Trump is going to jail. Get used to the idea. #

All articles about Doug Engelbart talk about the mouse, and mention "augmenting human intellect" in a vague way, not explaining what it means, and that he actually developed real software people could use for that. Engelbart thought augmenting human intellect was his real life's work. I know because 1. he told me and 2. same with me. Augmenting human intellect sounds spacy, something only a genius could understand, which is why it's not a good term for something that's pretty simple. Using an outliner to take notes and manage a project is an example of the computer augmenting your intellect. Doing something for you that you are not as good at as a computer is. Using a spreadsheet to augment human intellect could mean doing what-if analysis on a projected balance sheet. Sharing a recipe on Facebook with a group of friends is another example. Remember, Engelbart was talking about this long before there were computers outside of research labs. What seems kind of obvious today was anything but obvious then. #

I watched Breaking Away over the weekend. First time. The idealistic teen bike rider who worshipped Italian cyclists learns that everyone cheats. A hard lesson, one that I never learned, and keep bumping up against. Maybe bumping is too mild a word. 😄#

Did the NYT run similar stories about Trump being a weird and possibly ineffective advocate for enslaving women to carry unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancies?#

Reviewing the agenda for an upcoming Future of Thinking conference I realize -- if this really is the future -- we lost. Yet another promising tech that is going to be fought over like social media before it, and web browsers before that and PC operating systems before that. Winner take all and users be damned. It's not too late to make Tools For Thought a rare exception, where no company can lock their users in, and keep them from switching, where every product has to do everything and therefore does nothing well, and no one has the incentive to make their products better and their users more powerful thinkers. As an elder of this industry, I can't stand by and say nothing, not that I could when I was just a young whippersnapper. For whatever reason I insist on my products being open to competition, and that makes it harder to win, and so be it. That's the way it should be! ;-)#

It seems Marco Rubio is beatable. Wouldn't it be something if the listenters to Keith Olbermann's fantastic podcast could make it happen? I think it's possible. #

But what do I know. Heh. Every poll has Rubio far ahead of Demings. #

I usually exercise in the afternoon, but it's been so hot, so I did my Peloton ride first thing this morning. Then swimming, a nice breakfast with a tall glass of delicious ice coffee. The sense of well-being is overwhelming. I used to have this feeling all the time after working out when I was younger. Now it's harder to get there. It's nice to see if I do everything well, I can still do it.#

When I wrote about Utopia Bagels yesterday, I forgot to mention that Whitestone is part of Queens. It's a weird thing, of the five boroughs of NYC, the oddball is Queens, where each neighborhood was once a town, and they kept it that way even when they all became part of Queens. So my parents' address was in Flushing, NY -- not Queens, NY as it would have been if we were in Brooklyn, The Bronx or Staten Island (actually not sure about Staten Island, it's the forgotten borough, more part of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy than the greatest city in the world). Manhattan is the other weird case for a different reason. You send your mail to Manhattanites to New York, NY -- in other words fuck the other boroughs, Manhattan is the real New York. In a city that's known for its self-centered arrogance, Manhattanites take it to the next level. Not only don't they acknowledge that the rest of the country exists, they don't even credit their fellow NYers. Gotta love it. 😄#

Wow I miss Summer Streets. On three Saturdays in August, in NYC, they close Park Avenue and 4th Avenue below it, all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge -- and it's just for bikes and pedestrians. It's what NYC would be like if there were no cars. #

A reader thanked me for the tip about Olbermann. "With Maddow only one day a week, it's nice to know there is still a good, daily source of my kind of Snark and News available." My response: You're very welcome. But I think when you listen to Olbermann you'll realize as I did that Maddow wasn't cutting it. She stepped back because she lost her edge, she must've known it. I also think the MSNBC management must have been forcing her to not say the whole truth. Olbermann for now at least is unchained. But his show is owned by a big corporation so he'll probably eventually go stale too. But for now -- he's got it. #

Everyone who reads my blog must listen to Keith Olbermann's new podcast. Start with the first episode. There's more to the history of the Civil War as he tells it. What the Confederacy did by seceding from the Union was quite similar to the January 6 attempted coup, but after the Civil War, we (ie the United States) made the same mistake the Bidens are making. They wanted to bring the Confederates themselves back into the country. So really it was no surprise that slavery continued, it was just a bit more complicated. When we prevail this time, when Trump is dead and gone, and his successors are a bit easier to shame, we must have a purging. With force. No more trying to love the rebels back into the country. Deport them any place that will have them. Offer them to Russia or Hungary. You want em? We don't. If not, build huge prison camps in remote parts of America. Life sentences with no parole. These people should not feel after all is said and done that they are part of America. They didn't love it, they left it, tried to destroy it, they do not get to come back and enjoy the benefits of living in a free society. It's their turn to really feel the pain.#

What made me think of this was a random experience while waiting for my order this morning at Utopia Bagels in Whitestone, NY. It's in the neighborhood I grew up in. The people behind the counter looked nothing like the people I grew up with, coming from the current working population of Queens, one of the most diverse places in the world. The night before I had gone to see the Mets beat the Atlanta Braves. This year's Mets are unusually competent. Anyway there was a man there, in the crowded bagel store, probably in his early 80s, wearing a rent-a-cop uniform. I thought he was one of the few people remaining from my time there. He looked like a drinker and smoker. He could have been one of my childhood friends' fathers. He picked me out and asked if I knew what he thought. I said nothing. He said "America matters, that's all." I mumbled quietly well we can agree to disagree. After that I avoided him, looked around, he and I were among the oldest people there. This, I thought, is the new Queens, we are part of the old (and I am long-gone, just back for the Mets game and the bagels). On the way out, on an impulse, I tapped his shoulder and said in a voice that I was sure he could hear, but not too loudly -- Black lives matter. I don't know why I said it, it probably only meant pain for this man. He is a human vestige. So old and obviously tired, but he still had to do a job probably no one else wanted. I think what he was really saying to me was hey brother, you look a bit like me, maybe we agree us white people matter. But he couldn't say it that plainly. #

I snapped this picture of the scene at Utopia Bagels at 6:30AM this morning.#

I got a Lox and cream cheese on an everything bagel at Utopia Bagels and ate it on the drive home. It was heaven. I will remember that bagel as long as I live. Also the store gets its name from the street it's on, Utopia Parkway. It's just an avenue, not a major thoroughfare, not what in NY you'd call a parkway. It winds north-south through this part of Queens. I always felt privileged to live near Utopia. Wikipedia says where the name came from, an attempt to create a utopian community in Queens. There's no mention of Utopia Bagels in the Wikipedia article, but there should be. 😄#

I think Twitter, with Musk largely history, can become a stronger company than they've ever been. The way forward imho is to focus on the platform, so lots of apps can be made to run on it, not just one way to use its capabilities. Lots of user experiences. That's something none of the other social media platforms have let happen. Amazingly in 2022, while there are standards for images, movies -- everything but simple documents, with titles, unlimited length, simple styling, links and enclosures. That's where I'd like to see Twitter be the leader. Be the world-scale distribution system for simple text documents. Lead by filling the void. No standards bodies. PS: I bought a small amount of TWTR stock a few years back and continue to hold it. PPS: I basically wrote this business plan for the Apple of 1996. #

A new term: "alitoist." He's a politician now. A neophyte. His name should be as infamous as McCarthy as in McCarthyism. #

BTW, here's a screen shot of what Google Trends returns for alitoist today. Let's see if anything happens here. 😄 #

I am generally critical of the substance and format of cable news, but — the opening segment on Joy Reid’s show last night about women and abortion after Kansas was outstanding, deep, emotionally evocative, inspiring. The Dobbs decision, however awful, enslaving and life-endangering of American citizens, has a silver lining. It can stir us to act in care of each other, across all supposed divisions, find the American within each of us. We are still unitable if you push us hard enough.#

Today I coined a new term -- News Product. A product made out of news. I keep looking for something better, but in this case needed a descriptive term.#

This is funny. I've been programming almost 50 years if you can believe that. I do all my programming in an outliner so I can put as much text as I want into the code and it's still as simple as it was at the beginning. #

If the Democrats enjoyed politics even a little, we would be experiencing a huge wave of euphoria right now. We'd all be standing up in praise of Kansas, making the next state want to be next for FOMO. We'd be talking about what we can do next to make the US come together.#

The other day I read that Scoble thinks Tesla's way of playing music from an iPhone is as good as CarPlay or Android Auto. At first I couldn't think why that was wrong, but I just went down to the car (a Model Y) to set it up to work with the new Pixel 6 Pro I got yesterday, and remembered. When you're playing music on a phone in a Tesla, you have to use the UI of the phone to control the music. With CarPlay it's integrated with the display of the car, and it's simplified to be like a car control. And it's easy to switch apps, again using the UI of the CarPlay software, integrated into the car. It's so dangerous to do the same with the Tesla system that I never do it unless the car is stopped. The difference is integration. I wrote about this when I was first transitioning from CarPlay to Telsa, and it's a serious problem for Tesla that they don't have an app ecosystem, and unless they do a deal with Apple and Google, they probably aren't going to have one. It's no small thing to build one of those, they might have done it when they had the electric car business to themselves, but that's already past. #

The news people report decidedly that American is totally fucked, and we think they have some way of measuring fucked-ness, but yesterday the people of Kansas proved that we're not quite as fucked as they say. Another observation. If the Supreme Court is now made up of unelected politicians (it is), they are really shitty politicians. If they were smart they would have done the Dobbs thing after the midterms.#

I have a new Android phone this morning. One of the first things I did was transfer some music to the phone. I have to say it worked much better than transferring to my iPhone. From a Mac, which didn't work at all. I even bought a new Mac just for that purpose. Still couldn't get it to work. What's wrong with this picture? On the other hand, how do you play music on this Android wonder? All the apps begin with Google followed by three dots. Hmm. Which one plays music? I can't tell. Didn't they user-test this stuff at all?? I found an app that opens data files and when I opened one of the MP3's it figured it out and launched something that would play it. Now I wonder how that's going to work on my Tesla? We'll find out!#

Jon Stewart: "Only monsters would insist that doctors wait until women are so sick that they might die before they can receive appropriate medical treatment, which includes abortions.”#

I've been working outside an office for over 30 years, except for a brief period when I had an office at Berkman. Because I had the office, I was able to get an experienced radio team (Lydon and McGrath) to work with me on this idea I had for audio blogging (which became podcasting) and one of my colleagues suggested that blogging would work well with politics, which got the bootstrap of political blogging going just in time for the 2004 presidential election. So -- having an office and using it is good. In my experience, things get created that way that otherwise wouldn't.#

I mostly watch, read and listen to news to keep track of how they're screwing us.#

By far the best thing on Facebook are the "On this day" memories. I guess that means Facebook is winding down?#

Trump is old news, really tired and troubled. The enthusiasm is gone, they would vote for him if he was nominated, but they'd rather have a fresh Trump -- Desantis. Not good news for Trump-the-person, but nothing's changed for MAGA.#

The monthly ritual. Here are July's posts in OPML.#

I heard yet another piece on NPR this morning wondering why Biden's approval rating is so low. First question, who has ever shown that this number means anything? Esp at the end of July, the middle of the summer two years before he's up for re-election. Second, the reason his approval rating is so low is that he's old and frail. On the other hand, I know he's in great shape. But when he's giving a prepared speech, the makeup is bad, or the lighting, but his eyes have the beady look of a very old person. And he is terrible at reading speeches. The intonation is all wrong. There's nothing human about it. I imagine they've hired coaches to try to improve this, but he hasn't gotten better. Funny thing is, when he's doing a press conference, which is very rare, he's great! His mind is sharp, he's an excellent communicator. You quickly forget how old he is. My guess is that his handlers think the famous Biden gaffes are too expensive, so they play it safe with the prepared remarks approach. I don't think it's working. It's the source of "he's too old." And ultimately who cares what NPR thinks anyway. Stop worrying. Let Biden be Biden. #

As I work on my software, when I get something cool working I reward myself by playing Squeezebox on my Echo Studio. #

You know how Amazon was experimenting with having Alexa assume the voices of dead relatives. Probably not a great idea, but I just thought of someone who I'd love have announcing my musical choices. #

No wonder rss.land is such a mess. No one has been caring for it, for 20 years. People try to own it, exploit it, and when they fail, dump it. In that way it's amazing how strong it is. Even though we haven't been caring for RSS, it keeps going. #

Why isn't there a Reproductive Rights Pac like the NRA. One that rates candidates on their support for women. One that we can give money to that they in turn give to candidates that campaign on Reproductive Rights. It's not enough to be for it, you have to campaign for it. Of course people will say it's Planned Parenthood, but they do more than that. I'm talking about a PAC that's focused on making abortion rights a major issue in all elections until the Dobbs decision is reversed.#

August is the best month. Everyone is nice and relaxed. Nothing to do. No major holidays. Swimming. BBQs. Book reading. Hanging around doing nothing. Everyone is somewhere else. Baseball. Warm. Shorts. Hikes. Bikes. Beach. Fresh fruit and veggies.#

A rare day with nothing to blog. See you tomorrow! 😄#

Poll: Which do you watch most? Netflix, Amazon, HBO or Apple. #

Yesterday I wrote about Peloton's classes that take you places and how they don't work because the perspective is always shifting. Much better to have a constant first-person view, allowing your mind to zone out while your body works. An improvement beyond that -- have the speed correlate with how fast you're pushing the bike. And give me a boost, so if I'm going 10 mph, make it feel like I'm going 30. As if a strong wind was at my back. Often when you have the first person point of view in these classes it feels as if you're walking not riding, there's no feeling of speed. And you pedal harder and there's no change. I know that this would be hard to do and expensive, but (ahem) the bike and the classes are pretty freaking expensive too. Or better yet, let Nintendo write the software. 😄 #

I'm not apologizing anymore because I don't develop as part of a big company or write for a famous pub. #

"America First" means "White Christian fascists are in charge."#

Peloton has a series of training sessions where they go some place interesting and record one of the teachers riding there for 20 minutes or 30 or more. You're supposed get the feeling that you're riding there, I guess, but it's terrible. I tried it a few times, but yesterday I figured out why it's so bad. They keep changing the perspective. First you're seeing what the teacher sees. Then the camera goes off to the side, you're watching the rider. Then you're in a drone 200 feet above the rider, then the drone is looking down on the mountains or seascape or whatever. Then it goes back to the first-person perspective. I guess whoever designed these classes has no idea what it's like to ride? You only have one perspective and you get into the zone on it. But switching like that makes me feel sick! Literally makes me feel nauseous. I have to put my eyes somewhere else until the ride is over, but every so often I forget and there's that awful feeling again. Exercise is a meditation. Your mind does its own thing while your subconscious relaxes, just exerting and getting the body chemistry going to a nice place. And just when you're starting to zone out -- boom -- reality changes drastically. Again and again and again ad nauseum. Nothing in the real world works that way. Some free advice for Peloton. #

I ordered a Pixel 6 Pro. I've been enjoying my iPhone 13 Pro, but I've been wanting to try the pro version of the Pixel. I've been carrying two phones -- the other a Pixel 4a. Looking forward to trying the same thing without limits. I got the one with 512GB.#

I want an EZ-Pass for news. If I can drive the same car in Ohio or New Jersey and fly through the toll booths, why can't I do the same on the web with news.#

Is there doubt that at least some of the insurrectionists would have killed congresspeople if they had the chance? Maybe it was all bluster, but imho probably not. And if it's true, then the police at the Capitol, by holding back the mob, very much saved our country.#

Poll: Which company will buy Netflix?#

Jeff Jarvis: "The hippies ended a presidency, ended a war, made really good music, held historic festivals, got high, and got laid."#

2000: "After RSS 0.91, we breathed a sigh of relief that lasted almost a year. Glad that's over! In the meantime, repeated attempts to find anyone who cares about RSS at Netscape have turned up nothing. The people we worked with at Netscape left shortly after 0.91 was finalized." #

This year's RSS project is much like the project I did writing the 0.91 spec, the one based on actual practice, not a spec-writer's idea of how the base of feeds should evolve. I'm a big believer in following the spec, but if the spec is wrong -- that seemed to be what the devs were saying you have to do some more thinking. "See what's out there" is my motto, before making any assumptions. One of the reasons the only method for reading feeds in my project is the mailbox-style reader. I want to focus on what works and doesn't, before adding any alternative ways of viewing news. The mailbox style is what's out there in rss.land. That's where you start in 2022, because 2022 is not 2002. #

An unsolved problem as far as I know -- how to tell that two different URLs are actually the same feed? I know the Atom rel="self" element is an attempt to solve that problem, and it is fairly widely supported because the default feed validator, written by one of the Atom guys kind of requires it (if you look closely it doesn't, but people miss that). #

BTW, the validator situation is pretty bad. Apparently the original feed validator isn't working, and the W3C put up a fork of it a while back, but it seems to be giving different advice now. I think perhaps one of our projects should be to write an apolitical feed validator. One written from the point of view of apps that have to understand feeds. Basically saying -- if you do it this way it'll work better for your users, and forget about the various different standards groups who wanted to replace it. RSS got badly spammed that way. #

Yesterday on my linkblog I included a link to the NYT obituary for Tony Dow, who played the older brother on Leave It To Beaver, a show people of my generation grew up with. This morning I got an email from Steve Garfield, a longtime reader of this blog with a note that the NY Times had retracted the obit, because Mr Dow is still alive. I always try to check these things out but until now thought the NYT was authoritative. #

Another song that sounds great on the Echo Studio is Orinoco Flow by Enya. Seriously it's giving me goosebumps. #

A reporter asks if Jan 6 is a "bridge too far" for Trump as an at-large criminal (they didn't put it that way). If it isn't what would be? If he nuked a major American city? Would that be enough to put him in jail. Do people listen to their own words?#

Poll: Which borough has the best bagel?#

I updated the outlinerBrowser code, which is used in various places. I've seen other devs using it, which is good. It now supports image and inlineImage attributes, as they are used in Old School. #

An example of a site that uses the outlineBrowser code.#

Also backed up the source code of the site on GitHub. #

I was never that into Van Morrison, but his music fits perfectly with the Echo Studio speaker. I just say Alexa play Van Morrison and get to writing. #

I'm trying to see how long I can wait before turning on the air conditioning. #

Michelle Goldberg regrets calling on Al Franken to resign. But she misses an important point. Men saw what happened too. And while we were effectively silenced in the public debate, men do vote and that's a private thing. I don't doubt that #metoo contributed to more men voting for Trump. So there's another reason to regret forcing Franken to quit without any process, it was stupid politics. I think something similar contributed to Elizabeth Warren's failure as a presidential candidate in 2020. I enthusiastically supported her at first, but then I guess trying to get stronger women's support, she said some awful things about men. It didn't get any press, but I, as a man heard it, and as far as I was concerned it disqualified her. A president has to be for every American, regardless of gender. A woman president is also a president for men. And we can vote. We will I hope have a woman president someday, and when we do, she will appeal to all genders. Men can be feminists, but if you think that equates to attacking men for being men, you won't win. Men still have a lot of votes. #

Short podcast. Mostly about how exciting it is to work with people on RSS again, but at the end I talk about a misbelief that I advocate that people should run their own webservers. Even in my most positive days about making the web easy I didn't think that. But I do think we need alternatives to the VC-backed "free" web hosting companies like Medium and Substack. We keep learning this lesson, and at some point we should get it together to provide really free hosting for writing, with no business model attached, supported by foundations and contributions. It just doesn't cost that much to do the hosting of text files. A Twitter thread expands on this idea. #

The Secret Service must have known Trump was trying to overthrow the government. Assuming they swore an oath to defend the Constitution what’s their excuse for not stopping it?#

Today's song: Would I Lie to You?#

I missed the announcement of RSSHub. What a fascinating project. #

Yesterday there was a veritable riot of innovation in rss.land, more than any day in the last 20 years. But this is just the beginning folks. There's a lot more we can and Murphy-willing will do. #

BTW, here's the RSS feed for my Twitter account. #

And here's the mailbox reader view of the feed. I posted a couple of titled threads this morning so you could see how Twitter can be used as a blogging tool. #

Today's song: I am the Walrus.#

Programming note: September 18 is the 20th anniversary of RSS 2.0. After 20 years, there's a lot of new stuff that wasn't there when RSS 2.0 was rolled out, that because RSS has been stagnating, hasn't been added to the mix. I never should have stopped working on it, but the environment then was crazy. Anyway, I decided, at the beginning of 2022, that I'd spend the whole year building a new RSS toolkit. A top to bottom review. Only constraint is everything must be compatible with what's out there. With lots of room for innovation and refinement. Anyway -- today is a big day in the process. A lot of stuff is working, very little of it is visible. But a bunch of stuff that will make your brain explode, a little, is now available. If you care about RSS, please set aside a little time to focus on what's here in the blog for today. It's not complicated, but it is new. 😄#

The Guardian says Tucker Carlson "could" be a good president. What do you think?#

NPR this morning did the ultimate unforgivable "both sides" horse-race bs -- they labeled people who support Roe v Wade as extremists and wondered if such extremism will cause the Democrats to lose in November. Journalism will let the center go where ever the Repubs want to put it. Now Roe is extreme, last month it was the settled law, according to all but one of the Supreme Court justices (publicly, privately they were ready to destroy it). The problem isn't Repubs, they're just taking what we're letting them have. The problem is journalism and the Democratic Party, but even more broadly the problem is we don't put a stop to this and tell the Dems clearly that they have to get real, or we won't re-elect them. #

A country isn't great because it says it's great. A great country does what the Bill of Rights says, but for every citizen, and not for fictitious citizens like corporations.#

I can't believe all the crazy swirling around the Knicks right now. Here's the deal. We have a really interesting team, we're going to get really emotionally involved with them next season. We're going to love rooting for them, win or lose. So stop kvetching and relax. 💥#

It's fascinating to watch the discussion at Hacker News re XML-RPC. They got some things right. The protocol was designed in a couple of weeks by four people, two at Microsoft and two of us not. The Microsoft people were from their networking group. They wanted a cross-platform protocol to do what DCOM does. It was and is a brilliant idea. I wanted it as a way of designing APIs for scriptable blogging systems. We were in the process of shipping a new Windows version of Frontier, we already had a Mac version, and I wanted the two Frontiers to work beautifully together on LANs and on the net. I wrote a blog post about it, when I figured out that it would be done with XML and HTTP. I then got an email from Bob Atkinson at Microsoft asking if I wanted to work with them on this. I always admired Bob and people like him at Microsoft, they had an excellent engineering culture imho, so of course I said yes. What followed was one of the most productive collaborations of my career. And as a result not only did Frontier get great cross-platform compatibility, all the early blogging systems has compatible APIs. To the Hacker News folks, that's what matters in a protocol, what kind of interop did it enable. See my Rules for standards-makers for more on this.#

I want Biden to step back after the election and let the Democrats have a great primary campaign where we really discuss, as a country, what our options are going forward. Not limited to things considered too daring, like expanding the court. It's clear Biden will not do what we need. But that's okay, his greatest contribution would be to create a stage for the next generation of leaders to work things out, along with Bernie Sanders and others. #

Poll: Are you blocked by someone whose tweets you want to read, so you go to extreme lengths to read them even though you're blocked?#

An RSS-related question. Suppose I have a subscription to the NY Times (I do). And I'm using a traditional feed reader to browse their top stories. A mailbox-style reader. Here's a link to just that. Why can't I have the full text of the article in the right panel of the reader? Remember, I'm a paid-up subscriber, so I'm not trying to pirate their content, I'd just like to read it along with the other pubs I care about without a lot of ads and other stuff. I suppose I'd have to pay more for it?#

There is no "standards innovation paradox," at least as far as I can tell from reading this piece by Michael Mignano, who started a podcast-making company and sold it to Spotify. Podcasts are RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures that contain the podcast content. Anything that doesn't use a feed to distribute the audio isn't a podcast, and shouldn't use that name. Eventually Spotify will regret diluting the meaning of the name, the same way I'm sure Microsoft regrets trying to suck the web into Windows. When a new medium has so much momentum, it's best for the dominant company to just let it grow around them, and support it, and reap most of the profits. If you fight it, you'll get lost in the noise, no matter how big you are -- imho. This only applies if the new medium is very strong, as podcasting is today. For more, see this thread started by Priyanjana Bengani of Tow Center, and my response. "Simply support the standard and develop whatever features you want outside of the standard." I'd also recommend looking to see if anyone did it before you and try to be compatible with it -- and if you do -- you just created a new standard. It's just evolution. A lot of things have to be right for it to happen, and when it does, please -- don't get in the way, it's a miracle. 😄 #

NFTs are the new domain names.#

❤️  RSS 👍#