What do you do when you need to “lower your shields” for a minute to complete a purchase on Amazon, or tell Google that yes, it’s you who’s trying to access that one Google Doc you always forget to migrate over? I asked this question on Mastodon a few weeks ago, and the answers inspired me to write this post.
A couple of weeks ago, I created a video on YouTube in an attempt to start an open conversation about online privacy. As I keep working on these videos, I learn more about recording and editing. Here are some of my experiences.
An interesting post from Alex Schroeder yesterday discussed “framing a story” in a blog post. The idea, as I understand it, is to put a narrative into an otherwise technical post, giving it a bit of a personality. This can be a quote or just an introduction (like the one you read here) that has more of a personal touch. It brought some nostalgia I want to get into.
MPV is quickly becoming one of my hidden gems. It’s so clean and buttonless, it’s easy to dismiss it as an under-featured video player and keep using VLC: but don’t let the minimalist UI fool you. This only means the player comes with many features turned off, counting on you to turn them on if you need to. Here’s a quick example.
Last weekend1 I pressed the “Public” button on my first YouTube video in a long time. The video itself, a quick discussion about photogrphay and privacy, is nothing too special; but the fact that I finally “cracked” and decided to show my face, and on YouTube for that matter, is. more: I’m not a stranger to video recordings2, though my preferred mode of communication remains writing. I wanted to start a visual medium again to have the option to present how-to videos about my technology.
I wrote before about EWW, the text-only browser built into Emacs. Last night I’ve implemented a quick lisp function to have it search certain words in Wordnik. more: I got some help on the Emacs channel on IRC (My lisp gets rusty, I forgot that “let” in lisp lives only in the instant of the function, it doesn’t implement a permanent change). There, I also learned of Abo-abo’s define-word, which seems promising.
One of the things that came back to me with my morning jogs is listening to podcasts. I’ve discussed how I download YouTube videos and podcasts before, and now I want to share the ones I keep getting back to. more: This Week in Tech: You won’t find scoops or complicated technical jargon here. Instead, you can expect interesting dialogue between people in tech media who discuss current mainstream events.
In my last post I wrote about alternatives to Google Maps. That post is inline with what I’ve written here for the last year: my attempts to get away from the big tech companies and keep as much information as possible private. After my recent trip, I decided to give up this Privacy crusade.
Everyone knows Google Maps. There are competitors: Apple Mas, Bing maps, others. On smartphones though, Android of course but also iPhones, Google Maps is usually the go-to app. There are alternatives. I’m going to explore two here, for different purposes.
Having run this blog for almost three years, I’ve toyed with the idea of creating a more prominent method for folks to leave a tip1. As I found out once again, this is no easy task without giving up privacy.