I got the HooTo USB-C Hub for Christmas and I’ve tested it with the Google Pixelbook.
We wish you a Merry Christmas
Imanuel, God With Us
As we in news and media attack the platforms and their every misstep — and there are many — we need to turn the mirror on ourselves. It was news media that polarized the nation into camps of red v. blue, white v. black, 1 percent v. 99 percent long before Facebook was born. It was our business model in media that favored confrontation over resolution. It was our business model in advertising that valued volume, attention, page views, and eyeballs — the business model that then corrupted the internet. It was our failure to inform the public that enabled people to vote against their self-interest for Trump or Brexit.
But transparency is not just about confession. Transparency should be about pride and value.
Spark Review: Smart Email – MacStories
I’ve written of my search for a replace to Google’s Inbox, and on iOS I have settled on Spark. I wish it was available on Android, where I am using Bluemail.
Of course Brown scores 36 this week after I needed that last week. Sigh.
Rudolph?
Made my third trip to the eye glasses place to get my new glasses adjusted and confirm that the prescription is right and the measurements are right. I have a pretty significant stigmatism and the introduction of progressives has complicated the process of getting new lenses. Every pair I have had since progressives has required multiple trips to get the fit right, and one time the lenses had to be remade.
Today I got the manager/customer advocate take care of me. The first lesson learned is that for my prescription, experience matters. The customer advocate confirmed the measurements are correct and he did adjust the frame so that the glasses now feel better and sit better on my face.
I learned that my progressive prescription changed pretty significantly for my right eye, so that means I would definitely have a noticable difference and need more time to adjust. Most importantly, he told me that due to the change I need to hold what I am reading closer to force my eyes to read through the progressives. Holding a book where I had in the past put it at the mid-way point, which causes strain. Nobody told me this, I don’t know how I was supposed to know.
So, now I know I have to change what I do and I have to give my eyes/brain time to adjust. These simple but important pieces of information should have been given to me either at the first appointment or when I first picked up the glasses. My theory about this customer experience is that the experience of the people taking care of you matters. They probably don’t see my particular prescription often, and then 20 somethings doing the work simply don’t have the experience to handle my prescription.
My new glasses before and after with some hat hair after
About to get a new outlook.
A sign that I am a certain age, or that I am a little bit strange.
I fell down the rabbit hole of Federated Wiki after reading a piece by Mike Caulfield titled The Garden and the Stream. It’s made me think about my writing on the web and today I started to assemble those thoughts.
I am on holiday now and look forward to more time for this type of deep thinking.
I’ve written a wiki page that describes how I use RSS.
I’ve noticed several folks on micro.blog are also using Blot, which is a blog platform centered on Dropbox. Blot is not the first blogging platform that uses Dropbox as the content store, the first that I am familiar with was Fargo. The difference is that Fargo included a UI as well as a publisher where as Blot just has a publisher and the UI is one’s preferred text editor and the Dropbox UI.
I guess this Manneheim Steamroller playlist I am listening to has me feeling nostalgic.
I still wish I could batch all of my blog posts for a day into one titled batch, with the title being that day’s date. Perhaps I am being too picky, but when I scroll down my blog the dates above each post don’t look good. Titled posts aren’t much better. I could manually make it appear the way I want, but that is too much friction. I guess what I am saying is that I miss my old blogging format.
I got an idea. If you look at the Discuss link on this post, you see that it points back to the discussion thread on micro.blog. What if when you tapped that link on iOS it launched the micro.blog app? Right now it just opens the thread in a web page. On Windows if you are logged in to micro.blog you can actually reply and participate in the discussion.
You see, I think of micro.blog as a blogging platform and not as a Twitter alternative so I envision the blog is a starting point and not the micro.blog timeline. If one starts on the blog and I want follow up discussion, I should be able to make it happy. Adding a link like I did is easy enough.
Is Trump’s smartphone the most infamous in history?
The iPad and Drafts is evolving into my preferred blogging platform due to a shortcut I created that quotes text from web pages in the exact format that I prefer. I use Omnibear in Chrome on my notebook computers but doesn’t automatically grab the web page title, address, and selected text like the shortcut. I think I used to have a bookmarklet that did the job back during my earlier blogging days.
Oh, and the fact that Drafts makes it easier to link to pages doesn’t hurt.
The problem is, I don’t only use my iPad, so when I am reading on another computer it is a bit disruptive to have to switch computers to write a blog post.