Category: Burningbird

Categories
Education Environment Reads Social Media

What I’m Reading – Jan 2 2024

2017 Solar eclipse showing the diamond
Photo of complete solar eclipse taken in St. Louis in 2017

Today is a good day to read.

I subscribe to a good number of newsletters. Most are freely available, even if you don’t subscribe to the parent publication

One such newsletter is Landline, from High Country News. I subscribe to the Landline because it has excellent coverage of what’s happening with clean air and water, the Endangered Species Act, the Interior, and climate change.

From the Landline:  Is Biden waging a war on energy? Or on the climate?

Biden is twixt and tween on climate change and we’re going to end up with a really bad President if we don’t recognize this. Yes, we wish he could have done more for the environment and fighting climate change. Given. However, if you keep up with court cases, you realize he has done what he could given the current state of our court systems—not to mention the current state of Congress.

***

Another newsletter is from The 74, a media site dedicated to all things educational. You don’t have to be a teacher—or a parent—to have an interest in education. After all, what happens in schools impacts on what type of citizens kids become in the future. And even us older childfree couples have to live with these citizens.

From The 74, a story about one of the largest school districts in the country in Virginia, and the impact of its mistaken release of private and confidential data from 35,000 students.

From The 74: Alleged Rape Victim Presses Virginia’s Fairfax Schools for Answers on Records Disclosure

***

The Climate Coach is one of Washington Post’s free newsletters. You don’t have to be a subscriber to the Post to get the newsletter. Today’s Climate Coach is about our need to stop buying so much crap…and to consider getting rid of the crap we have.

Article has had the paywall removed.

From the Climate Coach: The Swedes know the secret to happiness: You are not your stuff

***

Speaking of newsletters, I suspect most of us are signed up for one or more newletters from authors who publish on Substack. I subscribe to several, though I can’t afford to be a paying client of all of them.

You might have heard recently about a neo-Nazi account on Substack, and the company’s response when asked about it. Linked below are some of the replies from people I follow on Substack.

As for me? If someone moves from Substack, I’ll do my best to find and follow them. But I won’t unsubscribe from someone who wants to stay on Substack. I’ve had an online site long enough to know that no matter where you go, bad people follow. I lease my server space from Linode, which is now a part of Akamai. I would not be surprised if Akamai is hosting a neo-Nazi web site. Or two. And if I find this out, I’m not going to pull my server and go elsewhere, because wherever I go, the bad people will follow. If not immediately, someday.

If you want to silence bad people, you drown them out with the good. So, don’t link to the bad people, don’t talk to the bad people, and don’t give the bad people attention. Only echo the good.

So, I’m linking to the good.

Kevin Kruse: Moving Forward

Ken White: Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity

Thomas Zimmer: On Substack’s Nazi Problem, and Ours

 

 

Categories
Environment Legal, Laws, and Regs Reads Texas

What I’m Reading – Dec 29 2024

Razor wire, like that Texas is placing at the southern border
Razor wire, like that being placed by Texas at the southern border.

The Endangered Species Act turns 50. There’s good news, and bad, about the law.

The good news is, it works. The bad news is, Republicans and some industries such as the fossil fuel, timber, mineral extraction, and cattle industries, don’t like that it’s working. And you can toss in a few states among those who have declared themselves just peachy keen to let species go extinct.

High Country New: The epic history of the Endangered Species Act

Sierra Club: Two Stoneflies Lead the Way for Conserving Other Uncharismatic Species

Vox: The ridiculously stupid reason the US is letting animals spiral toward oblivion

PBS: Architects of the Endangered Species Act reflect on 50th anniversary of groundbreaking measure

***

Our country has completely recovered from the COVID slowdown, inflation is under control, unemployment is down, and wages have risen—this despite a desperate effort by US corporations to milk the people of this country for as many profits as possible.

Yet, nary a peep from the media giving Biden any kudos for, at a minimum, staying out of the way and letting federal agencies do their job to control a post-COVID economy.

Public Notice: Biden doesn’t get enough credit for his economic record

***

I’ve been following the antics of Texas governor and legislature in court documents for some time. Without firing a shot, the state has unilaterally declared itself independent of the United States.

(Well, except when it holds its hand out for federal funds.)

The Texas government has triggered acrimony between the US and Mexico at a time when we need Mexico’s help to handle mass migrations. It undermines the federal effort to control migration, and then turns around and tells the press the southern border is ‘wide open’. And Texas creates havoc and hardship for citizen and migrant alike by shipping poor migrants to northern cities, without giving the cities a heads up, and without the migrants even having the clothing they would need to survive.

Worse, other than independent publications like the Texas Tribune, the media has done an appallingly bad job documenting the damage Texas is causing. Instead it plays into the Republican talking points of “Oh, Biden is in trouble! Migration at the border is out of control!”

I’ll have more on the Texas efforts, migration, and the legal cases associated with the efforts, in separate posts. As for the media, all I can do with it is focus on sharing stores from decent media sources, like the Texas Tribune.

Texas Tribune: U.S. Department of Justice says it’ll sue if Texas enforces new law punishing illegal border crossing

 

 

Categories
Burningbird

This is my home. This is Burningbird.

Screenshot of my earliest weblog - bright orange

I just published the last of the *recovered posts. I’ve manage to recover over 4000 posts. The last bit went faster than I expected, as I didn’t have as many posts to recover in later years.

I’ve not been chatty in this space in recent years. Months would go by before I’d write something to Burningbird. I spent more time on social media sites than I did my own space.

Elon Musk and his destruction of Twitter has been a good thing. It’s reminded us that we’re only renters in sites like Twitter and Facebook; renters at the sufferance of single overlords who could wipe out our existence on their sites with a single whim.

I have found Mastodon to be a superior offering, if for no other reason than you can pick your self up and move to another instance, or maintain your own instance, and have control over your own space. But you still don’t have permanence in Mastodon. Yes, you can move your follows and followers, and folks following you won’t even know you moved. But you can’t move your old posts.

And that’s right. Social media is intended to be today. It is now. It is a current spot where we can connect and discuss what happened today. You don’t freeze a street corner to keep alive a moment where you run into an old friend and have a great conversation. No, you will move on, your friend will move on, and that street corner becomes a place where someone else will run into an old (or new) friend.

If you want permanence, you need a home.

This is my home. This is Burningbird.

*With many, many thanks to the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine.

Categories
Burningbird

Web site recovery continues

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine I have recovered over 3600 web posts dating back to 1996. I’m not done yet, but I’m getting into the detective phase of recovery. This means using all the of the tools the Wayback Machine provides for recovery.

For instance, though you get a timeline of snapshots when you search on a domain, such as weblog.burningbird.net, you can get a listing of individual pages by using the wildcard (*), such as weblog.burningbird.net/*. By doing this, I’ve been able to recover seemingly lost writings if there’s a break in navigation between pages.

Considering that I never could make up my mind how I want to display pages—under archives for a time, by year and month another time, by subdomain, separate domain, by burningbird.net others—I’ve made liberal use of the wildcard in my recovery.

Lately, I brought in a new tool: the Ruby-based program wayback_machine_downloader. I’ve tested it in both Ubuntu and Windows, and it works beautifully.

I’ve given it both domain and subdomains and bulk downloaded most of the content the Internet Archive has archived from my sites. In some cases, where I no longer control the domain, I use the –to program modifier to grab just my content and not the content of the new domain owner.

I now have a backup copy of what the Wayback Machine has, and I’ve been able to recover pages more quickly. For instance, I able to recover a fragment of a 2003 post using this approach:

We Met. We talked. We expanded. And then the Net closed in. We reduced. We compacted. The energy was too much, the space too tiny, and we burst forth with wit, despair, beauty and brilliance, laughter, anger, tears, and, ultimately, cat.

We never forget cat. Cat is our anchor when our heads float too high, and we begin to think we’re Gods on a Wire, like pigs on a stick.

It is true that many of the recovered posts will never be read by another living soul in the future. That’s not what’s important. What’s important is I’ll finally have all my stuff in one place.

And I’m having fun. The Wayback Machine and all the tools that work with it are just a kick to use. The people behind this site and the tools are the most generous folk.

I’ll have more details on my Hunt for Burningbird at a future time. I just wanted to provide a quick update. I also wanted to test out the latest update of the ActivityPub plug-in, since its creator is now part of the WordPress team.

Categories
Burningbird Social Media

Yes to ActivityPub, but no to Friends

Image of mastodon

I decided to disable the Friends plug-in when I realized it was inserting every new feed item as a new post in my database. This could easily become unmanageable. Considering you can use a feed reader to read weblogs AND Mastodon accounts, it just didn’t seem worth the database burden.

I do still have ActivityPub activated. I agree with my friend Karl that I could wish it would not pick my profile name as account name, because this could make it easier to hack into our WordPress accounts, but it’s beta, it will improve, and it’s interesting.

I realized this week that I checked Twitter only twice and that primarily to see what was happening with the Speaker vote. Most of the folks I followed on Twitter are now on Mastodon, and I just don’t miss the bird site that much.

I’m now considering keeping my mastodon.social account. It’s cheaper for me to support mastodon.social than it would be to spin up a new Linode for a Mastodon instance. And I’m really not interested in installing software I can’t ‘read’ since I don’t speak the language. And no, I really don’t want to learn Ruby. I’m done with my programming language learning days, and content to stick primarily with markups, PHP, and JavaScript.

Update

I have temporarily disabled ActivityPub. I’m currently restoring all my old weblog posts using the Wayback Machine. I realized after about the 15th post yesterday that I was sending copies of each to Mastodon.

I’m not sure if the folks that follow me on Mastodon really want to know what weblogging was like in early 2004. It is interesting in that I stopped just on the verge of discussing my move to a new weblogging tool: WordPress.

I’ll re-enable the plugin when I’m finished.