onfocus

Outside Online Outside Online
image from Outside Online
Short answer: yes, some clever public awareness campaigns around responsible tagging help. Sometimes not sharing a thing we love is the best way to love it. See also the cautionary tale of The Broccoli Tree.
Medium Medium
image from Medium
Living the dream? On one hand this is a clever way to game Instagram. On the other hand, social networks are supposed to be about being social with other people so bots like this make it a less social environment. (I've also thought that hashtags in text are machine garbage that make things less human so I'm an outlier.) And businesses just blindly handing out gifts to antisocial media accounts? What? This whole article is an exquisite mess.
OneZero OneZero
image from OneZero
"Remember ‘We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party’? How vain and oblivious does that sound now? Well, it’s the morning after the free speech party, and the place is trashed."
Fascinating interview with fourteen content moderators who have worked at various services like Google, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
Postlight Postlight
image from Postlight
Webster’s Dictionary defines serverless as—well, it doesn’t define it yet. But I like Postlight’s take on it here. I’m also a fan of Airtable which does structured data and media entry well. With some light glue in Node.js form, you can present that data and media with HTML & CSS. I could see using this when you don’t need the overhead of running WordPress but you want some structure around how you enter content. Neat idea! In conclusion, serverless structure still requires servers.
Kickstarter
image from kickstarter
This is so good! This album let me hear these worn-in 70s soft rock favorites with new ears and you can feel JoCo’s joy emanating from every layer. It’s too late to back the Kickstarter, but I think you can still get some groovy swag. It’s also on Spotify and the like. RIYL: feelings.
nytimes.com nytimes.com
image from nytimes.com
I’ve been meaning to post this article ever since it came out but I’m being compassionate with my past self about not doing it yet. My future self is used to disappointment so that guy should be pleasantly surprised it’s off his plate. Anyway, lots of good psychology here to help with productivity. Add reading it to your to-do list.
Gizmodo Gizmodo
image from Gizmodo
"I’d start with, at most, 10 news sites to subscribe to. This will give you a feel for how fast you want the feed to move. Too slow? Add more. To fast? Delete a few. I try to narrow things down even further: Instead of subscribing to the New York Times, which publishes dozens of items per day, I subscribe specifically to the Times’ tech section, which means I get a much more curated selection."
Seconded. And hey, I could have written this. This article has great advice for embracing the decentralized lifestyle. I personally use a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS with Reeder on iOS which costs about $8/month at AWS. Instead of limiting feeds, I subscribe liberally and put them in folders by subject. Then I browse by subject periodically instead of the full list of feeds and tune from there.
null program null program
“This program opens a socket and pretends to be an SSH server. However, it actually just ties up SSH clients with false promises indefinitely...”
Discouraging bots is a fun hobby I approve of. I like this simple Python script that exploits an RFC loophole.
forbes.com
image from forbes.com
"The decentralized web is a mindset and a belief in an alternative structure that can address some of the afflictions that have risen from data pollution."
This article raises more questions than it answers but it’s a good summary of why some of us prefer decentralized web tools and recreation. Re-decentralization feels like a lost fight but I’m glad people are working on it.
Google Arts & Culture Google Arts & Culture
image from Google Arts & Culture
This Google site is a fun tour of some of the details in Vermeer's paintings. It works well on a small phone screen too. I also use the Google Arts & Culture new tab extension that shows me a new painting when I open a blank browser tab.
AirVūz AirVūz
image from AirVūz
Drone footage is dead. Racing drone footage is all I want to see from now on! This is a thrilling highlight reel by a drone racer/cinematographer. (I didn't know drone racing is a thing!)
The Atlantic The Atlantic
I'm not sure how to link to this because it's not a newsletter or a podcast. But if you're interested in Internet culture you should read everything Taylor Lorenz writes for The Atlantic. If you use a newsreader you can subscribe to her author page RSS feed (while they still offer it) or use IFTTT and the feed to email new articles to you—then it would be a newsletter. You could also make a friend read them out loud to you—then it would be a podcast. It's worth the extra effort to make sure these work their way into your media diet.
« Older posts  *  Newer posts »