Incognito browsing.

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I enabled iCloud Relay on my iPhone. It doesn’t claim to be completely private, but I find using it is completely undetectable by Google Analytics and Squarespace’s own statistics trackers.

YMMV, but if you want to be invisible, you might try it out. How-to. I use too many plugins on my desktop browser, but I’ve turned it on for all my mobile devices, and I’ve not noticed any slowdowns (good download speeds in this area on Comcast and TMobile 5G).

The Register: Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare.

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First I’ve heard of this. Look forward to scanning the report. So many folks are relying on older systems, hardware … valuable or sensitive information left to disappear due to inertia. Big lessons here.

I value paper more, as a result!

Fifteen minutes and NetNewsWire.

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VF: Mark Seliger’s Portraits From the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Beautiful light.

Atlas Obscura: Why the April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse May Blow Your Mind. A nice discussion of the experience of awe. Reminds me of some of my experiences back in September and October of last year.

fx guide: The Ultimate RC podcast +1 (Reunion Show) – Nikon buys RED. “The Good, the Bad, and the Damn Annoying.”

The Hill: Press: Does telling the truth matter anymore? Bill Press hits the target.

Popular Information: New data explodes myth of crime wave fueled by migrants. “… across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.” We all know the 'crime wave’ rhetoric was bullsh-t.

PVC: The Updated Professional’s Guide to Buying an M Series Mac. Still love my M1 Ultra Macbook Pro.

Guardian: Legal action could end use of toxic sewage sludge on US crops as fertilizer. I thought this had been outlawed decades ago! Good lord. So many more toxic chemicals these days, on top of heavy metals.

New Scientist: Mars's gravitational pull may be strong enough to stir Earth's oceans. Now that’s going to set tarot readers and astrologers wild.

ReadWriteWeb: A rogue AI might be able to replace all music with Taylor Swift covers. Our local radio station plays “Hotel California” so many times a day, I think I’d welcome a Tay-Tay cover.

Medium: How long does it take to design a website? Many clients will balk, yet this is a very realistic timeframe. The reality is, many will not have the cash or the deep desire to have such a highly-customized site. Hence Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress themes.

Ever hear of "zettelkasten"?

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The latest rabbit-hole I’m diving into. My Evernote has become a black hole of thousands (15,000+ tags alone) of aged content. I need something better. Been looking at The Archive and have downloaded Obsidian. Longtime readers will recall my experiences with The Brain (too pricey now), also.

I’d really like to have a filing system to back up my grey matter in a more useful, Google-Search-like manner. But moreso, to save some of my longer writings. I’m discovering lately that blogging has ‘built’ me for longer form pieces, and I’d like to categorize and save them in useful (quick recall) formats. So many times, when composing a longer blog post, I recall a piece of writing from the past. I can’t tell if I’ve stuffed it in Ulysses, Drafts, IA Writer, Evernote, FreeMind, Notes, Omni Outliner, Open Office, Google Docs, OneDrive, Yojimbo, Highland 2, Scrivener, Word, Pages, Textedit, or wherever. After decades of writing for the internet, I’ve got good things stuffed in every nook and cranny on my hard drives, depending on what latest whizzy app or app update I was fiddling with, in order to give a salient comment on the blog.

I’ve been terrifically disorganized with my longer writings, and now I need to pay the piper. I really wish I’d come up with some dazzlingly brilliant method of naming files, but alas … it never crossed my mind until now.

Consider this a ‘spring cleaning’. Thought others might want to peek, too.

The Atlantic: You’re Looking at TikTok All Wrong.

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I find TikTok has a fiendishly clever interestingness algorithm. It morphs as I use it, in ways that other such channels can’t match. You want to talk about AI; TikTok feels like there’s a machine presence on the other end of the line trying to psychoanalyze … watching, learning, recording. I used the word ‘fiendish’ purposely!

One observation: if you categorize your favorites, it uses the names of your categories as keywords when you actively save something, feeding you more using those keywords with the very next video. But the ‘lead’ wears fast as you deviate from the keyword. Fiendishly fast. It adapts to our shorter modern attention spans. I am fascinated.

Smashing Mag: Web Development Is Getting Too Complex, And It May Be Our Fault.

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Worth the read! Much of my work these days is using and training people in Wordpress drag-and-drop themes! The stacks - and really useful CMSs - are too complex, unless you’re making dead-tree sites (at my clients’ price point).