Recent content in Hello! on Alan Ralph
I’ve grown tired of reading most hot takes on whatever the Topic Of The Day is. Thankfully, those don’t reach me as often now that I’ve left social media behind me, but they crop up on various blogs and newsletters that I follow. That’s not necessarily a reflection on the bloggers or writers — I get it, it’s a prompt for putting your thoughts out there. And sometimes…
My experiment with using Firefox & Thunderbird as my daily drivers for browsing and email respectively ended a few weeks ago — I’ve moved back to Apple’s Safari & Mail apps. There’s nothing particularly wrong with either Firefox or Thunderbird, but there was just too much friction for my liking. That’s not to say that Apple’s app are perfect, but I’ve found ways…
I definitely feel seen as I read this post by Rach Smith : I was a few days in to having the games on my phone when I remembered why I deleted them last time. These games interfere with my life. I have good phone boundaries when I’m with my kids, doing work, or working out, but I had spent every other bit of spare “me” time merging and matching. I wasn’t going to bed on time. Thankfully I had a…
Around Christmas time, I decided to try an experiment. I cleaned up all the RSS feeds I’d collected in NetNewsWire , then transferred them into Mozilla Thunderbird . At the this point, some of you are probably saying “Wait, Thunderbird does RSS feed reading too?” Yes, it does . That has some advantages, plus a fair few downsides, as I’ll explain. The Upsides The biggest…
I think Greg Morris may be on to something here: For years, I’ve been trying to figure out why my handwriting is so bad. Seriously, it’s like what you’d expect from a three-year-old. I often blame my years in higher education – anyone who’s been through it knows that, unless you really put in the effort, your handwriting just stagnates after school. Everything has to be typed up neatly before…
Content Warning: derogatory language, rape. Robin Ince posted ‘ I Am Sorry to Repeat Myself But… ’ over on The Cosmic Shambles Network last month, concerning the use of language by comedians and the choices they make when doing so. (The quote I used in the title of this post is from the late Barry Crimmins.) Barry was no shrinking violet. Raped when he was little more than a…
This made me laugh this morning — from Charles Arthur’s thrice-weekly newsletter The Overspill in comment to an article from the Guardian about ski resorts struggling to deal with declining snowfall : Ironically, the most effective climate action at present has been taken by whoever at Boeing didn’t properly secure the door frame on one of its planes, leading to the grounding of 737 Max 9…
DNA-researcher: It’s not ‘woke’ to portray prehistoric Europeans with dark skin. It’s evolution Picture this: Almost 6,000 years ago, a girl walks along Lolland’s south coast and spits a piece of birch tar into the reeds. It didn’t taste great, but it helped to soothe her tooth ache. Fast forward 6,000 years, Danish archaeologists working on the Fehmarnbelt project stumble across the…
I tried using Obsidian for a while last year. I also tackled David Sparks’ excellent Obsidian Field Guide course on the app and its uses. There’s no denying that it’s a powerful app with lots of capabilities. But, even with some customised theming, it’s not pretty. Utilitarian would be the word I’d reach for to describe it to someone. It’s a step up from a…
My themes for this coming year are Resilience and Serendipity. Resilience covers my financial, mental and physical well-being. I’m now at an age where I need to start thinking about how I’ll support myself in old age. I have plans in place, but those will need reviewing. And as I mentioned in my 2023 review post yesterday , I need to get my EOL (end of life) documents sorted out. I…
I got a lot more done in 2023 than I’d hoped. Part of that was reducing and simplifying various things, but a larger part was actually knuckling down and getting things done. In the ‘reduce’ pile, I closed down a swathe of old online accounts that I no longer use or need. The processes varied from a few quick steps online to having to jump through hoops and explain to people that…
After a few weeks learning my way around Hugo , exporting and cleaning up all the old WordPress posts, and getting it all to the point where I feel it’s sufficiently functional, I’m now building and deploying it for the world to see. 😁 This is going to be a work-in-progress for most of 2024, as I play around with the site design and tweak the build and deployment processes, but…
This post is primarily for those of you who follow posts here via the RSS feed. On Boxing Day — the 26th of December 2023 — I will redirect the DNS for this place from the current self-hosted WordPress site to a new static website generated using Hugo. The RSS feed will change to https://alanralph.co.uk/index.xml — alas, I’d hoped to be able to jiggle it to match up with the WordPress feed,…
Vincent Ritter is pausing personal app development for iOS & Android . Instead he’s going to focus on bringing those to the web. “All hail the browser 🫶”. I heartily agree — web development doesn’t have to be hard, you’ve got most of the tools already installed. Sara Tasker’s Manifesto for posting online in 2023 is another thing I can definitely get behind. And it’s damn funny to boot! Rebecca…
Last Sunday, my website hosting had some issues that were causing it to timeout. I couldn’t even access the back-end cPanel. Everything was back up and running by Monday, but this incident has spurred my plans to migrate the site to a static layout hosted elsewhere. In other news, I created a simple static site for my Second Life alter-ego Spiffy Voxel from hand-crafted HTML & CSS. I’m pretty…
We don’t need more technology. Technology won’t fix human behaviour. We need kindness, we need compassion, we need a willingness to interact honestly with strangers online. That’s not something you can solve with a better protocol. We simply have to fight the good fight, day after day, trying our best to make the web a better place. Manuel Moreale, More new mindsets, fewer new technologies Words…
Elliot Alexander at XDA : When opening the new Outlook client for the first time, the user is asked to log in much like any other email client. If you enter an email address with a common provider, like Gmail or iCloud, the client will use an Oauth2 workflow to authenticate with your browser. If you enter a third-party domain, you’ll be prompted for an IMAP password (if supported). This is all…
Robin Rendle on the importance of spending time trying to learn something , then ask for help with the things you don’t understand fully.
Zsolt Benke remembers when IM (instant messaging) apps were actually good . These days, the only apps I use are WhatsApp (for family) and Discord (for communities I’m involved with online), and I can’t say that I like either of them much. I have somewhat fond memories of IRC. The other messaging services, not so much, but that was more because they were owned — and subsequently ruined — by…
Released today with an interesting new feature, Authorship, that lets you paste in someone — or something, such as ChatGPT — else’s words and have them marked as such. They’re making the format behind this, Markdown Annotations, open and available on GitHub . While I’ve zero interest in using any AI in my work, Authorship might prove of use for blog post writing when using quoted material from…
Dana Blankenhorn: AI and the Death of Writing The big story of 2023 isn’t ChatGPT. It’s the world tech leaders … say they’ve prepared for our children. They want our kids to learn Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). These idiots don’t care about the liberal arts, or the humanities. They consider those subjects useless. In this they’re united with Christian Nationalists who are…
At Rolling Stone , Spencer Ackerman lays the body of the “great man” on the mortuary slab and does a thorough dissection . The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security…
Jay Peters at The Verge brings the bad tidings. TinyLetters was acquired by MailChimp. MailChimp have in turn been acquired by Intuit. Those using TinyLetter will be able to migrate to MailChimp’s services. And pay more. And have trackers added. The Enshittening (h/t to Cory Doctorow for coining that term) is coming soon to a newsletter near you.
Jason Rodriguez’s story of how he discovered and learned to use technology at an early age resonates deeply with me. And so too, alas, does his frustration with how technology has changed, and how the relationship between technology and people like him has changed. Still, I do love parts of tech—not to mention the people I’ve met through it. I love learning new things and understanding how…
Joan Westenberg cuts to the core . Not every saved article needs to be read, not every podcast listened to. Part of managing our digital lives involves recognizing that it’s okay not to know everything and finding peace in our choices about what to engage with and what to pass by. In doing so, we reclaim our time and mental space, allowing ourselves to engage more with less. I’ve been through many…
I posted this to my private journal just now: I’ve noticed that iOS 17 has removed a lot of friction from the process of un-hiding and re-installing old app purchases. That’s a problem for me, as I’m prone to moments of weakness when I feel the urge to lose myself in a game. Keeping the phone away from my bedside at night would help, but I need to tamp down the occasional impulse to pull out my…
Not for much longer . I’m amazed that it stuck around for so long. It probably helped that it came in with Internet Explorer, another Microsoft product that has proved extremely hard to kill off.
No, I’ve not got Jack Baty Syndrome. (Hi Jack, if you’re reading this. 👋) I’ve decided to give Firefox & Thunderbird another go because I want to start moving over to apps that will be able to make the (eventual) trip with me out of the Apple ecosystem. This is not a knock on Safari, which is (shocker, I know) a pretty good browser these days, or MailMate , which has really helped me grapple with…
No matter how much Apple tout their trade in program, there’s no substitute for not buying at all or if you do then buy used. Realistically none of us need the latest and greatest iPhone, it’s a want not a need most of the time. Lee Peterson, Rethinking your tech purchases
Pedro Corá emailed me regarding my recent post commemorating 20-and-a-bit years of on-off blogging : To this day, I still dearly miss Movable Type. Of all CMSs, it’s the one I used the most. And in some aspects, so different than WordPress that I fear is what makes wp so weird for me to understand nowadays. The following is my reply to him. “My biggest abiding memory of Movable Type is of the…
Chris Coyier digs into (and at) the top 20 most popular WordPress plugins : It struck me recently how this list of plugins I saw in the 2023 Annual WordPress Survey wasn’t full of fun and interesting plugins that do interesting and unique things, they mostly just fix boring problems that users shouldn’t even be worried about having to fix at all. I’ve used several of these plugins at various…
The above title is mostly truthful if you’ll excuse the small matters of that blogging being across more than one domain name, and most of that content now only available via the Wayback Machine. I know this because I went in and searched yesterday. I’ve pondered whether or not to pull out that older content and put it back on this site, but, if I’m absolutely honest, most of what I wrote back…
I may have mentioned a few times on this blog that I’ve been online for a long time now. 34 years and counting as I write this post! And I’ve been in online communities since before most social networks today were even a thing. And in a few cases before the World Wide Web was a thing. (Hello to those who remember any of the many BBSes, online services & Usenet newsgroups from back in the day.) One…
This was a reply I emailed to Jack Baty in response to his recent post about Mac app launchers : Hi Jack, I rolled with Alfred for a long time, but to be honest I didn’t use most of its features, and eventually Spotlight got good enough that I decided to roll with that. I also tried Raycast when it first came out. It’s prettier than Alfred and undeniably powerful, but frankly it’s overkill for me.…
Microsoft has the cash to pay hackers to jailbreak its Bing AI, but apparently not enough to keep almost 700 people employed at the Microsoft-owned professional social media platform LinkedIn. The site is now undergoing its second round of layoffs this year, The New York Times reports . All told, 668 positions are being culled from its “engineering, product, talent and finance teams,” according to…
No app, no entry: How the digital world is failing the non tech-savvy — a more cynical view would be that the digital world is ‘working as designed’, where the ‘design’ is supposed to exclude and punish those unable to use it for any reason. Avoiding Distractions in Modern Computing — while I don’t think I’d ever go completely back to a text user interface (TUI), I suspect it wouldn’t be that much…
Yes, it has been a while since I last posted. To be honest, I’ve not felt a great need to write anything here. I’ve still be writing in my private journal every day, and that takes care of a lot of my need to get stuff out of my head. There are a few things to report on in my world: I gave Obsidian another try-out last month. I also bought and worked through the new Field Guide that David Sparks…
This 2020 blog post by Tobias Bernard has been sitting in my read-list for several weeks now while I ruminated over what he says in it. I stopped doing all these things at various points for different reasons, but underlying them all is a general feeling that it’s taken me some time to figure out how to articulate: I no longer want to invest time in things that don’t scale. … Not only is it highly…
This article on getting sh*t done if you’ve got executive disfunction mirrors a lot of what I’ve been doing to get my life back on track. Also, I like the blog design a lot! No argument from me on Manu’s three rules for online interaction — I just wish more people applied these or something similar, or at the very least engaged brain before typing / shouting. I’m sad that Anita Sarkeesian is…
Rob Fahnri’s recent rediscovery of his old iPhone 5c jolted my memory, as in many ways they were the OG cheaper iPhone for the rest of us. Apple eventually canned the 5c, for reasons I’ve not fully fathomed, although they did release the iPhone SE a few years later which I’d suggest is the 5c’s spirit in a non-plastic body. I’m hanging onto my SE for dear life, I love it and hope it’ll last me for…
Today is my birthday. As has been the case for many years now, I don’t feel any different. I’ll be going out for a meal later today with family, but other than that I won’t be celebrating. A few friends have sent congratulations online, which is nice, but I no longer get the deluge that I received back when I was still plugged into Facebook. Then again, a lot of the folks sending those messages…