antipaucity

4.5 years ago, I switched hosts (though not providers (that had happened 4.5 years prior to that)) for my “big” server.

Now I’m about to do it again.

After years of thinking about it, I finally got around to it.

I’ve rewritten my RSS feed driven website https://datente.com to run on Python from PHP.

I’m sure there is much room for improvement in the approach – and would appreciate any constructive feedback you may have. Here’s the GitHub repo: https://github.com/volcimaster/dorss.

After months years of threatening, I’ve finally removed one item from my round tuit plate: https://sweetree.ga is the latest Mastodon instance in the fediverse.

There are still a few bugs to iron-out of this instance, but it’s live, and I’m – once-again – tooting.

Come follow me – @warrenmyers@sweetree.ga

In the coming days, fully-automated registrations will be live .. mail settings are wonky right now, but I can manually approve anyone who’d like to join my instance.

Shared a TechCrunch story recently in a G+ group I’m in on Volvo debuting a new service to upload live traffic data from its vehicles to be sent to other Volvos so they can avoid problem areas.

Or…a self-built and -hosted Waze.

You may recall that I wrote some about these kinds of things starting back in 2010.

Why, exactly, Volvo thinks it not only should do this, but expects its customers to want the manufacturer to be doing this is something I don’t understand right now.

Sure, it’s an interesting technical challenge – but it’s not exactly novel…except in the sense of the vehicle doing this for you instead of you doing it via some mobile app or other.

If this is something drivers must opt-in to use, that’s OK. If you can opt-out, it’s OK, too.

But if it’s not optional – this is a major privacy concern: one I’m sure many people would do without even stopping to take a breath, but a major privacy concern nonetheless.

I’ve published another super-simple tool.

A la whatismyip.com, but with no extra cruft (and no queer formatting of the IP address under the hood), welcome IPv4.cf to the world with me!

Along with becoming more active on Mastodon,  I’ve been thinking more about concision recently.

One of the big selling points for Mastodon is that the character limit per post is 500 instead of Twitter’s 140.

And I was thinking, “what if there was a way to force you to write better by writing less / more compactly / more concisely?”

So after a couple weeks, I sat down and wrote an incredibly simple WordPress plugin. Introducing Paragraph.

Paragraph removes all formatting of a post or page, effectively turning it into a wall of text.

How does this help you?

If you see your writing as an uninterrupted wall of text – or a “paragraph” – you may notice that what you’re trying to say is getting lost in the noise.

It could also help force you to write more often but shorter each time.

Or maybe you’ll find it completely useless: and that’s OK, too.

I have started a Tech News channel on Telegram.

Follow it at @datente.