I kind of expected to be in bed before midnight, but what the hell; eleven more minutes.

Turns out my New Year’s Eve is baking brownies and starting to watch The Wire over again. I’ll take it.

Peace. 🥳

Self-hosting Email: Good Idea or Terrible? 🤔

Off to watch Die Hard at 11 PM, as the ancient Yuletide tradition demands. 🎄

Today I learned about the Adaptive Limiter in Logic Pro, so I can fix my too-quiet audio on podcasts in six clicks instead of fiddling with automation. 😎🎵

Completed my collection of Austin Kleon’s excellent (and adorable) little books. 📚 😎

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them. – Tim Ferriss, Tribe of Mentors

Stefflon Don is one of the cleverer artist names I’ve seen in a while. Good cover, too. Respect. 😂🎵

🎵 Did I just make a playlist of songs with “Cola” in the name? Yes I did, and it’s pretty great. 😎

Memory Matters, a rant about the need for the open web: www.danj.ca/memory-ma…

Anyone using Indiepaper instead of Instapaper? I’m not sure I get it. Is it basically a self-hosted version of the same? 🤔

I keep flip-flopping on my iPad.

Not *literally*—I don’t want to break it.

But I can’t make up my mind whether to build a new workflow around using it (like, reading articles on there instead of on my Mac, saving the latter for “work”)… or just selling it. 🤔

Confirmed: Atomic Blonde is very good.

I can’t remember if the ending of The Coldest City is the same, though. Guess I’ll have to read it again.

I have too many tabs and windows open, and it makes it hard to work. Every glance at my desktop is a reminder I have twenty things I want to do: which one comes first? Cognitive Paralysis. 😅

Can you relate to this?

Follow-up thoughts to Medium is Bad for the Web¹:

• The article I was attempting to save for later was How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You - it looks like an incredibly-valuable article. So it’s too bad Medium controls who can see it, and under what circumstances
• I should have added, when saying Medium is more sinister than Facebook: We all get that Facebook is a walled garden (it might be, at least for my generation, the prototypical example of such); most of what you put on Facebook cannot be seen by anyone who isn’t logged in to Facebook, which is a feature in many ways: privacy (nevermind that Facebook can see it). But Medium posts have URLs, which makes it look like they’re part of the web. But—and newspaper paywalls have this same problem—it’s when you try to share those URLs and are met with a doorslam, or try to save them to an API endpoint and it fails, that the facade shatters. Actually, Medium will decide whether you get to read the article or not
• A lot of writers may argue that they make money from posting on Medium, and that requires some level of control, because restricting access is what makes Medium content valuable. Which is just a return to the world of publishers / gatekeepers that the internet has let us escape. The reason Indieweb is crucial is because when a technological sea change levels the playing field between the powerful and the rest of us, it is inevitable that the powerful (and those who leverage the change to become powerful) will find ways to un-level the playing field again. If we don’t fight back, writers in 2025 end up just like writers in 1985: beholden to huge corporate interests that decide how and when and to whom our work will be presented… and whether we can feed our families with it.²
  

Posted some more booksmarks and a note on my Indieweb site; still not sure how to “project” those posts to Micro.blog… is it worth sharing each bookmark here? And how do I do that other than posting each one manually? 🤔

True-crime podcasts exemplify the incredible influence of sound design. If you stripped the background music out of most of these shows, you’d probably be asleep in minutes. 😏

Oh, IKEA furniture. You’re never as easy to assemble as you make it seem.

This does give me the opportunity to catch up on true-crime podcasts, at least. 😅

There we go. Quickly added some more bookmarks. Gotta get these open tabs processed, lest they paralyze me. 😝

Next thing to figure out is what/how to push from my site to my Micro.blog feed, and if I can do all that from one place… 🤔

I’m overthinking—doing that thing where I don’t post to my blog because I look at the twenty tabs I have open in various windows and just… shut down.

What I should be doing is looking at a webpage, making some notes, and uploading them to www.danj.ca.

🎵 This song came up from creating a station off of The Pogues’ Dirty Old Town, and it’s punching me right in the feelings.

music.apple.com/ca/album/…

📝 Useful Terminal Trick - Putting a Bunch of Files in Eponymous Folders

📝 Just Getting Started

Folks are setting off hundreds and hundreds of fireworks in the park across the street, and I have never been more grateful I don’t have some kind of explosion-oriented PTSD. #ThisIsHalloween 🙄

Happy Halloween 🤘🏼👻🎃

#listening-to #black-sabbath

I went to check out OwnYourGram today, and at the top of the site in red it says:

We’re experiencing trouble with Instagram blocking requests from this website. New accounts are disabled, and you will experience long delays importing photos on existing accounts.

Because of course Instagram is blocking requests from that website. POSSE > PESOS, in the language of the IndieWeb.

From Daring Fireball:

I’m genuinely curious why Apple doesn’t offer AirPods in more colors. Seems like something people would enjoy, especially black. My best guess is that Apple considers white earbuds to be iconic and part of the Apple brand.

That sounds right to me, and it’s one of those unfortunate cases where what’s best for Apple comes before what’s best for its customers. I’ll grant you it offers an opportunity for third-party companies to colour your AirPods, but the AirPods Pro are already CAD$329—I don’t think I’ll be in the after-market. 😂

The URL of this post should be in the filename of the file that gets created in my Dropbox.

Even if this works, IFTTT ➡️ Dropbox is a blunt instrument: as far as I know I can’t format the date it puts in the filename (which is currently in the stupidest format possible, i.e. October 27, 2019 at 02/48PM)

Let’s try this a third time.

This is a Micro.blog post that should get pulled from the RSS feed and end up as a text file in my Dropbox folder.

Let’s try this again.

This is a Micro.blog post that should get pulled from the RSS feed and end up as a text file in my Dropbox folder.

Another test to see if this IFTTT trigger I made will cause a text file to show up in my Dropbox. 🤔

Let’s test this mechanism for backing up my Micro.blog posts to text files…

I think the previous was my first “long post” to Micro.blog. It handles it pretty well. 👍🏼

Twitter’s naive algorithm insists that one of the twitter accounts I “might also like” is that of my ex-wife and call me self-centered but this is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with social media. 😜

(It’s nothing against her, either. Don’t get me wrong. But the fact that we have these globe-spanning mechanisms that have a sort of childish half-understanding of what human relationships are is… problematical.)

((“Here’s an account that a bunch of people (you follow|that follow you) also follow, you should totally follow them, too! And now we’ll show you their name and picture every time you log in!”

And there’s no way for me to indicate, actually, twitter, this is super inappropriate on your part. And even if there were, I’m absolutely not inclined to share personal information like that with a tech corp in the first place…

See what I mean? Problematical.))

Speaking of music from the ‘90s, I’d forgotten how hard Metallica can solo. 🤘🏼

Get access to a streaming service that can play practically any music on demand?

Immediately recreate the CD collection you had in your bedroom in high school. 👍🏼🎸

Thinking of using micro.blog like this. Full content on my www subdomain, little status updates (like this) (i.e. “microblogging”), and announcements of the big content, here.

Also: posting about how I plan to use micro.blog on micro.blog is satisfyingly meta. 😏