My latest thinking on the API blocking on the Billionaire Social Club is that the API’s will be turned on when the developers agree to pay for the privilege. Or pay more. Not sure what it takes to get an API key, to begin with.

Maybe a strategy to kill an albatross of an investment is to make so many offensive decisions that it is litigated out of existence. Genius!

Fascinating perspective on 1970s stagflation: The Forgotten History of the 1970s

Spent six hours today in a situation room because Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Defender are both in use at my organization. Please know that Microsoft Threat Protection can be leveraged to modify the contents of your PC and your user account can do nothing to prevent it.

Is anyone else really fatigued with the sensational adjectives in sound bites and headlines? I feel like everything is click-bait or attention-bait. I’m trying really hard to opt out of it but it is feeling more difficult to escape.

Sorry about the double post in the timeline. Not sure how I did that. Posts only shows the one.

Do not love wearing a mask. But Doc says “Do.” #CheckUp

I’ve decided that it’s okay to suspend a social media service for violations of my community standards.

“Snuck” into my house today, just to peek at the state of the remodel. I miss my home. Still months to go.

Today, I was reminded that I am in fact a Vikings fan. And tonight’s loss affected my mood in a way that I’m not proud of.

Gateful for Saturdays with no plans and nothing urgent. Grateful for cold brew coffee and half-and-half. Grateful for warm snuggly dogs.

The end of an era: Common Roots is closed.

They were a really integral part of making my wedding day amazing.

We were going to check out a comedian’s set after seeing a snippet on Tiktok.

Even though the TV audio was set as one of the Apple TV audio outputs, sound from the Apple TV was only playing via a HomePod Mini in a different room. I had to leave the YouTube app and the video I was watching to go into the system settings to set the audio output to the TV speakers only.

But that didn’t fix the problem. The TV showed the volume was responding to the remote control, but there was still no sound.

Switching to Apple Music gave the same result. No audio. No clicks, no pops, just silence.

Back to system settings to restart the Apple TV.

That “worked.” I’m getting system sounds now as I move the focus and make selections.

I relaunched the YouTube app to watch the video I had previously started. YouTube makes no effort to remember what was happaneing previously, not the video nor my place in it. At least the app remembered my search.

Now, the audio is playing correctly, but the HDMI pass-through for volume control isn’t working. This means I have to restart my TV, via a hard power cycle.

I’ve been supporting technology for a long time, and I understand everything that can go wrong. On good days I’m grateful that everything works as well as it does as often as it does. But we aren’t doing ourselves any favors with the complexity.

I have to reset both the Apple TV and the TV itself to get everything back to nominal operation. I’m not doing anything unsupported, but the electronics and the software fail with alarming and disappointing regularity.

It’s no wonder people hate technology. This is so stupid.

Also broken? The iPhone QR scanning functionality. Because I wanted to sign into the YouTube app without booting my laptop. The YouTube app on the Apple TV and on my iPhone are allegedly supposed to be able to detect one-another to validate my sign-in. Naturally this detection failed, even after several tries. Method two is to scan a QR code. Allegedly, the QR Scanner function from the iPhone Control Center opens links in Safari, but God help you if you have to switch away for a Multi-Factor Authentication code in a different iPhone app. Because whatever you were doing just disappeared and you have to start again. While you’re doing so, your authenticator code times out, so that is a wholly broken system and that verification method necessarily failed. There’s also no sharing the shortcut from the QR code to open in an instance of Safari—because apparently you’re already there, in a way that is ephemeral beyond belief. You can leave any time you like but you can never come back.

Fortunately I could get a code via SMS and Apple did thoughtfully allow me to easily paste that code from the clipboard into the authenticaton screen without having to switch to the messaging app or the code generator app.

I get it. It’s not necessarily the Apple TV on its own, it’s not the TV on its own. But isn’t it? Are these devices designed to a spec or aren’t they?

I don’t know. It works unless it doesn’t. It seems so dumb that everything suddenly requires a full reset to return to normal operation.

Thank you for reading my rant. It’s my frustration at doing what seems to be all of the right things but still having consequences I can’t control or remediate.

I’m sure the engineers who design these things can tell me why I’m being unreasonable.

Elon Musk was never a liberal, and his plans for Twitter were never benevolent - Thomas Zimmer - The Guardian

It’s not just me.

I’m thinking about the uncertainty that I have, and that I see others demonstrate, regarding social media services. Do I hang on, hoping for the best, or do I cut ties because I can provably show toxicity? If I cut ties, am I abdicating responsibility? How responsible am I?

Our social media is imperfect, like we are. All of our good intentions come back to us with their unintended consequences. And there it is, all on the record.

Perhaps moreso on the holidays than at other times, but always:

There are too many dirty dishes to do your kitchen prep.

The bag for the garbage can was just changed, how is it so full?

How has it already been a week since I did the laundry?

Watched It’s a Wonderful Life, again, today. I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen it from start to finish. It’s easy to point to the happy ending to instantly paint it as “Hollywood” or too simplistic. But if you’re a survivor, the titular message is profound.

Bad habit: Posting directly from the web-based editor. And correcting. And correcting. And correcting. I’ve made a small investment in editors. I should use one that points out the spelling errors, at least? It would be cool if I didn’t post basic errors for all to see.

Just read into Keybase documentation. Mastodon software supports Keybase, per-instance. However, due to what I’m guessing is massive proliferation, Keybase isn’t adding more instances at the current time.

I’ve waffled on Twitter. Disabled, re-enabled, and again just diabled cross-posting. Before the edict on barring Mastodon links in profiles, I had used Debirdify to learn that about 106 of the accounts I follow had federated accounts elsewhere. That’s less than 10 percent of the total number of accounts I follow there. The news escaping the Twitter bubble about the owner and his policies and his actions don’t really give me hope.

The interesting thing right this minute is dipping into the full federated Mastodon feed to see things I would otherwise have no idea how to find. The no-algorithm thing is cool in that sense.

I do think that things like boosting and likes will lead to much of the same “interaction-seeking” behavior from Twitter that can be leveraged in manipulative ways. I already see accounts whose output is primarily boosted toots, or broadcasting memes. My fear is that it’s just a matter of time until accounts are stolen and instances get weaponized as long as there is a financial or political incentive.

I worry about a commercial platform hosting speech and owning access to it, when the owner talks both about free speech and lawful speech. My sense is that culturally we will be now also facing battles over what is lawful speech, and protecting a specific point of view as lawful and anything other as not.

Nevertheless, I do see more and more accounts coming over into non-Twitter spaces. I find that interesting and exciting. I think there is value in having more than one path to information. And I fully support an individual’s right to own their words and their art.

I’m about half way through @manton’s Indie Microblogging book. I see the wisdom of using the web itself and protocols we already have as the social network. Weird, right? Using the interconnected network we already use, itself, as the social network?

In the end, I’m seeing aggregation sites (networks) as a single point of failure, and I’m seeing diaspora as the best hope for preservation and posterity.

It takes more work to run my own ship, but I like that I can head to the ports of my own choosing with hosting, email, DNS, RSS, blogging, and Mastodon instance. Further, I’m happy to pay the people in those ports that are helping me and providing value.

It’s probably just me, but only today I noticed that when you hover over a profile image in the Micro.blog timeline, the profile information for that account appears. #TIL

Watching from a distance as my intended destination for a Christmas get-away appears to be experiencing every possible ill effect from snow and wind and wave.

One under-appreciated or less-mentioned phenomenon of bitterly cold weather is that the world sounds different, not just the wind. Though the wind itself is hinting it its own power.

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media Having been through some lift-and-shifts, I feel this to my core. I agree with so many of the points, but most particularly that the community and the love can’t be bought.