The difference between Google and Bing in this case is consistent with something I’ve noticed lately, which is that Google seems to be forgetting a lot of old stuff.

I’m a big fan of Old Time Radio (OTR) and hard boiled detective shows.  If you want to hear all sorts of Noir type crime shows on Internet Radio, I suggest Audio Noir.  There you will hear mysteries, hard boiled, police proceedurals and more.

But the recordings of Old Time Radio make great podcasts and most are available at Archive.org.  Below is a list of some of the hard boiled detective shows I have enjoyed.  Philip Marlow and Sam Spade are the best of the genre.  There are others but these will get you started.🎙🎙

On some of these you have to download zip bundles of mp3 files.  So load up your iPod and enjoy.

Adventures of Philip Marlow. The Gerold Mohr episodes (most of them) are the best. The Mohr episodes define the genre on radio.

The Adventures of Sam Spade. Really good. Lighter than Marlow these are still amongst the best.

Broadway is My Beat.  The Larry Thor episodes are best.  Some of the characters are just weird but over time I grew to really like this show.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective.  Starring Dick Powell.

Let George Do It.  First few episodes are sadly played for laughs, but later episodes are hard boiled.

Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator.  Pretty standard.

Your’s Truly, Johnny Dollar.  I’ve singled out the Edmund O’Brian episodes which I think are the best and most hard boiled of this long running series.

Jeff Regan.  The 24 shows starring Jack Webb are the best.

Pat Novak, For Hire. Another Jack Webb show.

I used to collect browsers way back when, I don’t anymore although I do check out different browsers on occasion.  This conversation started me thinking about why I don’t care much about browsers anymore.

1. Back in the early oughts there was a race to add features to the browsers. Each browser had a different feature set, UI and different resulting workflow.  It was fun to test them and see how they fit in with my routine.
2. There were more rendering engines which made switching between browsers and adventure.
3. Everyone was on dialup. Speed really mattered. Today, not so much.
4. Security.  One reason I used Opera was because it was a little more secure against exploits having an oddball rendering engine.  It also didn’t auto download things from websites the way IE did.

We defeated the IE mono-culture for awhile to slowly have it replaced by the new Chrome mono-culture while Firefox seemed to drift for awhile. Apple developed Safari, but then quit the Windows field.  Many of the smaller Open Source browsers never quite seemed to ever be finished.  Opera got sold and the new owners ripped the guts out of it to make it minimalist.

In the end, almost all browsers seemed to be alike claiming to be: fast, clean, minimalist but maybe extendable, tabbed, and boring.  And if you use Chrome, also loaded with Google spyware which you probably can’t shut off even if they provide you with an alleged switch buried deeply in the UI.

Mainly I use one browser on each device, with a second as a rarely used backup/second opinion.  The days of having 4 or 5 browsers are for me pretty much over.

I was heartened to see The Correspondent has made their starter goal.  I donated a coouple of weeks ago only because I’d get my money back if they didn’t raise enough to start.  To my surprise, they did.  It’s still a win-win for me.  I’m hoping I’ll like the Correspondent’s brand of corporate free journalism.  Now they have a few month’s to put together a news and editorial team before launching in mid-2019.  Good luck.

Source: The Correspondent - Unbreaking news

As I got to the sidewalk a black limo glided up and a couple of educator types got out, armed with rulers, grabbed me by the arms and hustled me to the back of the car.  “McVerry, wants to show you something,” said one, with a pencil stored over her ear while the other one shoved a hood over my head. “The hood is for your own protection so you can’t reveal our destination to any of them later.

All I can say, is we ended up at one of Greg McVerry’s many super secret bases, heavily guarded by librarians and dusty library cats. I was in the Area 51 of Greg’s cyberworld getting a behind the scenes look at a secret Known install.

And you know, Known is really nice.  The script is really cool and easy to use.  Understandably, I only got to see it from a posters POV and not an admin’s but what I saw was slick and clean UI.  And it does Indieweb right out of the box - also cool.  I understand there are plugins to add more features to Known but I didn’t get a chance to see those.  I like the wizard sort of feature that prompts you to add all your social networks and other websites upon signup - that takes care of your h-card at the same time, I assume.

Some things Known is missing:

1. Templates: I always like a sidebar and as far as I can tell Known does not have this.
2. Import: I’m told there is no Import feature currently.  That makes it hard to migrate in from an existing WP blog.  There is an Export function, which is good.
3. No automatic updates: I suspect this will come after Known hits 1.0 release but I’m just guessing.

Many thanks to Greg McVerry for the tour.

After chaos, the EU’s plan to censor the internet takes a huge step backwards

I don’t know the details, but I’m not bound by EU rules, I will link to whoever I want to.

Leaving Apple & Google: next /e/ release and what features are in the pipe We’re working on stabilizing the current /e/ beta so that we can release a V1.0 on early 2019. It will include an /e/ application repository that will let users install most Android applications, in two clicks.

Find out how to add Mojeek to your browser

Just about every brrowser is listed.

Framagit

GitLab is an alternative to Github which is now owned by Microsoft.

All this Wordpress 5.0 Gutenberg stuff got me thinking.  With Wordpress it seems like the Indieweb starts making serious and cool progress and the Wordpress people come along and knock the game board and pieces off the table.  And it sounds like the disruption from Wordpress is going to continue for a couple of years.

Why not take a page out of Apple’s playbook and take control higher up in the food chain? Why not come out with an Indieweb compatible blog engine of our own?  Either fork an existing open source project or build new?  This does not mean you have to make it exclusive but make it the way the Indieweb wants the Indieweb elven magic to function.  Also put in the standard blogging features most people expect.  Why keep trying to adapt the Indieweb stuff to blog or CMS platforms that are at best indifferent, never designed for or just that don’t want to play ball?

This isn’t a slam on the coders who are working so hard to make everything work on Wordpress, I’m just asking if maybe it’s not time to find better terrain to fight from.

If the Indieweb really wants widespread adoption they need to come out with a turnkey solution.  It would act as a solution for many and a proof of concept for others to emulate. Something that can be put in hosting C-panels for one touch install. Something that just works, is easy to move to and move away from. Something supported, active, growing with enough polish that it inspires confidence in the user.

I’d really like to hear serious discussion on this.

On the term “Content”:

 

STOP using THEIR words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR belief. OUReffort.

START using OUR words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR belief. OUReffort.

Agreed.  John can bang words together pretty good. Read his essay on the term “content” at the link above.

This is a test post.  This is a link. I’m seeing if I can use a simple WYSIWYG editor.

I want to confirm that I can post in HTML on Micro.blog (instead of Markdown.)  I’m also testing this editor for potential use with Blot.

The editor is Bluegriffon which is  a descendant of the old Mozilla Composer (remember that?). I’m running the Debian version on Pop OS Linux.  It also works on Windows and OS X. So far it seems to be working pretty good. Now to copy/paste into the Micro.blog text box and see what happens.

Finished my drawing of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (you can see the work in progress here) and added some text from Robert Lowell’s For the Union D…

This is really good.

(Also testing webmantions.)

DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine, has acquired Duck.com from Google. Responding to rumors from a few days ago, CEO Gabriel Weinberg said that the new domain would make it easier for people to use the company’s search engine. The Duck.com domain was previously owned by Google, after it acquired On2 Technologies back in 2010.

Publish blog posts, photos and media to your own site, and syndicate it to your social networks. Keep everything on your own site.

I’m looking at Known this morning.  The website has that Silicon Valley - Apple vibe to it - lots of short sentences - completely lacking in key details. How many templates? Any screen shots of templates? Buried: yes they do have comments but no word on what kind of spam protection or what moderation looks like. Also buried: you can get a free Known site on a subdomain or managed hosting on a Pro plan - except no pricing anywhere for the Pro plan.  That tells me they are not serious about that service.

What I like about Known is the core support for Indieweb stuff.  The rest of the blogging features look a bit light weight, as far as I can tell from the scant details on the site.

But still we come back to the Indieweb stuff.

It begs the question, How important are the Indieweb features to me?  I think they are very important.  But I have to weigh that vs. blog script features that I have to directly use, hands on, all day long.  Indieweb sort of lurks in the background and you don’t notice it until another Indieweb user comments or mentions your post. Indieweb can get you discovered and engaged in conversations but it does not write the posts.  The actual features of the blog or CMS script outweigh having Indieweb goodness.  It would be nice to have both out of the box but I don’t think that is possible.

Like: Mumblings - My Micro.blog Wishlist

Wow.  Good, thoughtful, constructive list. Well done Simon!  If you are on Micro.blog this is a must read.  It also shows the immense amount of improvements already made and being added weekly and those are much appreciated.

I have several blogs: 1 x Micro.blog hosted blog plus 2 x Wordpress blogs.  After the Holidays, I’ll probably migrate my main WP blog (you are here) to some other blogging platform.  No matter what I do I will lose my Indieweb features on that blog.  But that said, I forsee it becoming increasingly hard for the Indieweb moveement to continue to support Wordpress in the coming months and years.

So here are some options I’m considering:

1. Blot.im - this is kinda cool.  I like that you have a backup of each post on your harddrive plus on Dropbox plus on Blot’s servers.  I like that it is compatible with txt files and Markdown plus HTML. My problem is I currently have 2 laptops in rotation and my Blot post files would be scattered between the two harddrives.
2. ClassicPress - I know I’m going to use this in the future that I wanted to build with WP.  They have a plugin that should convert most WP 5.0 sites to ClassicPress.
3. TikiWiki  - the admin panel stretches beyond the horizon.  It’s a full blog, wiki, discussion forum, article poster, static html page creator, FAQ generator, web directory, newletter engine and more stuff I can’t remember.  You just turn the features you are going to use on as needed.  Not for beginners.
4. Micro.blog - I already have one here.  I use it mainly for quick Tweet-like posts. Frankly it’s under utilized.  I think that will change if I move to any of the three platforms above.  The main problem, for me, with Micro.blog is that anyone that wants to comment must do so on Micro.blog which means that a friend from university following me on an RSS reader (it could happen) can’t really comment on a post or participate in a conversation.  MB might get those capabilities someday just not for now.  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to overcome this but I’m not coming up with any answers.  I do know that if I move to TikiWiki or Blot I will use my existing Micro.blog hosted blog more.

I’m just posting this to give people a snapshot of my current thinking.  This could all change tomorrow. But if you are stuck on Wordpress you might want to explore these as options for yourself.

To recap, Gutenberg Phase 2 will: Be outside of post_content. Focus on customization. Upgrading themes, widgets, & menus. Early version of phase 2 will be in the Gutenberg plugin. Be sure to reactivate it! Last updated: December 9th, 2018

This is the other shoe dropping.  The next phase of Gutenberg for Wordpress will need new themes.  Unfortunately this is going to effect the Indieweb in even more ways.  Will it make Indieweb themes obsolete?

Gutenberg: All your bases are belong to us!