Braun has designed some of the most iconic consumer products. What's most impressive has been the reverberating impact on design aesthetic & function they created.
Braun: Designed to Keep by Klaus Kemp
Teenage Engineering is back at it. This thing looks like it belongs in the cockpit of an X-Wing. I can't even tell you what I would do with this, but I want it. I want to waste hours playing with it. Maybe making music, but more likely pretending I'm taking down Storm Troopers.
My old CMS had link posts. Then I migrated to new a new CMS and they broke. I've migrated several other times.
Now, in my self-hosted Ghost.org CMS, it's fixed...mostly. Right now I only have it implemented on the pages that pull in all of my content, like my main index.hbs page. I still need to apply this support to my post pages, but will do that soon.
It was ridiculously easy. I wish I had adopted Ghost years ago. Here is how I did it in 3 simple steps...
Step 1: added #link to every post that I wanted to show up as a link post.
Step 2: to each post added the canonical URL to use Ghost's support for canonical URL's.
Step3: I added this #has handlebars helper within the loop that pulls my posts to my index page. This identifies which posts have canonical urls to display the correct link for each title type in the feed of posts on index.hbs.
{{#has tag="link"}}
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="{{canonical_url}}" style="text-decoration: underline #dfdfdf">{{title}}</a></h1>
{{else}}
<h1 class="post-title"><a href="{{url}}">{{title}}</a></h1>
{{/has}}I've been using a theme from the marketplace while I develop my own. So, I did need to hack in a way to underline the link post title url. I'll address that in the future.
Stephen Sinofsky, on his Hardcore Software Newsletter
This approach to regulation is not about innovation despite all the verbiage proclaiming it to be. This Order is about stifling innovation and turning the next platform over to incumbents in the US and far more likely new companies in other countries that did not see it as a priority to halt innovation before it even happens.
I am by no means certain if AI is the next technology platform the likes of which will make the smartphone revolution that has literally benefitted every human on earth look small. I don’t know sitting here today if the AI products just in market less than a year are the next biggest thing ever. They may turn out to be a way stop on the trajectory of innovation. They may turn out to be ingredients that everyone incorporates into existing products. There are so many things that we do not yet know.
What we do know is that we are at the very earliest stages. We simply have no in-market products, and that means no in-market problems, upon which to base such concerns of fear and need to “govern” regulation.
The uncertainty around AI is rightfully getting attention and causing concern, but the future is inevitable. The hubris in believing we can control the future doesn't really set us up for success.
Steven Sinofsky
Regulating AI by Executive Order is the Real AI Risk, by Stephen Sinofsky
Very curious how much they have spent on their own LLM’s, because this sort of suggests they believe (or are terrified that) the space is a land grab.
link 🔗
As a startup founder, there are a ton of variables you can't control. Here's what you can control:
- The product category you choose (⚠️ important)
- How you differentiate your product competitively
- Efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing
- Your skills, network, resources, experiences
- How you control your company's costs
- How you evolve personally
This is a great reminder for anyone building anything, by Justin Jackson. You can't control the world, but you can control how you live in it.
Ian Forrester on his cubicgarden.com blog
The amount of times I have received a message from someone on Linkedin, Facebook msg, Twitter direct message (which I don’t think works anymore – as you can imagine)., etc, etc. They all end up in my inbox and its super useful but sometimes I need to look at the little icon to then figure out what I should do next.
Should I treat it as serious, should I reply straight away or not worry too much. This is very apt when you are getting linkedin or twitter DMs. This is similar for Facebook messages.
It also affects the way you reply too, should I reply in my usual laidback style, should I add emojis, should I write a lot back, voice reply, etc etc.
One of the most frustrating ways that platforms have shaped our internet behavior is that they are the frame to which we prescribe context.
The irony is that the platforms themselves have been collapsing context for a decade now, as they all create experiences that average toward some sort of mean.
LinkedIn is a great example. With every passing day the content & engagement on it looks more and more like every other social network out there.
This begs the question, what should shape our context?
View all posts by Ianforrester
Context collapse with Beeper, by Ian Forrester
For the last year, I've been on a journey to reclaim my corner of the internet. I have a number of things that I want to do toward that pursuit, but it all starts with self-hosting my website, again.
I've self-hosted sites in the past, including this one. So, this didn't seem that daunting. I had moved away from this years ago out of pure laziness. Anytime I had to do server maintenance or upgrades, I would be pretty annoyed. Anytime I wanted to add support for new features & platforms that were (seemingly) regularly emerging , it seemed like a huge hassle.
I leaned on tools that were simple, but also open. Each one was purposely chosen such that if they become too expensive, hard to use or try to create lock-in, I can easily switch to something else. This is it...
Ghost.org for my CMS
I chose Ghost because its a pretty simple CMS purpose built for blogging, newsletters and simple content distribution. I've also spent a lot more time with Node.js, and for the most part it just works ootb.
The GhostCLI is pretty straight forward, so all my local development has been incredibly easy.
It certainly doesn't have the ecosystem support that Wordpress has, which comes with basically everything you would ever need for a website in 2023. I don't need all that. This is a simple, personal website. It's a blog. Ghost is great, fast & lightweight.
DigitalOcean.com for my server
I went with DigitalOcean because it was the only ootb Ghost image VPS that I could find. It's more expensive than I really want, but I don't have to deal with configuring load balancer, proxy servers etc...I don't want or need to deal with any of that.
Hover.com for my domain registrar
I've been using Hover for this domain for over a decade now, and there is no real reason to switch. It's simple to use & manage domains. No one wants to spend anytime in their domain provider, and Hover does a great job at letting me get in & out for simple changes.
Cloudflare for my DNS
The one downside to Hover is that it doesn't support CNAME root domain configuration. So, the root is always www. Cloudflare makes it easy to point root at the A record so that my root can be https://jtrem.com. Seems trivial, but whatever, I like how much cleaner it is.
1Password to manage SSH keys
I have always sucked at managing SSH keys, and doing it through terminal has always been a fraught experience. I have been using 1Password for personal password & document security for about 15 years now, and when I saw it had added SSH key support I dove right in. If I'm being honest, this took a little while to figure out because the config file documentation wasn't the best and I had to do a bunch of troubleshooting to get it to work.
Pretty simple setup.
Upon reflection, none of that was actually that hard, nor time consuming. Especially when I consider how much time I have wasted on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube & Instagram over the last 15 years. All in all it was only a few hours to set it up.
Right now I'm using an out-of-the-box theme from the Ghost marketplace, and tweaking it along the way for my needs. I am working on my own custom theme, but I'm slow at web design these days, and don't have a lot of time.
Web hosting in 2023 is easier than it's ever been. That isn't that shocking. It's still intimidating. I understand the pull to create digital presence on a big web platform. However, that gap has narrowed dramatically in the last 15 years. Self-hosting a personal site & blog can literally take a few hours with almost no maintenance. I couldn't say that a decade ago.
I railed against convenience in a previous post, but the reality is that some convenience is actually nice. I'm not a server admin, and I don't want to write my own CMS. I have a job. I have a family. I don't have a lot of time. Every single one of the convenience features I chose have some amount of interoperability or data portability that make it dead simple to move off of if I ever need. There is no platform lock-in. I choose these tools on the merits of their product, and as long as they stay easy, fair & open, I'll stick with them.