Journal

Scroll Your Own Way*

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*with apologies to Fleetwood Mac

Scrolling is a tool of our current digital existence, no matter how much we dislike our dependence on it. This is because most people are scrolling on an app platform where they have little control on the content they see. 

Social media algorithms mean you don’t see the posts of everyone you follow. You see only what is currently popular from some of them. Plus you see other stuff you don’t follow that their algorithm “think you might like”. Popular means engagement, so the original post is swarming with comments from strangers. You also see ads everywhere that often takes over the original material you are trying to consume. The interface itself is urging you to scroll! Like! Subscribe! Buy!

No thank you.

Digital life shouldn’t be this way. The best way to consume media is not with social media anyway. It exists on websites – blogs, news, magazines, opinions. Millions of new, and better quality articles created every week.

But you don’t want to visit dozens of websites to find out what’s new. What you need is a way to have the website content you choose come to you, when you want it.

This solution exists already in the form of a little known technology called RSS. It exists in the background of almost all websites. It’s a way for RSS apps to subscribe to that websites content and receive new articles when they are available.

In the RSS context, “SUBSCRIBE” doesn’t mean you pay, nor do you give your email. In fact the website owner won’t even know you’ve subscribed at all!

It’s like podcasts — but for reading.

This is not a paid sponsorship, but an RSS reader such as the no cost app called NetNewsWire. It shows you articles from your favorite blogs and news sites and keeps track of what you’ve read.

This means you can stop going from page to page in your browser looking for new articles to read. Do it the easy way instead: let a feed reader bring the news to you instead.

If you’ve been getting your news via Facebook and Twitter — with their ads, algorithms, user tracking, outrage, and misinformation — you can switch to your news feed reader to get news directly and more reliably from the sites you trust.

Take back control of your scroll. Scroll your own way.

Start with two or three sources. Maybe a news site and a couple of blogs you like such as, oh, I don’t know, chrisdenbow.website. His RSS feed is simply: https://chrisdenbow.website/feed

Give it a go, and after a few days, you’ll feel something magical happen. You have an app with a feed you can scroll through that you completely control. You decide what is in there. There is no algorithm. Just the latest posts from every site interleaved in reverse date order.

You don’t even need to leave the app to read. I subscribe only to full text feeds, so the entire article is readable within the app. No cookie pop ups or confusing menus to navigate.

There’s no comments or likes. If you no longer wish to see posts from a particular author, you remove their feed from your app and you never see them again.

Everyone should have the ability to scroll your own way.

While typing this up, I obviously sung this in my head the whole time.

Bring Your USB

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Say what? A social file exchange for designers, artists, DJs, writers, musicians, 
researchers, engineers and anyone of interest. I’ve had a content club on the brain for the past few months and just discovered this. I am on the waitlist but from everything I’ve seen so far this will be a blast.

Frequency Illusion

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The frequency illusion, also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias in which someone learns a novel word or concept—and then “suddenly” encounters it everywhere, whereas in fact it it is just more salient because it has been recently observed.

Psychology Today magazine

When we learn a new word, discover a favorite car, or unearth a previously unknown historical fact, and then come across it multiple times in short succession, the frequency illusion is at work. 

This cognitive bias leverages the brain’s penchant for pattern recognition: We direct selective attention to our novel discovery and scan the world for matches. We choose what to focus on and confirm more sightings of it—involving another cognitive bias, the confirmation bias, as well.

For me personally, I was not overtly aware of this phenomena until I read the Rabbits novel series. After that and ever since, I have seen multiple references to rabbits everywhere without actively searching for them.

We remember what we prime the mind to attend to. If we select a new concept, we’ll identify that concept more often; the minds will actively seek out more stimuli related to that concept to seek confirmation.

Finger Painting

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The glass tablet in my hand is not just a consumption device but also a creative one. I am limited in talent and funds to explore creating art with a physical canvas and physical globs of paint. And so in their place I am using technology to augment my creative practice.

To put it simply- sometimes I “paint” on my iPad. I’d say half of them are made with an Apple Pencil stylus and the other half by scrolling a finger over the glass. Finger painting minus the mess!

Reset

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Sure, the domain name is the same but the platform and the design are all new. The previous Ghost server was very proprietary and will not allow an easy way to export all of my writings there. Nor would it allow me to import decades worth of work into it. So, it had to go away even though I am taking a lo$$ on it. Because why write there when I cannot export?

I have imported the archives here from the previous years but not all of it. I still need to cut/paste from the former platform onto here. Grr.

This site design is a fresh, minimal look and inspired by the Mercedes F1 team colors.

This website is not complete and it will take a few days for everything to be up to my standards.

In the meantime, welcome! Have a look around. Let me know what you think in the comments after each post or from the “About” page.

Starship 4.0

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This morning I stood on the Cape Coral beach looking southwest waiting to see a rocket ship fly over us. I was there at Starbase observing the tallest, most powerful rocket ever to be launched up close. 100 yards away we camped on the beach where the Rio Grande emptied into the Gulf with Mexico on the other side. We were asked to leave the beach the next day before the test fire of the 34 Raptor engines. That was delayed so we made our way back home and missed that one. But it was exciting to see!

Still can’t believe how close we were permitted to get. Boca Chica Beach, Texas.

Today I had hoped to see this gorgeous rocket in flight and one day go to the Moon and Mars.

Starship’s fourth flight test launched with ambitious goals, attempting to go farther than any previous test before and begin demonstrating capabilities central to return and reuse of Starship and Super Heavy. The payload for this test was the data. Starship delivered.

On June 6, 2024, Starship successfully lifted off at 7:50 a.m. CT from Starbase in Texas and went on to deliver maximum excitement for the next hour until it arrived in orbit, re-entered orbit and then corrected itself for a splash down in the Indian Ocean successfully.

Liftoff

Alas, the flight trajectory that Space-X typically takes is in between Florida and Cuba. Today, the flight path took it south of Cuba. I didn’t have a chance in hell of capturing it. Not even a trail in the sky.

Too Far South

In the past few years, there have been 353 (!) launches from three launch sites from Cape Canaveral Florida, to Boca Chica Texas and Vandenberg AFB in California. 287 of those launches have been re-flights using rocket boosters that auto-land back to earth (!) No one has been able to do this before including NASA.

My View, Pre-launch, Launch, 33/34 raptors firing, In Orbit! De-orbiting, Re-entry burning through a fin, Splashdown, Success!

I can only hope that Starship 5 will be launched at night. Space-X’s other rockets are launched from Florida at night and we can see those easily.

Ukulele For Dummies

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Way back in 2007, I was invited to photograph the Birmingham Jazz Festival weekend and even attended a few workshops. One workshop was hosted by a group of brilliant high school jazz students from the jazz school. The special guest was the blues saxophonist “Blue” Lou Marini. He listened to the group practice and was asked what he thought. His reply, and I am paraphrasing here, was that they each played their notes perfectly and it was all very technical. But this isn’t jazz. You have to pour your soul into your music to make it stand out. The kids grinned, tried again and their passion came through.

I am not musically inclined. I have never taken a music theory class. I can sing and have always enjoyed it so my experience with music in a group setting has been limited. I can hear subtle notes and pick up rhythms from each instrument individually. My musical tastes are eclectic. But I cannot play…yet. At one point in the future, I will have to have my daughter, who plays beautifully patiently teach her old man.

In the meantime, I will fat-finger these strings on the ukulele technically for awhile. But real soon, I will heed Blue Lou’s advice and pour some passion into it. Technicality be damned.

“Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the m*therf**ker who plays it is 80 percent.” – Miles Davis

The Old Man Was Right

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Huh.

Way back in the early to mid 1980’s, I had purchased a generic, portable cassette player that I thought was the cat’s ass. I had control over what I listened to and could take it everywhere. I could copy our family’s limited albums onto a blank cassette and even record music off of the radio station. Audio freedom never sounded so good.

One day, my father asked me why I use cassettes when records were better? I remember saying, rather wisely I thought, that records were fine but I can’t carry a record player with me everywhere. I received a smirk and probably a “what the hell ever” sort of comment in return. Generational gaps, am I right?

Well, looking back, it seems to have stood the test of time so well, that everyone wants to have a record player now and scour everywhere trying to find those same albums. I know I did and acquired quite a few. However, if you don’t store them properly, they end up getting warped and unplayable. Ask me how I know.

Something unavailable at the time of that past conversation and I think we can both agree on, is the compact disc. Better sound quality, smaller in size, portable and you can even transfer the music digitally. A win/win/win/win.

As consumers, we strayed away from those CDs in favor of streaming our music and audio books. But I think it is time for a comeback. I’ve moved on from 8-tracks, cassettes, records and now, I think I am ready to move on from streaming.

For the past few months, I have slowly acquired a ton of digital music burned from compact discs that were borrowed from various libraries stretching from Cincinnati to Tulsa, Houston and now CCFL. Not to mention all of the CDs I have managed to keep ahold of over the years and all of a sudden, I am sitting on gigabytes of music.

There is a point to all of this, and once again, the old man was right. Over the years, I probably drove he, and the rest of our family nuts by suggesting the latest tech trends and tools to try. Since everyone else at the time was using Apple, I was on Android so it was a challenge to find a decent chat app to communicate long distance. Then I went all-in on Apple devices and decided that just plain old Messages app was perfect for our needs.

“Hey Dad, we can communicate on Facebook so you should sign up.” I promptly received, correctly, a “what the hell ever” comment that I waved off as a generational thing. Now I regret ever signing up for the damned thing and deleted back in 2018.

All of that is to say this: I am cutting back, way back on my digital tools, including my website. I want to de-BS my life and live more simply so I am taking steps to ensure this happens soon. Having lost one of my web domain names to a frickin’ casino in Iceland, I will hold on to the existing one with my personalized e-mail address for that domain. The same goes for my photography portfolio’s domain name. The web pages may disappear for awhile, but the names are mine. I own those lots even though there will be no houses on them so to speak.

Instead of a website and portfolio, I will journal using my own server’s database. An analog pen and paper are standing by too.

I’ll read analog books by day and the digital Kobo by night.

Eventually, I will even purchase a dumb phone that costs $100 that will allow me to call and text only. The current iPhone will be relegated to a camera and a portable music player (remember all those gigabytes of music files?)

It’s back to basics for me using the original pillars of the internet. WWW 1.0 brought us electronic mail, SMS messaging, digital journals, .PDF, podcasts, internet browsers and RSS. Speaking of browsers, I am going to remove 95% of all the apps on my iDevices in favor of using the browser instead. Too much personal data is being handed over to those app developers. Using a browser, I have more freedom and privacy.

I went online in 1996 when I purchased my first computer for college and have been an embedded netizen for almost thirty years. While I appreciate and am fascinated by technology and all it’s advances, the tech industry has proven themselves to be unworthy of holding the keys and locking their users in. They have bastardized the very tools designed for us and made us worse. As JOSHUA reminds us, this is all a confusing game. The only winning move is not to play.

So, kudos to my father who was right all along.

Why

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Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.

Why?

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Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.

Play More

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Time to pluck the strings and finally learn how to play this ukulele. Pretty soon it’ll be music to my ears. Not anyone else’s, mind you.

Rock & Roll

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As a follow-up to the previous post, I am looking for good cardio activities with low impact on my knees, so next up is cycling.

I recently acquired a road cycle and am slowly getting myself up to speed so to speak. Paired with AirPods, I can have a good beat to help me keep pace. Again, tracking activities is a cinch when using the Apple Watch and its built-in fitness guides. As a bonus, I’ve downloaded a third party app called Strava at the recommendation of the man who loaned me his spare bicycle. I like Strava but not too keen on the $80/y or $12/m subscription fee. I am unqualified to justify myself in that manner just yet.

No matter because for now I am content to let the good times…roll.