Excursions

I am missing out on too many wonderful posts on m.b written while I was asleep. RSS won’t help, neither will Micro.threads if conversation dies down before am awake. It’s time to hit the board again, need a relook at how this can be addressed.

I have lately felt hindered by the time I am listening to the same repetitive thoughts from other people on podcasts. Experts talking about, dissecting, the tech news. Or blabbering about something I would not be interested in typically.

I realised it had become a problem when these podcasts kept playing as static noise in the background — irrespective of whether I was working or driving or eating breakfast. In that sense, I agree with CGP Grey’s thoughts on podcasts as he dialled down his consumption on the internet.

But podcasts have taken too much ground in my mind: any moment of idleness can be instantly filled with the thoughts of others.

I firmly believe that boredom is good for brain health, and I’m banishing podcasts for the month from my phone to bring boredom back into my life.

I had cut back on my podcast subscriptions just a week before CGP Grey first talked about his experiment on Hello Internet. And the way, he worded his reasons for why giving up on podcasts was a key part of his experiment to reduction just persuaded me to go ahead with my plan.

So I have 10 subscriptions (down from 35) now, with just 3 technology related podcasts. One releases on Monday, another on Wednesday and the last one on Friday. That’s it, the week’s quota of the technology news is covered. One podcasts is a microcast, arrives on Monday. There four are the only ones that are set to auto-downloads. All the remaining 6 are released without any fixed schedule. I decide whether to listen to them only after I read what they are about and if that interests me.

I have been on this “diet plan” of podcasts consumption for at least a month now and I am already observing significant differences. I am listening to music, a lot more, again. My mind has become curious again - there is space for some thought experiments. There are times when I just don’t carry my headphones with me even when I am going to places alone. Anyway, with nothing to listen to, there is no incentive to carry them along. So I either read on my phone or just talk to people around. Surprisingly, I find it a lot better, more effective use of the time.

However, this also means I have some time to fill during my drive to office or the morning/evening runs. To address that, I have renewed my Audible subscription — listening to Audiobooks would at least be better than podcasts. Or so I think, for now.

No-news Experiment

I was also on an experiment 3 months back where I had decided that the only way I would consume news would be via my morning newspaper. And my hypothesis was I would feel a lot less burdened to know what’s going on and so be a bit more focused on the work at the hand.

As an extension, I had also uninstalled all the related apps. No Twitter. No news apps. No notifications from social apps (Messages, WhatsApp). The idea was it is just better to stay away from the temptation to check what’s going on.

I am glad that I have following the set rules for 3 months now and I thought it would be right moment to update on that experiment.

It indeed is a not less burdensome to be away from the news. I do not think I have missed anything major or urgent in these last few months. Newspaper provides me with the detailed reporting and not just blurbs. Opinion pieces provide better context on the important ones. The useless news, whose whole purpose is to satisfy the need for the news website or TV channels to keep “reporting” something, anything new, get filtered out by the editors. After all, there is a limited pace to fill in the pages on the printed paper.

So I am no longer bludgeoned with a constant stream of everything that’s negative. With that, I think there is a lot less crap in the world than I was made to believe.

Is it bad out there? Sure. But at least I ain’t bogged down by the insignificant drivel that the world is full of.

I don’t understand Google’s call screening feature. How does it solve the spam calls problem? Don’t I have to be equally attentive when the call arrives? I don’t think the problem is I have to receive the call, problem is I get the call in the first place. Some more thoughts.

I finally watched Justice League and I am left with a strange feeling. Sure, the movie is a drag, but it’s a lot better than recent attempts from DC. A lot less gloomy, peppered with few light moments. Never thought I would rate a DC movie same as a Marvel (latest Avenger) one.

Watching the hands-on videos of pixel Slate has been a very strange experience. Every frame suggests how laggy the ChromeOS platform is — but I have hardly seen anyone mention that. Is it not apparent while using it in actual? All impressions have been overtly positive.

I am loving this new addition to the Discover tab - now I can browse all the emojitags right here. How did I miss this update? Kudos @manton for making the m.b webapp better every day.

I don’t understand Google’s call screening feature. How does it solve the spam calls problem? Don’t I have to be equally attentive when the call arrives? I don’t think the problem is I have to receive the call, problem is I get the call in the first place.

Rather I am more distracted reading transcripts and making decisions. It looks to be targeted at the automated machine-driven calls. Human spammers/scammers will still have to be handled.

In most cases, the spam calls I get start with a person, a human, asking if it indeed is me. Then goes on to specify the call is about some information related to my account or a service I am using. And then comes the “offer for you” part. I tend to disconnect right at first step when someone wants to know if me is indeed me.

What’s to say the call screening will transcribe something like “This is xyz from abc bank and this is a service information call.”?

Anyway, no doubt Google has a great technology at its hands and the showcase via this use case sounds a lot coherent than the general duplex demo we saw during I/O. I am just perplexed how everyone seems to be already sold that this solves the problem which it isn’t even targeting.

Update: The post isn’t intended to be judgemental of the feature, rather it was, to be frank, in response to the constant perspective of “this is so useful, I need it now” from all around. But I could hardly understand why. John Gruber’s this comment finally triggered this.

man oh man, do I want that feature (Call Screening) on iOS.

Even Sarah Perez described the problem with scam calls succinctly in her opinion piece at TechCrunch.

Nearly half of all cellphone calls next year will be from scammers. And their tactics have gotten much worse in recent months.

They now often trick people by claiming to be the IRS, a bank, government representatives, and more. They pretend you’re in some sort of legal trouble. They say someone has stolen your bank card. They claim you owe taxes. Plus, they often use phone number spoofing tricks to make their calls appear local in order to get recipients to pick up.

I get it, it’s a problem. But Call Screening solves it how? I could not find the answer to that question in the whole post.

So Samsung has launched a quad camera smartphone in Galaxy A9? This madness needs to stop - these devices may be becoming smarter by day, we humans are running opposite fast on that scale. This is some crazy, mindless, shit-sticking race in play.

I have realised that I am being a lot more “social” on web these days. And I think m.b and efforts I put to enable the IndieWeb principles on my blog played a big role, to just open my mind to express more. I put down some of my thoughts.

Update: David has added a new function “to step around the issues micro.blog was having with images in Blot’s RSS feeds”. This change should allow using the Blot’s caching feature.

For all the defaults templates, David has already deployed the fix. So you should have the issue sorted without any update. If you have a custom template, to enable this change, wrap the html component around with the function absoluteURLs in your RSS file. For example, if you use html, use the below block in your description feed of your rss file (typically feed.rss).

{ {#absoluteURLs}} { { {html}}} { {/absoluteURLs}}

When you publish a micro post (one without title) on Blot which has images in it, Blot uses a CDN by default to store for these images. Though it may be helpful overall in blog performance, it causes some issues while interoperating with micro.blog. You will find that these images are not visible on its timeline.

It’s a known issue where micro.blog is unable to parse these images. To enable the images posted on Blot to appear on micro.blog timeline, make following changes with the configuration.

1. You can disable the blot cdn. This option is available on the Blot settings page under Settings > Services > Cache And Optimize Images. This makes the images be served directly under your blog’s domain. This change does not take much time to propagate, you will see the change reflect in the url for the images.
2. In addition, by default (in most themes), images may have relative urls. For example, you might just put \_images\<IMAGE_NAME> while adding the image to the post. However,these relative paths are again not parsed by micro.blog well (though most feed readers do it well). Anyway, to overcome this problem just include the complete url of the image while adding it (for example, http://<BLOGNAME>/<PATH>).

These changes should be enough to allow your images to be visible at m.b timeline.