DuckDuckGo, Walkmans and Elon Musk
Three random thoughts this Monday evening.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for my searches for the last couple of weeks. Both on the Mac and on iOS/iPadOS, I set it as my default search engine, and it’s been working really well, giving me very accurate results and helping me find relevant things when I was looking for something specific, and interesting stuff when my searches were more general.
Two weeks ago I also logged off my Google account, so I’d like to think that Google is not harvesting as much data from me as it did before, for years. The thing is that I’m still logged in YouTube, so I guess I’m giving Google more information that I’d what to think.
One of the thing that YouTube fed me today is that, apparently, Walkmans might be back. I’m a sucker for useless and/or sentimental gadgets, so I’ll probably end up buying more than one. I do have a cassette collection stored away somewhere…
Another thing that I corroborated today is that I don’t stand this guy. I mean the African one. Everything he says comes off to me as bullshit. I could not watch more than five minutes, and I made myself stay longer than I wanted because I think that we need to expose ourselves to uncomfortable views. Still, nothing but bullshit. Why on Earth are we so prone to give so much voice to guys that have proven to be liars.
UPDATE: These to comments by @pratik and @clorgie are much more accurate in their depiction of the guy:
I watched the entire Don Lemon’s interview of Elon Musk. Such an inarticulate and incomprehensible, the supposedly smart, man! Is this what we are considering a genius these days? Either he’s afraid to (he claimss he is not) admit or doesn’t understand the basic concept of implications.
[@pratik](https://micro.blog/pratik) I watched some this morning. Musk is a dull man masquerading as a much smarter one caught in his own web of lies. Sad.
I finally caught myself reaching for my glasses to pluck the small hairs between my eyebrows. Right after trimming the long hairs from the same eyebrows. I’m turning into a visually impaired Ebenezer Scrooge. #thoughts
I missed it because of DST, because in Europe we enter into DST a couple of weeks later than the US, so we’re still in winter time. But im not going to miss the next one, for sure.
Another interesting, thoughtful, and fun Micro.blog Analog Tools meetup this morning! 🖋️📓🗂️ We talked about hybrid analog/digital tools and processes, how friction can help slow thoughts down, and much more.
I’m going to write a blog post using Nebo, handwriting it with an Apple pencil.
I’m actually writing this down manually, and I’m quite astonished at how well Nebo converts it all. I read Annie Mueller’s post “It ’s just a blog” and I wanted to tell her how much I liked it. I don’t know if I will dare to tell her anything, I ’ve seen that a lot of people has already praised her and I' m nothing but a speck of dust . So I will post this in my blog and if she reads it, by chance,that will be enough. I’m sure she does not need more praise from a random guy in Spain.
It’s Friday evening and I’m heading to a dinner with lots of friends. A partner in my firm has been the Dean of our Bar Association and his term finally ended, so tonight we are going to give him an homage dinner and thank him for his service.
I have not gone out for dinner in ages and the week has been tough, so all I ask is for me to behave and do not drink. I’ve been known to get wasted in good company and good booze after a stressful week at work. So this is my plan. Go out with good friends to have a lovely sober dinner. Wish me luck.
Miguel Gila (1991-2001), a Spanish comedian, on patriotism:
Patriotism is an invention of the powerful classes so that the lower classes defend the interests of the powerful.
#thoughts
I think that the blogroll implementation for micro.blog’s Recommendations is lacking one thing. Since the recommended blogs accept an optional description, I would expect the description to show in the blogroll. I wanted to use that to explain why I think that each blog in the list is worth a visit.
It’s raining men, elevated style.
Golconda, by René Magritte.
I was reminded of Magritte by this picture published by Rex Barrett.
I called one of the categories in my site Thoughts, which means that, in order to write posts appropriate to the name of the category, I need to think, which means that I need to make time to think, and that’s being a problem lately.
So I learned that I need to have an ActivityPub user if I want to follow Fediverse accounts from micro.blog. Duh.
I read great news in my local newspaper:
Foreigners set a new record in Gipuzkoa (the province I live in) and now represent one in every eight inhabitants.
Gipuzkoa has broken a new record of foreign population and reaches, for the first time in its history, 12.1% of foreign people out of its total inhabitants, with Morocco, Nicaragua, and Colombia as the main countries of origin. The number of people born outside of Spain with residence in the territory rises to 88,005. The arrival of 4,994 immigrants in 2023 confirms the recovery of pre-pandemic flows and represents a gain of 4,333 foreigners in Gipuzkoa compared to 2022, when there were 83,672 people of foreign origin, accounting for 11.5% of the total. In fact, in just the last year, more foreigners have arrived than in 2022 (1,582) and 2021 (1,877) combined, although still fewer than in 2020 (5,772).
Yes. We need you. You are most welcome. Ongi etorri Euskal Herrira.
2024-03-17 UPDATE: I changed my home page to a more conventional one. The one I designed was quite gimmicky. If I ever learn a bit more about web design, I may come back to visually depicting my garden metaphor. For now, the patches in my garden, meaning the different sections of my website, will be featured in the conventional navigation bar.
I want my site to resemble a garden, so a few days ago I made a home page with buttons that represent the patches you can find as you walk around one.
Tonight, fiddling a little more with the site, I asked MacGPT to give me some simple code to change the color and the shape of these buttons. I managed to choose my own colors and even give an animation to each of them.
The patches that have content are different shades of green and are animated when you hover over them. The ones that are waiting for future content are yellow-orange-ish and static. I think they do convey that they are not alive yet.
And I added a link in the navigation bar that brings you to that home page. It’s called Panorama, because it gives you an overview of the garden.
Do you like it? Maybe the animation is a bit too much, maybe the colors are not right, maybe the whole concept is ridiculous. I’d love your feedback.
Is Micro Monday still a thing? @monday Anyhow, I wanted to let you know about a blogroll page I just set up. There’s a few very nice blogs there, and I’ll be adding more along the way. #thoughts
Hi everybody. I think I might have messed something up with my ActivityPub user, migrating followers to a Fediverse account and back. I finally reset/deleted the ActivityPub user. Can you please confirm if you read me here in the micro.blog timeline? Thanks.
Dilemma. I have never not watched anything that features Slash. Watching anything with Ryan Gosling in it is strictly forbidden in my Religion™©. #thoughts
Will I delete my micro.blog apps?
I have not detached myself from the habit of seeking feedback every time I post something in my blog. I want to go minimal, so I logged off from every social media account, deleted every app and turned off every cross-posting link. I told myself that I want to focus on my blog and look for other personal blogs and interact with their authors via email. Yet I still find myself looking for attention in micro.blog, the only app that I keep in my devices. Should I cut that tie too? I really like the small community around micro.blog and the people I once in a while chat with, so I don’t think I want to switch that off, but I have to look for some other way to prevent myself from seeking that social media dopamine reward. #thoughts
#geekery
P&B: Brad Barrish – Manu
This is the 28th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Brad Barrish and his blog, bradbarrish.com
Wow. Is this interview interesting and full of great recommendations. Do not miss it.
Notes on meaning, career, writing and blogging – Ratika Deshpande
🚀 Notes on meaning, career, writing and blogging – Ratika Deshpande:
The mistake I was making, and which I think many of us are making, in a zeitgeist where people think that you should make a living doing what you love and retire early, is believing that narrative.
Here’s what I’ve learned: the thing that pays the bills does not have to be the thing that you enjoy doing. And the thing that you enjoy does not have to be the thing that helps you do good in the world. Here again, we suffer from the idea that we must maximize the good we do (or the profit we make). Of course, if we are able to do that, that’s great, but anything less than “the maximum possible” isn’t bad.
This is really helpful for me, in these times where I don’t feel good about all the time that I give to the thing that pays the bills and the very little time that I have for the things that I enjoy doing. I’m constantly thinking that I need to streamline my productivity so that I have more time for my personal stuff, and the only thing I do is make more time to work more. Ratika has given me a couple of good clues to think about.
100 Days To Offload
The whole point of #100DaysToOffload is to challenge you to publish 100 posts on your personal blog in a year.
Posts don’t need to be long-form, deep, meaningful, or even that well written. If there are spelling and grammar mistakes, or even if there’s no real point to the post, so what? What’s important is that you’re writing about the things you want to write about.
Your posts could be how-to guides, or links to another post you have found interesting. They could include your own thoughts about that post, or a response to it. It could be a simple update about what you have done that day. Tell us about your dog, your cat, your fish tank, or whatever hobbies you have. Someone will find it interesting.
Just. Write.
I found about this in Manuel Moreale’s blog and I think it’s a neat idea. I’m not completely sold, though. I like that it might make me write more. I also like the sense of community that it can bring to the people that participate in the challenge, and how it can help to spread lots of personal blogs. But it’s precisely the challenging part, the Hall of Fame and the need to publish the hashtag in social media that I disliked, I don’t really know why, it feels like a competition, or a personal goal that seeks a reward in the form of social media dopamine. I might set the goal for myself but not use a hashtag. Or I might just skip this garden and continue looking around. Anyhow, you might like it so there you have it.