I recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. Now I've know for a long time that May is National Bike Month, and within that there is a Ride Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a little confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month.
Well it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding bicycles. The April 19 event…
Today we learned that the man responsible for the recent attack on a Michigan synagogue was a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon, and had lost several members of his own family, including his niece and nephew, in an Israeli attack in Lebanon this month. On and on the endless circle goes, you killed some of mine so I will kill some of yours. Jews and Arabs have been at it for 4,000 years…
For a long time I have been a big proponent of keeping my data on my personal website, and sharing to social media as I see fit. You may recall an earlier post where I talked a lot about the "open web". The problem is hardly anyone sees what I post on my website. People may follow a link from Facebook or Bluesky, but they don't come back and check if I've posted anything new, nor do they…
This is just a test and I will probably delete it. I am testing fed.brid.gy attempting to see if it will read my blog feed.
Lat week I wrote this post sharing some of my experience with Google Gemini and just what personal data it has access to. The short of that post is that while Gemini in a browser chat cannot access any personal data, Gemini in Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Drive, and Calendar can access anything you have in these apps. So it can scan your email message or look at your documents.
Today I…
Notes
Warm and sunny for today’s ride, 63 when I got home. Tough climb as always but no worse than the last time I did it, considering I have not done any climbing this year. In fact, though my advanced age has taken its toll in so many ways, I’m really no slower on the climbs than I was 10 years ago.
Nelson, Richard, John and I left the group and did the gravel loop out Wiles Road and DeArmond.…
Trump's invasion of Iran has emboldened some republicans to express their true feelings. Even before the bombs started dropping TheBulwark published A Green Light for Anti-Islam Bigotry for Trump’s GOP. More recently a candidate for Texas attorney general has said “ _Islam is not compatible with Western civilization_ ”. It's all in keeping with White Christian Nationalists' belief in the…
Yes! Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules introduced by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, first appearing in his 1942 short story "Runaround." They are:
In the waning years of the G.W. Bush presidency, Neil Young released a song called "Looking for a Leader" on his 2006 "Living with War" album. It pretty much summed up the mood of the county as people began to realize what a quagmire Bush had led us into in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama stepped up and we got lucky as he was about as good a leader as one could hope for.
Now comes the heartbreaking…
After creating my own ATproto suite of modules for Drupal I was excited to see Affinity Bridge had ported the Wordpress Atmosphere plugin to Drupal. While there are some major differences they both achieve the same goal of publishing Drupal content as both Bluesky posts and Standard Site documents. Here are some of the key differences.
Module | ATproto | Atmosphere
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Structure |…
This Persian rug hangs on our wall. As far was we know it is a family heirloom possibly from Baku, Azerbaijan where my grandmother was born. I don't know the family history beyond that but with the Jewish name Rosenberg they had most likely emigrated there from Germany and some point. Azerbaijan was part of Persia for most of it's history. Persia began it's long decline after the Arab conquest of…
It's a pattern we've seen so many times before. There is nothing like a war to boost a president's ratings. Trump was sinking fast. He can't escape the Epstein scandal. His immigration crackdown was hugely unpopular. Pretty much everything he has done since returning to power has been unpopular. Democrats have been winning big at special elections and it was looking very likely that they would…
This is another test post to see if I can get my posts to get noticed and picked up by other sites. This has had me learning more than I ever wanted to know about Webmentions, Microformats, Bridgy, and a bunch of other details that all must be just right for this to work.
The end goal being what's know as POSSE which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I think I'm making…
When was the last time a war actually accomplished anything except death and suffering? Not in my lifetime. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, all the same story. We go in without really knowing what our goals are. We fail to accomplish whatever it is we think we're doing there. And we leave in disgrace, leaving behind a destabilized country ready to be taken over by the people who we were supposedly…
In my first post on this subject I wrote about my intention to make this website the hub of my online interactions.I talked about the vision for the web that many of us had in the late 90s and early 00s, that the web would be a federation of personal websites that we would use to share ideas and communicate. Then came the walled gardens with their corporate management to squash that idea. But…
For a long time I have been a big proponent of keeping my data on my personal website, and sharing to social media as I see fit. You may recall an earlier post where I talked a lot about the "open web". The problem is hardly anyone sees what I post on my website. People may follow a link from Facebook or Bluesky, but they don't come back and check if I've posted anything new, nor do they…
I opened a Gemini chat session and asked it flat out: "Show me everything you know about me." It came back and said nothing.
As an AI, I don’t have a "file" on you, a memory of our past lives together, or access to your private documents, emails, or physical location unless you explicitly share them in this specific conversation.
What prompted this question was that I had been working in a…
Awhile back I read a fascinating book called Becoming Earth. Conventional wisdom has it that our planet evolved through geological means until it was suitable for life. The theory presented in this book is that it was life itself that brought about the geological changes needed for life to thrive and evolve. For example before our atmosphere contained enough oxygen for air breathing life to…
In my continued effort to syndicate my blog posts far and wide I have implement Standard Site. This is an AT Protocol Lexicon for long form publishing. A Lexicon is a schema for structured data. Basically fields with strict definitions of what can go in these fields. Bluesky is also based on an AT Protocol Lexicon. The difference is that Bluesky's lexicon limits posts to 300 characters. Standard…
The biggest yet. Social media is saying the biggest single day protest in US history. It was good to see so many people, but once again it felt more like a party in the park than a demonstration. This time it literally was, as they had a band setup in the park. People first gathered on campus and then marched to the park, and then on to the courthouse where we once again lined both sides of the…
I have been working on various ATproto integrations for Drupal over past few months, and have now combined them into a single suite. The code is available on Github. Much of this is tailored to my custom Drupal content types and would only server as an example to others, however you should be able to use the atproto_client as is and write your own code on top of it.
The individual modules…
Evidently one of my riding buddies and I had a different idea of the route and managed to collide at an intersection. Him being much larger than me, I came away worse for the ware. I hit my face, broke a dental bridge and suffered a concussion. It's been a week and I am just getting to where I can use the computer even though my vision is still impaired to a degree.
This crash eliminates the…
