It took me seven years to leave Facebook. I wanted to leave in 2018 but, as administrator of a work account, I had to remain. While greatly reducing my activity on the site in that time, I saw the steady decline of the platform (what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’). My timeline was filled with advertising, some of it creepy because it was for things I had searched for elsewhere online, most of it completely irrelevant.…
Can I just say … Mastodon is great! I follow several people there who are part of the free and open source (FOSS) tech movement and are working to free themselves from online surveillance. It was there that I learned of the Opt Out Project by Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University who works at the intersection of society and technology. She opted out of Google in 2012 (an eternity ago in tech)…
Since receiving “The Dressmaker’s Companion: A Practical Guide to Sewing Clothes” by Elizabeth “Liz” Haywood for Christmas, I’ve wanted to write a review of it. I haven’t gotten around to it until now because every time I dive into this treasure to figure out what to write, I get lost in all the fabulous information presented. When I first opened the book, which is a hefty 449 pages, I landed on the section discussing the…
Buckle up, kids! Time for a tech how-to based on the trouble I had this week with the music app I have on my phone. I have used Musicolet for years now and I love the app, once I can get it set up properly. Hubby and I have a giant collection of compact discs (also called CDs for those who came along after CDs lost out to online music platforms). We like to be…