first post from the touch
this is a post typed from the iPod touch to see how easy it isto use. Aside from not having a proper keyboard it seems to work fine. Great for blogging on the move.
There is a level three risk of foresst fires at the moment. Now is a time when smoking and other forms of fire should be forbidden. Now is the time of year where the sides of roads catch alight easily. Forests are at risk.
Yesterday when driving home I spotted a fire by the side and I reported it on Waze. They don’t have a “warn about roadside fires” option yet. I have now added it as a suggestion.The sooner a fire can be reported, the sooner firefighters or other emergency services can put it out.
Hashtags
I hate hashtags. I have tweeted my hate for them since they came out in 2007 or 2008. I hate them because I came to the web when meta information was meant to be hidden in the meta data of a page, not plastered as white text on a white background to spam search engines.
I was playing with the Pixelfed iOS app yesterday and I wanted to explore the social network. I gave up within seconds. I scrolled down and I saw that rather than sub groups that were for cats, dogs, lemmings, landscapes and more the sub categories, or categories were hashtags.
Why Hashtags are crap
Hashtags are crap for two reasons. The first of these, as I argued back in 2007-2008 is that it makes it easy for spammers to look for a hashtag and start to spam a conversation with little to no effort. It neutralises the possiblity of good engaged conversations, especially around some topics.
The second reason is that with WordPress, Hugo and other content management system style services you can generate pages with tags and categories directly.
The Origin of the Hashtag
People forget that the hashtag was developed when Twitter was an SMS compatible system. Hashtags would allow people to quickly and easily see the topic of a tweet withing having to read the entire text. Now though, in the age of dedicated apps, the hashtag is obsolete, and should be destroyed.
Threads Wants Hashtags
I’m writing about this topic because I saw that Pixelfed uses hashtags, rather than tags or categories, which I find absurd, but also because I see that Threads wants to implement hashtags.
So Called Ugly URLs
The same culture that calls hyperlinks with extentions ugly is fine with #tags. That’s absurd. As an archivist and Media asset manager I think that having /topic/index.html that resolves to /topics/ is much uglier than /topic/ducks.html because when you want to find a file you need to sort through thousands of index.html files that mean nothing if you don’t read the front matter of the files.
Hashtags are Fashion Over Function
Hashtags, in my eyes, are fashion over function. By adding a tags text field, you could add keywords/tags, and have the software create relevant hyperlinks. Tags work extremely well on Hugo,and categories work well on WordPress. We don’t need to use ugly hashtags, when proper meta data practices would do the same thing, without wasting characters.
An Alternate Solution For Idiots Like Me
The alternate solution, to keep idiots like me, happy, would be to see that someone wrote hashtag keyword, and have the website parse the hashtag and turn it into a hyperlink to that keyword automatically. We have had href tags for decades, and that’s why hashtags are so absurd.
It encourages me to see that not everyone puts hashtags in every post on Mastodon.
Content creation and Social Networks both fulfil our need to communicate with others. In one case we are working on the long form and creating content in blog form, photographs, well produced videos and more and through certain social networks we do the opposite. On twitter and facebook we spend most of our time writing two or three sentences at a time. These posts are quickly out of date.
Content creation in the form of article writing, blogging, well produced video, photo essays and more take time. You need to think of an idea and you need to think of a narrative. You need to find 300 words of content. You need to find at least two or three minutes of content if not more. If you challenge yourself to create this content then you see why facebook, twitter, vine and other short or quick social sharing platforms are so popular. It also explains why Geocities and other platforms eventually implode.
According to recode Twitter is making a huge video push — and tweaking Vine’s six second limit in the process.
The move is also symbolic of Twitter’s willingness to change elements of its product that have become part of its identity. Last month Twitter tweaked its iconic 140 character limit to get people tweeting more. Now it’s tweaking Vine’s six second video restriction, too. Former Vine boss Jason Toff (who left in January for Google) told
Recode last fall that Vine’s video limit was not “overly sacred.â€
Vimeo differentiated itself from other video sharing services in that it showed that it wanted high quality edited videos rather than rushes like we used to find on Google. In the last few months the quality of videos on youtube has really increased. There are a number of gameplay, engineering, fitness videos, how-to instructional videos and more. Finally Youtube is a source for serious content. We will see when Vine, Snapchat and other video services establish the same reputation.
Letter writing and blogging are similar. Recently Documentally started letter writing again. These “letters” are newsletters written every friday and sent by e-mail to a small number of people. I too have started “letter writing” but as blog posts. The beauty of “letter writing” is that we can write when we have time rather than when people are available. As these are asynchronous people can read what we wrote ten minutes or ten years from now. Now that instant messaging style social media conversations are sent back to the history books we have a greater freedom to choose where we share content.
I have had a meetup.com account since I was using yahoo as my primary e-mail provider. For years my account was dormant because activities that I
At the same time as my meetup habit is picking up my FaceBook is declining. I am now into my fifth day without using the social network. I stopped using FaceBook and Instagram because whereas they used to be networks to keep in touch with friends they are now networks to enrich influencers and leaving us feeling empty. Add to this the genocide, the monopoly and other issues and you see why we decrease the habit.
Social networks should first and foremost be about connecting people and enabling them to enrich their lives by both meeting new people and by practicing the activities that they enjoy. Social networks should empower people to find people with whom to have adventures and a social life. Social networks should contribute towards an active existence.
Twitter and Seesmic were two social networks that encouraged people to converse, and have such a great time in the virtual world that they wanted to meet in person. Facebook
In using Meetup.com for several weeks I have met new people, started climbing again and I have come home feeling fulfilled. This is especially true for last Wednesday and this Sunday. When I do group activities sports are not my motivation. Socialising is. I want to meet new people and I want to converse. I am an active participant rather than an observational introvert. Groups that are inclusive of introverts are worth being part of.
In summary we use social networks because we want to diminish solitude Networks that allow us to connect with people on a personal level are to be prioritised. Those that leave us feeling disconnected should be unplugged.
A few days ago I noticed that twitter was tweeting their programs as they were on in German and this looked like a good idea. I commented it was a shame that they didn’t have the same in French. Within a few days it’s there. This morning I saw Arte’s tweet for one program and so I’m watching a guy play some Chopin on the Piano.
I spend quite a bit of time watching the twitter stream so if someone gives me their program details, as an opt in then there’s a good chance that I will tune into the program on the spare of the moment.
If I had intended to watch the program at 2038 in three days time I would have forgottten about it. As things are that’s what’s playing on the right side of my screen now.
For two weeks I have been sorting through terabytes of data and it has been a journey through time. It’s easy to collect data and every so often when the laptop is full, move that data to a hard drive until that drive is full, and then onto the next, and the next, until you have a drive or two per year, for several years.
What makes this interesting is that these drives have dmg files, iso images and more. They also have fitness tracker files and dive logs, and versions of your website as it changed over the years, and more. It reminds you of when you used Adobe Air and a Nokia 95 8gb and more. It also gives you access to files you had completely forgotten about but are happy to find. It’s photos and videos that have value.
I tried to move Aperture and iPhoto libraries but they are very annoying to move because they contain tens of thousands of files. They contain thumbnails, preview files, a complicated folder structure and general chaos. When you move a photo app gallery from one drive to another it’s very slow because of all the files within. I usually choose “show package contents” go to “master” folder, and move the photo albums by year to an external folder. Transferring galleries this way is much faster. It takes the time to move data, rather than the time to recreate the complex folder structure.
In the process of clearing drive space I found that I had old versions of Linux on several drives. Some of those might have been good for 32bit challenges. I don’t remember if I kept any, or deleted them whilst trying to reduce the amount of gigabytes to transfer.
Each one hundred gigabytes I transfer takes about an hour, so if I can delete several hundred gigabytes of files I will save several hours of sitting and waiting for files to transfer. I’m writing this blog post as I move 278 gigabytes in about two hours. If it says “more than two hours” it means that it will take almost three hours. Moving terabytes of data between drives takes a lot of time, especially with older drives, especially if the file structure is complex.
Final Cut Pro has package files. Within these package files you will find render folders, transcode folders, and other files. You can safely remove render files, but with originals and transcode files I would double check that those files are still available somewhere else before deleting them. Transcode files, render files, and preview files are regenerated when you open a project so you can remove them to save space once a project is finished.
For some reason I went into the FCP package file and moved the folder structure to outside of Final Cut Pro. It took me a while to realise this. As soon as I did I copied the folder back into the package file and when I established that all the files were duplicated I deleted the duplicate files and saved several hundred gigabytes. I also saved several hours of my time for transferring. I also saved time that I would otherwise have spent sorting. I still have 1.8 terabytes to move, so that’s another 16 hours or so to go.
When consolidating files from several smaller drives to a large central volume the most time consuming part is the time that it takes to move data from old drives to newer drives. It’s at least an hour per hundred gigabytes so ten hours per terabyte. The one good thing is that you can start the transfer and forget about it until you notice a message about duplicates, or other.
This is time consuming but eventually I will have well organised files and I will be able to add the volume or two to photoprism and photoprism will index everything. It will be worthwhile in the end.
Yesterday afternoon I dropped by Nik’s house, (Loudmouthman) for what would be the first Social Media Living room event. The idea is simple. Participants of Social Media, whether through Twitter, Seesmic and other networks meet in the physical world to have nice conversations.
Quite a few people turned up including Fred2baro, Danacea, Mark Harrison, Jason Jarrett and one or two other individuals. we talked about tech and about life. The point is that to create a podcamp takes too much time and there is a need for more frequent smaller events. This was a perfect opportunity.
Among the amusing features of last night was the recording of a seesmic post via three laptops, three accounts and three webcams. We joked about which camera to look into and it was yet another example of taking Social Media friendships into the physical world.
No more complaining that spending time online means meeting fewer people. It doesn’t. I’m looking forward to more such events.