Free Spirit
02-25-2023
Analog vs Digital
I observed my Royal Scrittore typewriter collecting dust this morn g moring and thought I would give it a go. Two sentences in and my fingers hurt. Compare this tothe keyboard on my MacBook Pro where every key stroke is effortless and does not hurt.
Do I want/need to sell this piece of ..antiquity? I love the aesthetic but it feels more annoying than. beneficial. And if it doe does not. inspire joy, then it is out the door.
Damn. Back to the Mac.
How the hell did this software program help organize thirty years of my photography archives in under an hour? Download, install and sign up for the 30-day free trial. And we’re off!
I plugged in my 10TB external hard drive and pointed to where I wanted the photo copies stored inside Mylio. I am ecstatic to see all those decades of images in one library. Next I added the Archive Backup hard drive and did the same thing.
Next, I started importing photos from folders on my Macbook Pro. Not much there since I send the previous month’s images to the Archives. Example: Only February 2023 is in the Photos Folder on the Mac.
Every image that is currently in Photos gets copied to Mylio instantly. A great addition to the 2TB iCloud storage and backup.
Ever since downloading all the photos I have posted to those social media accounts and then deleting those accounts, I have stored them away for safekeeping. The time has come where I have the ability to see them all in one place. Everything is organized by year and month. Boom.
After adding all your photos, Mylio has a variety of ways to help organize. Date, keywords, favorites, geotagging etc. Once organized, Mylio syncs to the vaults stored on all of your devices.
I haven’t played around with this too much because of the other, more professional tools I use but the capability to make basic edits is baked into Mylio.
This is a fantastic solution, one I wish I had discovered sooner. It is a time-saver, a life-saver and alleviates a lot of self-induced frustration at my lack of digital asset management. Once everything was imported and sorted, I then clicked “subscribe.” Yes, it is another subscription, but it ticked all the boxes for my requirements of photo archive management.
You could say I enjoy reading. But what good is all of that time spent if I do not retain that input? I need a system for transforming reading into meaningful action and lasting insight.
Other people would call this “hobby reading” but what’s the point of reading if you cannot use expand your intellect and use alternative phrases? Fine, we’ll call it “reading for fun.” I use the Libby library app to connect to the three public libraries I am a member of. Here I can borrow any book title or audiobook that is available. Once borrowed, I will send the book to my Kindle e-reader for consumption. While reading, I can highlight text and even make a digital note about anything of interest to me. Anything I highlight or make note of gets automagically exported out of the Kindle and into my personal knowledge database that I call Grey Matter. From here I can link and backlink thoughts and ideas for later reference.
I also enjoy keeping up on the latest technology websites, photography trends, art trends and homegrown blogs like this one right here. I do that through the magic of RSS. With a website reader like Reeder or FeedBin, I can have hundreds of websites aggregate into one spot. They come to me, I don’t go to the websites themselves. From there I can read an article, then either discard or save to read it later as a reference. Notes and highlights are made in there too, and sent off to Grey Matter for when I am ready. Tom Critchlow, refers to it as “digital bricolage” or “web foraging”. Love it.
There is a running joke in my family that I consume too many Apple devices every year. Well the joke is on me because I did it again. I upgraded to the Apple Watch Ultra. Horology is the study of time and so she is appropriately named.
UPDATE – the watch has been returned because I realized I simply don’t want it.
If podcast creators charge a subscription fee and hide their content behind a paywall without an RSS feed, it is no longer a podcast. It becomes an audio book instead.
More later.
This was first posted on my website back on May 31, 2022, and I’ve added some new thoughts.
Anyone else noticed that today’s WWW is insufferable? I don’t specifically know when it turned, or why most users became jerks, but I’ll go ahead and guess about 2010. Making money off of content became more important than the content itself. This is a long post, but in short, the best way to fix it is to write good stuff and to be nice to other people. As the WWW was intended.
In the past, enjoyed content-rich websites created by people from all walks of life. They built and hosted their websites and networked with others to share their stuff, and it worked. Internet = interconnected. We learned from others, and we benefitted from other’s unique knowledge. Nowadays, there are advertisements everywhere, clickbait headlines as well as the tracking and selling of your private data and browsing habits. Where did all that good stuff go? To Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. etc.
Content creators, webmasters, and anyone with a hobby blog generally gave up and went the easy route of 180 character tweets and generic posts about what they ate and where on Facebook. Boring. People used to write, or photograph, or paint stuff that others would want to read. People used to write blogs, whether they were read or not, no one knew. Aficionados of every imaginable topic would research and post their findings for all to see.
When the tech conglomerates started to gather and consolidate web properties, the content was squeezed out. These platforms were nicknamed Web 2.0 as if version 1 needed upgrading. Version 2 was not an upgrade in my mind, in fact, it made the internet worse. Ad-driven content became a thing. You had to pay to play. The more eyeballs and attention on your stuff can be monetized to the widest possible audience. The internet became deceptive and, oddly, less social. Users became mean and divisive because now there was perceived competition.
It is almost impossible to find good content on the WWW now. Type a topic of interest on a conglomerate-ran browser, and you’ll have to sort through at least two pages of the search to get to anything that isn’t ad-driven and would be relevant to your search. When you do come across an interesting link, you are bombarded with sneaky and not so sneaky tactics to get your attention and your data. Web windows will pop up blocking the content, asking you to submit your personal info and subscribe. Pleas to purchase something that is offered. Advertisements litter the site with most, overwhelming the content you want to see. “Like me on Facebook”, Comment! Subscribe! Retweet! That is just what we see, but goes unseen is the amount of personal data that is collected and distributed to the tech conglomerates. Did you do a search on a medical symptom? Well now, the next website you visit will have a pop-up advertisement on a specific cream to help remedy that. It’s disgusting, invasive, and intolerable.
Where are people writing now instead of their own homegrown webpage? Social media. If you write on Facebook or post images to Instagram, the only people who can see it our the users on the platform. Have a business and your “website” is only a Facebook business page? Half of your potential customers cannot see it unless they are a Facebook user. No, thanks. Instead, people are writing out their limited thoughts on a limited platform that does nothing to further a conversation. That is, if you can actually see it on the FB platform. Facebook’s algorithm guarantees your content will be buried in favor of something they claim is more interesting (read that as attention-getting and therefore more potential ad revenue for them.)
I won’t continue on about how the political and social media outlets combined are divisive and spiteful. I stopped both after the 2016 election, and I am blissfully ignorant. All this wasted time, effort, content, and energy spent on these proprietary platforms do nothing for the individual except to make themselves money.
So, what’s the fix?
Create your own website. There are a few free (with ads) hosting options as a start. Or you can use WordPress on your own hosted site. Web hosting and your own domain name will make it yours and on the cheap.
One of the pillars of the internet , next to e-mail, is the personal, humble blog. This is defined as the social internet, not social media. Creators, writers, photographers, video hosts, and podcasters all need to put their works on a site that they own and fully control as opposed to posting on restrictive social media outlets. These personal websites will then generate what is called a feed for syndicating their works out to the internet (RSS or Really Simple Syndication). That is step one.
Step two is reminding their followers, their fans and their audience to embrace RSS aggregators, or feed readers so they can continue to enjoy the creator’s content. Sounds simple, yeah?
These RSS readers pull the website owner/creator’s latest articles into an easily readable format that the individual controls. Think of it as a podcatcher…but for reading! Not some algorithms that are driven by social media control or advertising. RSS has no advertising unless the creator mentions their sponsors, that is. You are in charge of what you want to read, who you want to read it from and to save it later for reference- or discard. You are in charge of your intake.
Start by adding sources you know and trust. A source is a place where information comes from. When you add sources to your feed reader, you’ll be able to monitor them all in one place. By sources, I don’t just mean news sites. Sources can include:
Websites/Blogs
Subscribe to the RSS feed of any source or publication. Get new posts from industry thought leaders, medium authors, or personal interest blogs like this one.
Magazines
Follow everything from major industry publications to niche magazines.
News publications
Follow major news publications or local news sources.
Research journals
Keep up with the newest literature in your area of study.
Pull content from Twitter accounts, hashtags, Lists, and searches into your feed reader. No ads!
Newsletters
Get email newsletters delivered to your reader so you can declutter your e-mail inbox and read without distractions.
Get posts from subreddits and searches in your feeds.
Youtube
Subscribe to YouTube channels or playlists and get new videos in your feeds. No Ads!
Podcasts
Follow podcasts and never miss out on new episodes of your favorite programs.
Which feed reader should you use?
Start simple and free- try Feedly ( no, this is not a paid endorsement) In fact, I started to use Feedly a long time ago but opted for a cleaner, more personal aggregate called Reeder and FeedBin. These are one time purchases for me. Feedly has iOS, Android and web apps so you can access your feeds. Your news, your way.
It is way past time to delete your social media accounts and rejoin the social internet, like we used to do. The World Wide Web is a much better place and it starts with all of us taking control of our websites and consuming them our way.
And of course I would appreciate being one of the first web sources you add to your new RSS feed reader. When you do, drop me an email to let me know. It is the social internet after all. If you have a website, I’d be happy to subscribe to it in my feed too.
Finally, make good content to share for anyone who may take an interest and be nice to others.
All my life, we’ve been told that computers were incapable of being intelligent, self-aware and creative. But here we are in 2023 partnering with Artifical Intelligence in creating works of art with photographs, paintings, music composing and even creative writing.
I recently had a conversation (see below) with an artifical intelligence using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a large-scale language model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the Generative Pre-trained Transformer architecture, which uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like text. The model is pre-trained on a massive dataset of text, allowing it to generate new text that is coherent and grammatically correct.
How very reassuring and seemingly IT wants to assuage my concerns. So I asked IT a similar question in a different context hoping for a more reassuring response.
Image and speech recognition: Computers can now recognize and interpret images and speech with a high degree of accuracy, which has applications in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. Computers can control robots and drones and make them perform complex tasks. It is important to note that computers do not possess consciousness or emotions, and they are not human-like entities, they simply can perform tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence, but they can do it faster, more accurately and with less error.
One of these days, I may not feel up to writing an article for this website but instead, turn to my Artificially Intelligent partner and ask her to write, edit and post. But it is not this day.
Not sure how long this will last but I’ll give it a go. The idea is to change up text blogging for audio posts.
Update
The Audio Mojo podcast is now available to stream on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you want to add it to either one of those or in your feed reader, the RSS url is https://anchor.fm/s/d991b480/podcast/rss
I have had a need to simplify my websites and the expenses that come with them. That changed today.
A year ago I transferred this website to a self-hosted instance instead, for simplicity and ease of use but I gave up too much control. Today, I transferred it to a Ghost server and have taken control back. This move will save over half of the expense, too. At the same time, I moved my photography website back and to Adobe.
Today is a fresh start for this site. I am in the process of moving all of the articles published previously to an Archives page. There was an unfortunate issue with migrating the data over resulting in the first ten years going missing or a corrupt .xml file. Now the records go back to only 2011. I’ll keep sorting that out as I don’t want to lose all those memories.
ChrisDenbow.com was rebuilt in a couple of hours but it is still not finished. It will take time to clean up the migration process, slap some paint on the walls and customize the site to my liking. For now, we’ll log this attempt at version 1.0
Update– Yes, everything from former website has migrated over smoothly except all the images in the previous posts. Those are broken for now. Eventually, I may go back to the more recent posts and add the images manually back.
I toyed around with DALL-E today and asked for a random but specific depiction of “a dark background oil painting of an intelligent looking fox smoking his tobacco pipe while working on his MacBook”
And here are the results. I think this is a brilliant use of modern technology.
But is it art?
After years of dragging my feet, I have finally purchased not one, but two, Amazon Kindle e-reader devices. The first was a cheap ($15) Fire tablet from a pawn shop. I had no intention of buying anything, just a passing curiosity, but then I saw it and thought, Why not have a dedicated reader? I liked it. Furthermore, I enjoyed having a smaller tablet to read myself to sleep with every night, rather than a large iPad or my phone. However, the weight of the tablet, the highly reflective, smudgy, glass screen and the fact that the tablet had the capability for distractions (apps) had me wondering if I should just go back to what I had using the iPhone instead.
I came across the Kindle Paperwhite edition yesterday and took another look at the possibilities. This is a minimal, reading-focused, no distraction reader that has a wonderful glare-free screen that weighs less than nothing. Perfect. So I left the store and stewed on it. Not two hours later, I went back and purchased.
After signing in to a new Amazon account (ugh, I despise Amazon) I realized there were constant ads on the Home Screen. Nope. After researching online, I discovered they can be removed for a $20 fee? I chatted up an Amazon rep, and they were able to waive the $20 instantly. Now it is perfect again. I have no intention of purchasing digital books from Amazon ever again. I learned this way back in 2013 when I canceled my original Amazon account and discovered I could not take my books with me. Digital Rights Management (DRM) be damned. For the past few years, I have enjoyed reading books from public libraries using their Libby app on my iDevices. But now I can read in their app or send to the Kindle instead. Brilliant. Now I need a solution to export all highlights and notes I make on the Kindle to other software platforms to use as a reference. I hope that with the proper tools such as the Kindle, I will be able to exceed my reading goals again.
