Falls ihr euch Argumente zurechtlegen möchtet, um mit Menschen zu Themen wie dem Rechtsruck zu diskutieren und dabei in der Lage sein wollt dem Populismus stand zu halten, findet ihr hier einen guten Ansatz: www.aktiv-gegen-diskriminierung.info/argumente…
As I’ve written before, I’ve switched browsers to Vivaldi and am very happy about that choice:
I used to be a big fan of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Now I read about For Advertising Firefox Now Collects User Data By Default. Learning about stuff like this makes it hard to continue to trust them. What are the alternatives? Going back to Safari? Not sure about what to do.
Today I find a link in my RSS feeds where Mozilla’s strategy is now revealed publicly. They seem to want to create a new advertising infrastructure.
Across both pillars (product and infrastructure), we maintain the same goal – to build digital advertising solutions that respect individuals’ rights. Solutions that achieve a balance between commercial value and public interest. Why is that something for Mozilla to address? Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.
I am trying to figure out which websites I visit regularly that have to rely on advertising. I will make a small collection and create replies to this post with all the sites that come to mind. It’ll be interesting to see how much the part of the net that I use has to rely on ads.
The brightest flame burns quickest
Maybe the answer is simpler than I think. Maybe I should just keep things simple. If I like my coffee the way it tastes, that should be enough. If I enjoy playing the guitar songs I love, there’s no need to dig into the theory behind them. And when I write on my blog daily or a few times a week, that’s enough too. There’s no need to turn a hobby into something bigger. It’s fine as it is — an enjoyable way to spend time. Trying to grow it into something more only leads to destruction.
I feel you, Yordi. I’ve been there. And I am not sure I am not still there. I always wanted to do things “right”. It’s actually a mantra of mine: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing it right.”
But that quickly leads to burnout and boredom. Unless you find a way to do things in moderation. Recently I picked up singing. And I do that maybe once or twice per week. And I enjoy it tremendously. Now I started playing piano again, and mostly re-learning it. And building on the little that I already knew. And I specifically set me the goal of not playing more than once or twice a week. Not daily or anything like that. Because then I know that I would hate it soon.
So yes, my last blog post was a few days ago. I don’t need to write daily. Let others do that. 🫶
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