Excursions

The games that light plays in darkness always mesmerises me. At times, I am glad that my camera doesn’t have my sight at night.

I wonder what are the simpler ways to pull the data out from Mastodon? I do not think it supports Webmentions yet. Are there any feeds? I mainly want to pull likes and reposts and replies. Display them with original posts if possible. In short,

Twitter:Bridgy :: Mastodon: ?

Boy, Google’s Night Sight mode looks totally bonkers — if the image comparison by Vlad Savov is anything to go by, his comment “play around with it as I have and lose your shit at the unreal results it produces” is apt. Want to know how the hell is Google doing that?

With a very different demographic than West, India has an efficient way of solutioning a tech that focuses on local problems first. Mobile-first. Low-data Lite apps. And now with electric vehicles - “with more rides possible in a day, the e-rickshaws are proving more lucrative”.

At times, you can’t understand why something triggers a positive vibe in your mind. And you don’t need to, always.

These look like such simple questions, but am sure one can’t get all right. Even when you employ the internet. Is that’s the case, how can complex claims made during election period?

This election season before you share, decide, vote, double-check.

An investigation reveals many apps were used to dupe brands; revelation, they say, shows “just how deeply fraud is embedded in the digital advertising ecosystem”. Why are we surprised? When was the last time you clicked an ad? Am trained by now to ignore all ads. I do not think any humans click an ad intentionally.

In addition, the whole online ad business is built on duping users to click on ads and force the brands to pay for these useless click-through. I won’t be surprised if the automated ad clicks are way more common.

I don’t get the enmity for Bluetooth headphones. For normal usage, these are very convinient. Are they without any issues? Of course, not. But they never evolved because there wasn’t any demand. And hence no incentive. Now there is, and am already seeing these become common.

There was a time when I used to visit the Wikipedia main page as a routine, every morning. It’s one trove of fascinating information. As I grew, not sure why I decided to be less smarter and abandoned this routine. That page is still brilliant.

There are new calls for retraction of Bloomberg’s compromised spy chip story — a story that apparently a lot of background research from renowned publications too failed to corroborate. And now people with skills are getting critical of the presented claims. Not looking good.

Time for another break. Time for another chai! ☕️

Learnt that “olden” is an accepted English word. It is so obvious, but I never thought it to be a “real” word. I always believed it to be just a poetic substitute for “old”. So never used in prose. I guess I was wrong.

Micro.Threads Update: Added an option to fetch more posts in the Thread Discovery section. I’ve played with this option on my local - though not wholly solved yet, it has reduced the missing out on posts issue for me.

YouTube’s recommendation engine is one of the worst out there. It fails to understand long running interests and prefers decisions based on the immediate watch history. Makes me completely wary of clicking on a video that I do not want Google to learn from lest it gets polluted.

So OnePlus preferred to postpone their event by a day to “maximize the amount of people we could reach with our message”. Reason? Well, Apple decided to select the same date as theirs. And they will even cover any costs people’ll incur to change the plans. Apple is .. splashy.

Magic happens when you let the colours play their natural game!

Me: “Let’s go, brush. It keeps your teeth healthy”

Daughter: ”We don’t eat brush. Neither do teeth. Vegetable, fruits keep us healthy.”

Me: “Well brushing kills germs. Germs cause cavity. Cavity is bad. So .. brushing is good?”

Daughter: “That’s not fair!”

Logic rarely is? 🤔

‪It’s fascinating to read the comments declaring Android EU licensing as a bad move for consumers — saying prices will go up. It’s irrational to assume every other aspect of the market will stay the same. I believe it‘d be interesting few months, actual effect‘s yet to be known.‬

’ Impossible’ is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools. -Napoleon

There’s so much to learn while you build paperclips 😬

Looking at all the personalized invites for the October event, I am sure Apple would have a “made on iPad Pro” story during announcement. I expect few “pro” apps targeted for iPads, on the lines of Photoshop, demoed during the event — one of them used to build these invites.

“Helm is a personal server that lives where you do. It’s finally incredibly easy to own your online identity, starting with email.” I am not sure if there is a market for such a product. A dedicated hardware that serves only email. Makes it limited, especially for its cost.

“Wear Space is a wearable device designed to aid concentration by limiting your senses of sight and hearing.” WTF! Just look at those product images. Silly.

When did we go so wrong? And this is “the future life”? Aren’t we already too cut off from the reality?

As we move closer to the end of October, I dread there would be no October event from Apple - so no updates to iPads, and more importantly Macs. Boy, would I be pissed off - I’ve been waiting to upgrade my Macbook Pro since pre-WWDC period and time’s running out for Apple.

Facebook is just being Facebook - “after saying last week no data collected through Portal would be used to target users with ads, Facebook now says the data can be used to target ads”. Why think otherwise? “To pull a Facebook” would soon be synonymous for crapping on users.

Last few weeks have been days of many firsts; it was only apt that I captured all these thoughts. It was time to update the \now page. I enjoy drafting these updates — it gives me chance to go through the posts since the last update and reflect.