A couple of months ago I wrote a post promoting the use of Twitter’s Circles. It was one of my coping mechanisms for using current Twitter in its semi-broken state.
Then people started reporting that their private circle posts had were appearing in public timelines.
They were right.
Twitter sent out an email last week acknowledging what they call an “incident.” So that something…
I feel bad if somebody followed my advice to use circles and then Twitter leaked something sensitive.
Sorry.
I ran a mastodon server over at winnipegsocial.online for about two months. I took it down last over this past weekend.
When the mastodon exodus started to bubble up I thought I’d jump in feet first and find out what it takes to run a server.
Overall, it was just about as easy as I expected. But at the end of the day, almost nobody used it and it was costing me a lot of money for what was had become my own personal mastodon web client.
I’d say the complexity of setting up a mastodon server is right around “running ubuntu on the desktop and installing a package that’s not present in the package manager” complex.
It’s almost point-and-click, with a couple of additional steps.
DigitalOcean and friends all seem to have 1-click installers to get the web server portion system.
In addition the the webserver that’s runs the Mastodon application itself, you’ll also need a CDN to host media and a service to send mail.
FWIW, I chose DigitalOcean’s “spaces” mainly for the convenience of having only 1 bill. I chose SendGrid for mail, due to their generous free tier.
If you’re interested in setting up a Mastodon server and you’ve ever messed with Linux, I’d say “give it a shot.” DigitalOcean’s guide covers pretty much everything you need to know.
There was literally zero day-to-day maintenance. And no need to moderate anything.
US$35/mo. ($5 of that is storage, no backup, no mail cost)
I originally spun up my mastodon server on DigitalOcean’s cheapest 1GB RAM server plan. The webserver and all its systems actually ran really well.
However, when it came to upgrading from Mastodon v3 to v4 I repeatedly ran into problems. Eventually realizing that NPM was exhausting my system memory, so I had to upgrade to a 2GB server in order to complete the upgrade.
When I asked my twitter followers how many people were interested in joining a Winnipeg-based Mastodon server mid-November, 25 out of 36 people responded positively.
After two months of operation, the server had fewer than 30 users and I was the only users who’d posted more than a handful of toots. It just didn’t make sense to continue to pay to use my own instance when I could just as easily hop onto another one.
At the end of this experiment, I don’t think I understand the purpose of location or theme-based Mastodon servers. Sure the Mastodon server has a “Local” UI that displays posts from users you follow on the local instance. But I guess I don’t really see the purpose? They’ll show up in your freed regardless 🤷♂️
In terms of Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, I have many thoughts. But that’s a blog post for another blog time.
Anyways, for now you can find me @[email protected].
This past week I’ve made three minor tech-adjacent discoveries that have the potential to change my life in small but important ways.
None of these are groundbreaking on their own, but together they’re actually making me a little excited about “tech” again. In sort of a strange way.
I’ve always had two related problems with email newsletters. They clutter up my inbox and I never end up reading any of them. Because of this I actively avoid subscribing to newsletters and often unsubscribe to newsletters randomly. Stoop solves this problem in the best way possible.
Stoop in an app for reading newsletter. Like a podcatcher but for text.
Stoop gives you an @stoopinbox.com email address, which you’ll use to sign up for newsletters. It then receives in them like any other email services, except with a UI tailor to newsletter consumption.
It goes a long way to de-clutter your inbox and gives you a distraction free newsletter reading experience.
A couple of years ago my two boys each received Kindle fire tablets as Christmas gifts. As kids do, they promptly forgot them and abandoned them in a pile of clutter.
I’ve been meaning to read more, for years and year. I’ve only been meaning to read more books proper; but also all those Pocket links I stow away and forget about; and those cool newletters everyone is always recommending 😉
Digital reading has always been a bit of a Goldilocks problem for me. Desktop computer screens are too big; iPads are a little big (great for magazines though) and too heavy to hold up in bed for an hour; phone screens are too small and distracting.
Then I remembered the Fire Tablets.
They’re prefect! Roughly the same height, width and most importantly weight as a paperback novel. Battery life is great and screen resolution is acceptable. You can side-load the Google play store and get most apps. But I’m keeping mine limited to reading apps to maintain a distraction free, reading-focused environment.
I’ve been making a conscious effort to pick up the Fire instead of my phone whenever I want to read Google News or that sort of thing.
Its only (minor) shortcoming is speed. The hardware is old and sluggish. Web browsing is a pain, changing context is slow. But flipping and scroll pages is fast enough. And you could almost spin the sluggishness as a positive, since it discourages you from change contexts and helps focus on what you’re currently reading.
Apparently you can still but the Fire 7 →
I can assure you this is not an ad! But I do have a referral code ZL5RTDVQ if you end up using this.
I feel a little weird talking about a financial product, so I’m going to keep this a short as possible.
I was chatting with Internet Good Guy Levisan around the time the Apple Card “unboxing” videos started popping out, commenting on how r/latestagecapitalism they were. He mentioned KOHO, on account of it also having a metal card.
KOHO is an app-based prepaid VISA that offers 0.05% cashback on all purchases (2% on some purchases if you pay for “premium”) and has none of the lame fees that you’d expect from a one time used pre-paid visa you might buy as a “gift card.”
It also offers a “virtual” card in the app for online payments. One that you can turn off if your accounts get pwn’d. AFAIK virtual cards have been rare in the Canadian market before now.
Also you can feed the card with Interac E-transfers.
KOHO feels like it might be a way to get some of the benefits of Apple’s Credit card, without burring yourself even deeper into Apple’s ecosystem.
It’s early days but I’m optimistic that this will improve my financial health. Especially since it’s pre-paid only and there is no way to carry a negative balance.
There you have it. Three things that are blowing my mind this week. 🤯🤯🤯
What’s exciting you right now?
I have been experiencing an unusual burst of adventure and excitement surrounding some of the tools I use. Over the past week and a half I have been trying out Nylas N1 as my daily email client.
Nylas is an open source, extensible email client. It follows the recent software development trend of editors like Sublime Text and Atom. The app focuses on core functionality and relies on the community to add features and visual themes. As a developer you can build the app yourself and use it for free, but you’re locked out of some of the paid functional. So, I signed up for the free trial to give it a full shot.
Nylas has three features I was most interested in:
1. Social Sidebar
When you open an email, the right-hand view pulls up social info for the sender. Including their Twitter picture and other social links. I thought this would be kind of cool and useful. However, I ended up ignoring it entirely.
2. Read Reciepts
Back in the bad old days of Outlook Express (and beyond), you were able to send a “read receipt” to your recipient. IIRC this depended on a proprietary (or non-standard) attachment. The recipient would have to acknowledge the read receipt, then an email would be send back to you in the background and your local copy of OE would process it and produce a “read” checkmark somewhere in the UI. A horribly Kludgy and inefficient process!
Nylas handles read receipts with a server-side process, similar to the way Mail Chimp, etc track opens and clicks. It’s totally seamless.
I found this to be a compelling, albeit creepy feature. My main complain is that the there was no in-app way to disable the notification. Though, seeing someone open your email immediately after sending it, then not hearing back from them (ever!) is also horribly disheartening.
3. Snooze/Send Later
Prior to Nylas, my email client (both on desktop and mobile) has been Google Inbox, prior to that I was using Mailbox. A key feature with both clients was “snooze,” it allows you to basically resend an email to yourself at a later date (or location). My stress level surrounding email decreased 1000% when I started using snooze, I can’t live without it.
I had assumed that Nylas’ snooze feature would sync with Google Inbox’s snooze. Unfortunately they don’t, so Inbox on my phone had no knowledge of the snoozes I’d set in Nylas. Bummer.
Send later is sort of the opposite feature to snooze. It’s a great way to compose an email to a client at midnight and have it automatically send during regular business hours, for example. In the past I’d used Boomerang to send later with gmail. I had been missing the feature since Boomerang is not compatible with Inbox. Nylas’ send later works as advertised. Bonus.
Nylas is good. It’s been a long time since a decent alternative has entered the email client arena. I recommend you give it a try.
Unfortunately, there’s one big issue. The search, it just doesn’t seem to work right. I found myself switching back to inbox to search almost every time.
And there are a few other minor issues that will prevent me from using it.
These are all fairly minor, I know. But for me they add up to a deal breaker.
Update: A thread in r/pokemongo addresses most of the game playability gripes i express below. Very useful if you’re new to the game. Check it out.
Much hyped Pokémon Go finally launched in Canada over the weekend (while I was out camping). I downloaded it ASAP, after some expected server issues setting up my account, I fired up the game in a few random places on my way back home. I was able to catch a handful of Pokémon at the random places we stopped along the way and a few at home.
I noticed a Pokéstop down the street so I thought I’d try the walk-around-in-circles-staring-at-my-phone-like-an-idiot thing I’ve been hearing so much about… literally everywhere. The Pokéstop was about 600m away and rewarded me with 3 Pokéballs for my efforts. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I found this to be a disappointing amount. I did not encounter any wild pokémon along the way, so I decided to take a more circuitous route home, in an attempt to stumble across more. I did not.
To be clear, I have no idea how to play this game.
On my walk, I noticed several leaf type patterns pop up on the map, I assumed these represented Pokémon burrowing or scurrying away. So I attempted to follow and capture them.
There is no real in-game indication on how you are supposed to do this. I can’t be sure if I was unable to catch one because I was doing something wrong; there was a server issue; or if it’s intended to be extremely difficult to find a Pokémon. When I finally found one, the process of catching a Pokémon was equally non-intuitive. A target appears overtop of the character, so looks like you’re supposed to try to throw balls right at it. But the “catch” animation seems to happen behind the character. But when you throw a ball behind the character, nothing it doesn’t work! Or maybe it’s random? All-in-all I found it extremely frustrating and disappointing.
After finishing this post I’ll do some research, I’m sure I must be doing something wrong. After all a game with such mass appeal must be much more intuitive.
From a more technical perspective, the augmented reality aspects of the game are a little overblown. The game does 2 things that are being called “augmented reality.”
1) Spawning locations and characters on top of a real world map. I suppose this is interesting, but not a ground breaking technical achievement in 2016. It seems to rely mainly on readily available, quality, map data.
2) The Pokémon appear in the real world! Except they don’t really. The game seems to pick a point, roughly on the horizon and the Pokémon graphics are overlaid over the image of the camera, rather dumbly. Pokémon aren’t hiding behind bushes or taking into account the real world in any way. I caught one that spawned on my son’s face.
Overall, to someone who was a few years too old to be caught up by the original Pokémon craze, the most interesting thing about Pokémon Go is the cultural phenomenon. I think it’s popularity can be attributed solely to the popularity of the Pokémon brand.
I’ll be sure to report back with a followup post after I ask a 10 year old how to actually play the game.