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Twitter’s Not For Me

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Twitter has a new For You page inspired by TikTok’s For you page according to Quartz. Many years ago we had Seesmic, a video chat community where people could share video messages 24 hours a day. We even experimented with recording videos and sharing them by phone when this was still novel.

Tik Tok has a critical flaw, as do plenty of the more popular social networks. As someone said on Mastodon today, “You have to be fast to say something new, before hundreds of other people have posted every possible reaction. That is what’s wrong with social networks today. I use social networks because I think social media is an awful term, used to encourage abuses rather than empathy.

By shifting to the “For You” algorithm based model Twitter is making the mistake that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other websites have made. It is forcing people to see populist crap rather than personal and meaningful chats.

I saw someone tweet “I have 8000 followers and my tweets have 3 million views.”

Social media should never be about huge follower numbers, and millions of views. It should be about personal conversations that lead people to want to meet in person. It should be about connecting with people.

The more Musk destroys Twitter, the easier it is to stay away for hours at a time, and to spend minutes rather than hours on the site. I played with Substack but I don’t want to post too often because I don’t want to generate too much noise. I am also playing with a shorter form WordPress blog. With the short form blog I don’t mind being noisy because I clearly state that it is a Facebook/Twitter replacement.

As soon as websites use recommendation engines, rather than chronological posts, I move away and I lose interest. Social media should be relevant and timely, not algorithm driven populist mediocrity. Time to move on.

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Fondue for Lunch

Fondue for Lunch

Byrichard

The weather was cold and cloudy this lunchtime so going up to the mountains for lunch was feasible. If the restaurant had been filled with people, and if we had shared a table with others, then I would have skipped and driven home. Luckily the road was closed to go up to the mountains so that stopped some people from going up. There were also the benefits of clouds and cold air temperatures. Combined these things meant that the restaurant was less tempting for large crowds. We ate a fondue.


View of La Dole from the other side
View of La Dole from the other side


I did not plan to go up. It was spontaneous, and I had my own car, so that if I saw that it was too busy I could turn back or walk to the summit. We’re still in a pandemic, so if I feel a risk is too great I bail.


Today is interesting because it seems quieter than it should be. The restaurant was quieter, but the villages and other places are quieter too. It’s as if people are hibernating or hiding. I saw that all the cars are goine from the garage for example.


In other news a Valaisanne, dressed as Lucy Walker climbed the Matterhorn in period costume. In Uri, due to the glaciers melting people are asked to be attentive to archeological remains. If we leap to the space age then we see that SpaceX might be struggling to find enough liquid oxygen due to the pandemic. With hospitals needing more of it SpaceX might be in second place to get it.


https://twitter.com/UkTravelling/status/1431612722467250183

Kdrive and PhotoPrism

Kdrive and PhotoPrism

Byrichard

Yesterday I configured PhotoPrism to work with my iPhone photo album that was being synced to Infomaniak’s Kdrive, before then being synced to a drive that I could access via the Photoprism docker-compose config file. I then used No-ip to make that PhotoPrism instance available to the world wide web.

For several years I have had an Infomaniak Kdrive account but did not use it much, until I noticed that what costs 100 CHF with Google Drive costs 67 CHF with Kdrive. That’s a 34 CHF franc saving.

Migrating Data from Google to Infomaniak

This is interesting because of two things. The first one is that you can easily migrate your Google Photos Albums to Kdrive, and from Kdrive to your local machine without having to spend hours doing so manually. I am in the process of migrating from Kdrive to my local drive, for my Google Takeout album but this is slow.

What worked well was telling Kdrive to download the iPhone photo album from the Kdrive cloud to my local machine. I then edited the docker-compose config file but it took some trial and error before I understood how it works. It’s simple.

Telling PhotoPrism Where to Look

In my mind it should be “label: destination” but this is wrong. With Photoprism config files it is destination: label. To explain this more clearly: 

volumes:
 - "/mnt/photos:/photoprism/originals"
 - "/mnt/videos:/photoprism/originals/videos"

“mnt/photos” is the folder location and “photoprism/originals” is the label that docker and photoprism recognise. This is important because when you understand this you can set an external drive to be the photo gallery main drive, run index, and catalogue everything.

Ingesting Photos and Videos

If you export your Google Photos albums via Google Takeout, you can unzip the 2 gigabyte files, and as they unzip the files and their related JSON files are all brought together. Tell PhotoPrism that the Google Takeout folder is the import folder. After this mark “move files once ingested” and press import. PhotoPrism will then ingest all those files, delete what has already been ingested, catalogue everything, and leave you with an organised folder of photos and videos.

The indexing stage is very fast but can still take time, depending on album size.

The Next Step

There are two possible next steps. The first is to access this gallery from anywhere using tailscale, or using No-IP to access your photo album remotely. I recommend tailscale for this stage, because I haven’t seen much information about how secure PhotoPrism is so I’d rather not risk it.

I setup no-ip before telling my router about it and within a few minutes I had access to PhotoPrism and Nextcloud via No-Ip. I will write about that experiment tomorrow.

And Finally

When you’re playing with linux, and experimentating with projects like PhotoPrism you need to take time to understand how they work, to adapt them to your use case. I did this. Now I can get PhotoPrism to behave as I want it to. Now I can use external hard drives, and index photos, without having to import them. Within minutes I can plug in a drive, tell PhotoPrism where to find it, index it, and then use it.

If it had two factor authentication and more security measures then I would consider having it on the cloud, but for now I’m happy to use it via Tailscale’s VPN, as this is more secure.

Apple Health Step Data Sources
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Apple Health Step Data Sources

Byrichard

Yesterday I spent some time looking through Apple Health Data Sources. I see that there are plenty of data sources. These are the Apple watch, the iphone, Alltrails, move, connect, stepsapp, pacer, Suunto, Ingress and three more that are marked as inactive.


Move is the app that gets data from some Casio watches. Connect is Garmin connect and gets step data from Garmin devices. If I take steps and they are logged with a casio or a garmin device they do not count in iOS apps but if I take steps with Garmin and Casio devices without also wearing the Apple watch the same steps are not counted.


The Apple Fitness and Health apps have access to all the same data. Everything goes to a central database on the iPhone. It’s from the iphone that the data is not shared transparently between all other apps.


In practice whether you have a suunto, Garmin, Apple Watch or other fitness tracker each device should feed, or retrieve data from Apple health, and each should display that data, regardless of which device you wear.


Whether I wear my Garmin, Suunto or Apple watch I would like all three to access health data transparently so that I can choose which individual watch I want to wear on a specific day. I don’t want to have to wear all three of them. Not that I do. I only have two wrists. 😉 I can only wear two at once.


The privacy argument is moot, because each app can be granted access to Apple Health, and Apple Health can be granted access to each app. This means that all the data is already transiting both ways for all apps.


And Finally


When you buy a Casio or other watch the battery is expected to last from three years to ten years, and you are expected to replace the battery when it dies. With the Apple watch, now that it is four years old, the next step would be to swap the battery. The Apple watch is now at 70 percent. The battery costs 79 CHF to replace.


When the Suunto battery got low on the Ambit 3 I got a Spartan, but when I replaced the Spartan I went for a Garmin, so I lost the ability to keep my old log going, and had to migrate to the Garmin app. With the Apple Watch we’re on yet another silo. Every brand has a silo. With the Apple watch it’s worse, because you have the fitness app, but then you have all the third party apps. Everything would break at once if you stop using the Apple Watch.


I would love for Garmin, Suunto and Apple wath to allow the free flow of tracking data in both directions, so that I could choose the best device to wear, and the best app to fiddle around with. Strava is the giant in the room, but I don’t want to use an app where I have to pay a premium for added functionality.



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The Kendra Party – Networking Event and Party

Byrichard

Last night I went to the Kendra event not knowing what to expect from the event. It started at 6pm and ended by 9pm and i had the opportunity to meet with a few people of which Brendon Kenny of VK media and the Jummp project.


A large amount of metadata is currently being discarded without understanding its value! JuMMp aims to promote interoperability for metadata and signalling information exchange. This will enable contextual navigation within live and recorded content for users of digital devices such as PVRs, games consoles, mobile phones and computers – providing value to end users and to all stakeholders in the content chain.


It’s an interesting project and you can participate in the conversaton and learn more through their facebook group. It’s an interesting project with some very interesting backers so I look forward to seeing how they implement this in the wild.


Other people I met with are Mark and Alex of Astream – a streaming service provider, Darren of Ioda, an independent online distribution Alliance and Dennis of zzizzlfilm – short film distribution for filmmakers by filmmakers. I was also introduced to Nick, product development Director for Bsky and a few more people.


It was a good event with many interesting people to meet and whenever the next event is organised I will make sure to turn up.

Twitter Threads and Blogging
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Twitter Threads and Blogging

Byrichard

Twitter threads and blogging are both free but whereas with one you need to click to read the continuation and it’s hard to print the other is self contained and easily shareable.


I see twitter threads, that as twitter threads are a waste of time on a conversational channel but would be ideal for a blog post. Imagine that you combine two or three tweets. That length would justify a blog post.


Blog posts can be of any length but ideally they should be three hundred words or more. In the case where a twitter thread has three or more points it would perfectly justify a three or more paragraphs post.


With a blog post you can source and give examples of the point you are trying to make and you are not limited to a specific number of characters. You don’t need to run a sentence from one tweet to the other.


You can also add images, documents and more and add headings and more. If you often feel the desire to write threads you could even take up blogging again.


Your blog posts can be written with a mobile phone at any time of day or night and from anywhere. I mention this because with the unreliability of newer Mac book pros mobile phones become a more tempting proposition.


I deleted twitter from my mobile phone because the signal to noise ratio is so high that it is no longer a social tool. It is used like RSS and the conversation is uni-directional. Do you really want your train of thought to compete in such a noisy environment?


The blogosphere is just as noisy as twitter but with one key difference. People who read blog posts are looking to invest their time rather than scroll mindlessly. We might as well take advantage of that.


I saw an image on Facebook that said that we need to keep our social media appropriate for good mental health. I’m suggesting that we take it a further step and skip social networks like Facebook and twitter and start conversing via blog posts again. Let’s re-allocate the time that we devoted to social media to self owned blogs and platforms where we go to learn, share and be creative.


I still love blogging because the aim and the challenge is to find just one idea to write about daily. It’s easy to write 20 tweets and post twenty thoughts a day to Facebook. It’s much harder to write one blog post a day. The challenge is good. We gain in creativity, self discipline and focus.


Next time you’re tempted to write a twitter thread stop yourself and write a blog post. It will take the same amount of time but your audience will be more engaged, eventually. Give your ideas the treatment they deserve.

Close to Success – Exporting Instagram images to WordPress Natively
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Close to Success – Exporting Instagram images to WordPress Natively

Byrichard

When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.


When Facebook bought Instagram that slowly changed. Algorithms and popularity contests became more important than sharing between friends and so the sense of community was lost and we were posting for strangers rather than friends.


For months, or even a number of seasons now, I have felt that Instagram is just a way of forcing us to see images by people we are not that interested in, with the hope that we will eventually see images that are relevant to us. That time investment we make is devalued when you consider that the Facebook behemoth is making millions from our mindless scrolling.


During the pandemic my patience for social media finally fizzled out and I’ve been playing with my website. By playing I mean, experimenting, learning, and developing and trying new ideas.


One of those ideas was to export my Instagram account and find a way to flip it over to Wordpress. Why Wordpress, rather than another social network? WordPress is an open-source social network that we control. We control advertising, we control posting frequency, we control layout, and best of all, there is no group of investors holding our… …I’ll leave that to your creative imagination, over the fire.


I tried finding tools to import from JSON to WordPress but in one case I needed to install wp-cli and that was complicated, and I wasn’t confident that it would be tolerated by the web host. I could have asked but instead, I set myself the challenge of installing MySQL on the laptop and running the localhost for experimenting. I failed to connect my localhost WordPress install with MySQL and eventually after two days of trial and error I decided to take a break and try something easier. I tried XAMPP but then I found what looked like a simpler tool, with WP-CLI integrated.


I settled on LocalWP. With this, I tried the GitHub project I thought would help me import the JSON files but that failed so I looked for another solution and it got me 90 percent of the way to achieving what I wanted to achieve. When I confirm that this process works I will post a How-To guide.

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