a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
07:55 – : Time check: it’s the last day of my fifties…
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
09:41 – : People outside the UK, what’s wrong with this picture? (incorrect and misleading answers only, please)
07:39 – : In Glasgow to see the massive underground turbine that will supply clean, renewable energy to the whole city. There’s a low background hum everywhere you go, but it seems worth it. I met friends for coffee in the “Hammer and Bagel” a socialist bakers co-op in the city centre. #lastnightsdream
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
Last year, I wrote about wanting something a bit like dopplr, something to remind me of who is where IRL.
This morning, via John Gruber, I see that Ev Williams is bringing us such a something.
Of course I signed up straight away… have you met me?
At first glance, after first coffee, but still before first light in this part of the world in December, I’m not wild about the implementation. There are a couple of things that make it look like this is only for a certain kind of person, who lives in a certain kind of place and can afford a certain kind of technology. Oh and can afford a certain liberty with their own data and that of their contacts (or as the app has it “their people”). I’m becoming more cynical and sceptical about it the more I write.
this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.
I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends.
Throw in a clumsy use of flags (Good morning, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish friends!). I’m not even sure what that one is. (oh and you’ll need to be on WhatsApp to get the notification.)
Your plans had better be in a code that your friends will understand, as you only have 24 characters.
The granularity of location is the other problem. Letting people know that I’m going to be in “London, UK” isn’t much use. Which points to the use case being international travellers in select cliques for whom London obviously means “my parents place in Primrose Hill”. But if you know people *that* well, are you going to use a separate app for it, or are you going to have a Whatsapp group?
I may also have a chip on my shoulder because my little old iPhone SE won’t show the left and right edges to some screens.
Eh. Will wait and see who else turns up.
PS the wordpress featured image for this post is AI generated and does not represent an accurate representation of the Mozi interface.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
10:14 – : In the style of the “how old are you in internet years?” meme. I realise that I’m “put up with parsing an RSS feed and making it into a data structure, rather than looking for a JSON version of the same” old.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
This is mostly for Dave but I welcome eye-rolling discussion from all.
I’ve been doing a thing for a little while now, but only Dave has asked about it. And so, in our cozy, little internet for two, I’m just going to talk to him about it now.
Dave, hello, old friend. Thank you for paying attention to my RSS feed and this long, slow ongoing conversation about blogging that makes other people’s eyes glaze over sooooo quickly.
You asked:
@lloyddavis.bsky.social please can you show me how you do your micro.blog > WordPress daily thing. I think that’s probably the best way for me to achieve this: da.vebrig.gs/2024/10/30/%…— Dave Briggs (@da.vebrig.gs) December 10, 2024 at 5:52 PM
Well. So. Yeah. Hang on a sec.
In the summer, I was having cognitive capacity issues, keeping track of who I was talking to where about what. So I looked at the cross-posting capabilities of micro.blog – I was attracted to it first by seeing it being used by my early blog heroes Adam Tinworth and Robert Brook and I’m a big fan of how Manton Reece eats his own dogfood. Each of these people do their own thing with it and none of them are to blame for the stupid things I might choose to do when I pick up the same tools. I just mention them because I don’t want to look like I invented all this or that I think I’m cleverer than anyone else.
Where was I? Yeah so one of the cool things Manton has kept on top of is cross-posting to these different platforms. It was the most straightforward way of writing a post once and having software post it in several places (btw they also go to my ancient tumblr – and could go to medium, linkedin and nostr if I wanted to go bananas). And recently, I’ve been able to see my BlueSky and Mastodon replies there too, but that’s another complication and we’ve got enough complications here already, I think. Focus, Lloyd, focus!
Cross-posting deals with the copy/paste problem, but I was still feeling a gap. Ever since I got on Twitter, I wanted to have a place where I could find all my stuff instead of it being in different places. I couldn’t get my act together to go full POSSE, so maybe it’s cousin – PESOS might work. PESOS means publishing elsewhere, syndicating to own site. It feels inferior, and a bit wrong, but it kind of works for now.
I feel the need to just step back and acknowledge that I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just bumbling along having a life and now and then saying stuff on the internet. I don’t have Information Strategy meetings with myself to work out the ideal infrastructure and architectural approaches. I’m just the same bumbling blog-hacker, driven by novelty, that I’ve always been.
So I decided that what I’d do now, since I’d got all the chunks being made on micro.blog, it might be nice to make a daily digest post on here (perfectpath) of all the chunks I’d made that day. (turns out, it’s hard to get *all* the chunks, I’m human, sometimes I forget and just post something on one platform directly – also replies – we’ll come back to that).
I was also interested in how to use ChatGPT for helping me remember how to write code. So I asked it to write a script using the WordPress XML-RPC API (because that’s all I could remember there was) to take my RSS feed from micro.blog (because that’s all I could remember there was) and automatically post it here at about midnight every day. After some iterations I got to this version of the script. I then made a cron job on my home desktop computer to run at 11:55 each night, redirecting the output to a log file.
55 23 * * * /usr/bin/python3 "/Users/lloyddavis/blog digest/micro_digest.py" >> ~/microblog.log 2>&1It’s all a little bit shit, but it’s my little bit of shit. Before we start with the “why don’t you just…” here’s where I can see it needs improvement:
I’ll never be a consistent weeknoter – at least in the sense of consistently posting week by week. I’m consistent in my irregularity – I just looked and it’s almost exactly a year since my last one.
So this is December 2024. I’ve been looking forward to this (in the way that people say to their proctologist that they’re looking forward to their next appointment) for a while. I’m now into the last few weeks of my fifties. After the weekend I’ll be saying “I’m now into the last fortnight of my fifties.” That’s how I’ve been dealing with it. Doing a time check every now and then through this year in an effort to make the passing of time feel slower. I’m pretty sure it’s the anticipation that’s doing me in. Once I’m there and I have a badge that says “I’m 60 (you might have to speak up a bit!)” or something, then I’ll be OK with it. That’s what’s always happened in the past with so-called significant birthdays anyway.
The main difference with this one is that it comes with some small benefits, not just free NHS prescriptions but also the start of my Audit Commission pension. It stems from my employment there between 1996 and 2002 when 2024 still seemed a long way off. Nothing huge, but still, it’s money every week for the rest of my life (the end of which, currently at any rate, “seems a long way off”)
On Monday I went to a Hard Art meeting. It was exhausting. Lots of people said so afterwards, although I always find it exhausting, so I’m not sure what was different from them. I’m pleased to see that lately we’ve adopted more Open Space ways of working (without it being *me* who’s pushed it to the fore). There’s lots more to think about in terms of how we work on stuff together and I’m a bit depressed that I haven’t been able to give that as much attention as I’d like this year, but when I pause and look back, I recognise that we’ve made progress.
I’ve been experimenting with republishing my micro.blog entries in a digest here. If there isn’t a digest that’s because I didn’t write anything. I use micro.blog as the place I write stuff that will end up on BlueSky/Threads/Mastodon. Everything gets cross-posted to those three (plus my old faithful tumblr). I have a script that runs just before midnight and checks the RSS feed for my micro.blog and puts them into a reverse-chronological list with a timestamp that links to the original – as always, it’s a prototype for something else. What I want is a digest of all my microblogging activity – a record of the little conversations I’ve had that day – but those are fragmented across the three platforms and although federation is coming (probably in a slightly sub-optimal way for the two newer ones) it’s still hard to catch it all. It’s also not mission-critical. My main aim at the moment is that it doesn’t piss people off.
I started to feel that thing where the natural world round here is slowing down getting ready to pause and reset, but the human world is speeding up, desperately trying to get stuff done before any sort of pause.
I’m not rushing, but I sent a few emails to tidy things up and clarify when we’re going to do some work and when it can be billed for etc. I’m very grateful not to be having the kind of end of year where it’s unclear just how we’re going to make it through to January. My condolences and solidarity if you are having that kind of end of year – it sucks.
On Wednesday, I remembered that micro.blog will host audio for you, so I made a little podcast about podcasting and cross-posted it here.
I also went to the dentist. She confirmed that I do need another crown to replace the mishmash of fillings on the upper left side, but that it’s not super urgent (but could easily become so if unattended).
My dentist is on the other side of Guildford town centre. I’m glad that I gave myself space to walk into town, but not so glad to find that a suspicious package had closed the train station, so I chose to get a slower but less crowded bus home rather than the faster, crammed one.
We gave in and handed a list of odd jobs to a chap who is much more able to do these things than either of us are. So now we have pictures on the walls; all the downlighters in the kitchen work; we have working lights in both the attic and garage; and best of all, he fixed the handle on the dishwasher so that I don’t have to scrape skin off my fingers trying to open it first thing in the morning.
I’m working on a first product to put out on metalabel. It’s an annotated version of the Tuttle Annual Report that I wrote in 2009. It’s fun to do and to noodle over what all that was about back then. I did get round to creating a Tuttle Club label page and the emptiness of that is motivating me to have something to put up there. I’ll be opening up conversations about collaborative working to share there in the New Year.
I’m aware of my tendency to make up systems to make stuff and then be too exhausted to implement those systems. But I’m doing some of that kind of stuff too – (hopefully with more of the actual making stuff and without the exhaustion).
That’ll do for this week.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
13:02 – Audioblog: Wed 4 Dec 2024: If I’ve done this right, the feed should be at lloyddavis.micro.blog/podcast.x…
10:44 – : “The Observer” is to the chattering classes what “The Spirit of the Blitz” is to the Clarkson/Farage axis. You don’t love The Observer, you loved being a kid and cutting up the Sunday Supplement and making collages out of it with clippings from Radio Times.
Still. A picket line is a picket line.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
I saw that micro.blog will host mp3s – so I made one.
The feed (I won’t always cross-post things here for now) is https://lloyddavis.micro.blog/podcast.xml
Perfect Path 