Technology
Yoto Mini Teardown and Rescue
Last Post: 14 Jan 2024Yesterday my daughter’s Yoto mini took a dunk in the bathtub. She was devastated, she uses it almost constantly. So it was Dad to the rescue. The device was straight forward to take apart, but I wanted to share how I did it so that other parents don’t have to figure it out on the fly.
A Solid Fediverse
Last Post: 14 Jun 2023The Fediverse is great, I love it, but as I see more and more projects to spring up to replace different private social media operations. First it was Twitter, now Reddit is seeing an exodus to Lemmy, there is also Pixelfed to replace instagram and bookwyrm to replace Goodreads.
It’s great. But it isn’t without its problems.
No consistent Identity
We don’t have a clear identity federation system. I came across Keyoxide which seems like a great way to start gluing your identities together, but is not yet user friendly. As a result I have an ID on three different fediverse services and I can only sort of glue them together with profile links.
LLMs - I Won't Be Fooled Again
Last Post: 30 Apr 2023I’ve stayed on the sidelines of much of the LLM debate, but I’m willing to stake out my skepticism on this “world changing” technology. As I think back over the arch of my online life, I see these foundational models as the latest in a series of events where amazing technology was going to change the world. But each time individual value is diluted for corporate money grabs.
Going way back in time, my first real formative experience on the internet was Geocities. When a friend showed me that I could write an HTML file and make it show up on the internet I was hooked. It was magic to me that I could make something the whole world could see. I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of how to make these sites.
#Technology | #LLMs | #AI
Hashtag Strings in Hugo
Last Post: 1 Mar 2023I did a fun bit of Hugo templating today that seemed worth sharing. I was previously generating my list of hashtags to apply to a social post inside of my Zapier workflow. I’d pull the list of tags then manipulate them into a single string and add the # symbol.
Today I realized that this would be much simpler to do in Hugo as part of my JSON output. It came out like this:
Fediverse Hosting Wishlist
Last Post: 10 Feb 2023I’ve been experimenting with the Fediverse / Mastadon and I really like it. I’ve been on my friend’s Seattle locals instance that he runs as a hobby. I sort of want to run my own instance, but I don’t want to think about any of the server operations. I want a hosting provider and I want it t to make it easy.
Content moderation is the problem
Content moderation is the biggest problem in Social Media, particularly scaled social media. Facebook makes more content moderation decisions every hour than the entire U.S. Justice system has made in it’s entire existence. Some of those are really thorny issues that don’t have a single solution. And there are some very serious problems with serious legal implications.
Create a Mastodon Integration for Zapier
Last Post: 30 Dec 2022This site is hosted on GitHub pages using Hugo, mostly because it gives me an excuse to play with very simple CI/CD pipelines and scratch the itch that wishes I was an engineer rather than a product manager. Hugo is nice because it creates the RSS feeds that I love to have and use myself. I have been using that RSS feed to drive automated publishing of new articles to social media through Zapier. The pipeline looks something like this until just recently
Solid Pods - A Better Place to Store User Data
Last Post: 13 May 2020Solid Pods (Personal Online Data Store) are an open source project from the efforts of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the original internet) with a goal of re-decentralizing the internet. This project is still in development, I think it has a lot to offer in order to help make developing web applications easier and safer for the developer, user, and society at large.
Solid provides a web standard’s compliant API to provide the owner of the pod with an identity (WebID), storage (document store), and relational language for data. Applications can be built to access and store data in the pod, rather than in storage systems owned by the application.
One Wheel Pint - An Honest Review
Last Post: 2 Jan 2020Commuting is a pain. My particular commute is a multi-stage, adventure that can take an hour on a decent day and mind boggling amounts of time if something goes wrong in Seattle traffic. My spouse and I start by carpooling to our day-care, drop off a kiddo, then catch a bus into downtown, and finally walk across town to my office. Most of the time it works just fine. But it doesn’t take much to throw off the whole experience to a post-apocalyptic hell-scape of gridlock. In the past several years, we’ve seen car accidents and trucks full of bees or fish completely stop the major high ways and all of the side streets.
The Compliant News Room
Last Post: 30 Oct 2019There has been much ink spilled and great gnashing of teeth over Facebook’s news tab and the inclusion of Breitbart as a “high quality” news source. I continue to be amazed that social media organizations have moved to help establish clear standards and certification for what counts as a high quality newsroom.
In Enterprise software if you want large companies (like Facebook) to buy your software or services, you will eventually have to get a compliance attestation from a third party auditor that your company follows industry standard practices around code development, testing, deployment, and security. Depending on who your potential customers are there are a cornucopia of potential certifications, SOC2, ISO (lots of these actually), HIPAA for health, PCI for credit cards, FedRAMP for the U.S. Federal government. All of these standards provide you a checklist practices that you have to demonstrate your compliance with, then you find an auditor to come in, look at your books and ask you to prove that you follow your own stated policies.
The Email Interview
Last Post: 10 Jul 2019I don’t like conducting interviews. I would rather be interviewed for a job than interview someone for a job. If I have to choose between written and oral communication, I will usually prefer to write. I like async communication because I have time to think clearly and then commit to words what I’m thinking. I have a mild central auditory processing disorder, meaning an in-person interview pushes my limits of listening, and critically processing, and taking notes on answers in real time. Critical assessment of the candidate’s answer will probably be the functional task that drops.