Some small thoughts on the Middle East
This is a very personal, moving piece by @jsonbecker.
It’s surreal to see your cousin in a Washington Post video. It’s worse when the reason she’s being interviewed is because of her experience living in a community in Israel that was overrun on October 7th.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve seen her.
I am 42 years old. The “conflict in the Middle East” was present on the news for as long as I can remember. When I was around 15 years old I had the chance to take part in a student exchange program and travel to Israel. We lived in Ashkelon, a small city very close to the Gaza strip. It must have been near the end of the 90s and I guess it was a bit more relaxed (don’t want to say peaceful…) back then. I was able to visit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and I am still impressed by what I experienced. The magic, the food, the architecture and all of the history. I would love to go back there and see everything with my adult eyes and experience it with the knowledge and appreciation I have today. But I wouldn’t go there now, or previously. As a kid I didn’t understand why people couldn’t stop fighting and my understanding did not grow as an adult. The blind hate and it’s source in the people’s religions is one reason I do not like religion. I don’t think that the fighting will ever stop in my lifetime and that thought makes me very sad. I am glad, personally, that I do not have any relatives in that region. My situation is very different from Jason’s. Still I feel for him and how torn he has to feel. How frustrated and helpless.
I recently wrote about Pinboard and how I use Obsidian to save bookmarks.
For saving website to reference later, which you could call bookmarking, I mostly use Obsidian. It’s my preferred solution for taking notes that I want to keep. Right now I have over 5.600 notes in there. A big part of those are my journal notes, which I imported from Day one. To make saving websites quicker I wrote a small Alfred.app workflow that calls a Shortcut (from Apple shortcuts). If everything works out (it does most of the times!) a note is created in Obsidian.
Since then I tweaked my Apple shortcut a bit. A reason for that was that Brett Terpstra has released Marky 2.0:
I recently revived Marky the Markdownfier. In case you missed it, Marky turns any web page into clippable Markdown for storage in notes/organization apps.
Marky is available via API/cURL. That made it quiet reasonably easy to save the website’s content as markdown and add it to the note. That essentially freezes the contents and the bookmark gains value since it acts like an archive. It’s not always pretty what comes out as Markdown, but it does the job well enough.
I didn’t stop there, though. I learned about Obsidian’s feature to embed websites as iframes.
Learn how to use the iframe HTML element to embed web pages in your notes.
And now my notes will be prettier still with the original website embedded as iframe.
Here is the link to the Apple Shortcut https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/27c9d7137bd54e4f9291c33b0020374d How you use that shortcut is up to you. My preferred way is to call it from Alfred.app
Currently reading: Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson 📚
A quote from Shelby Foote:
“I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.”
In that regard a practical link I found this morning: Gwern.net writes about sidenotes in Web Design with many examples how different authors tackle it. Of course, the examples are linked and you can get lost in those websites as well. Dangerous start into the week, everyone.
This morning I was able to reproduce a bug(?) I came across using Halide. Photos seem to disappear randomly. At first I thought I was imagining and didn’t properly take a picture. This recording demonstrates it. Wrote to support already. (The pic of my white cupboards just vanishes…)
This!
Israel is out there assassinating hundreds of civilians on a daily basis and no one fucking cares
A few years back I memorised the shortcut to create a new folder in Finder on Mac. It’s Cmd-N, Cmd-W, Cmd-Shift-N.
Works every time. 🙈
Fedi(verse) is for losers? I don't care.
From where I sit, I don’t see that we have a strategy. Fedi is fine and all, but it doesn’t scare anyone. That’s not good enough. Twitter was always flawed but it was a great tool for activism and continues to be useful in some ways. Bluesky has some of that old-Twitter vibe, and perhaps it will supplant the original, in time; inshallah.
I wouldn’t count myself as part of the fediverse but I am. I don’t do Mastodon. It’s one of the reasons I use micro.blog to host my content right now. I don’t think that joining a mastodon instance is the right way. In my opinion the best way to share your thoughts is on your own personal website using your own domain name. A name that you control. And then use federation through protocols like ActivityPub to take part in the social circles. That way I don’t have to care about Mastodon or the fediverse.
We deceive ourselves as to what constitutes effective action, and we are deceived by billion dollar algorithms that understand our subconscious better than we do and feed our illusory sense of accomplishment through facilitating and encouraging such paltry (yet addicting) protests.
When I read the original article up top about “the fediverse is for losers” in my opinion it touches on this exact topic. The fediverse isn’t good for activism. You don’t use it to make the world better. You use it to complain about what others do (which is kind of what I am doing here right now 🙈). If you really want to make the world a better place, change routines in your daily live. Interact with people outside of your computer. Bring a smile on another person’s face. Show them you care.
Since switching to Vivaldi, yesterday
For now I will switch and try out Vivaldi. The feature set makes somehow sense and what I've seen about the browser so far seems good. We'll see.
I noticed that my camera has new options during a video call. I can set a background 🎉. This background choice is just lovely. 😍
