Month: December 2018

Had a go at fixing two laptops at today’s Restart Party, with mixed success.

One was a 2010 Macbook Pro with a swollen battery. The battery was pushing against the trackpad which was failing to click. Took the battery out and ran off mains, but still no joy from trackpad. Owner had forgotten the password so then became a bit of a mission resetting password just to get to a login to check the trackpad setting. It looked like one-finger clicking was disabled but then we ran out of time before I could figure out how to navigate to the setting with just the keyboard. A USB mouse would have been a help.

The other was a very recent Acer Chromebook that had been dropped and was supposedly no longer turning on. It turned on fine though. The screen was flickering occasionally but nothing too egregious so I suggested rather than prying the screen off, for which I couldn’t find that much info, but some thing suggested it was glued down, best to keep using it as is and then actually pulling the screen off if it failed completely.

So both laptops went away in usable order, but didn’t really have the satisfaction of a ‘fix’ as such.

Who’s actually behind the Data Transfer Project? According to its homepage it’s Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter. Seems like maybe it’s a noble effort from a few devs from within those orgs, but not actually genuinely supported by any of them at a corporate level.

Because it’s been going since 2017 and with the combined finances and skillsets of these orgs they could have easily figured out data portability, if they really cared.

https://datatransferproject.dev/

Replied to Personal and Human by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
Thanks for posting this – I feel like sometimes too my online presence has become something of a link aggregator or a fact exchanger, less of a rambling human conversationalist. Could be that it’s the preserve of IRL? But I totally back trying to bring back revery and musing.
Really good #redecentralize meetup on Thursday.

My personal takeaways were:

– the BBC R&D team are looking into things like decentralisation and personal data stores
– I should start using my Scuttlebutt account
– Holochain sounds like it has its politics in the right place and I’d like to understand it better

Liked https://www.kickscondor.com/personal-and-human by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

Been busy with a bit of travelling and working on my link directory, but have been reluctant to just post a pointless update such as this one—senselessly notifying everyone. However, aren’t pointless things terrifically human?? It seems that to post a note like this stumps and defies the algorithms and is emblematic of the struggle this blog is making (and its friends) to preserve humanity in hypertext. I think that if I fall into a pattern of just littering the world with tech tutorials and link discoveries (as if it were ‘breaking news’) then I am losing out on the human chance to thank you for reading or talking to me and to say something meandering or listless, which is eminently human and could help to shake your automated daily ‘feeding’ out of the rigor of new tutorials, new news and remind us that we are both typing and flicking cursors around and somehow smiling at each other through it or pondering each other in confused or amused reveries—I think ‘weird twitter’ was able to accomplish this, but I wonder if one can only make technology human by completely subverting it—these reveries are happening, but they are not synchronized and it happens with great distance between us in many dimensions. I enjoy it a great deal, though, and hopefully you do, too.