Ron Guest

Tools of the trade today, ready and waiting. The wine is Molly Dooker “The Boxer”. 🍷

We have our 🦃 in the oven and everyone is looking forward to having a special day together. ❤️

I’m thankful for the community of people I’ve found on micro.blog and to @manton for providing a place for us to gather. It’s a great post-social media tool.

The sky was lovely but the clouds were a bit confused (multiple types meandering around today). 📷 ⛅️

Now that I’ve used Micro.blog’s ActivityPub feature to create a Mastodon compatible name I no longer need cross-posting (my posts will go to Mastodon’s federated timeline). And I can follow a Mastodon user by entering their name in the search on the Discover tab of the iOS app.

I think Ars Technica’s post today on Facebook’s harmful nature is spot on: “Sorry Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook isn’t a ‘positive force’. Facebook makes users depressed, and Facebook posts helped fuel ethnic cleansing.” This is a result of active choices by Zuckerberg.

Question for those with the new iPad Pro + Apple keyboard: If you fold the keyboard back when not in use, e.g. to draw on it on a table or lap, how much does the fact the keys are still exposed bother you? Dig into your legs or etc on a lap?

On a short road trip with my wife today and back tonight. WiFi and cell coverage limitations are sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful. 🗺 🚙

The problem isn’t services selling likes, it is the whole notion of Likes and Followers that is to blame for what amounts to fraud.

Instagram is cracking down on services that sell ‘Likes’ and followers - Recode

For Micro Monday I’d like to suggest you look at the timeline of @numericcitizen Great photos and overall good taste in what he shares. Interests and inspires.

My wife got a sewing machine and is learning how to make clothes. Here our son models Mom’s first ever pajama pants. 📷 🧵 👖

Bought an Apple pie today. It will not survive to Thanksgiving. 🥧 📷

There are a lot of pieces and connections (some required, some optional) for users adopting Micro.Blog. As a new user back in January I was often a bit muddled about the relationships. I decided to map out the ones I’m aware of. I’ve used many of these myself.

• The left column lists many of the ways a user can post using micro.blog. This is more important than you might think because none of those boxes is equal to the other. They each have limitations/advantages or bugs that impact what you can/can’t do. Especially early on I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out which to use. It’s gotten better lately.
• The center column, above the backend, has some apps/sites that also host blogs (I just listed WordPress and blot.im for now).
• Along the bottom I drew the micro.blog backend in the center pushing updates to Github pages which is then cloned to a repo on my Mac. Since that clone is in an iCloud folder it serves as a sort of crude and imperfect backup of last resort.
• The column on the right shows destinations other than Github pages: the micro.blog timeline, Twitter, Mastodon, and etc. I put Instagram there as well but I didn’t connect it yet because I haven’t successfully used OwnYourGram (I’m sure I just need to spend more time on it). N.B. I don’t currently cross-post to Twitter either.

I’m a rather visual person for data like this so it is helpful to me. Not sure if it helps anyone else.

Wasting time on some Fallout 76. 📷

Our dog is not happy 🐶📷

My year-end MB goal: follow 100 users. Current count: 79 users

How many people I follow is such a better metric to think about than how many people follow me. It shouldn’t be hard for me to add 21 followees (?). Maybe there should be badges for following people //@macgenie

Sitting at the bar for dinner and a guy sits next to us. With a new 11” iPad Pro and keyboard case. Envy!

My conscience much more often brings to mind “I wish I hadn’t done that” moments from my distant past than moments where I made a wise decision to avoid what would have been a big mistake. 🧠

Unsung macOS advance: I’m “one of those people” who manually run disk checks on my Macs every month. In the past repairs were needed every couple of months. But since Apple introduced APFS I haven’t needed to use First Aid a single time. Stress–

As part of switching back to hosting via micro.blog I’m doing some thoughts regarding feng shui of my overall net presence. I’m frequently torn because when something new comes along I’m all “oh, shiny new toy let’s try it” but its often just a PITB that pays me nothing back.

I’m in the process of changing back from posting to my WP site to posting and having content hosted on micro.blog. My apologies if anything “unusual” appears on the timeline… 🤷‍♂️

I feel rather dirty lately.

The below setup to host Windows 10 on an external SSD on my Fusion drive iMac is working really well. But it means disk access on macOS feels rather slow in comparison. Forgive me Steve Jobs.

My saga creating an external SSD for booting Windows 10

I’m not “at peace” with my current blogging set up and I’m hoping some of you will provide some advice or insight. A year since starting down the IndieWeb path I’d really like to evolve my approach. So if you’re inclined can you read my post on my muddle? Thx In a blogging muddle

With all the changes in the social media world the past year or two and the rise of new ways to blog/post I find my mind in a bit of a muddle. I’d really like your input on a simple approach to achieve what I think I’m aiming for. Here are the attributes I’d like to have (probably not complete but the best I’ve come up with):

• Portability: I want my posts to be portable. By this I mean if however I'm hosting the content goes boom (or I just want to change my setup/services) I have full access to my content in a form I can import in an automated way. I have >10 years of posts.
• Private Journal Support: I want to (continue) to have an automation that adds my new posts to my private journal (Day One using IFTTT currently).
• Content-type Feeds: Optionally I'd like to separate out feeds into short posts, long posts, and image/video posts.
• IndieWeb: I want my setup to be "IndieWeb Conformant" (not a real thing but I think you can guess what I mean). This includes aspects such as authentication, collecting responses, etc.
• Cross-posting: I want one post to rule them all. By this I mean I want to be able to selectively distribute my posts to any site/service. Of course some sites/services are not open to this but I want what I'm using to make it possible as much as reasonable. The most important platform for my client app is iOS. macOS is optional as long as there is a browser option.
  • At present I think cross-posting to micro.blog, mastodon and possible Twitter are important to me. I stopped posting to Twitter about 6 months ago but if they follow through on the changes mentioned recently I might return.
• Site Design: I want to have some control over the format/display of my site, ability to add new pages, backgrounds or etc. I generally like clean and simple formats (such as on blot.im and to an extent micro.blog).
• Backup: My content needs to have a solid backup method.
• Reliability: I want the services I use to have good support, reliablility and performance. I'm a low volume poster.
• Ease of Maintenance: I would like it to "just work" unless I happen to be breaking it making improvements.

When I started using Micro.blog in January it covered some of this but there were some major gaps. There have been marked improvements but some areas of concern remain (I haven’t gotten the impression these will be addressed in the foreseeable future):

• Portability (I may not understand but GitHub pages doesn't seem like a good approach)
• Micro.blog doesn't doesn't really allow me to control where a post goes on a post-by-post basis. It's easy to forget the last setting used and there are no visual clues in the UI.
• Backup (again, only Github pages as far as I know)
• Reliability is still a bit of a concern as I regularly get errors/timeouts trying to post. I am also concerned that the backend of MB is a "one man band" and it's future depends on a single person.

At present I have a self-hosted WordPress instance for my content (some notes on the setup here). It’s been rock solid on reliability (whenever the MB clients can’t post WP always works) and is relatively portable. But it’s high(er) maintenance and completely overpowered for my needs – it gives me the same feeling I get when I order food at a restaurant and they serve me a plate with more food than I could eat in a week. I would also say that my setup is a “one man band” so if I tire of maintaining WP or am sick for awhile or etc it might go down.

Nothing is perfect in technology. Looking over my list vis-a-vis Micro.blog I think I could go back to a MB hosted approach if there was a better solution for portability/backup. In any event, I’m open to any and all input. It will soon be a year since I decided to go the “microblogging” route and it seems like it is high time I settled on my approach.

This is canon, via Chris Mills.

The definitive book about Windows 10 error messages

It’s not a campfire but the fireplace made some adequate s’mores. 🔥