onfocus

This is a great story about some amateur radio folks who acquired a block of IP addresses in the early internet days and recently sold them to Amazon for millions of dollars. Their plan:

"It is our intention to grant funds across all reaches of the educational, research, and development spectrum, with awards being made to support qualified organizations whose programs could well serve to advance the art of digital communication, with special emphasis on that which would benefit Amateur Radio."

Om Malik tapped into a current of mistrust around smart device features sponsored by the big services after he wrote about his hesitation: Hello HomePod. So Long Sonos & Bose. Even my first generation Sonos speakers attempt to phone home frequently (for use stats?) and I block that with pi-hole. When I wanted to add a speaker recently I purchased a used first gen on eBay because I don’t want yet another always-on microphone in my home. I mean, have you seen the headlines?

Darius Kazemi describes running a modified Mastodon instance for 50 friends. This is my kind of heresy:

"I'd like to advance the notion that software does not have to scale, and in fact software can be better if it is not built to scale."

I think his vision of thousands of small communities that federate would be a better future for social media.

This resonates:

"Invest 80% of your learning time in fundamentals. Leave 20% for frameworks, libraries and tools."

I think it's good to step back and be mindful about where you're putting your energy. This idea reminds me of Stewart Brand's pace layering metaphor. We need all the layers for a healthy ecosystem. This article is a good reminder that we shouldn't focus so intently on the twists and turns of the outside layer that we exclude the others.

Field Notes really knocked this National Parks edition out of the, um, recreation enclosure. If you don't already have stacks of these nicely designed notebooks this edition would be a good place to start.

Fascinated by this report that the recent earthquakes in California disrupted the atmosphere 13 hours before the quake. It’s the first I’ve heard of ionospheric anomalies before earthquakes.

I really enjoyed this history lesson / manifesto / questioning. (lesfesquesto?) As the author says, "I find that both building and designing is a constant cycle of having a question and trying to find the answer." This offers some interesting questions including: what potentially important ideas have we forgotten and how can we use computers to iterate faster?

I was nodding along so much with this talk I hurt my neck. It's often hard to think about the forest of maintenance when you're in the trees of development, but it's critical because: "Humans have a finite amount of capacity for sweating details."