Laura Kalbag @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com

“Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing.”

https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-1838974714

@viduno aw friend, that sounds awful. I’m certainly grateful for your efforts! ❤️

Got a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or 4B and want to get a static or dynamic server up and running really really quickly?
@aral’s got Site.js working on those tiny creatures: https://ar.al/2019/10/18/site.js-and-pi/

@UnclearFuture I was just sent a link to it! Thanks! I’ll give it a go…

@n0m1s thanks!

Related: hours of my life spent trying to find the original url from an amp url is TOO MANY.

How to tell a true friend: they strip the tracking identifiers and amp junk from a url before sharing it with you.

@Jelv @indie gah, sorry! that’s because it should redirect to our videos on https://small-tech.org/videos/

“Activists and tech critics sometimes use the word complicit when talking about companies that look the other way when their inventions are causing harm. Assistive might be more accurate. Providing database and web services—even just email—to a cruel immigration regime assists in the cruelty.”

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/apple-chinese-government-microsoft-amazon-ice.html

“Platforms *are* societies of intertwined people and machines. There is no such thing as “online life” versus “real life.” We give massive ground if we pretend that these companies are simply having an “effect” or “impact” on some separate society.”

https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/tech-platforms-are-where-public-life-is-increasingly-constructed-and-their-motivations-are-far-from-neutral/

“[T]he ‘natural evolution of technology’ was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what ‘progress’ actually means.”

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/1/20887003/tech-technology-evolution-natural-inevitable-ethics

Today I am 33. But Apple has perhaps accurately assessed I am nothing more than “a child with an administrator account.”

Ouch. Thanks Apple.

Want to make a little chat app? Even me, while very tired and usually not confident in these things, had fun going through the tutorial and getting my own basic chat app going this afternoon.

Site.js holds so much promise and I’m very excited about it.

https://ar.al/2019/10/11/build-a-simple-chat-app-with-site.js/

Very last-minute trip to Stockholm for
Nordic.design tomorrow. Give me a shout if you’ll be there!

https://nordic.design/2019/speakers

Don’t be all cocky, pressing buttons without thinking like me! Make sure you have enough disk space before updating!

Sitting on the floor looking despondently at the carpet while @aral patiently fixes my fudged Catalina install for me. 😞

@notabene I used to do that! And “um”. I squashed them after having to edit myself on a number of podcasts. Still, you get rid of one sound and it leaves room for new ones!

And trust me, it needed the tightening. Reading a verbatim transcript of myself speaking has made me hate myself and my gratuitous use of “so” and “the thing is…”

I’m sorry this has taken an unreasonably long time, but my slides from #SOTB2019 are finally up on my Notist profile. (I wanted to make sure the slides had a proper transcript—it’s a “tightened” version of what I said on the day.)

https://noti.st/laurakalbag/K0n0Gl/accessibility-for-everyone