This year my SXSW participation was scaled back to just a couple of acts last night. It was the Trinidad & Tobago showcase. The two singers: Isasha, who played for about 10 minutes due to technical issues, and Destra García who put up a good show.
Hopefully I’ll be more active next year.
What have I done?
Those of you who subscribe to The MKX® (via email or RSS) or pay attention to that list of links on the website’s sidebar know that I’ve been using a service called Delicious for link sharing. I started in 2005 back when they were known as Web 2.0 pioneers “del.icio.us”. I’m stopping now.
Delicious was a great, promising service for “Social Bookmarking”. They were “cool”. Then Yahoo bought it in their own desperate bid for relevance only to proceed to neglect it almost to the point of irrelevance. So they sold it to AVOS Systems, who then sold it to Science Inc. I don’t know who either is.
In the meantime, the website improved somewhat, an unusable iPhone app was released – not in the sense that it was hard to use but in the sense that it truly didn’t work at all, and the bookmarklet stopped working. The latest owners, before making any improvements, decided to stick ads to user’s RSS feeds without any warning. Monetizing is fine but not warning your users before such change is not. This was the straw. I myself subscribe to Delicious feeds for about 7 people who share maybe one link every six months. Yet I get one ad foe each of them daily!
So I decided to make a change. Introducing:
I am using a OSS system called Shaarli. I am self-hosting it which means that it cannot get sold to Yahoo without making me rich. Right now, I’m using the stock version, which sports a design only a mother could love. That’s ok – if I find time for it I may tweak it to be less offensive. All 1875 links were imported. Getting a combined RSS feed for The MKX® and The MKX® Links wasn’t so easy. I used ChimpFeedr (by MailChimp), then I put that through FeedBurner (which gives me both usage statistics and the email subscription service and risks joining Google’s Graveyard at any point). I hope it works out.
In the meantime, I apologize for any ads or RSS oddness. Let me know of any problems.
Quick doodle, 0.5 mm BIC mechanical pencil.
WordPress puts together these neat annual reports for us bloggers.
The one for The MKX® is here.
The highlights:
I make no resolution to post more in 2016, but it may just happen.
J.J. will push every single nostalgia button in your body. You must go see it.
I hate spam and I go through great lengths to minimize it. Internet security is also interesting to me, and I think most people just don’t know not follow good security practices, and aren’t aware of just how awful things are, as in, how inept websites are at securing your data.
Data breaches are rampant and many people don’t appreciate the scale or frequency with which they occur.
Security researcher Troy Hunt maintains ‘;–have i been owned?, an excellent website that aggregates data from lots of known breaches and makes it easy for you to find your information on said breaches. Of course this aggregate data is only the tip of the iceberg, as most breaches are not known or he has no way to get to the data. In any case, it’s interesting to go see who has your email.
I ran this tool on the domain I use for the majority of my emails to see which ones are there. Remember I use a different email address and a different password for each and every website I sign up for. Results weren’t all that bad. Out of 723 email addresses, “only” 4 were found in the database of pwned websites. The winners are:
This is quite horrific.
Run your email through their search and post to the comments to see if it was found on any compromised websites. It will be interesting to hear.
Ilan’s jewfro is approaching mine. Much better than last year’s.
PS: What is the most widely accepted English phonetic spelling for חֲנֻכָּה?
From twelve-time Iuval winning director.
With the guy sitting in the back for like a second in Velma is Living.
Coming soon for your binge watching pleasure.
(the cocaine is fake, but the mustache is real)
True story from this morning:
I got in the car in order to leave for work. I had my laptop in its bag and my giant coffee mug. I opened the driver side door to throw them in, then went around, got in the car and drove to the office.
As I was driving, I noticed my phone wasn’t in my pocket and I couldn’t see it. However, thanks to the magic of Apple Watch I could see that it was in range. So I dropped it and it’s under the seat or something.
On the first stoplight I used the nifty “make iPhone ping” feature from the watch. I could hear it, but faintly. So maybe it’s under the rug or something? I couldn’t find it. Second and third stoplights were the same. So I decided to wait until I park at work.
When I parked, I opened the door so I can better crawl under the seats. Ping – and now I could hear it loud and clear. What the hell?
And there it was:
I bought the case with the following criteria in mind:
I never added “good car paint grip” to the list. Got lucky.
In case you care or plan on letting your phone air out while you drive down the highway, this is the case (Amazon) that saved me from re-purchasing a $750+tax brand new phone.
