I’m not really using Twitter or Instagram on my iPhone much. Micro.Blog use has grown, obviously, but I’ve also rediscovered games on my phone that I downloaded a while back and never deleted. So instead of doomscrolling… Mario Kart Tour.

Been a long week. Busy weekend ahead.

Facebook trying to build a Twitter competitor… inside Instagram? Sounds like a bad idea. 🤣

Interesting article about a new “automated” McDonalds restaurant design. (It’s not automated.) The new design focuses on customers who order ahead with apps or use delivery services. A great example of how changes in consumer behavior can drive changes in the way our physical spaces are designed.

So now, I follow newsletters, Twitter users and Instagram feeds in Feedbin and Mastodon users in Micro.Blog. Interoperability is pretty cool.

I set up Instagram as a feed in Feedbin. It’s really strange, but I like it.

One of my favorite things about Micro.Blog is being able to bold and italicize in short posts. But I forget about it…

This post on software pricing from iA is really interesting. They present a history of pricing options, discuss the pros and cons of different approaches and then ask how much you would pay for their forthcoming presentation software.

Celebrating my wife’s birthday tonight at the War Mouth.

I always forget how crowded coffee shops get in a college town during exam week. (Next week, this place will be a ghost town.)

It’s been a Monday, y’all. It was rainy and gloomy all day. I’ve gotten a lot done, but I feel like my to-do list grew faster than I could check things off.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I purchased a tiny laser printer, an HP M15w, to use at home. It’s perfect for printing drafts of the papers I write for school. After years of using crappy inkjet printers, I’m really happy with this simple little black and white printer.

Finally got around to watching the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and I’ve got to say, I really enjoyed it.

This week marked the end of another semester of PhD work. Still a ways to go before I finish. I really need the next month to hit the reset button, clear my mind and get organized.

Seth Godin has some thoughts on why search engines are getting worse.

Brands: Federated

Self-hosted social

There’s lots of hype about Mastodon as people flee Twitter, but lately, I’ve been thinking about how brands will function on federated social sites.

If the big brands in the world are going to give Mastodon a shot, they aren’t going to just join an existing instance… they’ll host their own server for all of their related accounts. Let’s say you are a large international brand like Starbucks. Are you going to use @starbucks@mastodon.social? Not when you can have @official@starbucks.com, @news@starbucks.com, and @customercare@starbucks.com. If you run your own instance, you never have to worry about someone grabbing a handle you wanted to use. No worries about the content moderation policy on the instance you’ve selected. And because of the way ActivityPub works, your posts will be visible across Mastodon and other compatible services. As a bonus, it’s much harder for a fraudulent account to spoof you if you connect your federated social account to your primary domain name.

(In reality, someone will create a service to manage this for brands and charge big money for it, because there is no way a corporate IT department is going to accept the risk of running a Mastodon instance.)

Just placed a JetPens order.

Team Wertz tree decorated.

SOUTH CAROLINA UPSETS CLEMSON!!!! 🏈

I’m trying to edit down a longer study for a journal article… and the editing is 10x harder than writing the original draft.