I've posted less than usual on my blog this last week, but I have posted a few different things!

Firstly, on 23 January I posted about the walk Viv and I went on through the Sherbrooke Forest. There are also a few nice pictures there of the temperate rainforest environment 😊

Then on 25 January I posted two links on the subject of Invasion/Australia Day. First was this Fairfax article by Meriki Onus and then there was this Twitter thread by the same person outlining the reasons for and demands of the protest marches on that day (two days ago now).

The day after that I posted a photo of my cat, unimpressed that a cool change came through and demanding that I put the 40°C (104°F) weather back 😾

Today I posted this longer post about dabbling in language learning. Basically I've been tossing up whether to try teaching myself some basic German, and then I went on to reflect on some of the other languages I've dabbled in and ones that I'd like to know a little of, if I had the time! Such a shame that there's not infinite time to just study all the languages 😂

Once again, I'm just dropping some links to some posts I made in the last few days 😅 I figure that more frequent updates is better than less frequent ones, so this post is here on that basis. None of these are really long posts (well, the book review is four paragraphs).

• I finished the first Murderbot Diaries book, All Systems Red, and thought it was great. I reviewed it here.
• A photo post of Gizmo, my parents' dog… he'd had a stressful night the night before with thunder and "bickie thieves" (actually not thieves but you can never be too paranoid when you're a silly little dog)
• Little site update, I added more pages to do with reading – now I can manage my "to read" list and display what I'm currently reading from my own site! Although it is, definitely, more of a manual process than using Goodreads or something like it.
• I found a tool that lets you compare COL in selected cities around the world. (You can also see my short post about that tool)

Gidget is an indoor-outdoor cat, but we (try to) keep her in between dusk and dawn (which is even the local bylaw, although hardly anyone abides by it haha). Last week she was giving us some problems: where usually she'd been coming in between 6–7pm, she was jumping the fence to a neighbour's and not coming home 'til 11pm, if we didn't find her and carry her in before 6. She also wasn't coming in for snacks over the course of the day like usual, nor spending her time chilling in our little backyard where she usually spends a lot of time. Instead, she'd hide in the front flowerbed, or (as I said) jump the fence to our neighbours' properties.

I think there was an obvious cause: where we hadn't had anyone visit for like six months due to the lockdown and then my mum's health issues, we did have my folks visit on New Year's Eve and then three days later on the Sunday (Sunday being the day we usually catch up each week). ( Read more... )

Originally posted at micro.jayeless.net. At the original source, you will also find a photo of my little treasure of a cat.

One of my major hobbies is reading. I was a fanatical reader as a kid, and while I've definitely gone through periods where I haven't read for pleasure so much (generally times when I was having to do a lot of reading for school or uni), it's something I've come back to doing time and time again. I read sixty books in each of 2019 and 2020, which is a satisfying pace for me.

The main site I've used to track my reading over the last decade is Goodreads. Unfortunately, Goodreads is far from an ideal platform. ( Read more... )

Originally posted yesterday at micro.jayeless.net.

Originally posted a couple of days ago at micro.jayeless.net. Crossposting now, cos better late than never, right? :)

Everyone likes the idea that when you put your data into an app, you'll be able to get it out again easily. Unfortunately, the reality is that many apps' import and export functions fall way short of what you'd hope for, leaving you with a ton of manual work to do if you're determined to switch apps. So today, you get a gnarled tale of me trying to move my archive of journal entries from Notion to Standard Notes.

( Read more... )

So I posted a quick "note post" that I started reading La pasión según Carmela.

I posted a link to an article about Catalan nationalists joining the Esperanto movement early last century (that link goes straight to the article, not to my note post about it, haha). Basically as Esperanto was designed to be a universal second language, the movement was predisposed to defend and celebrate regional cultures in opposition to the dominant "central" culture (Castilian in Spain). So not only was Esperanto itself compatible with keeping speaking Catalan, but conferences and such also provided good opportunities to showcase Catalan culture to a broader audience.

I wrote a long post about how Australia devalues language learning, prompted by a number of universities announcing that they'll axe various courses in community languages.

On my new static site, I also published a review of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, which I ended up enjoying. Despite a slow middle section, the ending brought it all together really well.

I posted a link to a useful guide called "make a Hugo blog from scratch". The actual Hugo website has a Quick Start guide which is indeed fantastic as what it says on the tin, but the rest of the official Hugo docs seemed to me very technical, like they assumed you basically already knew what you were doing. If you actually want to configure your Hugo site by making your own theme or using custom post metadata, and you need more scaffolding than the official docs provide, then the guide I've linked to should be your next stop.

I also had a few photo posts: cat in tall grass, our local dog beach on a humid, overcast day and a Colombian-style chicken and rice dish I made (a recipe is linked to from the description there).

Last night Viv and I finally finished all the episodes out so far of Killing Eve (yes, we were sleeping on it for a while). Overall I have to say, what a brilliant show, from the raging chemistry of the leads to the other stellar performances to the cinematography to Jodie Comer's ridiculous talent with accents to the 10/10 banger of a soundtrack (the bulk of which is by a single band called Unloved and all available on Spotify, for what it's worth).

I do think that seasons 1 and 2 were superior to season 3. This is far from the only show that I feel like this has happened with – from Veronica Mars to The Good Place, I think a lot of my favourite shows have suffered a little step-down in quality after their second season. In the case of Killing Eve, I just felt like the plot was less coherent, even though the characters' lines were as witty and enjoyable as before. ( Read more... )

Originally posted on micro.jayeless.net.

Hello, Dreamwidth – long time no see! I thought I'd put together a quick post about a new blogging platform I've discovered and the train of thought that led me to it, in particular the concept of the IndieWeb.

I've written before on here about some of the issues I have with modern social media, in particular the addictiveness of intermittent rewards (good posts) being hidden among the dreck, how I feel divided across half a dozen different platforms, mostly just a passive observer on any of them, and how can you make a site financially sustainable without monetising users' data. In the back of my mind, I've still really been missing the era of personal websites and blogs, even if I've struggled to use Dreamwidth consistently. Anyway, a couple of days ago I re-stumbled across the concept of the IndieWeb, and this time I was intrigued enough to actually look into it properly, and what do you know: a ton of this philosophy really resonates with me.

The core of it is "POSSE": Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Essentially, establish your own site as a primary, canonical home for all your content, so as to preserve control over it and maintain some independence from unscrupulous social media companies. But then, because staying in touch with the people you care about is more important than preserving some kind of social media purism, you syndicate your content back to the sites where your friends and family actually are. In a perfect world, you could even backfeed interactions from those other sites back to the original site, but some platforms (Twitter) make this much easier than others (Facebook, Instagram – which is sad for me because FB and Instagram are where all my friends and family are). At any rate, the idea is to strike a middle ground between getting away from the frustrations of modern social media and still managing to keep in touch with people.

As you'll see if you check out the IndieWeb site, there are a number of different platforms people are using to try to maintain this kind of presence, but the one I've eventually gone with is Micro.blog. The main reason that that was my choice is that the technical barrier to entry was very low, and I thought I'd be more likely to stick with something that didn't take much active maintenance on my part (and not much of a learning curve to get started). What I'd mainly like to do with it is use it as an old-school personal blog, where I can post about anything of interest to me: cooking, books, games, cat photos, pretty scenery I saw on outings photos (now that those are allowed again…), stuff on languages, society, really whatever. If you want to check it out, you'll find that new personal blog right here! But I also want to be a bit more diligent about crossposting content (or linking to it) where it makes sense – photos to Instagram, book reviews to Goodreads and LibraryThing, "this is what I've been getting up to"-type posts to FB, a bit of everything to Mastodon, and probably more of the wordy, thoughtful posts to here. It'll probably take me a bit of figuring out, especially because I can only really automate crossposting to Mastodon and Twitter (and, you know, Twitter is kinda a cesspool), but I love the idea of having a coherent "online presence" instead of (or in addition to, technically) all these watered-down compartmentalised things on different sites. Almost like having my own online home.

So anyway, that's where I'm at! I hope you guys on DW are doing as well as can be managed in these times.

A few years ago, the Victorian government launched a program to try to replace all the state's “dumb” power meters – the ones that an actual person needs to visit every three months to record manually how much power has been used – with smart meters, that can transmit usage information near-instantaneously. When I moved into this flat in 2015, I was confused as to why every single other unit had had its meter upgraded to a smart one, while mine alone still had the traditional dumb meter. I wanted to be able to keep a close eye on my power usage so I could see, for example, which appliances/heaters/etc. were wasting power and thus worth replacing, and so I could also be stingier with my power usage if I noticed I was cruising towards a larger bill than I wanted. But because I was stuck with the dumb meter, the only way to keep an eye on this was to actually go to the meter (which was located inside the carport of a different unit, btw) and check the readings myself.

By the end of 2016, the Victorian government was proudly declaring that “All households* in the state are now equipped with smart power meters!” and I still didn't have one. (The asterisk basically led to a clarification that went, “All households except the ones where upgrading the meter was a bit difficult.”) Anyway, a few months ago I found my energy retailer (a different privatised company from my energy supplier) had a form on their site where you could ask to have your dumb meter upgraded, so foolish me, I thought I'd submit that form.

( The bureaucratic saga continues under the cut. )

I thought I'd share this article from the NYT Magazine, called Online Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, For A Price. Basically it explores the maxim that “if you're not paying for the product, you are the product,” contrasting free-to-use web apps like Facebook and Gmail that mine user data for info they can sell on to advertisers, with paid apps that pledge not to (and often have nicer, cleaner, trendier interfaces to boot). What it goes on to conclude is that, essentially, being able to pay for the nicer, privacy-respecting option is a privilege which has become a kind of status symbol; if you're on a low income, you don't have the choice.

What it didn't really go into is platforms that have both free and paid tiers (like Dreamwidth), or platforms that are free but rely on donations from more moneyed users (like Mastodon instances), that nonetheless don't scrape user data for onselling to third parties regardless of whether you've paid or not. I feel like it's this which is really the way out of the binary they've presented.

I do think it's an interesting question: how can you create an ethical online platform, that doesn't violate user privacy (or degrade the user experience for advertisers' benefit) but is still financially viable? After all, things like servers, bandwidth and developer time aren't free – someone has to pay. It'd seem that, after ten years of operation, Dreamwidth has struck a sustainable balance: they get enough income from paid users to cover the costs incurred by the userbase as a whole (and have also carefully balanced the paid tiers – and what you get at the free tier – to try to ensure this happens). LiveJournal had the same system once upon a time, although as I recall, once they removed the invite requirement to create a free account, the system became unsustainable and then they felt they “had” to introduce ads. Dreamwidth hasn't had the same problems after removing its invite requirement, probably because the site never really went “mainstream”, so its user base is smaller but more dedicated (so, a higher proportion of users are paying). At least, that's what I would think on the matter.

Mastodon (and the rest of the Fediverse) has taken a different approach that I also think is interesting, where the platforms are decentralised and federated. That means that server/bandwidth costs are distributed across a much larger number of people (everyone who runs an instance), although of course individual donations to instance maintainers are welcome (and probably necessary, once an instance reaches a certain size). Mastodon does seem heavily reliant on volunteer labour though, both to develop and to moderate. I also, honestly, would be unsure of how “permanent” you could consider anything uploaded to the Fediverse to be (insofar as anything online is permanent, of course!). Instances can shut down, and I've also heard of media (like attached photos) being lost even when the toot they were attached to remains – like, I saw people speculating that it can get kind of unreasonably expensive to retain all the media ever uploaded to you (or federated to you) forever, so some instances (they say) are not doing this. I don't spend much time looking at ultra-old toots so I couldn't really tell you.

See, whether you consider that a problem depends on what you're using social media for. Mastodon, at least, is a Twitter-like platform that doesn't make it easy at all the look back into your archive; ephemerality is really what you expect from it. Whereas, say, if you're talking about a blogging platform (or really anything with a navigable archive), you want uploaded media to stay put.

Anyway, I clearly do prefer the user experience of the “sanitised” web (like, Mastodon is just so much more pleasant than Twitter to use), and I do have a few subscriptions going to different things, which I guess makes me one of the privileged that the NYT is talking about. Now that I'm an adult with a bit of disposable income (!) I don't mind chipping in a little bit to keep the services I value going. But I do also think it's unfair for those without that ability to be saddled with ads-infested experiences where all your data gets sold to third parties (and it's not like many people can pay for every site they use online…), which is why I think developing business models that strike that middle ground are so important.