Technology

Research On Searching

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Over the previous years, online search engines have become overwhelmed with advertisements and results that may somewhat be relative to the original query you typed into the search field- it is maddening.

Even Boolean searches with tools such as “and” “or” “not”, plus signs, minus signs, quote, endnotes, etc are rendered useless. I’ve tried advanced library search strategies to no fruition that benefitted my search query.

I suggested awhile back that Apple should build their own search engine but they are content by taking Google’s $1 billion annual payout to make their search engine the default inside the Safari browser instead.

When I read that Apple Intelligence (brilliant marketing, by the way,) was going to be included in the next software update sometime later this year, I signed up for an OpenAI account to feel out how well it’s ChatGPT could help. I’ve been using it as a research assistant to answer the same questions I would ask a standard search engine.

The results are night and day. Instead of providing thousands of websites that may point the way to an eventual answer, ChatGPT provides an answer back to me in the form of a conversation. If I have a follow-up question, or ask for specifics, the reply is lightning quick. Of course, all information has to be verified. I won’t accept answers blindly without a second opinion. 99% of the information I checked and rechecked have been spot on. Nothing is 100% when it comes to research, especially from an LLM (Learned Language Model) such as ChatGPT. You cannot call it A.I. simply because it is not sentient. It is not intelligent on its own. It has retained and provides data based on human data. Everyone knows we are flawed and make mistakes.

ChatGPT will too, but for now, it does a damn better job of providing information better than all the other search engines do. Even though that is why they exist.

Useful
Maddening

A Look Back

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Once again, I find myself working behind the scenes of this website. This time, I am organizing the backend, the stuff that no one else sees. I am also wrapping up the migration of writings from my previous sites into here for posterity. Such as it is.

It’s been fun to look back and see the previous designs of this site in all of its iterations. I’ve learned a lot, experimented quite a bit, and still have a ways to go. Nowadays, I care more about substance than style and will make an effort to keep the experiments to a minimum. Until then, here are a few screenshots of this site through the years. I wish I could have done the same during the early years.

March 2011
May 2012

Back In Time

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With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.

The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.

I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.

Offline

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It has been a full month since I told my phone carrier I want to remove the data package from my mobile plan. The monthly bill for just talk and text is $20 monthly.

To prepare myself for this, I ripped a lot of music from compact discs, then realized Apple Music has download features so I did that to all of my playlists. Next, I downloaded an offline version of maps so I can still navigate around this new area. The same goes for other media such as podcasts and e-books.

Truth time- the first week offline I was reaching for the phone to look something up but was unable to. Time to panic? I did, but got over it quickly. I cannot send or receive photos via Messages app, again, just text.

Sure, I am not able to use the Geocaching app to discover hidden caches, but eventually I’ll get another hand held GPS unit for that. No e-mails either, but wait, is that so bad? It isn’t.

I may be “off”, but I am content for now.

Three P’s

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For digital documents you want to keep for a long time, I suggest the Three P’s:

  • Plain text
  • PDFs
  • Printouts

While in college in the mid 1990’s, and prior to purchasing my first computer, I utilized a word processor. Think manual typewriter but with a 3.5″ floppy disk for storage. I wish I had known enough to preserve all of my writings. The floppy disks were formatted for the word processor but not the computer. It wiped everything off the disk to make room for the Windows formatting. The lesson here is to preserve your work and prepare by future-proofing formats. It was a hard learned lesson. All of my personal writing, studies and papers gone.

I was reminded of all of this when I read about how Hemingway’s early notes and the beginning of a novel disappeared. His wife had gathered his works and left Paris by train to Switzerland to meet him and a publisher and somehow, the suitcase went missing from the train platform and they were devastated.

My loss was due to ignorance and in no way as significant as Hemingway’s loss. But the pain was there.

My revamped workflow process is:

  • Write and edit drafts in Ulysses (saved to cloud, backed up onto my file server)
  • Publish from Ulysses to my website (saved to cloud)
  • Copy/Paste to my own database in plain text format (cloud, file server)
  • Migrate all of my work into the database in plain text, organize.
  • Print to .pdf by year (saved to cloud and file server)
  • Print to paper by year (saved to a dedicated yearly file folder or binder)

Interesting enough, while walking through the library’s “read and return” section, the word “Hemingway” ended up in my peripheral vision.

Rabbits and Frequency Illusion!

I usually don’t give them a glance but the paper spine was attractive. The fiction novel title is “The Hemingway Thief” and how the aforementioned luggage was lost. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to be a good yarn with a few secrets and twists. Looking forward to reading it as soon as possible.

iOS 18

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The beta version of the newest iPhone operating system has been installed on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. There is a lot of new features to unpack but for now, the custom icon tinting is my favorite. I love a uniform screen.

USB ♣️

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Two weeks after receiving my specialized USB Stick, I am finally in the club. Now I can share files with others and pick/choose what files I would like. File formats include pdf, jpg, mov, etc. Here’s a look at the console below. Once I have inserted the USB and verified my secure credentials, I am in.

I have only had time to share one file, a .pdf of JPG photo magazine from 2007 (I miss that periodical), and have downloaded an image shared by another. So I look forward to becoming more involved in the ♣️.

Until next time,

HTML

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I am in a mood again. Thinking about keeping this website online as a private online archive while at the same time, writing to the journal inside my own offline database.

If I do take this private, it’ll be a stripped down HTML-only version.

Stay tuned.

The Matrix Has You

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It is 2024 and the Matrix is real. Of this there can be zero doubt, if you consider your daily screen time. The digital avatar of you online versus your physical meat space in the real world. Are you intellectually honest with yourself?

Can you feel how disproportionate this balance is?

Retro Denbow

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As part of my mission this year to “de-bullshit” my life, I’ve been contemplating acquiring a dumb phone and with luck, my carrier has exactly one model. It’s features are the ability to talk, text and take crap-quality images and that’s it. The carrier representative must have thought I was mentally unstable for even thinking about it and maybe he’s right. I currently have the iPhone 15 Pro Max which, for only a few more months, is the best on the American market. So “why go backwards?”, he asked.

The 2024 TCL Flip looks like it came right out of the year 1999.

I love the iPhone, but apparently I love it too much and I want to reduce my dependency on it.

Then I got to thinking, why not remove all the apps off of the iPhone except for the phone, messages, the camera and photo apps? Why not have my carrier remove the data option from my plan and I pay less? Hmm.

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.