Category: Wandering.Shop

Interesting read: Misinformation & propaganda are guaranteed to spring up around pandemics, but they won’t …

Interesting read: Misinformation & propaganda are guaranteed to spring up around pandemics, but they won’t have quite the same political baggage as elections. Any solutions & mitigations for pandemics should help against political disinformation too.

Fake News and Pandemics

On Wandering.shop

2024 note: so much for that idea.

Timing. Last week I moved some downloaded images from a dying device where the USB …

Timing. Last week I moved some downloaded images from a dying device where the USB port was no longer reliable by copying them to Google Drive and was surprised to find the images showing up in Google Photos.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who found that confusing.

Now, Google is disconnecting the two services from each other so that when you upload to one service, you know which service the file is going into.

https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/

On Wandering.shop

@Algot It’s interesting how that changes the effect. To me, the red-circle version looks like …

@Algot It’s interesting how that changes the effect. To me, the red-circle version looks like red (on red), almost the same red except slightly orange (on green), and magenta (on blue).

I guess there’s enough contrast with the red circle & green stripes that my brain doesn’t meld it as much as it does the other color combinations.

On Wandering.shop

SDK complaining

You have an API that, for whatever reason, uses FIVE different formats for transmitting dates and times.

You also have a Java SDK that will generate the XML requests and parse the responses.

Shouldn’t it be the SDK’s job to convert a standard Date object into the five different formats your XML gateway needs, and convert the responses, instead of making devs keep track of which format you want where and do all the conversion themselves?

On Wandering.shop

I spotted some of these feral parrots in the grocery store parking lot today.

Green and red parakeet in a palm tree, grooming its leg.

Green and red parakeet in a palm tree.

Green and red parakeet in a palm tree, looking sideways.

Two of these parakeets flew across the grocery store parking lot into a palm tree, squawking as they went. I could only spot one of them once they’d settled, but I managed to get almost a dozen photos of it while it sat there.

On iNaturalist

Link: Feral Parrots Are Taking Over America!

“These birds, descendants of escaped pets, have managed to create thriving colonies in these cities despite the annual cold weather.”

On Wandering.shop

I spotted some of these feral #parrots in the grocery store parking lot today. Two #parakeets flew across the lot into a palm tree, squawking as they went. I could only spot one of them once they’d settled, but I managed to get almost a dozen photos of it while it sat there.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/26590485

#birds #parakeets #FeralParakeets #FeralParrots
#nature #wildlife #photos

On Photog.Social

TODO: combine with this post and others

rambling thoughts on self hosting

Thinking about what it means to self-host a service, and that there are degrees even within that.

I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in the sense that I manage an installation of WordPress, but I run it on a VPS at a web host. It’s not as self-hosted as someone running a server on a Lollipop or FreedomBox, but it’s more self-hosted than someone using WordPress.com. It’s also more self-hosted than someone using the managed WordPress hosting at the same web host.

On Wandering.shop

The key advantages of self-hosting are privacy and control. Unless a service uses end-to-end encryption, the admins at each level can probably read your stuff – you have to trust that they won’t do it unless they have to.

And of course when you run your own service, you don’t have to fear losing control when Google Plus shuts down, or Flickr changes their pricing structure, or Tumblr changes their TOS, or MySpace botches a server migration.

On Wandering.shop

The obvious disadvantage of self-hosting, of course, is that you’re on the hook for all the maintenance. Spam filtering, moderation, security updates, server migrations – those are all on you.

And unless you’re using your own software, even on your own box there’s still the risk that a project is going to shut down & leave you without security fixes, or pivot to a new direction that no longer fits what you want. (So glad WP’s block editor is still optional!)

On Wandering.shop

@iona Yeah, that’s sort of the balance I’ve settled on, too. I manage the top-level web apps, but my webhost handles the hardware, the virtualization and the LAMP stack.

(And email. Ugh, I’d forgotten how much of a pain a mailserver can be to handle until I tried to set one up on a Raspberry Pi a couple of months ago.)

I guess I’m kind of splitting the difference.

On Wandering.shop
On Blog

Fascinating: At the Guédelon medieval construction site in central France, builders are reconstructing a 13th …

Fascinating: At the Guédelon medieval construction site in central France, builders are reconstructing a 13th century castle using only the technologies and materials that were available at the time. Hand-quarried stone cut with hand-forged tools, treadwheel cranes, etc.

A medieval castle in France could be Notre Dame’s salvation

#history #architecture #france

On Wandering.shop