Excursions avatar

Excursions

★ Liked How itty.bitty works

Good showcase of possibilities. Static goes next level.

itty.bitty takes html (or other data), compresses it into a URL fragment, and provides a link that can be shared. When it is opened, it inflates that data on the recievers’ side.

Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression;

This is terrible — I cannot understanding the reasoning behind such a regulation.

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

Ah, of course. It’s EU - has to have a Google angle.

I think I need to gain control on how a feed client, micro.blog app for example, process my title-less posts. This is especially important for posts larger than 280 characters which get truncated.

I don’t like how ad-hoc it’s done. I better generate a title myself in the feed.

I am tired of the tangled cables around my earphones. They are too messy and discomforting. I think I would soon move to a wireless option. Wish the market wasn’t so broken though.

So that foldable Surface “phone” running Andromeda OS? Yeah, that was just a concept after all.

The Surface Phone and Andromeda OS have been shelved indefinitely(…)

Microsoft has (had the experience of designing for foldable form factor). It even has right at this moment many of the pieces that could be stitched up to make a Courier. Unfortunately, just having pieces doesn’t mean you can immediately make a whole.

Showcasing and demoing, wooing even, the technology concepts in development is always easy, relatively. Especially to the tech minding folks (I include myself in that) who tend to think forward and imagine the potential use cases for themselves.

But delivering a product with it for masses is difficult by magnitude. I guess however these product are just boring to lend any coverage.

After a bit of playing around, I am still not clear on the purpose and benefit of IndieBookClub. Without aggregating the data from multiple users on all the books, the entries would remain just posts around books on individual sites. Aggregation is the key.

It’s time to catch up on C.B. Strike - second story “The Silkworm”. I like the characters, right from the books. And I had especially liked this plot and presentation from Rowling.

As we move away from the centralised web to the peer web, it’s time to rediscover, re-embrace, and reclaim RSS.

Siri shortcuts are amazing — potentially game-changing. Just default suggestions show the system is learning, suggests actions used frequently on mobile. This could be huge once iOS 12 is public, with app support.

I have seen Monocle in action now and realise the power of Microsub standard. I do not think I can read feeds in any other manner now. This is fantastic!

I always wanted to sort out my webmentions and the respective microformats in reply posts. Aaron’s post could not have arrived at a better time. Here’s hoping it comes out the way I want it to.

It turns out that culture is the most powerful force available to us. Culture comes from each of us, from the connections between. Culture isn’t created by presidents, Popes or kings.

Finally got the support for like and reply webactions — have handled the respective microformats. Favourite and replies are two post types that I think are very relevant for microposts.

  • ’’ tags : likes, link, social

I always wonder what made us so careless, so self-focused that we ignored the greens around us.

You know how at times you keep making a very very silly mistake, but you blame a much larger/complicated problem? Yeah that. I keep doing that.

It’s worse when you loop others in to look at the problem, as I did @manton. Sigh. I am able to post Manton. Please ignore.

I was facing an issue with my micropub endpoint while publishing via an external app.

The markdown block quote character “>” gets formatted as “>”. This causes further issues while generating a correct html.

It may be resolved now.

It had been so long since I was actively engrossed in something. It was kind of a low productivy phase. I think I might be over it now. Now. That needs to get updated.

Every time I read about Google Duplex, there is a sense of uneasiness in me. I just can never put it in words. I am not sure what makes me sceptic about the technology. Is it not a useful technology? Or is it the fact that the technology demoed is just too good, sound too useful to be true? I think it is the later.

Google believes in openly demonstrating the things they are working on, the tech they are building. However, they oversell what the tech can achieve; they drumbeat the most ideal scenario without much thought to its ramifications, its pitfalls.

John Gruber, as always, again puts it perfectly in his post on Google Duplex’s latest demo.

I still think the whole thing feels like a demo of a technology (the human-like speech), not a product. Google claimed this week that Duplex currently succeeds 4 out of 5 times at placing a reservation without a human operator’s intervention. That’s a good batting average for a demo, but untenable for a shipping product at Google’s scale. With a 20 percent failure rate, Google would need an army of human operators standing by all day long, to support a feature they don’t make any money from. I’m skeptical that this will ever be a product expanded to wide use, and if it is, it might be years away.

Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a stunning demo.

Exactly. That completes my thought — it’s the tech that Google markets. Tech, not a product, can be marketed and sold is a fallacy that Google, for some reason, continues to believe.

Book Review: Murder in the Mystery Suite

A mystery of murders during a “Murder and Mayhem week”, amid “some role-playing and fantasy crime solving”. Now that’s one juicy premise. Alas, a juicy premise is necessary, but never sufficient after all to make a compelling read.

A widower Jane Stewart works as a manager at her ageing great-aunt and -uncle’s storybook resort. Things go awry for her when during her planned Murder and Mayhem week, one of her guests is murdered and the book he had won as part of a scavenger hunt is missing. It is now Jane’s responsibility - not just as the resort manager, but as a guardian to the treasure the book was part of - to find the real-killer and the missing book.

This is such a simple plot that could very well have been penned into a riveting mystery. But it wasn’t. I was so close to give up on this books at one moment - actually that was right at the moment it stopped being a murder mystery and veered into at attempted thriller around a treasure trove. Plot is thin. Writing is barely passable. Mystery is poorly narrated. There just isn’t enough suspense and urgency to hold the reader’s attention. A straight forward story, narrated in an extremely amateurish manner.

A word on the writing first, I think the way the book started was pretty promising. Author Ellery Adams did have a nice plot at her hands. However, the way she chose to present it is so unlike a murder mystery typically is. I wasn’t involved enough to care for anyone who was dead because the characters just weren’t built well. Add to that, a reader was informed, told, that a person was murdered — never shown. For that matter, every thing that happens is told to the reader, not shown. And that’s where lies the biggest fault of the novel.

An inclination from the author to kick start a series by making this much bigger than a simple, cozy murder mystery didn’t help either. All it does is introduce a string of unnecessary subplots and a meandering ending that attempts to set ground for books to come.

A murder mystery needs a meaty plot, strong characters and succinct narration. Unfortunately, this books fails on all count for me. Jane, the protagonist, doubts at multiple points in the book if she is worthy to be the guardian of a family secret; wishes if she had just been a Resort Manager. I, as a reader, wished the same.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In the new Google Duplex demos, the system clearly calls out it’s Google Assitant, but then goes on to hmmm-ing and umm-ing like real person. It’s unnecessary, deceptive; plus the scenario’s too ideal.

Safari is a browser, wish the updates to such an important app wasn’t tied to OS upgrades. I do not want my whole OS to be upgrade — just give me the new improvements in browser.

Most companies hate monolithic updates, with Apple it’s the other way round.

Best update in iOS 12? Post upgrade it asked for iCloud password 0 times. That is many ones less than what the experience was earlier. Folks at Apple were listening after all, may be they just weren’t making noise. A great improvement.

Incredibles 2 was underwhelming. Action (which was sleek, no doubt) won over balanced narration. Very similar to other animated movies (Despicable Me, Megamind) — unlike one from Pixar.