A useful thread, where people share their answer to a request for "an extremely minimal, clean blogging site with practically no bells or whistles where I can just share things on my mind ..read more

I'm tired of people using the term "podcast" when I can't find it at the place where I get my podcasts ..read more

It's pretty easy to create a FeedLand news service for your friends or co-workers, and it'll plug into a lot of the stuff we're working on now for presenting news without requiring people to learn a feed reader. That's a bridge too far for many people. In other words, your understanding of feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) can be of service to others. And by collecting useful sources of news, maybe even insightful ones, we can help upgrade the quality of news we all get. The first step is to learn how to use FeedLand, and it's pretty easy, esp if you already understand feeds. And with categories and OPML ..read more

StackExchange and OpenAI have made a deal. I used to use StackExchange all the time, now I never do, ChatGPT is much better. There's a lot of anxiety out there, it seems but this is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. There was a time when StackExchange was a godsend for programmers. But that time has passed. Here's a demo. I was trying to figure out why some ancient code wasn't working. I never understood how it worked, and now I had to figure out what was going wrong. So I debugged it, carefully, step by step, with ChatGPT. It's as if I was working with another programmer ..read more

A free idea for Apple that might boost their stock price. I use the Voice Memo app to take notes while I'm programming. Sometimes I talk for as much as fifteen minutes, because I ramble a lot, but I figure stuff out this way. I'm sure at some point the Voice Memo app will do automatic transcripts, I wish it did now. When I finish a memo, a few minutes or seconds later, there's an email waiting for me with the text of the memo. Now here's how they boost the stock price. They also provide an edited version of the memo, without repetition and rambling, and sidebars (they can be treated as sidebar ..read more

Now that I have my blogroll as a regular feature in my blog, I am able to keep current with more bloggers. It's actually much more than a blogroll, it's a feed reader. When a feed that I'm following updates, it moves to the top of the list. And if I want to see what's new, I just click on the wedge next to its name to reveal the most recent five posts. From there, I can get to the full post by clicking on the permalink. If you want to get a feel for it without taking the plunge yourself, you can leave my blog open in a browser tab. You'll get exactly what I get ..read more

I asked ChatGPT for "a rustic street scene in Co-op City in the Bronx." An actual street scene in Co-op City. I fooled it. Co-op City is in a part of the Bronx that is not old. There's nothing rustic about it. Or even possible. Before Co-op City became a massive housing project it was an amusement park called FreedomLand ..read more

BTW, I was struck that famous editor and writer Ben Smith said he was ashamed at starting out as a blogger, on an MSNBC show hosted by a true hack. The quote was from Jeff Jarvis, who like me, cross-posts to a variety of social webs, presumably manually. Where did I put my comment? Hell if I know. Heh I found it. My comment: "I didn’t know he had been a blogger. So my respect for him went up dramatically in an instant, and in another instant, plummeted. What’s wrong with people?" Bad news for Ben, he's still is a blogger, btw, in his heart. I can tell. And true journalists and true bloggers sh ..read more

I said this to a friend recently, in an email: “I noticed a change with the doctors, where earlier they would dismiss my fears of having this or that fatal disease, now they're always looking for the thing that's going to kill me.“ The friend, a retired English professor, said the sentence was very effective. Part of me would like to send the sentence and the review to my freshman English professor, I think she would be proud. Instead I decided to blog it ..read more

Some pragmatic notes how cross-posting works these days. I use regularly: Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky. Two that have APIs I can use: Mastodon and Bluesky. I can't send images to Bluesky via their API, they broke the interface. My way of doing it is now called "legacy." The app that uses that feature doesn't work. But I don't even remotely have the time to go back and fix it. The items in my linkblog come from this flow. If it appears in my linkblog, it also appears on Masto and Bluesky. When I want broader distribution, I do this: Open a new browser window. Open a tab to Twi ..read more