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)…
When I pinned a portion of the lyrics to Duran Duran’s song “Future Past” on my Twitter feed on December 31, 2021, little did I know they would serve as a requiem for the site. If you’ve not been following the Twitter saga, gazillionaire Elon Musk, who seems to have more money than sense, purchased Twitter and has been burning it all to the ground in the course of a few weeks. I have been…
My friend and fellow historian David Grabitske threw down a writing challenge on Twitter recently. The following tweet passed through my timeline recently from Stephanie @SimplyDreamin95: “Does anyone else email themselves stuff they need to save on another device and read or do you have your life together? #PhDLife” I retweeted Stephanie’s tweet and said: “I email myself stuff aaaalllll the time to read and save it on another device.” David replied that he did…
I have a habit of breaking WordPress websites and putting them back together again. I’ve done so at work a few times and with this particular site. When I say “break,” it’s not that I’m trying to make them completely inoperable. What I’m attempting to do is make them more efficiently operable, usually by combining two separate sites. A little over a year ago, when the pandemic first hit, I didn’t have the energy to…