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Friday 28 September 2018
Swam in the sea at Abbey River Beach with Ben, Daisy, Joe, Sam. It was ~60F/16C outside, ~62F/17C in the water. Very sunny, warm when the breeze died away. GIF grabbed from video by BL.
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Last night I went to the first Server Co-op meetup hosted by Agorama in Rebecca’s Flat. It’s a more-is-more space, and then some. It was a lovely evening. Notes:
Check out infocivics.com by Paul Frazee. “Computing networks are social and political systems. We should attempt to answer how the technical design of a network will influence the internal politics.”
There *is* a mobile Dat browser, but apparently it’s a bit… buggy. See Bunsen for Android (nada for iOS). Still, kudos to them for taking a stab at it. Apparently the project of making a Dat browser sort of hits a brick wall due to node.js, but a bunch of devs have taken it upon themselves to make a Rust implementation of Dat. TBH I don’t understand the ins-and-outs well enough to be able to describe how that lowers the barrier, but it sounds like the future of mobile Dat might be brighter for it.
I haven’t dug in to Scuttlebutt yet, and it sounds like it’s about time. An offline-first protocol, described by KG as a database/social network/community. See also Patchwork. Feel like I heard HL say that it came about after 2011 Christchurch earthquake due to the difficulties at the time with having any sort of connectivity, but that might be wrong?
And crucially, are there ethical conversations around P2P tech that we’re failing to have, or happily skating past? I’m thinking about when Facebook and similar now-giants were in their nascent stages, surely some of the current nastiness could have been avoided if the making was accompanied by a little more thinking, more extrospection? How do you wrap your head around the potential ethical implications of something that doesn’t yet exist? I found KB’s anecdote interesting, when a few fascistic idiots attempted to hijack Scuttlebutt but were almost immediately, organically, blocked from having any meaningful impact. It feels great, but who’s to say they’re not off in their own node somewhere trolling away? Feels awful to think that Scuttlebutt might be harbouring some sort of extreme-right cell, and yet maybe so be it, should it be a decentralised network’s responsibility to police that? How on earth would that work anyway?
Separate: I got my hair cut by Dean last week and am very pleased. When it’s styled it’s a bit Josie Packard (fabulous) and when not styled, it’s very Shawn Hunter (not totally a bad thing).
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There are a few tunes that you turn up and hum along to when they come on. “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” by Jimmy Ruffin ticks the box for me. It’s one of those weird ones though, a song that has a kind of uplifting melodic line but some pretty sad lyrics.
Quick edit: Oh man, and “Crying” by Roy Orbison, and “Heaven Help Us All” by Stevie Wonder, and “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers. (Solid playlist on right now, clearly.) That last one will always have the softest spot in my heart.
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Very pleased to now be a part of Host. Feels like a really good fit.
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I keep encountering issues when running Craft’s setup command locally. Note that I use MAMP Pro for this sort of thing. I entered all the database creds correctly, and then got a SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory error. This StackExchange answer sorted it for me. Add 'unixSocket' => getenv('DB_SOCKET') to /config/db.php and DB_SOCKET="/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock" to .env.
Still encountering database connection issues on staging for one site currently under development. All of the credentials are set correctly in .env, but getenv() in /config/db.php retrieves the wrong DB_USER value. Ended up explicitly adding the problematic value to the /config/db.php file as a quick workaround, but it’s not ideal.
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I was digging around the web for old folk songs this morning and came across Chumbawumba’s English Rebel Songs 1381–1984, was particularly taken by “The World Upside Down”. I wanted to try arranging it but didn’t want to just duplicate and Frankenstein the last score I was working on, so I finally sat down and made a boilerplate.
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And go all in w/ iced tea. Hot tip for cold tea: cold-brew tea + squirt of lemon juice + splash of peach and elderflower squash = top-notch summer beverage. I am a little over caffeinated right now.
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❤️👍😍⭐️🙌
The quick-kudos tools that have evolved online definitely have their usefulness, but most of the time it feels like sugar. Satisfying and fostering a hunger. It cultivates a bottomless pit of competition, arbitrary measurements of self worth, and requires a level of intrapersonal gymnastics that I’m not personally capable of sustaining.
Is the problem just the public-ness of it all? What about deliberately quiet kudos?
I want to give those sorts of kudos almost every day. It’s hard to describe the use cases, though there are many… Maybe someone famous does work you admire. That’s the I-want-to-tell-you-that-this-is-fantastic-but-I’m-genuinely-not-latching-on-for-likes use case. Or a rather private friend finishes a project they should be damn proud of. That’s the you-need-to-know-this-is-great-but-we-both-know-you’d-prefer-if-I-didn’t-turn-this-in-to-a-conversation use case.
And I sure as hell would be happy to receive that sort of thing. Little pick-me-ups are critical, especially when you are mostly/fully your own employer.
It’s the digital equivalent of a great compliment from a stranger. The sort of compliment that leaves you feeling a tiny bit lighter. The sort of compliment that isn’t motivated by a mob of people giving you the same compliment. And it usually has little to do with the identity of the complimenter. (In fact, when a complete stranger follows up an IRL compliment by introducing themselves, that’s often when the moment sours a bit, or gets a smidge creepy.)
So how to give quiet kudos? It should be as simple and familiar feeling as similar features – as in, just select an emoji – but definitely not public. It shouldn’t associate an identity with the kudos either, IMO. Hopefully that would avoid spamminess. It’d probably also need a daily/weekly/monthly summary setting but good lord, it definitely shouldn’t ever send a “you received 0 kudos this week!” sort of email. And it should include other reactions, the bad with the good.
I would be surprised if this doesn’t exist already in some form or another… need to dig a little harder. I suppose one preexisting version of this is the e-newsletter since it’s an opt-in system. Particularly TinyLetter. But that just feels a little too business-y for what the sort of thing I’m imagining. Might look in to making the tool I’m imagining. Add it to the someday list.
In summary:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I say yes.
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Wanted some soulful-but-not-overly-corny tunes to work to so I put on a “song radio” Spotify station for music related to Gillian Welch’s “Look At Miss Ohio”, specifically the v. from Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains. First track to pop up was “That Day Is Done” with vocals by Elvis Costello and The Fairfield Four, Larry Knechtel on piano.
Oof, my heart…
The song was written by Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney, and it looks like it was originally released by Paul McCartney on his album Flowers In The Dirt. Personally, I prefer the Costello + Fairfield Four version. For a similar version, see live recording on YT. Related: see the history of The Fairfield Four, pretty exceptional. The group will soon be 100 yrs old.
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Made this Caribbean-esque fish tonight, 10/10 will make again. Measurements below are estimations. Serves 2.