Jonas Voss

Jeg har prøvet micro.blogs micro.one løsning i en måneds tid nu, og den virker fint, men jeg har egentlig ikke lyst til at blande endnu en platform ind i det. Jeg vil gerne have, at min hjemmeside igen er det sted jeg poster mine ting først, hvorefter det så kan findes andre steder. Desværre så har min nuværende løsning (withknown.com) ikke haft nogen opdatering i et års tid, og det Mastodon plug-in jeg bruger, fungerer ikke længere, og jeg er hverken smart nok, eller har tid til, at forke det, og fikse det selv.

Så nu dropper jeg micro.one, og hopper tilbage til at bruge min blog. For at undgå at manuelt poste opslag fra min blog til Mastodon og BlueSky, så ender jeg nok med at bruge fed.brid.gy til at spejle det jeg poster på min blog, til både Mastodon og BlueSky. Jeg har stadig ikke helt gennemskuet hvordan det med at følge nogen på BlueSky og Mastodon med sin blog-bruger fungerer, eller om det overhovedet er muligt. Så det kan være jeg bliver nødt til at have en dedikeret bruger udover min blog, som jeg kan bruge til at interagere med indholdet fra f.eks. BlueSky og Mastodon.

Det fediverse er nogle gange lidt kompliceret, men jeg synes faktisk det er udfordringen værd. I 2017 kastede mig gladeligt over Known som valgt platform, for på det tidspunkt (og er det vel nok sagtens stadig, hvis altså bare den fik lidt mere kærlighed) var den en fuld platform der kunne det hele med ganske få ting. Til gengæld er den skrevet på en måde som gør det svært for mig selv at tweake og dimse, så det har jeg bøvlet lidt med.

Jeg håber den får mere opmærksomhed i denne tid med ændrede politiske vinde, og mere fokus på uafhængighed af store centraliserede tech-selskaber og deres platforme. Ellers kan det være man skal overveje at skifte til noget mere simpelt, måske en SSG, eller noget mere bredt tilgængeligt, som f.eks. WordPress.

For et par dage siden sad jeg og rodede i min hjerne, efter navnet på et program jeg brugte på Mac OS X i nullerne. Det var en lokal wiki, og jeg brugte den ret flittigt, men jeg kunne simpelthen ikke huske hvad det hed.

Søgning på søgemaskiner efter lokal wiki program fra 00erne var selvsagt ikke særlig vellykket, så jeg satte chatbots på opgaven.

Min prompt var:

what's the name of the app from 2000s for mac, which was like a wiki, but it was an application running locally on your mac. It wasn't free, but it was so good. It was made by a software maker that had a few other apps available, but I don't remember what they did. I think it might be the company that made transmit FTP, but I'm not sure. Can you help me with the app name?

Og her er resultaterne.

Bard:

ChatGPT (den gratis version):

ChatGPT havde det mest korrekte svar, men de hallucinerede begge.

ChatGPT fik navnet på programmet rigtigt, det hed nemlig VoodooPad (og var pissefantastisk). Det hedder det stadigvæk, og det er det sikkert stadigvæk. Seneste version er 5.4.0.

Bard mente at programmet måtte have været CyberNote lavet af Panic Inc. Men Panic Inc har aldrig lavet et program der hedder CyberNote.

Begge bots mente at mit bud på Panic Inc var korrekt, men det er forkert, de havde intet med det at gøre. Det var nemlig Flying Meat Inc der lavede programmet jeg ledte efter. Det er senere hen blevet købt af Primate Labs, der nu vedligeholder og udvikler det. ChatGPT troede så at det var Flying Meat der havde lavet Transmit, men det er altså Panic Inc.

Summa summarum, det lykkedes mig at få navnet på det software jeg prøvede at komme i tanke om, men der var lidt (muligvis selvforskyldte) blomster i resultatet der lige skulle luges lidt ud i.

Water at airports has been around since 2017, according to wayback machine. The purpose is, in the words of its creator:

I created this website because not only am I fed up with paying high prices for drinking water in airport departure lounges, but we all need to cut down on the amount of one use plastics we are throwing away into the environment.

Users, as well as the owner, contributes their own findings. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the forum to keep a note of the updates for the different airports.

For the last couple of years I've been travelling with a water bottle to avoid using more plastic than necessary when travelling, and this site has been helpful in finding where to fill it in the departure lounges I've visited.

One of the perks of paying for a Flickr Pro account is that you get a limited free account with Pixsy, a service that scours the web for photos from your Flickr account, to see if they are being used anywhere.

If you find a that your photos are being used without your permission then Pixsy offers, by just one click, to send a Takedown Notice to one or more sites. Besides requesting that your picture be taken down, the takedown notice also requests the site to amend the article that was using the photo, to include a paragraph saying that the photo has been removed due to copyright infringement.

I gave it a spin, and a few of my photos had been used without my permission. Most prominently these two pictures of MF DOOM from a concert in Dublin in 2010, were being used by wellknown websites:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/voss/5079060535/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/voss/5079060937/

So I hit the Takedown Notice button in Pixsy, and here's what came out of it.

I've sent out a total of eight takedown notices at the end of October through Pixsy. Seven was to commercially run websites with global reach and recognition, and the last one was to a personal website with no obvious commercial scope.

In terms of full compliance to the requests in the takedown note, only 1 of 8 was 100% successful. The 100% successful one was an American university newspaper, that besides using my photo uncredited, also allowed visitors to buy printed copies of my photo, through their website. Nice.

Another prominent website's legal counsel replied that they genuinely didn't know that I was the copyright holder of the photo, and claimed that in those circumstances, using my photo without crediting me was within the fair dealing doctrine of UK copyright law. Guess what, it isn't.

It is true that you can use orphaned material on some ocassions, but photos are specifically omitted from this clause. It's also true that you can use material without crediting it for news reporting, but photographs are specifically omitted from that clause as well.

One of the websites that I sent out two takedown notices to (for two separate photos), removed the image mentioned in one, but didn't remove the one mentioned in the second. I'm looking at you, factmag.

All 'n all, I guess a 87.5% success rate on the initial purpose of the takedown notice, to make these sites stop using my photo without my persmission, is not too bad. The question is: Would I have had the same success rate if I had simply written my own requests for them to take down my photos, without all the legally binding text included in the ones from Pixsy? I might have to test that, as I still have a few photos being used without my permission.

Anyone else out there tried the takedown service from Pixsy and are willing to share their results?

I've been looking for a different way of consuming Instagram. Facebook has introduced more and more features in their neverending quest to wrestle users from Snapchat and onto Instagram, and I don't care for those. I like Instagram, the photo sharing part, not so much the TV and Stories part. The other reason is that whole privacy thing, of course. Turns out big social media players weren't quite the stewards of our personal data we were hoping for, and spending less time on actual social media websites seems like a good thing.

Except for some musicians and photographers, I don't follow brands on Instagram. I mainly follow people I know. Family, friends, and tags. Being a camera and photo enthusiast, I enjoy looking at photos taken with a variety of cameras and film, and a lot of people use Instagram to show their analogue makings.

For a while I used an app called Hermit on Android. Hermit is a wrapper that turns mobile web versions of websites into apps. It has ad blocking, and a bunch of other nice features. Using Hermit helped me get rid of ads on Instagram, and their algorithm somehow works differently on there as well. I liked the ordering better, it seemed to be more chronological. Only downside: I had to consume it on my phone. It was good, but not great.

Granary.io and Atom to the rescue

Thankfully, people much smarter than me are creating tools for consuming silo'ed social media in different ways. One such tool is Granary.

To be able to get the feed of your friends, and not the feed of your own damn self, you need to find your sessionid cookie value from Instagram. Do the following:

Edit: There's actually a much easier way to do the below, by using https://instagram-atom.appspot.com/ - thanks to Ryan for pointing it out.

• Open the Chrome Browser
• go to instagram.com and login with your account
• after logging in, open the developer console of your browser, and reload the page
• find the "Application" tab and click it
• in the left hand panel there's a "Cookies" item, click the chevron to the left of it to expand it
• click on the line that says https://www.instagram.com
• in the list of cookies like csrftoken, ig_cb, mid, and rur, there should also be a cookie called "sessionid"
• copy the value of sessionid

Next, open Granary.io, and click on the Instagram logo. Granary will load up this url, and then you have to fill out some fields. You need to fill in your Instagram username, select @friends from the dropdown, select "atom" as your format, and paste the cookied ID you gathered above, into the last field where it says sessionid cookie (for @friends) and hit the GET button.

When Granary has done its thing, you'll end up with a link below the form. With the cookie value removed, mine looks like this:

https://granary.io/instagram/l3traset/@friends/@app/?format=atom&cookie=

This link holds your liberated Instagram photo feed. I plugged mine into my Feed Reader and into Aaron Parecki's Aperture and now I can read my Instagram feed on my phone using Indigenous, and on my desktop, all with no ads and no stories. Glorious!

Is anything lost?

Besides losing the ads and stories, you also lose the ability to favourite a post on Instagram, and to add comments to a post. However, I don't necessarily see this as a loss. If I want to Like a post, I can just do it on my own personal feed, and it ends up looking like this. Sure, if it's a post from a friend of mine, they won't know from their post, that I liked it. But you know how you can fix that? Write them an email. If your feed reader lets you email a post, you can email your friend saying you liked their picture.

Not being able to comment might be the biggest loss, but if you can live with that, then I think you should do it, go forth and liberate your Instagram feed.

This will definitely be the way I will consume Instagram until we've all moved over to Pixelfed.

P.S. I'm not sure how long the sessionid cookie lives for, so you might have to reconstruct the link in Granary once in a while, but that should be about it. Also, don't share that sessionid with anyone. I'm pretty sure it can be used to log into Instagram as you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome#Genome_size

HIV can easily fit on a floppy disk.

https://soundcloud.com/sangobeats/respeita-ft-dkvpz

#music #bailefunk