🙌 Liked: The White House Banned Cameras From The Daily Press Briefing So CNN Sent A Sketch Artist
For me the indieweb is an idea, a way of doing things rather than the specific technology used to achieve it.
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Here is a list of the ones I try to keep up with, listening to new episodes within a week or so of their being released.
Bonus! Towards a Poetics of Audio: The Importance of Criticism
Beaker Browser and Indieweb forevah!
I love the idea of terminal-like commands in the browser. I'd like to see this come to Beaker Browser one day...heck, I'd like to see it come to Safari one day.
On a recent episode of Core Intuition they made passing reference along the lines of, "wouldn't it be neat if Siri became a sort of scripting language for iOS?" I doubt it would happen, and I don't have anything concrete to say about that, but I think that would be awesome — especially in the context of a future where SiriKit has been extended with a wide variety of intents.
Weird quirk of the hackintosh: I can hear power cycling through the machine if speakers are plugged in and not playing music. Every fraction of a second or so I here a tiny static click. The speakers don't make the sound when plugged in to anything other than the hackintosh. 🐝
…like a book club, but for podcasts, and distributed over the indieweb.
Anyone interested?
Here is how I imagine it would work. You listen to a podcast, you enjoy the podcast or have thoughts otherwise about it. You blog about said podcast on your indieweb compatible or at least indieweb-friendly website…perhaps including a call out somewhere in the text or title of the post marking it as an indieweb podcast club post. Others read your post, listen to the same podcast and engage in conversation.
🎧 📱 ♣️
There has been some chatter about blogrolls (which do not sound wicked delicious) and web-rings lately. I think something like what I’ve proposed could be an interesting take on the traditional web-ring because it is more of an informal social-graph than it is a ring of connected blogs. Nested Venn diagrams. Here, blogs aren’t connected, individual posts are connected by a shared topic/interest. It may also be a way of including folks not in the indieweb in indieweb-couched conversations.
I’ve noticed that the indieweb community seems to be a bit navelgaze-y. Don’t get me wrong, I’m hot to talk about indieweb-tech until the cows come home, but I think it a good idea to talk about things beyond the indieweb on the indieweb to make sure we continue to innovate and iterate on the indieweb.
Are you interested? Have any ideas about how to make this work? I’m thinking the best way is just to give it a go and see what happens. Maybe we can talk about plumbing once we have some stuff to push around in our pipes? With that borderline gross sentence, I’m going to go listen to some podcasts.
Cliche bar harbor picture
Stayed up MUCH tooooo late playing with routing in PHP and Go.
Currently working to optimize CSS font rendering for a particular set of Android devices. Interesting, albeit sort of weird challenge.
At work today I was tasked with writing a job description for a position we’re looking to fill. Writing this job description lead me to think about my job, and my job description, and then to my education…and how the heck I got here. Not in like a big ol’ revelatory way, just in a following-the-breadcrumbs kind of way.
Those thoughts led me back in time to the days when I was wicked interested in water catchment. Frankly, I still am wicked interested in water catchment, but that is a post for another time. While studying water catchment I stumbled into permaculture. Before I knew it, I was enrolled in a summer-long permaculture design and forestry course.
In a sort of tangential way, I think permaculture design is the design framework that most meaningfully impacts my thinking at work. At its surface permaculture is concerned with biotic systems — it explores ways of using or replicating natural systems as tools…do not quote me on that. That is an atrocious definition of permaculture. That is not the point, though — at first glance permaculture is about plants, water, soil, sun, animals, and people.
Taken as a system, though, permaculture is a toolkit for seeing interactions, connectivity, and feedback loops. A core principle observed in nature and embraced by permaculture is the concept of a feedback loop. Feedback loops are hella relevant to webby techy work.
Feedback loops are all over the place. Filter bubbles (besides being a semi-problematic term) are a type of feedback loop. This very webpage relies on a number of feedback loops to render content (if else blocks, ftw!), but I digress.
Feedback loops are all over the place, they are, however, lacking context for the most part. Permaculture is groovy because it stresses the interconnectivity of everything. EVERYTHING . Not in a hooky way, but in a rooted dirty dirt way. Everything is connected in that it is happening on Earth. In this place. Nothing is isolated from the feedback loop.
This is a big deal for many reasons, but in this context it is a big deal because it is a dramatically different view of feedback loops than is normal in the webby techy world.
Fragmentation and isolation
I think those are major themes of the current era across the spectrum, but especially within the microcosm of tech. Not just socially, but structurally.
Think of Facebook. Facebook is in the business of segregating people into groups. Demographics. Buzzfeed’s listicles do the same thing: “You were a 90’s teen if you remember these 7 cartoon characters!” …that content isn’t just supposed to be hilarious, it uses nostalgia to feed tribalism.
…I’m starting to sound like a frenetic Douglas Rushkoff
Back on track: permaculture design is different because it doesn’t value commodity and segregation. Through the framework of permaculture design, it is hard to see segregation as anything but a means to kill something. Permaculture uses segregation as a way to eliminate pests because in isolation, cut off from reality and the rest of the Earth, stuff tends to wither. That is my biggest fear when I’m working on a project. Until today I didn’t realize where this fear came from, but I think it makes sense for me to trace it back to permaculture.
I feel cozy in this realization and look forward to taking it up in a more conscious way from here on out.
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