Posts in category 'technology'
DIY eReader News with RSS
Did you know Calibre can turn an RSS feed into an eBook? I didnt! It turns out Calibre, tt-rss, and Wallabag make it possible to roll your own news that you can read right on your eReader!
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again: I’m a big fan of RSS. For the uninitiated, RSS is a way to subscribe to a feed of content from a website and consume it in a reader or other tool of your choice. And despite claims that it’s dying out, I still manage to have more content in my feed reader than I possibly have time to consume.
For a long time I used Feedly as my RSS reader of choice. But back in October I decided to switch to tt-rss, a self-hosted RSS feed reading service that works on both browsers and through a mobile app. Then, in a fit of boredom, I used some self-hosted home automation tools to incorporate email newsletters into my feed. Meanwhile, I also decided to stand up an instance of Wallabag, a self-hosted website bookmarking service.
But I ran across a problem: with all this content at my fingertips, I started to fall behind, particularly on all those long-form articles and newsletters I want to read.
And then I discovered Calibre’s news scraping features and a solution presented itself!
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/eaioyc)
The ai thought leader on Twitter is now one of my favourite things (and also makes me want to play around with GPT2)…
- (https://b-ark.ca/y4yC2S)
Speaking of surveillance, the EPS is looking at employing facial recognition technology. @bevesslinger, how are you ensuring the EPS has proper oversight in their use of this technology?
RSS: A Better News Feed
Social media algorithms care only that you’re engaged. They exist to advertise. Everything else is a side-effect. RSS lets you ditch the machine and build your own feed from trusted sources.
Quite a few years ago, for personal reasons, I decided to drop out of major social media platforms. This was just at the time when those platforms truly started to take over the world, so the whole thing more or less passed me by as I watched from the sidelines. As a result, it wasn’t until very recently that I came to appreciate just how much these platforms have become the primary way that people run across content online.
Of course, this really shouldn’t be surprising. Once upon a time, the internet was made up of an untold number of websites, big and small. And this posed a real problem of content discovery. Sure, we managed. We managed with search engines, and bookmarks, and web portals, and other ad hoc technologies. But it was a huge pain.
Today, this same kind of content discovery is done on social media platforms, with content pushed to the consumer by machine learning algorithms that optimize for “engagement”, which is a technical term for “time spent on the service”.
On its face this would seem like a good thing! After all, if you’re engaged, that must mean you’re delighted by what you see!
But the reality is a lot more complicated. Yes, certainly the things that delight us will keep us engaged. But so do the things that make us outraged, or offended, or jealous. And the algorithm can’t tell the difference. So whether you’re clicking on a link because you want to see a picture of a large cat in a small box, or you want to read an outrageous article about how the world is really flat, it’s all the same to the machine.
The result is an algorithmic filter bubble that often serves to misinform, usually while making us miserable.
On the other hand, those algorithms really do provide a useful function: They push interesting content to us so we don’t have to go and seek it out. The problem is, we have no control over how they function.
Well, as you can probably guess, I’m here to tell you that there is an alternative, and it’s a technology that’s almost as old as the web itself: RSS.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/4WQCm6)
More proof that surveillance capitalism is everywhere, and laws like CCPA and GDPR can’t come too soon. @Cooper4SAE, what are you doing to push for an enhanced privacy regime in Canada?
- (https://b-ark.ca/0sAK6O)
Well this is disturbing… we desperately need rigorous laws to protect personal privacy
- (https://b-ark.ca/AcuCCA)
With the proliferation of IoT (aka “smart”) devices, the #Futurama episode “Mother’s Day”, where robot toasters and staplers revolt against humanity at the behest of a crazed dictator, is starting to feel eerily prescient…
- (https://b-ark.ca/wyuuk0)
Well, I now have Jekyll automatically generating tagmojis from page categories in my feed to M.b. Mappings are configured in the site config and the rest is automagic!
- (https://b-ark.ca/KU04wG)
I’ve been rewatching “Halt and Catch Fire”, and what I forget is, in the background, folks like Chuck Peddle, creator of the 6502, were the giants on whose shoulders Jobs and Gates stood. Thank you, Chuck!
- (https://b-ark.ca/s8oQSM)
Great piece on Brave. The Freeloading argument isn’t accurate, but the rest of it is spot on and highlights how Brave is regressive and disempowers content creators.
- (https://b-ark.ca/kiI8uo)
Posts like this make me want to finally learn how to program the FPGA on my shelf! So cool!
The XO Arriveth!
For those unaware, a couple months back I decided to get in on the OLPC G1G1 program, which allowed we priviledged members of the first world two buy two XO units, one which would go to a school somewhere in the developing world, and one that we could keep. The goal of the program was to spur interest in their work while encouraging donations, and let me tell ya, it sure worked on me! As it also did for two of my co-worker. :)
Anyway, I’m happy to report that a couple days ago, my XO arrived! And it’s a fine thing to behold. Compact and cleverly designed, these tiny, kid-focused, ruggedized laptops are a marvel of technology. Darn cute, too.
Anyway, there’s a ton of other pictures and material one these little things, so rather than going on and on about what makes them so cool, I’ll just post a photo and be done with it:
BTW, did I mention I typed this up on the XO? Well, aside from the photo upload, which apparently doesn’t work in the XO browser.
New Arrivals
Geez, three weeks since my last update, and… well, frankly, not a whole lot has happened. Odd how, when you become an adult, your life suddenly becomes a lot less interesting from day to day. However, it goes without saying that at least a couple noteworthy things have happened, otherwise, why the post, other than to regurgitate my varied and disconnected thoughts into the digital ether?
So, what news? Well, first off, a photo from the garden. A while back, I decided it was about time to get some various plants planted. This included the usual garden, a mix of the everyday peas, carrots, spinach, and some zucchini, with rogue dill fragrantly invading the empty spaces, a hill of potatoes, just a few to see how they do, some sunflower plants, and last but not least, berry bushes, specifically raspberry and saskatoon. Well, in the weeks following, much has been afoot. The sunflowers are at least six inches tall, the various garden vegetables are coming along quite nicely, but most importantly, my raspberry bushes have started bearing sweet, delicious fruit. And to prove it, I even have a photo!
Incidentally, these are just the most recent of the ripened berries. I’ve already enjoyed a couple early fruit, and let me tell ya.. they are delicious.
Meanwhile, on the technology front, I finally decided to take the plunge and by my very own laptop. To be honest, the fact I hadn’t done this already was just a little bit ridiculous, and after spending many hours hacking away on the company tanktop (big, hot, heavy, and ugly), I finally decided the time was right to just buy one.
So, what did I buy? Well, I could’ve gone for a regular ol’ consumer laptop, something fairly inexpensive and functional, but such gear tends to be a little heavier, have poorer battery life, and most importantly, be somewhat fragile. So I decided to splurge on some gear that I knew would be heavy-duty, light weight, and generally capable of withstanding the abuses I’m likely to put it through.
I bought a Lenovo (previously IBM) ThinkPad. The T61, to be precise, which is the latest model in the T-Series.
Now, I know, ThinkPads tend to be a bit pricey, but for that, I got:
- A titanium roll cage,
- Best-in-the-business keyboard,
- Good battery life, which is even better with the Ultrabay battery I purchased,
- Quite thin and light, at just shy of 5 lbs,
- Quiet as heck.
Basically, exactly what I was looking for.
As for specs, it’s a 2Ghz Core2Duo, 2GB of RAM, 120GB hard disk, 1440x900, 14” wide-screen display (I would’ve prefered 1400x1050 standard-def, but they can’t be had… apparently the LCD manufacturers are shoving wide-screen displays down laptop manufacturers’ throats), nVidia Quadro NVS 140M video chipset, 802.11abgn, and a DVD-RW. Plus the usual assortment of USB ports, VGA out, a pair of PCI-Express slots, the Ultrabay, modem and NIC, etc.
As for software, it came loaded with Windows Vista business (which, for the record, isn’t nearly as bad as people claim, though I turned off Aero and SuperFetch pretty quickly), with the usual assortment of goodies, such as Office, and to my surprise, SQL Express 2005. In addition, after shrinking my NTFS partition by 40GB, I threw Ubuntu Gusty in, which, after a rough start, has worked fairly well (although sound doesn’t work at all, and I can’t adjust the screen brightness within X, which is pretty irritating). I even got suspend-to-RAM working after a bit of fiddling with settings in xorg.conf. I must admit, as a desktop OS, Ubuntu performs quite admirably, and is easily the closest I’ve seen to a truly mass-accessible Linux distribution.
So, overall, an excellent and worthwhile purchase! Of course, that basically blows my toy budget for the rest of the year.
Update:
I lied. The bastards gave me a trial version of Office. Oh well, OpenOffice it is!
