How is the word dissertation progressing through the blogopshere
Here’s the result when looking up three terms for dissertation on blogpulse
Here’s the result when looking up three terms for dissertation on blogpulse
Any french speaker knows this frustration. You see that a new service is available to Switzerland, drop by the site and everything is in German. Google latitude is in German and hundreds of other sites too. The most recent site to suffer from this curse is Nokia music, recently made available in Switzerland.
It would seem that those in charge of marketing in Switzerland believe that people in Switzerland only speak German. French speakers exist too, and so do the Italian speakers. As web content creators maybe it’s time for you to offer us the services in French so that we may use them.
Will companies providing services in Switzerland ever realise we’re not all German speakers? That remains to be seen. Nokia music, you’ve lost my interest.
Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.
At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4. It tends to get hot and slow down to a crawl.
This could be seen as a failure, or as a success. The reason for which it is a success is that I managed to get NixOS to work on a Pi, in the first place, and that I managed to compile a few changes before the system became too slow to work.
With Debian too, I class it as a success, rather than a failure. I class it as a success because I read documentation, understood it, and then installed Darwin first in command line, and then with the GUI. It was working well enough for a bit. it’s when I left the machine to “sleep” and the display time out that the system failed to start again.
It counts as a success because if I had been using a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB or higher it would have worked well. It’s only because of the limitations of the hardware that this could be considered as a failure.
The other success that I am counting is that I was able to get my log ready for editing on three linux machines, within minutes, rather than quarter hours as I had previously. I have learned the work flow to get the hugo version of my blog downloaded locally, and set up the theme, and then git-ftp to upload the latest hugo compilation.
Today I wrote my blog post using VIM rather than Wordpress and VS Code so it went faster. I find that I am gravitating towards simpler blogging habits once again. I only broke with blogging via VIM because I thought it would take hours to set things up again on the current machine.
Mobile data transfer is speeding up 10.1 Megabits per second over I-HSPA.
Nokia Siemens Networks, a provider of mobile broadband solutions, completed tests with Mobilkom Austria recently testing its new I-HSPA solution. The call, conducted with an unspecified mobile device, reached downlink data speeds of up to 10.1 Mbps during the tests.
Many people have e-mail accounts and enjoy writing to their friends every day, but little do they know about the dangers of hackers or people who have too much time on their hands. A few weeks ago while I was on the computers it struck me how simple it might be to enter someone’s account. I therefore wondered what methods there were of finding passwords.
We all receive many forwards, chain letters and so on. Sometimes there are some which are like a form asking many harmless questions about your hobbies, favourite foods etc. and you fill these in without thinking very hard. Some of them even include questions such as “What is your dream vacation spot?” or “What would you buy if you won the lottery?” Notice anything? That’s right! They are the same questions as the ones that e-mail providers suggest for the password hint. By sending out this information, you invite people to attempt a break-in..
Getting to know people is another good way of getting passwords. For example one person’s hint was “Who do I like” and if you know the person, it won’t take too long to figure out the password.
Keeping the browser window open and letting someone else use the computer:
Since I have my own laptop, I am safe from this threat. But many times in the computer room I have seen some people leave the browser window open. This may seem fairly harmles but you’re encouraging someone to use your account to send messages under your name. If it happens to be someone honest using the computer after you, then nothing bad should happen. But if it is someone who is bored, angry or just has a twisted or cruel sense of humour, then they may insult a person to whom you were writing. These sorts of pranks can destroy an e-mail friendship without your even knowing why.
I hope that I have successfully demonstrated that care should be taking in choosing a password and also that you should log out and close Internet Explorer or other browsers before letting someone else use the computer.
safe surfing/ surf’s up/ logging out for now.
When you’re s student normal clocks no longer have any relevance to the way you live your life. Sometimes you go to sleep three hours after the sun rose and other times you have a nap at three in the afternoon. Occasionally you sleep from ten at night till 6 am. That’s extra ordinarily rare.
When you’re in halls this is particularly true. You’ve got an entire ethnic group in university that takes the university to be the same as school. They come in at 8 am and leave on the dot at 1900 hrs. That’s because they’re still at home and they live according to their parent’s cooking schedule. They love to play during the day.
Most of the people I know are of the night disposition. They will party all night and pull all-nighters to get work done rather than get up early in the morning to do things the way non-students do. It’s a great way of life. You might not see the sun in winter but in Summer there’s a chance you’ll be sitting in the sun soaking in the rays whilst office workers are slaving away.
It doesn’t matter, in three to four years most students will experience the same so it’s only a question of time.
Anyway, the point of this post is that I was leaving the library after doing some work on my dissertation when I spotted an orange fox lurking around. it was looking for food and that’s not hard to find where students have been. I thought that I should scare it off by hissing and stamping my foot but it remained oblivious. I decided to walk up the stairs and turned around. It was heading towards the turnstiles to get into university. Did I meet one of the rare academic foxes in North West London? Let’s see whether I see it at my graduation.
How many of you have had such encounters with nocturnal creatures?
One of the unique things about Twitter in 2006 and 2007, especially during the first tweetups was that it was a network of strangers who became friends without meeting in person. The people I became friends with in 2006-2007 are still friends now, to some degree. I met them every week at tuttle events and tweetups.
At the same time Facebook was a network of friends from university, which then became friends from work, to friends from various activities. These were networks where, in the first case, you met new people, and in the second you consolidated personal friendships in the physical world online.
This morning I noticed a Fortune article titled ‘People are posting a lot less on public social media’: Creator economy investor says the old web is gone, replaced by ‘people who are professionally entertaining you’.
The entire reason for using social media is to connect with human beings, at a human level, and to develop friendships that go from the world wide web to the physical world. By being about influencers and other charletans Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and other social networks become worthless because it’s the cult of the amateur supercharged. The Amateur who pays to create content for free, so that others can benefit is absurd.
When social media was about human beings connecting with each other, getting along, and then finding the desire to meet in person social media was a pleasant and friendly place to spend time. That’s where social media outshines other media. Social media was about connecting people. Social media was about multiplexing. Social media was about our social networks being our social net worth to use some of the marketing terminology of the time.
“creators thrive when brands are happy to pay them to create content on platforms they’re creating content on,” Lee says.” On paper this is fantastic. On paper dehumanist content creators are creating social media content creators on a platform that undercuts the sense of self, and friendships. Plenty of content on YouTube is sensationalist rubbish. They might get sponsors, and their content might be monetised, but the content is mediocre, at best.
Instagram thrived when it was a network of friends sharing photos with friends. It became absurd when it put forward the impersonal influencer.
The paradox is that I’m curious about a lot of things. If I had found YouTube videos that were worth watching, about certain products, I might have watched them, rather than surfed to articles and blog posts. One of the issues that I find with TikTok, YouTube and other platforms is that the content creators are long winded and disingenuous. They write clickbait titles to force you to watch their content, but in doing so they get me to do the opposite.
I’ve been surfing the web since the 90s so I have seen three or four decades of clickbait by now. I’m tired of the clickbait content. Influencers rely on clickbait tactics to get views, and I find this exhausting. I often browse YouTube for content, but within minutes I usually give up. Everything is sensationalist clickbait.
Most reels on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are awful tabloid crap.
“The reason people follow social media creators, the reason they bother, is partly because of the authenticity,” Kaletsky says. “There’s nothing in the world that’s less authentic than an AI-generated character. So it sort of defeats the point in many ways.”
That’s precisely why I switched away from Social Media. Sensationalist clickbait is not honest. Sensationalist clickbait is not genuine. Social media is so busy getting algorithms to push rubbish upon us that they forget that the reason we use social media is to see what people we know are doing, rather than strangers. The issue is that algorithms are showing content by strangers. That’s not influence. That’s clickbait. that’s spam. That’s irrelevant.
The entire raison d’être of social media is to be a way to see what your network of friends are enjoying and what they think of things. It’s about engaging online, and desiring to do things offline. By keeping people isolated social media is undercutting its entire reason for existing. Why should I use YouTube or Instagram if I am shown irrelevant content?
If I want to know what strangers think, I have the open web. I have search engines, and I have news sites. Since the death of Twitter I find myself blogging more, reading more articles, and doing other things. I reverted to pre-social media habits.
Social media had a reason for being, when it reduced isolation and connected people. Paradoxically Facebook groups do that. I have a deep dislike of Facebook, but that’s where it feels like I could still find an offline community that could lead to in person meetings.
I’m tired. I am tired of reading about how influencers are being put forward. I am tired of seeing articles about how influencers are having to keep social media companies happy. I am tired of never seing articles about how social media companies ignore the Return of Investment for ordinary users. One of the consequences of this focus on ROI for “influencers” is that influencers use Mastodon and the Fediverse in the same manner, diminishing the ROI of being on Mastodon instances. The focus should be on connecting people.