A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
After experimenting (again) with Obsidian I came across Forestry.md which describes itself as "Open Source Digital Garden Hosting". I thought it was cool, but then realised that it would be yet another system where I have to fit into its workflow, rather than vice-versa
…Just a quick note to say that each tag on Substrate now has an RSS feed. For example #philosophy has this feed. So you don't have to see my donkey memes if you don't want to.
It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.
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The inimitable Sarah Drummond has created BINFAX 100 which, she says is a way of contributing to the Count Binface campaign:
Yesterday, whilst on a break, I built BinFax.
Helping Count Binface put his manifesto of bringing Ceefax back into action.
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N.B. You should probably know that I wrote my doctoral thesis on digital literacies and I have opinions including that literate practices happen in communities, rather than being a solo intellectual pursuit.
I'm going to dive straight in.
…I'd like to think that something will come of this initial finding against Meta for being in breach of the Digital Services Act.
I'm hopeful, if only because WhatsApp isn't included in this. It's very difficult for legislatures in this day and age to meaningfully find against social infrastructure (which is what WhatsApp has become in Europe) but it's much easier to regulate social media.
…There's a lot of talk about dumbphones at the moment, at least in my circles. But, of course, everyone still wants access to WhatsApp, Signal, etc. So there's a whole niche of expensive 'dumb' phones which are supposed to help you reclaim your life.
…For the past few months I've been following Nīkau, "a global platform, information and operations security consultancy in service to NGOs, impact-driven organisations and grassroots movements". In addition to security auditing, etc. they also run courses, such as Cloudbreak which is an intensive 6-hour session "[walking] participants through the process of building up and tightly securing powerful cloud infrastructure" to provide "alternatives to Google Docs & Drive, Zoom & more."
…As I think I've mentioned previously, in the past few weeks I've had a couple of conversations which were incredibly eye-opening to me. I think it's quite likely that I have what has, since 2013, been referred to as AuDHD. Essentially, it's something different to autism and ADHD when each are present individually, and is instead a complex, ever changing relationship.
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