Went for a walk round the park this afternoon. Hailstones in May!
Category Archives: posse
Liked: The Slow Death of the Power User — fireborn
This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
…
The YouTube tutorial is the perfect emblem of this rot. Tutorials are not documentation. A tutorial teaches you to perform a specific sequence of steps to achieve a specific outcome. The steps are usually correct for the specific scenario the tutorial covers. If your scenario differs — if something’s changed, if you get an error the tutorial didn’t anticipate, if you’re using a different version — the tutorial has given you no tools to respond. Documentation teaches you to understand a system: what its components are, how they interact, what the configuration options mean and why they exist, what the error messages indicate. One produces people who can follow instructions. The other produces people who understand what they’re doing. The industry has enthusiastically replaced the latter with the former and called it democratization.
Found via via Digital literacies involve layers of abstraction | Thought Shrapnel
This is a really interesting & powerful post. I didn’t touch a computer till my 30s and missed the whole BBS experience. I didn’t start with basic or the command line, but mac OS 7. The system was small and simple enough to get some sort of handle on things. Simple open ended software, HyperCard & appleScript helped too. My experience with the AOL HyperCard community was very like:
Kids learned by watching, by lurking in forums, by getting their stupid questions answered by people who then expected them to answer someone else’s stupid questions eventually
By the time OSX came along I was not ignorant of or put off by the terminal. I’ve never become expert, but I can use it in a basic fashion.
I also learned, by viewing source, how very basic html works. I know how to set Safari to show the full URL. I think these things are worth learning & teaching.
I was lucky in being exposed to tech in simpler times, there a lot of basics I know nothing about but the ones I do grasp I believe help.
As educators get excited or hot under the collar about the latest AI or design it for you free graphic package I do wonder if we have thrown the baby out with the bath water.
There is a lot more in the posts, it notes problems from the tech giants, algorithms & AI, suggesting learning and anger as possible ways to push back.
The hawthorn is starting to come out in the park.
I was planning a trip to the northwest of Scotland, close to the part of the Highlands where I’d grown up. I’d travel on public transport to locations from three favourite films. First stop: the lonely rail station at Corrour, as featured in Trainspotting – the highest mainline station in the United Kingdom, 410 metres above sea level. Then on to Morar, where Local Hero is partly filmed, on Camusdarach Beach. Finally, the Isle of Mull, star location in Powell and Pressburger’s 1945 filmic wonder I Know Where I’m Going!
Rather delightful.
php blocks in WordPress 7
How To Build PHP-Only Gutenberg Blocks In WordPress 7
PHP-only blocks are an ideal migration path for existing shortcodes. The render logic is often identical — the only difference is where the parameters come from.
As a very amateur and occasional dabbler in shortcodes & very simple plugins this looks interesting. It will need WordPress 7 and php 8.1. There are already quite a few how to articles out there already.
Victoria Park this afternoon sunny and very warm. In a sheltered spot near fossil grove we watched 2 Speckled Woods spiral, jousting up and around for quite a while. A Red Admiral and a coupe of orange tip butterflies around too.
wordpress.com/social
At WordPress.com, we believe short thoughts deserve a real home. Today we’re introducing a new theme built for quick posts, replies, and reblogs: the kind of writing that lives somewhere between a tweet and a blog post, on a site that’s entirely yours.
from: A New Theme for Short-Form Blogging on WordPress.com – WordPress.com News
A new setup on wordpress.com with front end posting, 500 char limit in their editor, but you can go past that if you use an alternative editor, WordLand for example.
It is not clear to me if the features go with the theme, or there is a plugin I can’t see at work. I’ve only got a free WordPress.com account. It looks like you could change the theme.
Of course it would be interesting to see this on self hosted WordPress sites. I did experiment with a telex block that gave simple short form posting. Not quite in a popup, but could be useful on mobile.
Update: Manton has some thoughts: Manton Reece – WordPress short-form interface.
I know, the ones without ads are mostly out on the long tail, but what matters is that anybody can podcast on the Net, just like anybody can publish there. RSS—really simple syndication—gives all of us scale. This is, as Kurt Vonnegut once said , a miracle on the order of loaves and fish. It’s foundational.
The Other Reasons Why Podcasting is Hot
🐻 Bears Repeating
Life in Links 66
I’ve not posted a set of links for a while, keep saving them, but retired life is busier than I thought it would be. I am prompted by this newletter post:
Own Your Web – Issue 18: Curators
So every time you share a link on your blog, every time you write a few sentences about why someone else’s work matters to you, every time you add a new entry to a blogroll or a links page – you are a curator. You are doing what no algorithm can do. You’re saying: I am a person. I read this. I think you should read it too.
There is a good selection of links to link curators.
I am not sure when I subscribed to Own Your Web
Own Your Web is a newsletter by Matthias Ott about designing, building, creating, and publishing for and on the Web.
But it is great. There is an RSS feed too.
The TACO Tracker: Every Time Trump Chickens Out
Trump won’t stop chickening out. We won’t stop tracking it
One of the more amusing uses of AI
Via brad who has the Indieseek.xyz Indie Web Directory
Indieseek.xyz is a small human curated, searchable, directory of web links to both websites and to individual web pages. We try and list pages that are informative, fun, classic and useful
And
Just a linkblog, mainly for articles and individual blog posts that I find and want to share. I think of this as me being a DJ only playing articles rather than songs.
Brad also post funny political thoughts most days on mastodon.
Another great source of links is Joe Jennet
i.webthings hub
Welcome to the hub of i.webthings, an independent, noncommercial web initiative
Joe credits where he finds his links which can lead to some other interesting directories.
Commonplace is a self-hosted, federated link-collection manager. You can create curated collections of links and share them with followers across both the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.) and Bluesky — without creating new accounts on either network
Created by Doug Belshaw. And changing quickly. I am logged on via indieAuth, which is nice. I’ve created a few collections, the largest so far is AI Reading. It is always interesting to try out new pieces of software.
Commonplace allows sharing collections, suggestions and replies.
Commonplace now has a bookmarklet, which is for me essential. It grabs an image and description via open graph (I’d guess) to give a description. You can edit this and add curators notes.
I’ve used a bunch of link collectors over the year, delicious, pinboard, locally in the drafts app, on my site and a few more. I’ve not used pinboard much in the last few years. I feel a bit guilty about not updating my lifetime sub when pinboard changed to annual fees. Life-timers like myself could upgrade to a yearly fee. I didn’t. I mostly use drafts in a fairly disorganised way. At the very least commonplace is giving me the chance to think a bit about my link collection & sharing. It is also interesting to watch the development, as Doug is AI coding the site.
Here is an ‘real’ teaching and learning link. I’ve been doing the odd bit of supply and wonder if I should give this a go.
micro:bit CreateAI is a free, web-based tool that makes it easy for students to explore AI through movement and machine learning (ML).
You can use micro:bit CreateAI to train an ML model and then run it on your BBC micro:bit V2.
- Collect movement data from the micro:bit accelerometer
- Train an ML model to recognise patterns in the data
- Code the micro:bit to run ML models and take your creation anywhere.
And a last weird one.
Code seems like a computer on the web. You get a desktop. Also can create web apps and get access to AI. The UI has me baffled. I might not be the audience.
Ardinning this afternoon. Very sunny & bright. A few butterflies, mostly peacocks & some orange tips. A couple of peacocks spiralled up high. Cuckoos calling. At the bench beside the loch we heard a big splash. Looking round through the bushes we saw an osprey come out of the water & fly off.