Tag: Link-o-rama

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Space debris, normalcy bias, RSS as the foundation for social media

AI-generated picture of a cat staring at a computer, in a woodcut / watercolor style.

AI-generated picture of a cat staring at a computer, in a woodcut / watercolor style.Too many tabs open in the browser today, even compared with my usual tab overload.

  • Good piece on Ars about space debris. Pull quote by Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist from the University of Texas at Austin, “I also predict that we will see a loss of human life by (1) school-bus sized objects reentering and surviving reentry and hitting a populated area, or (2) people riding on this wave of civil and commercial astronauts basically having their vehicle getting scwhacked by an unpredicted piece of junk. I predict that both those things are going to happen in the next decade.”Just reading this post, I feel like Jah would be a lot of fun to work with…
  • “How to rebuild social media on top of RSS” by Jacob O’Bryant. Not sure this way of thinking will take off, but I like the idea.
  • “How normalcy bias will define our future” by Jessica Wildfire. Wildfire writes about the concept of normalcy bias and how it’s defined the past few years and how it’ll impact us in the future. The concept is something that’s been gnawing at the edges of my brain for a while now, but I didn’t have the name for it. Things that, objectively, should be cause for alarm that people just refuse to react appropriately to. (Whether that’s Trump, COVID, or Elon Musk, to name only a few…)

Definitely worth a read. Expect I’ll write more about it in the future. What’s on your mind lately?

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Amyl and the Sniffers, Fraidycat web follower, Mogwai

Fraidycat logo

Let’s shake some of my browser tabs and see what falls out.

Fraidycat web follower / feed reader

Fraidycat logoRSS has been on the decline since Google snuffed Google Reader. Many sites, these days, don’t even support RSS. It’s a problem.

One solution that might fit the bill for many users is Fraidycat. It comes as a standalone app for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as extensions for Firefox and Chrome. (I’m currently using the standalone app for the Linux desktop.) The standalone appears to be an Electron app, so I might switch to the Firefox extension.

Fraidycat pros:

  • It handles RSS/Atom feeds, and a number of sites that don’t have proper feeds like Twitter, YouTube. Want to follow a YouTube channel outside YouTube? Fraidycat has got you covered.
  • It allows you to organize feeds by a free-form system of tags (including emojis) and their importance (Real-time, Frequent, Occasional… etc.).
  • Has an import/export system that makes it super-easy to switch from, say, the desktop app to the Firefox extension. Or just export OPML to import into another feed reader, or plain HTML bookmarks.
  • Easy to use, intuitive, open source-ish.

Fraidycat cons:

  • Doesn’t handle things like Twitter lists, Wikipedia pages that you might want to follow. Coughs up an error when you try to follow these.
  • The license is open source-ish. Specifically the Blue Oak Model License which is MIT-ish but not OSI-approved.
  • Earlier this year the next release for Fraidycat was “postponed” so the author could work on another project. Hoping it really is just a temporary postponement and not about to become abandonware.

Amyl and the Sniffers

I snagged this EP by Amyl and the Sniffers on the last Bandcamp Friday. It’s raw, joyous and punk-y. I think I might have been 45 seconds into the first track when I decided “yeah, OK, I’ll listen to this again and again.” Released in 2016, but I’d have believed it if somebody it came out in 1983. Assuming live music returns someday, I’d definitely head out to see them live.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3846936675 size=large bgcol=333333 linkcol=2ebd35 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Short, sweet, noisy. Give it a listen, loud.

Mogwai – It’s What I Want To Do, Mum

Song I stumbled on while testing out Fraidycat. Instrumental goodness.

[youtube https://youtu.be/tFUGspVnZFQ]

Gimmie something I wouldn’t usually read…

If you are entirely unlike me and need reading suggestions (vs. having a stack of books taller than you that need reading), then I have a great site for you.

Break the Bubble will give book suggestions that are “bubble breakers” for books you might be unlikely to stumble on, usually. Give it The Hitchhiker’s Guide, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Post Office by Charles Bukowski and it suggests I might want to read Dread Nation by Justina Ireland or My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland. (Also a “Captain Underpants” title, so there may be a few glitches in terms of age appropriateness.)

That’s it for today’s Link-o-Rama. What else should I be looking at on the Web?