For several months, I noticed that my MacBook Pro made weird hissing and clicking sounds in the morning. That’s bad, I thought, and I checked to be sure my backups were OK.
But other than that, I didn’t think about it. The sounds only lasted a second or two and only happened once or twice in the morning.
Recently, I realized the MacBook Pro wasn’t making the noise. It was my insulated coffee carafe, which rests next to the MBP when I’m having coffee at my desk in the morning.
I recently received this message in text spam:
Evelyn, it’s no sin to love each other and it’s not annoying.
Just that one single line of text. No greeting, no context, nothing else.
A+ for creativity. Genius.
Red Hat: ‘The power of AI is open’. I wrote about how the crimson cap crew at Red Hat says open source has what it takes to meet AI’s demands for rapid development cycles and compliance with security and regulatory standards.
Esquire: Nazi-Curious Madman Currently Under Indictment For 91 Felonies Gives Speech. Headline of the week.
Interesting analysis on using social media to drive traffic by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day (one of my favorite newsletters). A couple of highlights:
- Threads is driving the most traffic. He thinks that’s just a bait-and-switch by Meta but is happy to ride it out while the fun lasts. I agree on both counts.
- He creates one-minute videos talking about what he’s written and posts them to various places.
- He takes a screenshot of one good paragraph and posts to X, Threads, etc. Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post and Casey Newton of Platformer seem to do the same.
- Like me, he doesn’t have a lot of patience with posting in each place in its native format. To me, that’s too much like work. Like filling out expense reports.
Also:
… my main takeaway from these early days living out in the wilderness of the new internet is that everything is a big mess right now and you can kind of go and do whatever you want wherever you want. Which is, obviously, a little scary for folks who haven’t used their browser’s URL bar in a while, but four of the biggest platforms are all showing the same recycled video content and the smaller social networks that aren’t are, well, just social networks. Which means platforms don’t really matter anymore. We’re in a moment of possibility and, sure, I wish I could just write my little emails and call it a day, but exploring the web and figuring out what works for me isn’t the worst thing in the world either.
The video idea is intriguing. And the audio could run as a podcast, too! On the other hand, I go weeks now where all the work I’m doing is marketing writing, which I’m still figuring out how to promote—much of that doesn’t have my byline. Nearly ALL of it, actually. How do I promote that kind of thing? And yet, some of my favorite podcasts come out on an intermittent schedule.
Red Hat debuts edge platform for vast device networks. I wrote about the Burgundy Beanie bunch at Red Hat launching Device Edge, an open-source, minimal-footprint platform for edge computing on small, resource-constrained devices.
It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk
Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:
To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.
Tomasky says Trump is “not going to be throwing anybody in the gas chamber,” but:
The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service….
Many Americans would not be shocked by those measures. Many would cheer—until the Republican Gestapo came for them.. And don’t be sure that Trump isn’t going to throw anybody in the gas chamber. Trump is already talking openly about building concentration camps.
Trump invoked “vermin” on the very day that The New York Times broke yet another harrowing story about his second term plans, this time having to do with immigration. “He plans,” the Times reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” And he wants to build huge—yes—detention camps. There’s much more. And all of this, by the way, appears to have been fed to the paper by his own people, who are obviously proud of it. They want America to know. And just before this, remember, Trump told Univision that he would use the Justice Department and the FBI to go after his political enemies.
Plans to add ActivityPub support for Tumblr are likely dead. I can’t see that as a priority given Tumblr’s recent drastic staff cutbacks.
Rodrigo Ghedin: Automattic’s Tumblr/ActivityPub integration reportedly shelved.
Laurens Hof: ActivityPub support was a “hasty announcement” by CEO Matt Mullenweg, followed by “quick quiet shelving of the project only a few days later.” Tumblr is supported by ads and subscriptions, and interoperability undermines both those business models.
“Imagine a mug that’s left on a coffee table.” — Anil Dash, That goddamn mug
“Reality isn’t brand safe. If you’re in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.” — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr “Brand safety” killed Jezebel
Alleged pickleball masturbator nabbed after Columbia Pike peeping incident. From the comments: “Pickleball penis perp perpetually pleasures phallic package, police properly prohibit person.”
The documentary “Sly” reveals depths to Sylvester Stallone.
What emerges isn’t the superstar who turned Rocky and Rambo into American icons as much as a thoughtful, surprisingly self-aware artist, who happens to be much smarter, more sensitive and steeped in cinematic history than even his biggest fans might have known.
Both Bruce Springsteen and Stallone “have channeled their inner selves through art to create a third identity, one that exists somewhere between truth and fiction, that has become a potent avatar, especially for their male fans.”
A surprisingly moving profile of Geddy Lee. “… in the era of headbanging and ‘Cat Scratch Fever,’ they were singing 11-minute songs inspired by the epic poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” There was never a band like Rush. Geddy Lee doesn’t want to forget it.
A researcher identified the man on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 50 years after the album’s release. The man was a thatcher named Lot Long, and the album cover is based on a found photograph from the Victorian era. The photographer was named Ernest Farmer, now the subject of an English museum exhibition. Long lived 1823-1893. Researcher Brian Edwards, who discovered the photo, has been listening to the album since it came out more than 50 years ago.
In the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” a character recommends a specific track from Led Zeppelin IV as make-out music, but when the big make-out scene comes around, the music on the soundtrack is Kashmir, from another Zeppelin album.
Britain’s ‘loneliest sheep’ was rescued after two years at the foot of cliff. “The ‘over-fat’ ewe, named Fiona, was hauled up from her solitary spot on a remote Scottish beach by farmers.” She had a “huge fleece.”
A kayaker spotted the sheep, which followed her along the riverbank, calling out the whole time. The kayaker described the experience as “heart-rending.”
Jezebel: Feminist media site shuts down after 16 years.
Jezebel was a great site that “pioneered the sharp, dishy coverage that came to characterise many digital upstarts.”
Tough day for online pioneers yesterday. Tumblr is scaling back drastically, and Nextdoor is also laying off a lot of people.