It's Monday!
What in your life has been magical or meaningful lately?
oh my god check this outthis just might be the coolest thing i have seen in my entire life
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Now that I've set up a music-streaming app on my home server, I now have an opportunity to do one of my favorite menial tasks: tagging, organizing, and standardizing a music library.
I'm not kidding. I actually really enjoy this. 🤓
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The last time I underwent a significant music library organization effort was the very end of 2012/beginning of 2013. My now-wife and I were down in Tuscon so she could do thesis research on the border. I didn't have any such task to occupy myself, so I decided to clean up my music library.
My personal library has stayed pretty clean over the years since, but now that I have a home music server, I'm integrating my wife's library as well, and she... is not nearly as fastidious as me.
California doesn't have enough prisoners to fight wildfires for submimimum wage because too many are sick of or dying to COVID-19.
🇺🇲🦅🎆🙃
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The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them. At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these "cloaked" photos as you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends, printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would any other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, "cloaked" images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable by humans or machines and will not cause errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you by presenting an unaltered, "uncloaked" image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public) to the model, the model will fail to recognize you.
TFW you realize that there reason you hate Disney and Apple are because both companies took ideas that were freely given to them, reworked them, and then proceeded to threaten and sue everyone who dared try the same thing.
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I've successfully set up my own #selfhosted Navidrome server (thanks to @YunoHost@mastodon.social, @deluan@twitter.com, and Éric Gaspar on Github), and it's awesome.
I love having my own music streaming server. As Google prepares to kill Google Play Music (and shuttle users to YouTube Music), and in an era when we're seeing the idea of "ownership" in tech degrade more and more, it's nice to have my stuff and know it's mine.
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Today, I was trying to find (using commercial search engines) information about a topic. Maybe 9 out of 10 or more "relevant" results was about purchasing items related to the topic. Not ads placed in the result page, no, the actual results.I remember how, when I was younger, I used to marvel at all the information out there on the web. How it was like a giant library.
I scarcely recognize the place now. If you want to search information about a topic you don't go into a mall. But that's what it feels like I'm forced to do.
I remember going to the library and pulling out drawers of index cards to locate the relevant non-fiction shelves with good content on topics I wanted to learn about. Imagine if those index cards had been mixed with cards with advertisements on them. Increasingly diluting the content with junk. That is the web of today.
Thirsty Thursday
[heads-up: alc mention]
Happy Thursday, everyone!
What have you enjoyed drinking lately? Any particularly good mixed drinks? Tea blends? What are your libations of choice lately, whether alcoholic or not?
...alternatively, let's commiserate about dating during a pandemic. Either. Both.
Also, started making more bulk barley tea (mugi cha) which has been a very nice Japan nostalgia this week.
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SmolScrappyHungry wrote:
Adding some dark cocoa bitters from pdx bitters project
Ooooh. That's a heck of an idea. I'll have to try that.
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I hate the way thatwhile /I/ have a personal server computer and can put up text files or gemini maps or html pages or whatever kind of simple or complex content,
any 'ordinary' computer user would put every one of those pages in a 'Google Doc'
for various reasons of storage space, no administration knowledge, no alternatives, etc, 'Google Docs' have replaced independent web pages for the average person.
why don't we have Google Completely Arbitrary JSless Page Hosting.
google are cowards
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I was getting a bunch of notifications of new posts, but when I clicked the "network" button, nothing new was popping up.
I realized this evening that I was still on the "Personal" tab, which only shows conversations I'm part of. Clicking on "Latest Activity" brought me back and showed me all the stuff I'd been missing. Somehow, I'd forgotten to check that. It's easy to overlook!
Learning experience!
(And hey, if you're still trying to figure out how to navigate Motley, maybe this work-in-progress guide might help?)
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That's neat! I've heard of Funkwhale but was honestly uncertain why I would bother with federation. I may have to look at it again, because I know there's an existing Funkwhale YunoHost package.
I'd been looking at Ampache and Airsonic, but both seem to have spotty ongoing support, and their UIs are a little dated. That's one thing I really liked about Navidrome--it's got a very clean and modern UI, drawing on the Material guidelines.
Thanks for mentioning Funkwhale!
A "close" button that doesn't work on an advertisement that takes up half the screen.
I fucking hate navigating the web in 2020.
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"Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas. "
Photos from Gifford Pinchot National Forest
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I am quite sunburned and bug-bitten and exhausted, but I am back from a weekend backpacking trips in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington!
Pictures to come in a bit.
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Pictures to come in a bit.
This "bit" is going to be longer than I anticipated, because:
- I can't seem to upload more than one photo at a time, and
- Motley is giving me some issues when I try uploading photos; first I ran into a filesize limit, and now I'm just getting a blank screen when I submit the file.
Please hold. 😆
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This is super cool!
The Darebee Resource is an independent fitness resource run and maintained by a small group of volunteers and fitness professionals. Here we make fitness accessible, make training fun and make a healthy lifestyle easier to start and maintain – on a budget. We believe that fitness is not a privilege, it should be made this accessible for everyone - not just people who can pay for it....There is no catch, there are no hidden links or sign-ups – everything is available in high quality and is free to access and download, no strings attached. And it will always be the case because we believe that this information should be free and available to everyone who needs it. This is an ad-free and product placement free resource. We have no sponsors and no one with deep pockets to back us up, this website and all the work that goes into it, is supported exclusively via user donations.
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big fan of radical left-wing ideologies like "compassion" and "treating people with respect"
imagine a future without cops, where dangerous situations are properly deescalated by shia labeouf showing up with a bag of burritos
Capybaras are classically friend-shaped. They are the epitome of friends. You cannot look at a capybara and not understand that this creature is a Friend.
I imagine that, but in a person. But I'm not sure how to operationalize it--I think you know it when you see it!
A great read by @Hypolite Petovan on the advantages of the Fediverse.
But fine-grained user-controlled filtering is exactly what makes the Fediverse better than Twitter. We just aren’t meant to receive all the content in the world, some of it is upsetting, for a variety of personal reasons that are specific to each one of us. The people advocating for having unfettered access to all the federated content must necessarily be equally unaffected by all points of view and I for one don’t want to have anything to do with them.Thankfully, on the Fediverse, I don’t have to.
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Spencer
in reply to Spencer • •Thing the First: Tarot
I've been continuing to practice secular tarot. It's prompted some really interesting reflections.
Perhaps the most meaningful moment was a few weeks back. I've been working my way through the book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by Tyson Yunkaporta, and it was causing me to think a lot about the ways in which American society is built unsustainably--both in terms of actual resources, and also in a more abstract psychological sense. How we've lost touch with such natural cycles as mortality and seasons. How everything feels so precarious right now. I drew a single card for the day, and it was the Tower: a symbol of catastrophic change and the things we build being brought down by forces beyond our control.
Drawing that card after doing so much thinking on the subject really helped pull all those threads of thought into focus. It clarified the meaning and yielded a powerful emotional experience.
... show moreThing the First: Tarot
I've been continuing to practice secular tarot. It's prompted some really interesting reflections.
Perhaps the most meaningful moment was a few weeks back. I've been working my way through the book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by Tyson Yunkaporta, and it was causing me to think a lot about the ways in which American society is built unsustainably--both in terms of actual resources, and also in a more abstract psychological sense. How we've lost touch with such natural cycles as mortality and seasons. How everything feels so precarious right now. I drew a single card for the day, and it was the Tower: a symbol of catastrophic change and the things we build being brought down by forces beyond our control.
Drawing that card after doing so much thinking on the subject really helped pull all those threads of thought into focus. It clarified the meaning and yielded a powerful emotional experience.
Thing the Second: An altar?
As further proof that I'm leaving my cantankerous, clinical science-ism behind me, I've been thinking in the last week about making a sort of altar or shrine. Mostly because I miss the omnipresence of shrines in Japan--especially in Kyoto, it always felt like you could just turn the corner and find a little Shinto shrine. I feel even more appreciation for that now. Reality is heavy and corrosive lately, and I would love to have some thing that feels beautiful and significant and lovely. A respite.
Part of me wants to put it outdoors, but I don't know where in our little yard it would go. Indoors means making it susceptible to the cat, though. Decisions.
Thing the Third: The garden
We have sunflowers. They've been blooming for a couple weeks, and I never tire of seeing their smiling yellow faces, nor the pollinators happily buzzing around them.
We also have tomatoes! This is our very first tomato from the heirloom plant our neighbors gave us. I'm grateful it gave me an opportunity to make a "warts and all" joke. We sliced it up and made a delicious caprese:
Having a garden is magical. Even though it's been a little difficult this year, the garden has yielded life and flowers and fruit. Last week, I planted clover in a bed, and the leaves are starting to poke out of the dirt.
Life emerges. How lucky I feel to witness it, shape it, and care for it.
Hypolite Petovan
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