Puzzle time with daughter - assembling beauty, a piece at a time.
Thoughts
Every time there’s a story around ads, I grumble knowing that so much talent is wasted on such trivial a thing as advertising — our AI overloads must be happy us humans are busy fighting away our intelligence.
It’s time to catch up on all the lost sleep last week working late on the hobby projects — so much was done, but so much more of the health was lost. Eyes’re burning hot, cursing me to go to sleep.
So a good 10 hours sleep now, followed by a walk to get some work done close-by.
The biggest struggle for me while using Mastodon is the fact that it does not recognise Markdown. Like Twitter, statuses are plain text with no understanding of html - no formatting, no hyperlinking. I’ve been “ruined” by Markdown - if an editor doesn’t support it, it’s broken.
Me. Words. And Chai ☕️
Apparently, 23andMe had an API that “developers of health apps, weight loss services and quantified self tests” could use to build “services” over anonymized data sets of user’s DNA. They no longer do. But seriously, did no one see what all could go wrong here? Facebook.. uhmm?
Aha, I had no idea Jason Mraz has a new album out - Know. Time to put him crooning in the background, stringing his guitar, get some positive vibes. 🎶
It’s been some time now that I have listened to a track that’s so fun and so meaningful at the same time as O’ Meri Laila. The whole album is an experience in its own way — very different, but appealing at the same time. A must listen 🎶
There‘re many feature requests for the new platforms that we users are making. To do some inspired by Twitter/FB. To not to do some inspired by them. I have one plea to the decision makers, like @manton - do not to listen to us if it doesn’t fit your vision. We may be wrong.
I come to this place often. And ruminate. There’s something about the structure that calms me.
Time for churning some thoughts. Time for slurping some chai. ☕️
Another blogging platform I was fond of, and had self-hosted in between, Ghost is upgrading to 2.0. This is a fascinating story — I am still amused how the guys behind this continue to ask for the price they do for hosting one blog.
A walk amidst the nature, under an umbrella. With raindrops composing the best of the music to go with.
Nothing more calming.
Cathy O’Neil at Bloomberg mentioned she felt sympathy for “the big boys of tech”, like Zuckerberg. I, on the other hand, have no sympathy for these geniuses. I feel they ignored their responsibilities and sensibilities for way too long. Few thoughts.
I had no idea there is a new Cormoron Strike novel coming. I like the name too, “Lethal White”. Mysterious.
I better complete all the currently-reading books before September arrives. It is always fun to read Rowling write characters. 📚
I think I may need a how-to on ActivityPub. The goal and the approach sound so promising. But how do you “implement” this, if that’s even a right way to describe? Can I make, for example, my blog an ActivityPub enabled site? I could hardly find any helpful documentation.
I decided today that I do not want to display the likes, replies and repost types of posts on my blog’s homepage. It looked too crowded on there for my liking.
I consider these as the social posts - may be they will fit better in a section of their own.
Sleep has to be one of the costliest currencies out there. You borrow some from your daily kitty and you have to pay back with some high interest rate. That is over and above the drab feeling you carry throughout the day. It’s better not to lose any sleep over losing sleeping.
A trail in nature, to serenity. A quest to seek calmness. When your reinvigorated mind carries your weary body through.
So is it time now to dust-off our old Tumblr blogs now? I know we are (finally) fed up of Twitter and Facebook policy swings. But that doesn’t mean we should forget why the platforms that failed, did so in the first place. No point joining back before those issues are addressed.
Blotpub update: Endpoint now supports uploading photos, however just as multipart data. So you would not be able to upload the images from Micro.blog official apps yet. But you should be able to do so via Quill, as I did my last photo post.
I seriously wonder how different is Mastodon from Twitter - of course, other than the fact that it is distributed. It solves none of Twitter‘s core problem — it’s still a stream of posts which are difficult to follow. And hence is prone to fail at scale.
Am I missing something?
There are colors that nature paints just to brighten your day!
Meditation
I have been a lot restless these last few days. My mind wanders a lot, it’s cluttered, full of thoughts. Full of things I need to do. Things that I can, I should do. I start working on one, and then my mind forces me to move on to another. Without completing any.
I do not think that’s really healthy. I think I may have to put my mind at rest.
Meditation is, of course, one of the way. So I started looking out for all the help possible, to figure out how to get started. And guess what? It’s a market full of catchy, link-baity articles from opportunistic freaks. Anyway, I think I may not get much help on the internet; may be there is just no need to go out there, seeking help on getting started. I may as well just get started - so I have started with an app called Oak. I have had a couple of sessions and have been pretty satisfied.
I will continue to have these sessions as beginner and see what happens. I am really hopeful that meditation helps, that it allows me to regain focus. I know few people who have benefitted, I know of a strong proponent in @ablaze. Actually, it is his experiences that have inspired me towards meditation.
If these couple of sessions are any indication, am sure it will be a good experience to go through.