run by some techbozo.
  • https://mastodon.social/@davebriggs
• I have an account on the mastodon.social server (that I even need to say this highlights a problem for mass adoption of Mastodon) while Mark says it’s actually better to just run your own (ditto). I suspect the biggest problem I have is the size of my network (76 following, 45 followers on Mastodon vs 7,076 and 7,693 on Twitter) which is going to take time and effort to build up.
• Bluesky is apparently another Twitter replacement that has some momentum, but is currently invite only and I’m not invited. The fact that it describes itself as a "protocol for public conversation" worries me. Most people don’t want a Twitter like service to be portable and federated. They just want it to not suck.
  • https://blueskyweb.xyz/
• Dave Winer keeps on working on these things
  • http://textcasting.org/
• Maybe as I type these notes into my text editor I ought to be copy and pasting them individually across Twitter and Mastodon too… or maybe I ought to look into rigging something up so it all kind of works automagically.
• "a comprehensive guide to the story of mel" – I can remember obsessing over bits of hacker folklore like this when I first discovered the internet and this particular bit of its subculture
  • https://melsloop.com/
• This from Matt Mullenweg, ruminating on the 20th anniversary of WordPress, struck a chord with me: "That’s what is beautiful about blogging. It’s too bad the advertising and social media platforms got us all caught up in status games for the past 15 years…All you need is one view, one like, one comment, to change your life."
  • https://ma.tt/2023/05/power-of-one/
• Mimestream looks an interesting Gmail client for Mac
  • https://mimestream.com/
• Carl has started a new blog
  • https://mutuallearning.wordpress.com/
• The Theranos story is one of the most interesting chunks of Silicon Valley hubris in recent times. I really enjoyed reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou which documented the story, although was published before the legal process completed. This Guardian article is a useful primer
  • https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/30/elizabeth-holmes-enters-prison-11-year-sentence
• Mike Bracken on innovating digital public services
  • https://hellofuture.com/news/mike-bracken-on-innovating-digital-public-services/