Mastodon becoming a US entity with a neoliberal board of directors and the goal of growth über alles is the issue here folks, not whether Eugen and company are compensated for their work. Of course they should be and well too. Or is that a privilege reserved only for the mediocre yes-people at the Googles and the Facebooks of the world?
If, on the other hand, maybe we’d like more folks to contribute to the commons and maybe not even be captured by Silicon Valley how about this radical idea: Fund them so they can live (at least as well) as any mediocre yes-person at a mainstream tech company.
little story about when you get to see films that make you glad film exists
when i was first dating my wife over a decade ago, i was teaching and used a lot of documentary films in my classes. students had to learn how to observe and interpret people in a safe space.
it was getting late in the year, and i was running out of footage. so my wife and i would stay up until 2am some nights, trying to find enough footage that i could screen the next morning. she'd dig through my old film studies textbook ("A History of Narrative Film"), websites and old forums and imdb, calling out names, and i'd dig them out and watch a minute or two to see if they'd be good candidates.
most of the newer docs were plain bad - more shiny editorials than anything else. people acting instead of being. totally useless for students whose job was to interpret real human behaviour. so i tried to rely on older, more cinéma vérité -style docs.
it was hard to find old docs though - not only because many weren't digitized, but also because young people weren't aware of them, which meant that the web wasn't yet aware of them. imdb might have an entry for it, but only a few thousand people in the world might know the name of the movie.
my wife's secret weapon was a site called jinni. it had some truly solid algorithmic fundamentals that produced high quality recommendations based on what you watched. these weren't the google/amazon garbage recommends you have now: these were based on film qualities, and could produce pretty novel results.
one night it was beyond late, and i was shooting down every movie she recommended. she was getting pissed, and i was getting even more neurotic about finding the right one. she started randomly clicking around jinni in frustration, and came up with a black and white doc from the late 90s with a graffiti title. it looked bad, but i pulled up a low res mpeg someone had stashed on IA
we watched about 3 minutes together and forgot about finding anything else. we watched the entire thing that night, neither of us went to sleep, and i couldn't think about anything else before i taught a few hours later.
it was a movie called Dark Days, about the people living underground in the tunnels beneath NYC: https://vimeo.com/66989517
a decade later jinni's gone, we're married, and no one makes documentaries like this anymore.
jeff vogel's Spiderweb Software website, in march 2000. creator of the Exile and Avernum series, jeff previously took mail orders and telephone orders. the web site introduced the concept of ordering shareware games over the internet to his fanbase.
5 years after its disappearance from general use in HTML, it is surprising still using a server-side imagemap to handle navigation clicks on the menu 😆
Well, I tried to accept #AI and view it as simply a new tool in the #artist arsenal. It's not. It's t̶e̶c̶h̶n̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ #capitalists exploiting technology to turn us into drones with no creative outlet. AI will break #society. It will be worse than the #WorldWideWeb. Despite sci-fi literature and movies speculating on how AI might affect the world, it will be far more catastrophic than anyone could imagine. #Capitalism assures the worst possible outcome. The #singularity is supercharged capitalism.
That has my running joke, whenever someone asked, how long I have been using the internet. These days, most people don't ask such questions, because many people cannot imagine a world without the internet. But by pure luck of birth, I was born geographically where the Internet began.
The slang term to describe the network before the Internet was the proto net. That is not what it was actually called, but it was something newcomers on the internet called the early prototype.
The biggest surprise to most people is in the begging, the internet was free. I am not talking about a free trial. You simply called up the local access number, and you were connected. There were no usernames or passwords, and you did not have to sign up with an ISP (internet service provider). This was a very brief time, and it did not last long.
The first consumer ISP was called, "The World" and my family's account number was in the double-digits.
There were no photos or videos or even dot com domains, as you had to remember IP Addresses the same way you had to remember phone numbers. Shortly afterward, there was a listing website, which acted more like a phone book or index, than how you would think of a search engine. On that note, I still own, an old copy of the Internet Yellow Pages (2nd edition).
The first photos were text art, also known as, ASCII art.
It would be easy to say in the beginning there were no ads on the Internet, but technically, in the beginning most websites were little more than business and government listings.
Entertainment would not come for a while. But arguably the first "social media" sites were known as "post boards" which latter become known as "bulletin boards" and eventually were called, "forums."
In the beginning, people used their real name for everything. It was thought strange and creepy to use an anonymous screen name. And for a brief time, everyone did indeed know everyone on the internet, it was so small in the beginning when most of the world had not yet even heard of it. It was technically possible to even download the internet (all of it).
I sound old, but I am only 43, and whether you believe that is old depends on how old you are, I guess, but I sure do not feel it. But I am old enough to know, we have come a long way. The Fediverse is something I enjoy, because it is a concept I once imagined would happen. It was considered a radical idea of a dreamer. And although I had no part in its creation, I am still glad it exists.
while i was goofing around with #globalTalk, I ended up searching for some old Simpsons icons for my classic Macintosh (an LC 475), and stumbled upon an entry on the garden called Banned Simpsons Icons. (Who could resist downloading something with a title like that?)
They were called the "Banned Simpsons Icons" because Fox once sent the artist - Jeanette Foshee - a cease & desist letter for her uncannily perfect renderings of the copyrighted characters. they planned on suing her for every penny she made ($0.00) on them. this was back in 1995.
i thought - hell, what a wild story. why don't I get a hold of the artist - jeanette - and find out more about her banned icon set?
what i stumbled upon broke my heart, and i ended up spending a week digitally preserving what i could find.
i discovered an awesome hack for hi-DPI/retina displays when you're building websites using lo-dpi displays
one of the downsides of working in lo-dpi is that you're generally working at 72ppi... and while graphics look pixel-perfect on your lo-dpi monitor/browser, they look like shit when a hi-dpi display auto-scales them (bicubically).
this is shown in screenshot #1 taken from a retina display. you end up in an ugly mix of two different resolutions - low-res button images, and high res text. mixed res is super distracting to the eye.
i stumbled upon one solution to this completely by accident. if you render out the image to hi-dpi (say, 300 ppi) and then scale it down to the desired size in html/css (e.g. <img width=25% height = 25%>)... it will render at 72ppi on lo-dpi displays, and 300 ppi on hi-dpi displays at the proper size.
screenshot 2 shows the result on a retina display - a nice sharp icon, with sharp text below it.
i've been sitting on this gem for 25 years. i think it's time.
so back in 1997, i was a first-year undergrad and dial-up was finally rolling out to the general public in most of canada.
with every new welcome package, u of a students received a 25 page manual on setting up smtp/pop for eudora lite, and a copy of netscape navigator.
the Computing and Network Services department decided that the best way to onramp students to the world wide web was via an interactive multimedia tutorial for win95 and macOS that they built themselves with macromedia director
last year an old buddy was cleaning out his basement, and he found his NetSurf '97 CD. couldn't resist capturing some of the 👌 performance by virtual paul
after watching doug block's Home Page (1999) documentary a half-dozen times over the past year, i realized how much i missed having a personal home page.
not an itch.io page. not a github repo. not an imgur album.
an actual personal home page full of links to interesting places and people, and a little blog area to write personal stuff in. i haven't had a personal blog since the early 2000s.
i wanted to have some fun, so I hauled my dusty ol' iMac G5 out of storage and installed Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks. i hadn't used any of them in almost 20 years.
i thought it might take me a week to build a home page...
... it took me a year 😅
so this is my little attempt at rebuilding what we lost in the 90s. let me know if you've got a little homepage i can link back to in my hyperlinks area.
#Throwback to when #Yahoo! didn’t have an exclamation point, wasn’t financially tossed around by telecom companies and investment firms, and was just Stanford grad students Jerry and David’s guide to the #WorldWideWeb
while doing some hypercard research, i stumbled upon jim stephenson's classic Hypercard Heaven site, which used to be found at members.aol.com/HCHeaven/ back in the 90s and early 2000s. thankfully WBM kept a copy mostly intact.
it is a treasure trove of old hypercard articles and news. i've archived a copy here. hopefully jim won't mind:
Ideally, I usually prefer to promote good news, as opposed to bad news, especially when I am passionate about a project or development. I am a firm believer in both herd mentality and self-fulfilling prophecies.
I want to make it clear, my primary web browser of choice is still Firefox and I still regularly contribute to Mozilla.
But as I said, and I hate to write this, Mozilla Firefox is in trouble.
Personally, I am a T-Mobile Home Internet subscriber.
When using T-Mobile Home Internet, I noticed upon a fresh installation of Firefox, my browser (Firefox) would not download and install the non-free media plug-in Wide Vine (spelled as one word, WideVine)
I had performed multiple fresh OS and browser installs. I had switched DNS and changed IP addresses, regularly.
The only solution was to use a VPN or otherwise circumvent my ISP.
I should mention, I reached out with other T-Mobile Home Internet users, and not just locally.
At first, I assumed it was exclusive to T-Mobile. But in my effort to network with people and track down the cause, I learned there are a fair share of Comcast Xfinity customers who have the same issue. But I should add, Comcast Xfinity is not available in my area, so I cannot further explore that myself.
I have been using a program known as, "PortMaster" to track all my incoming and outgoing connection.
As one of the unlucky people experiencing the "WideVine Issue" among T-Mobile Home Internet and Comcast Xfinity customers, I noticed WideVine is downloaded from a few sources (server locations).
One of those locations, Firefox does not check, but all the Chromium-type browser pull from when they have exhausted the other locations, which time out.
The IRS (Internal Revenue Service) website is meant to be easily accessible to everyone.
For the first time, ever, Mozilla Firefox experienced an issue with a government website. It gave me a bad member of another web browser which also experienced an issue, many years ago: Netscape
Vivaldi Browser is what I used to overcome the technical issue. It is a Chromium-based browser. It made me think