Neil @neil@glasgow.social

Antidepressants or Tolkien character? https://antidepressantsortolkien.now.sh/ More difficult than I’d have guessed.

I have been listening to podcasts since the early days of the idea and became enamored of RSS and all the cool possibilities that it brought. Now with Spotify and Audible making a play to gobble up a bunch of "A-List" podcasters, I worry that the open podcast ecosystem may start to get locked behind the walls of Big Media

We Lose A Lot When Podcasts Go Closed Instead Of Open

Just last week, Ben Thompson's excellent Stratechery site had a great post describing the important - 1/2

For the next week, you can download Civilization VI for free on the Epic Games Store:

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/sid-meiers-civilization-vi/home

Menthol cigarettes banned from today
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/menthol-cigarettes-banned-from-today-18279624

Spotify is buying up all the popular podcasts and removing them from the commons in order to drive you to their platform.

Podcasts have somehow stayed open access, built on standards, and just (mostly) work. Moving them to a proprietary platform just so a few people (ie: not you) can make money is bad for everyone who isn't making money. (ie: you.)

RSS never disappeared, it just became a bit forgotten about as people got sucked into proprietary platforms. I have used many different RSS apps and services and have come back to hosting my own (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news) but Feedly, Inoreader and Tiny Tiny RSS are all good alternatives.

It's Time to Get Back Into RSS | Daniel Miessler

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/its-time-to-get-back-into-rss/

jarden (jean garden)

https://trekmovie.com/2020/05/15/breaking-star-trek-strange-new-worlds-series-with-pike-spock-and-number-one-headed-to-cbs-all-access/

😱 cabal:// is now registered with the International Assigned Names and Numbers Authority!!!

https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/uri-schemes.xhtml
Ctrl-F cabal

The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/HTTPSNoOldServers

in fact, in view of this, the case for simply abolishing universal credit altogether and either reverting to the legacy systems which are still, by necessity, up and running, or instead moving forward to the only kind of universal system that matters - a UBI - is considerably strengthened. the judgement leant *hard* on repeated govt declarations that UC wasn't intended to be a money-saving measure; in essence govt has now been ordered to find a way of putting its money where its mouth is (with a substantial side of "fuck you")

24 hours from now we'll be live on https://matrix.org/open-tech-meetup/ for the second edition of Open Tech Will Save Us, with Eugen (@Gargron) from Mastodon and @mhoye from Mozilla, PLUS big updates on the state of Dendrite #meetup #decentralization

Nicola Sturgeon reinforces 'stay at home' message after Boris Johnson's speech
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/nicola-sturgeon-reinforces-stay-home-18230079

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I stopped using Spotify and replaced it with #Funkwhale a couple of years ago because Spotify suddenly stopped offering an album I'd had in my collection for a long time with no notice nor explanation.

Now I'm hearing that a bunch of podcasts are going Spotify exclusive as well, meaning that they are no longer actually podcasts and are not accessible to people in countries which Spotify does not serve.

Kill Spotify dead, frankly. Just the worst example of art distorted by tech.

I've been working on a project called openEngiadina (https://openengiadina.net/), using ActivityPub for "local knowledge".

We have an initial demo: https://openengiadina.net/geopub/

It's still very rough, but I hope enough to demonstrate how events, points of interest, local organizations and businesses can be created, shared and be discovered on the Fediverse.

A longer explanation of the demo and some background: https://inqlab.net/2020-04-06-geopub-activitypub-for-content-curation.html

This work has been supported by @NGIZero.