Dave The Web Guy
| The Dave Cam is once again the "Dave Cam". It now looks down on me in my computer chair. Be ready to see anything! |
Did I Fix the Bug?
04/14/2024
This is just a test post to help fix a problem I have with Battle Blog's instant publishing system not rendering media properly on some RSS endpoints.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (29)
Register to Comment
Lazy Saturday
04/14/2024
Meet my two cats. Gina, the long-haired one, I adopted from the Ten Lives Club, a cat rescue organization operating here in Western New York. Skinny Pete, the gray one, was adopted by my friend neighbor and I, with me eventually taking full responsibility, from our front porch where he lived comfortably for a year in one of the cat houses we put out there. He's very socialized somehow and he and Gina have bonded and get along extremely well. As this lazy Saturday picture might suggest.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (22)
Register to Comment
Broadcasting the Broadcaster
04/10/2024
There I am in this Channel 7 (Buffalo) news piece live streaming the aftermath of a police chase. It's my hobby. Now, let's go around the room and tell us all a little something about yours.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (73)
Register to Comment
Not Sure They Thought This Through
04/08/2024
"Retire the Red Shirt Way". I see this ad tagline all the time by Independent Health and can't fathom for the life of me how it passed any focus group. Especially for the age group it might be targeting that is well familiar with that if you're the guy in a red shirt on any episode of the classic Star Trek, you'll retire by dying. I mean, look it up.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (284)
Register to Comment
Moment(s) of Totality
04/08/2024
Here's a sweep of the neighborhood during the totality of today's total eclipse. Despite the clouds, our particular vantage point provided just-in-time breaks in the cloud coverage to give us a steady lot of worthy peeks including a second or two of the totality's ring. But the best show was how dark it got.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (47)
Register to Comment
Eclipse Morning
04/08/2024
It's as cloudy as they predicted for today so far. But, there are hopes that the clouds will thin enough by the time of the eclipse.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (56)
Register to Comment
Unthinkable in 2024: I'm Going 100 Percent Blog
04/07/2024
Look at my social media postings across Facebook, Instagram, Threads and X.
The last postings you see at any of them are the very last you will see from me.
I want to go "100 percent blog" starting with this very posting. I want every impulse to blab and to experience any dopamine hits to result exclusively from this sole platform. And, I want that effort to live beyond experimental status.
I want to do this so hardcore, people who are used to seeing updates or what not through any of the social media outlets mentioned above, eventually, if ever, wonder what the heck happened to me.
"April-ish 2024?, wasn't that the last time Dave was around?"
I said I want to do this beyond anything resembling an experiment. But because in 2024's internet where all the world's power brokers want average people to forget about the liberty of the original world wide web, and thus this shouldn't "succeed", you as the wayward audience member should certainly view it as that.
Here we go then.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (59)
Register to Comment
Meta Makes Good on Promise to Join the Fediverse
03/23/2024
In an encouraging sign to me that the expectations of continuing a centralized web are beginning to implode, Meta announced that @Threads now integrates with the fediverse. Post via @Threads as your preferred platform now, and you will now be discoverable by people using other platforms. And better, if you leave @Threads because, say for example, one loose cannon takes it over one day and the service becomes unstable, you can take your posts with you.
This is a pretty ironic - and some argue, suspicious - move by Meta which is as company that is happy with the world believing that "Facebook is the internet" and thus antithetical to an "open web" - but there's really no outcome that I can think of today that isn't bullet proof against Meta attempting to exploit itself as the biggest port to the fediverse and somehow wind up "owning it".
For me, Meta is doing this because it realizes that the open web and its advocates aren't letting up and the future of digital traffic is decentralized. Or, put another way, going back to the way things were albeit perhaps more polished than the 90s web was. Sort of like Microsoft had to concede that Android was the best way to continue being relevant on the smartphone and now does all kinds of Android stuff with its Microsoft legacy wares.
In my video above I stress test what should be a simple thing to do, and, well, wound up being just that: Subscribing to an @Threads user (me) via Mastodon, the flagship port for the fediverse.
Linkage
- Meta's announcement that it has entered the fediverse
- Dave the Web Guy on Threads
- Dave the Web Guy on Mastodon
By Dave for Personal Blog.
demonstration fediverse threads
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (125)
Register to Comment
Missing Mochi
03/15/2024
Our Mochi passed away last week. We were reminiscing and remember that she was once the star (well okay, in a montage) on an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos (she is the black one in this footage). She was deeply loved and will always be in our hearts.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (133)
Register to Comment
When Sponge Bob Goes Evil
03/13/2024
When Sponge Bob goes evil.
And -- for some reason also wants to stalk my cats' litter boxes.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (131)
Register to Comment
On Jesus Toribio Pinero...
03/13/2024
My natural father Heriberto (or, "Eddie" as he apparently went by) enamored my mother by telling her that his grandfather or great grandfather was the "first governor of Puerto Rico". Our mom remembered him telling her that "he ran around the mansion as a kid!"
And, duly, that there was even a street there named after him.
After he died young and my mother went on to marry others, our association to that side of the family faded to such a degree that this possibility only rang as absolutely true when we later independently looked it up and indeed learned that the first governor there was a one Jesus T. Pinero. It had to be true then! Yay! - Instant prestige!
Eventually we reconnected with a long lost aunt, my father's sister, and upon putting the claim to her, someone who had grown up alongside him most of her childhood life, she had no idea what the hell he must have been talking about.
Dang. It was enough of a story to get me birthed I guess.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (323)
Register to Comment
More Grumbling Over Social Media Demonization
03/10/2024
I will never understand why politicians and the mainstream media are so "activated" by the potential ill effects of social media. I believe it's a war on people freely talking to each other.
When I'm given to contemplate I cynically cling to my abstract ideas of conspiracies against free speech (countries and authoritarian societies like China prove the raw dynamic exists - it's just a matter of shoe horning the same drive in a liberal democracy), or offended institutions not getting their cut of the dole from the big tech companies that build these communication platforms.
The mainstream media meanwhile wants a diminished landscape of people who are able to compete effectively against their profit making process and controls, giving it the driving incentive of rebuilding its relevance. If social media is killing or sexualizing the children, spreading misinformation, undermining democracy (ironic claim), or depressing everyone - it's better to delete your feed and turn on the one-way influencing box of TV once again where a relatively few drive cultural narrative.
Well, something along those lines. It's not like I'm sitting in the room with the Illuminati while they work the whiteboard over these matters to say exactly.
But the truly maddening thing is that all of these charges would be lodged against the Internet and world wide web directly had social media platforms never become a thing. Can you imagine the constant crowing about how depressed teens are because they surf the web or exchange simple email?
Taking all the best intentions for what they claim to be, where were all these movements and grandstanding speeches as television, movies, and consumer advertising, tweaked and engineered with as much expertise as anything TikTok or Instagram have applied, were force paraded through children's minds for decades and decades? Regulating mass commercial brainwashing does have its appeal if we are all suddenly "waking up" to how industry attempts to program us, after all.
Linkage
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (142)
Register to Comment
Can't Use Threads via NordVPN
03/07/2024
If anyone else uses NordVPN and finds that they can't connect to Threads, add these to your split tunnel. I found these doing a simple network traffic inspection while experiencing the issue:
- cdninstagram.com (may be all you need)
- instagram.com
- threads.net
- facebook.com
Here's the example of how it looks in my set up.
The usual disclaimer is that this worked for me.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (325)
Register to Comment
Why People Gotta Log In to View My X Stuff?
02/24/2024
I recently discovered that my X content isn't accessible unless you log into X. I have two X accounts and this problem applies to both of them.
Neither account is set to privatize my content, either.
It's obviously a bug but there doesn't seem to be a clear path to reporting it, particularly if you're not a paying user of X. They do have a help and support center but all of the boilerplate forms one would submit don't apply to this particular situation.
As a bug, I suspect it's tied to X's activity over last summer when they did in fact try to force people to log in in order to view people's feeds. They rollled that back pretty quick, but maybe something about my accounts got left behind.
I'm basically de-platformed on X -- at least to the extent that I can't microblog to the random world at large. Ironically, I have no problem taking my borderline mental illness rants to Threads, but one of the affected accounts is part of a community with almost 500 subscribers I'd like to keep my reach with. And, while I am enamored by Threads, despite whatever issues X has with its stability (as a service, and the particular man running it), I still think X the most evolved and feature reach microblogging tool on the market, if using one is important. I'd like to have it as an option while I continue to weigh which service I intend to ultimately run with if either.
Otherwise, I guess X is making the decision for me.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
interesting twitter XFormerlyTwitter
Comments (0) | Promote (0) | PermShare | Focuses (278)
