Notes

Short updates, links, and thoughts that do not need to be full blog posts.

I have no idea what to do with myself in the liminal time between Christmas and New Years! Should I be tinkering with tech projects that I'm interested in, or just playing video games guilt free?

I know I’m getting older as I just bought a new fuel can and I’m genuinely excited for it arriving 👴🏻

Is anyone using @GitHub #CodeSpaces for a multi-repo setup. Every time few months I spend a couple of days trying to get it working, fail and vow to try again later.

I was converting my personal site over to use a CMS and changed my mind at the last minute. MDX is just too damn handy. I just wish handling images was better. I want my build system to optimise them, stick them in the cloud then never think about them again.

I finally got to go #flying today. We flew a few circuits to make sure I still knew how to land before heading south to Slieve Croob then on to Bishopscourt before returning to Ards.

My wife Ellie and I in the cockpit of a light aircraft. Were both smiling and wearing aviation headsets.Slieve Donard in the distance with clouds rolling around it. I the foreground is a small lake surrounded by green fields. The wing of the plane the photo was taken from is visible in the top of the photo.Scrabo tower, framed by the wing structs of a light aircraft

I decided to check Twitter to see if I had any notifications. I've not logged in in over a week and I had notifications about random content from people I follow!

Is this Twitter trying to reengage me or is this a horrifying new feature?!

A screenshot of the twitter notifications tab. Three notifications are visible. They are just random posts from people I follow.

I’ll be going flying tomorrow. I’m a private pilot and for the first time in weeks, my time off lines up with suitable weather. I am very excited! Anyone interested in that kinda thing and want to know more about it? Feel free to ask!

The #fediverse has a real potential to democratise access to information. The status quo is an algorithm that we have no insight over showing us content that will keep us hooked. With Mastodon we see things posted by the people we follow in the order they posted them. Frankly it’s a little boring and that’s a good thing. Mastodon is most engaging when your involved in conversation with other people. On Twitter you could doomscroll forever. Here, you have conversations, then get on with your life

The #ActivityPub spec only describes how servers and clients should communicate, it doesn't cover how that data should be presented to people.

I think it's only a matter of time before someone builds a timeline algorithm for #fediverse content that might even show #ads.

I'm not sure how I feel about that yet, but if it allows people that run servers to cover their expenses, it could help ensure that they (and by extension, your content) stick around a lot longer.

If you're interested in the #fediverse and #ActivityPub then I suspect you'll want to hear about Solid (https://solidproject.org/)

It's the project Sir Tim Berners-Lee is working on. You might know him as the creator of the World Wide Web.

Solid is a project that hopes to separate user data from the app that uses it.

A person would store their data in a "pod" and give/revoke access to that data to/from the app.

This means user/account data is very portable! More so even than Mastodon.