onfocus

The world doesn’t deserve another mouth sounds but we got one anyway. (On your wedding day.) Yahoooo!

"I feel like these videos are a very good way for me to get out this thing within me that likes things that feel like a magic trick: You’re not expecting this thing to happen, so when it does, it’s a little rush of dopamine."

One of the best Internet traditions. Thanks for all the dopamine, Demi!

“What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.”

Just entering this link into the fossil record. But seriously, anything that gets people excited about indie publishing is exciting! The gardening metaphor reminds me of my favorite Gary Snyder line I think about all the time: “Sweep the garden. Any size.”

lo-fi music + animated clouds brought to you by poolside.fm.

Fun experiment: see if loading up Paul Ford's random archive.org ephemera thing gives you the same dopamine hit as the random crap social media gives you to look at. I enjoy it.

Video of windows from around the world. Very nice tour of other people's views.

The Board was presented with a unique and complex situation – impacting one of the largest registries with more than 10.5 million domain names registered. After completing its evaluation, the ICANN Board finds that the public interest is better served in withholding consent as a result of various factors that create unacceptable uncertainty over the future of the third largest gTLD registry.

This is a relief. The .org top-level domain is not being sold for parts after all.

Douglas Rushkoff:

"Today, the bottom-up techniques of guerrilla media activists are in the hands of the world’s wealthiest corporations, politicians, and propagandists. To them, viral media is no longer about revealing inequality or environmental threats. It’s simply an effective means of generating a response, even if that response is automatic, unthinking, and brutish."

This is a great point about the nature of meme culture. It used to be a counterculture code language. Now it’s being used by billionaires to influence.

Anil on links and the web we’ve settled for:

"So let’s look at all the apps that live under our thumbs, and interrogate the choices they’re making, and then imagine what they would look like if we demanded that our tools don’t tie our hands."

Get thee to this list. So many feels retracing these footprints. I wasn’t walking alone this whole decade—the weird web was carrying me.

People are greedy. That's why we can't have nice things. Here’s more about why this is horrible from the EFF: Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG.

I recently wanted to set up some "internet free" time for certain devices on my wifi (sorry kids) and this python library did the trick. I used it to set up a script that blocks or unblocks devices by mac address and I run it on a regular schedule with cron. Netgear should offer a consistent, well-documented API for its routers. Until then, pyNetgear can help automate a few tasks. Which is nice.