Bluesky PSA

If you are on Bluesky, you may want to have a look at this blocklist. On Friday the Trump regime tried to spam Bluesky by setting up a whole bunch of accounts and then posting the usual odious crap. Fortunately, Bluesky makes it easy to block accounts and even easier with blocklists, which require only a couple of clicks to block the whole list. Here's one you can try.

Threads versus Bluesky

I set up a Mastodon account (@ksoltys@twit.social) soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter and have been using it happily since. Late last year, I joined Bluesky (@ksoltys.bsky.social) though I still prefer Mastodon. That's largely because of the maturity of Mastodon's feature set and the availability of good third-party Android clients. I currently use the default Mastodon web client but on Android I use Fedilab.

As for Threads, I won't have anything to do with it. I'm trying to reduce my usage of Facebook and I expect it to become less congenial now that Musk has abolished what little fact-checking it has. 

Engadget has published an article comparing Bluesky and Threads that's worth reading if you are considering joining either of the platforms or are already a user. One of the major differences is content moderation. 

"“Moderation is in many ways, like governance,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told me earlier this year. “And setting the norms of a social space, we don't think one person or one company should be unilaterally deciding that for an entire ecosystem where people are having public conversations important to the state of the world.”

That philosophy plays out in other important ways. Twitter was never a major source of traffic for most publishers, even before Elon Musk’s takeover. But the platform once played a vital role in the news ecosystem. At a time when Elon Musk has acknowledged that X penalizes posts with links and Threads’ top exec has said that Meta doesn’t want to “encourage” hard news, Bluesky’s leaders have actually tried to foster link sharing, and several publishers have reported seeing significantly more traffic from Bluesky, compared with Threads and X."

I do wish Bluesky would give us the option to resume sessions at the last post viewed (an option available in some clients including Fedilab for Android). This makes Bluesky less convenient to use. I will be looking for a good third-party client for Android when I have some spare time. 

For now, I still prefer Mastodon. 

New to Bluesky

I will never forgive Elon Musk for ruining Twitter, which was an essential service for many people. Twitter is still there, as X, but it's a pale shadow of its former self and has become a cesspit of right-wing and misogynist content, some of it posted by Musk himself.

So what are the alternatives? 

There are now three major platforms vying for users.

• Threads is Facebook's offering. It has the largest user base but being a centralized platform under the control of Mark Zuckerg's Meta has put off many users, myself included.
• Mastondon is a federated and distributed system which means it can't be bought by a billionaire with an agenda. Mastodon is relatively small (about 10,000,000  users). 
• Bluesky is also potentially a federated platform though currently it has only one central node. It's probably the closest to the original Twitter in design and feel and recently has surpassed Mastodon in usage. 

I'm not going to discuss Threads as I am not on it nor do I plan to join up.

I have been on Mastodon for two years and it's become my replacement for Twitter. It doesn't have the reach or variety of users that Twitter had, but I'm finding the overall quality of what I'm seeing there much higher than what I saw on Twitter at it's peak. You can find me there at @ksoltys@twit.social. 

Bluesky has experienced a large surge in membership over the last month, most of it coming from Twitter users who can no longer stomach Musk's antics. I signed up recently and my handle is @ksoltys.bsky.social. 

So far, I haven't been very active as I'm gradually finding my way around. The interface is very close to Twitter's, but lacks many features that Twitter had or that Mastodon currently has. (One example: in my Mastodon client, when I sign in, I can go to the my last location in the feed rather than having to start at the top and work my way backwards). 

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on Bluesky right now. But I am going to list a few resources that I've found helpful in getting started there.

• How to use Bluesky Social: Everything to know about the popular X alternative. "Bluesky is one of several social networks striving to offer an alternative to the site formerly known as Twitter. Here's how to join and use it."
• An Unofficial Guide to Bluesky, by Debbie Ridpath Ohi. 
• Maybe Bluesky has "won". "November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this weird-assed social network."
• r/BlueskySocial on Reddit.

Featured Links - November 18, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The marina waiting for winter

How to Stay Covid Safe When in Hospital. "A guide to navigating the risk of hospital acquired Covid - as well as how to manage overall risk of nosocomial infections and hospital derived complications." Reading this article may save your life.

Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges Hall discusses Norman Rockwell's famous painting. "Ruby Bridges became a civil rights icon when she was 6. Yet she didn't realize it for decades. The world knows her as the little girl in Norman Rockwell's famous 1963 painting, The Problem We All Live With, a black child being escorted to a white New Orleans school by federal marshals."

What Is RSS? If you aren't using an RSS reader, you're online life is a lot more complicated than it needs to be. I use Feedly and would have a hard time living without it.

In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928–2024. Kurtz was the co-inventor of BASIC, arguably the most influential computer language. It was the second one I learned, after encountering FORTRAN in university.

Half-Life 2 remaster drops; no word on Half-Life 3. "Half-Life 2 RTX, a remaster of the original game featuring all kinds of fancy, cutting-edge graphics tech, has been revealed in full force and looks absolutely beautiful." I can't wait to play this! It's too bad there's no release date yet.

Trump Claims a Mandate, But He’s Wrong And It Will Cost Him. "Trump is already overreaching, giving Democrats a clear opening."

The Ghosts of John Tanton. "Today’s contentious immigration debate is the construct of one man’s effort to halt overpopulation, brace for climate change and preserve “European” culture. Now climate change is amplifying environmental concerns that have always run through the white supremacy and the anti-immigration movements. Experts warn that extremists who seize on global warming to justify violence are part of a far right trend to reclaim environmentalism as their own."

Featured Links - February 26, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A winter beach

• Dodge Lodge. "This week, we remember a Cinderella story gone wrong and learn why playing with dynamite is a bad idea." A fascinating bit of Northern Ontario history that I have not heard about before this article.
• ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. "The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?" From Cory Doctorow, who coined the term last year.
• Google is making a map of methane leaks for the whole world to see. "A satellite that measures methane leaks from oil and gas companies is set to start circulating the Earth 15 times a day next month. Google plans to have the data mapped by the end of the year for the whole world to see." This is a very good idea.
• The ultimate guide to using PowerToys. "Windows may not be perfect, but Microsoft gives you the tools to make the experience better with PowerToys. Here's everything you need to know." If you are using Windows, you need PowerToys and this article is the best guide I've seen.
• How to digitize and declutter your CDs and DVDs. "Save the content you still want, sell the discs you don't."
• Google's inconsistent Pixel experience makes its phones impossible to recommend. "Three generations into the Tensor experiment, the time has come to stop making excuses for Google's buggy software." I'm more concerned about Google's penchant for killing off apps and services. I've never forgiven them for sunsetting Google Reader. 
• Long Covid ‘brain fog’ may be due to leaky blood-brain barrier, study finds. "If barrier controlling substances entering and exiting brain is off balance, it can drive changes in neural function."
• Bluesky: An Open Social Web. "Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?" I have not signed up for BlueSky yet though I probably will at some point. But right now I spend too much time on Mastodon and I don't need another time sink in my life. If you use BlueSky, I'd be interested in your experience if you want to leave a comment.

Featured Links - January 15, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:

Winter walking hazards

• Huge ancient city found in the Amazon. "A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation. The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon."
• Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? (gift link): "After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again." This probably applies to Canada as well as we drive the same cars and drivers are just as badly behaved.
• I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script. "It was only about halfway done, but the script David Lynch wrote for the sequel to his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel, Dune, was still better than Dune Messiah."
• Why You Should Rest—a Lot—If You Have COVID-19. 'The only guaranteed way to avoid Long COVID is not to get infected by SARS-CoV-2. But if someone does get sick, "Rest is incredibly important to give your body and your immune system a chance to fight off the acute infection,” says Dr. Janna Friedly, a post-COVID rehabilitation specialist at the University of Washington who recovered from Long COVID herself.' 
• Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app. "Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app." This is sad news. I liked Artifact a lot and found it quite useful. 
• The Space Force is changing the way it thinks about spaceports. "There's not much available real estate to grow Cape Canaveral's launch capacity."
• How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse. "This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything."
• Quantum mechanics model unveils hidden patterns in stock markets. "A new study published in Financial Innovation has developed a novel quantum model for stock market fluctuations that incorporates economic uncertainty and herding behavior. The study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the origins and implications of stock market anomalies such as fat tails, volatility clustering, and contrarian effects." There's a some people call stock market analysts quants. 

Featured Links - January 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. It's a longer than usual this week because of the holiday hiatus.

A foggy winter country scene

• Siberia’s ice is melting, revealing its past and endangering its future (gift link). "Siberia is heating up around twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the frozen ground known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages."
• What We Lost When Twitter Became X (archive.ph link). "As a former Twitter employee, I watched Elon Musk undermine one of the Internet’s most paradoxical, special places."
• 1 Key Element Gives The 2000 Dune Miniseries An Advantage Over Villeneuve's Dune Films. "Over two decades later, one key element still gives the 2000 Dune miniseries a huge advantage over Denis Villeneuve's Dune films. Here's what to know." The 2000 miniseries is well worth tracking down and watching; it's available on YouTube. 
• How The Beatles helped turn the Pentax Spotmatic into an iconic camera. "The Pentax SLR had huge influence on a generation of photographers - including the Fab Four."
• Unpredicting 2024. From science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder: 'If we reframe the coming year around one simple idea—expect surprises—then it becomes clear that predictions are irrelevant and can even be dangerous when they lead us to rely on eventualities that don’t happen. Because the future we care about is the dimension of surprise, by definition we can’t predict it. So ignore all those “predictions for 2024” articles, they’re not going to help.'
• SOTP: State-of-the-Pandemic. "The pandemic's 2nd biggest wave of infections and what the JN.1 variant is telling us." A detailed look at current conditions and future possibilities from Eric Topol. 
• How Standard Ebppls Serves Millions of Requests Per Month with a 2GB VPS; Or a Paen to the Classic Web. "Standard Ebooks is a project that takes transcriptions of public domain literature, like the kind typically available at Project Gutenberg, and creates beautiful, modern ebooks out of them using a detailed style manual. Volunteers from all over the world work to produce these ebooks, and then we release them free of cost and free of copyright restrictions."
• 2024 Fediverse Predictions from Tim Chambers. "These are fun and like seeing the tech predictions starting to pop up in a lot of other places."
• Why U.S. streets are becoming deadlier for pedestrians. "Pedestrian deaths in the United States have been going up since 2009. Over 3,000 more pedestrians died in 2021 than in 2009, a trend that's not mirrored in other industrialized countries, where pedestrian fatalities are actually declining. Even stranger these deaths in the U.S. occur more frequently in the evening. So, why are so many pedestrians dying at night in the United States?"
• The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance. "With its market share hitting a new low, can Firefox rise from the ashes or is this the end?" 
• Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX. (Archive.ph link) "Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies." I wouldn't be surprised to see him off the board of Tesla and SpaceX because of this.

Will Threads Kill Twitter?

Here's a good analysis by Alasdair Munro of what it would likely take for Threads to become a viable successor to Twitter. 

The increasing hostile, ad filled timelines and difficulty finding trustworthy, timely and relevant information have hugely damaged Twitters value. Threads is the first real competitor capable of capturing enough relevant audience to become a rival environment. Usability needs to be fixed fast - especially desktop use and a chronological timeline only of people you follow. If this happens, it has a real chance of scaling and becoming more like Twitter felt 5 - 10 years ago. A safer space for professionals to discover and discuss cutting edge developments in their fields, and to follow world events from trusted sources in near-enough real time.

He makes some good points but ignores two key issues:

• The amount of personal data that you share with Meta when you sign up
• The fact that ownership by Meta is a single point of control; in other words, it's not (yet) federated.

I'm staying away from it for now and likely for quite a while. 

Featured Links - May 15, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A classic car in a modern colour

• Ben Franklin Would Have Loved Bluesky. "Facebook an0 Twitter seem less relevant by the day. They may be replaced by new 'federated' platforms."

• The ‘Brain Fog’ of Long COVID Is a Serious Medical Issue That Needs More Attention. "Brain fog is such a nebulous term in long COVID that it delegitimizes efforts to get disability accommodations and medical leave. 
• Good Omens Parody by the Hillywood Show. Actually an official production and it reveals the release date for season 2 of Good Omens. And it contains Neil Gaiman.
• Post-COVID Condition (Long COVID). Resources for managing Long COVID from the Ontario College of Family Physicians.
• I lived in the PATH for two weeks in 2012. It was weird then, but it’s weirder now. Here’s why. "Toronto’s expansive underground retail network was prime downtown real estate before the pandemic. Has hybrid work humbled it for good?" "I miss wandering the PATH on my lunch hours. It was crowded, vibrant, and colourful. Now, not so much."
• A Fundamental Change to the Earth’s Water Cycle is Underway. "Expect more heatwaves and flash droughts."
• You need an e-reader, and here’s why. "E-books are good for you, incredibly convenient, and best consumed on a device built for the purpose—such as a Kobo."

Featured Links - May 1, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Fibre is coming

• Astronomers solve the 60-year mystery of quasars, the most powerful objects in the universe. "Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars—the brightest, most powerful objects in the universe—by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies colliding."
• Quiet and Efficient – New Propeller Advance Paves Way for Electric Planes. "The electrification of aviation is viewed as a crucial component in the creation of a fossil fuel-free future. However, electric aviation is faced with a challenge: the more energy-efficient the aircraft, the louder it becomes. Fortunately, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed an optimized propeller design that opens up the possibility for electric aviation to be both quiet and efficient."
• Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options. "There have been a bunch of attempts at filling the void left by an unstable and untrustworthy Twitter, and it’s been fascinating to watch how it’s all played out over these past six months. I’ve actually enjoyed playing around with various other options and exploring what they have to offer, so wanted to share a brief overview of current (and hopefully future options) for where people can go to get their Twitter-fix without it being on Twitter."
• Ancient Solar Storm Reveals Vikings Were In North America Exactly 1,000 Years Ago. “[Our] research demonstrates the potential of the AD 993 anomaly … for pinpointing the ages of past migrations and cultural interactions,” the study concludes. “Together with other cosmic-ray events, this distinctive feature will allow for the exact dating of many other archaeological and environmental contexts.”
• 30 Insanely Useful Websites That'll Come in Handy Someday. "The title is hyperbolic, but there are several very useful sites listed in the article."
• We built a human-skin printer from Lego and we want every lab to use our blueprint. "Our bioprinter could not only provide us with an accurate representative model of human skin, it could also be used to add diseased cells to the healthy models we produce. This would enable us to study how skin conditions develop and how healthy and diseased cells interact. It would also enable us to see how skin diseases progress and how potential treatments can be developed."
• 2023 Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists. Locus is the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field. Some of the short fiction finalists are available online to read. 

Featured Links - March 13, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A snowy park

• A break from Covid waves and a breakthrough for preventing Long Covid. From Eric Topol, a biomedical researcher who has been writing consistently informative articles about the pandemic. 
• For Rare Book Libraries, It's Gloves Off. Seriously. When handling rare books, experts say that bare, just-cleaned hands are best. Why won’t the public believe them? (Gifted article, no paywall).
• The Mastodon’s Guide to the Fediverse. If you are just getting started, or want to get started with Mastodon, this is one of the best guides I've seen.
• Low Orbit Satellite Systems Like Starlink Continue To Harm Scientific Research. "Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like Starlink continue to pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue."
• Turn your InDesign resume into an accessible PDF. The principles here apply to any PDF.
• Westinghouse eVinci: The Pint-Sized Mini Reactor Designed to Kick Diesel to the Curb. This is a technology that is worth widespread deployment.
• A Tough Weekend. "This past week, the federal regulators took over Silicon Valley Bank. I won’t repeat what has been reported in the media (Insider and Axios have ongoing coverage.) I won’t share how we got there — these two links explain the problem quite well. However, what I will do is share what I am feeling — this might be the worst weekend I have experienced as part of the technology community. "

Extending Mastodon

I've been using Mastodon more over the last month, especially since Twitter killed off third-party apps like Talon, the Android client that was my primary interface to Twitter. I still look at Twitter to follow a handful of accounts for information about COVID-19 and the Ukraine invasion, but the limitations of the official Twitter app and web interface make it difficult to use.

The official Android app and web client for Mastodon lack features that I used on Twitter. However, Mastodon, its API, and Activity Pub, its core protocol, are open source, so people have been busily extending it with new clients and add-on tools. 

Here are a few that are useful.

• Fedilab is the Android client that I currently use. I like it because it has one key feature lacking in the official Mastodon client. I can mute users who I've added to lists so they don't show up in my Home feed. 
• Mastodon List Manager is a "dead simple manager for all of your Mastodon Lists, letting you quickly assign people that you are following to one or more lists. Search, filter, and organize your follow list to make reasoning about your lists easy." Coupled with the muting feature in Fedilab, it makes lists much more useful.
• Mastodon Threaded Reply Viewer is a simple web app that shows all of your posts and lets you view replies in a threaded format. It's handy but would be even better if it indicated which posts have replies. (You can view all of your posts (including boosts) in the Mastodon web app with a URL in this format: https://[your host]/@[your username], but the viewer is easier to use. 

Finally, for those who are more technically adept, here's an article that shows how you can extend the Mastodon dashboard to show you your followers, the lists they belong to, and their recent posts. At the end of the article, there's a list of links to a series of articles about extending Mastodon to do new and interesting things.