2. 2012-12-03

    In November 1955, Bo Diddley was booked to play live on the Ed Sullivan show, the middle America's favourite TV variety show. As legend has it, he was booked to play a single tune, but he misinterpreted his cue card, which had his name, followed by a song title, launched into his, perhaps slightly racy for the times, eponymous calling card - "Hey, Bo Diddley!", immediately following it with the song he was booked to play, the only slightly more sedate "Sixteen tons". They tore the roof off the house, and got themselves banned from the show. 


    Here's a particularly rocking performance from 1965



    That lady on the second rhythm guitar is known as The Duchess .


    Not many musicians get to name their own beat. And in this case, it's a beat that refuses to die. Not many musicians can play it well, but that hasn't stopped them trying through the years. I put a playlist of the most egregious examples I could find up on spotify . There's some direct lifts, some re-interpretations, some slightly tenuous reaches, and hopefully some surprises. It's an editable playlist, so please feel to add any that you find.



     


    I feel sure there ought to be a Spiritualized song in there, but for the life of me I can't find one from memory.


    Once you get into the habit of spotting them, it's quite an addictive hobby. I find that I often only spot them a while after I've picked out a song as an earworm.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  3. 2012-11-29

    If you find that your Mac's 'Open With' menu is growing cluttered with identical menu entries for the same application, this indicates that your Launch Services database is confused. 


    In the normal course of action your computer scans for entries to merge into this database at boot time, and then at login for the user domains. The Finder updates it with new application information, as and when new App or Framework bundles are encountered during it's normal operation. Unfortunately this database does seem to be capable of becoming persistently corrupted, which will result in symptoms like a duplicate-riddled 'Open With' menu, or incorrect or inconsistent Filetype/Application associations. 


    On Mountain Lion, you can interact with the system database from the shell, using the lsregister utility. Run it without arguments to get basic usage instructions. It is not on any default, paths, it's buried away inside /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework .


     /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Support/lsregister -dump 

    will show you the current database in human readable form. To scrap and rebuild the database completely you might do something like this 


     /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework

     /Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -all u,s,l -r -v 

    The -domain argument there is specifying that we should recursively ( -r ) scan for bundle directories in the the u ser, s ystem and l ocal domains (i.e. "~/ /" , "/System/ ", and "/ " ) and register their document type bindings and other information with the Launch Services agents, which will update their database with this information. The -v switch turns on progress logging, which is all done to stderr.


    If you're in the habit of installing apps or library bundles to some alternative roots than the builtin domain types, you can add those paths to the command, instead of the domain flags.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  5. 2012-11-01

    Rat Avatar : A research project has seen human subjects control a rat-sized robot, and rats control a human-shaped avatar in a VR environment.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  7. 2012-10-08

    Original Sim : From Marvel Fanfare #25 (1986) - Dave Sim Marvel character portfolio. Yeah, me too.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  8. 2012-10-07

    Manga-Camera is a free camera filter iOS app. The intent is to render live photos in the style of a manga action frame. You pick a background effect and then snap. There doesn't seem to be a way to apply the filter to library photos, you have to shoot live, which is the way I prefer these gee-gaws to work. It takes a little practice, but I found the results can be entertaining, and occasionally even a little convincing.

    manga camera

    Jack was made for manga, obviously.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  11. 2012-10-03

    A-list iOS developer shop Tapbots today released a remix of their excellent twitter client ( Tweetbot ), focused on tiny pay-subscription social network platform app.net . I think Tweetbot is probably my favourite thing about my  iPhone, and so I immediately purchased it. No obvious disappointments, all the slick performance I like is there, and it brings across some features I've been lacking in ADN for a while, like the ability to swiftly upload photos. I promptly celebrated by taking photos of every last.fm staff member with an ADN I could track down . I think this will probably increase my use of ADN moderately. Mobile is an essential component of gathering the off-the-cuff asynchronous status updates a service like this is built upon.


    I'm not sure that it will gigantically increase my engagement with ADN alpha. I was a bit suspicious of all the frothy cliques, with an intangible unease that I struggled to define, at least until I suddenly realised it was a cogent reminder of the very earliest days of bootstrapping the IMDb message boards . That left me feeling more comfortable with what the thing was, but no more inspired to engage. I'm still in love with the idea and the ideals of the place, and I'm reasonably confident it hasn't yet fallen into it's proper, more useful place. I'm shallow enough to enjoy my sexy low user id on some level that even I don't properly understand.


    Has App Dot Net "arrived?". I think not yet. Netbot feels like a threshold event of some kind, in as much as serious developers are prepared to put enough effort into the ADN platform to produce fully realised software harnessed to it, and this degree of finish does not come cheap. ADN seems to be on a little draught of second wind recently, there's been a couple of fun toy apps, some positive press, and the recent price drop, bringing a wave of fresh users in. I'm still very positive about ADN as a concept, an indicator that there's now a long tail of internet folk interested enough in paying for stuff to make services like this potentially viable. I won't be really  excited about ADN until I see the first compelling application built over it that is some mostly new and useful thing, rather than a new skin on an old one.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  13. 2026-02-03

    2026 is the year of Linux (in Linux (in Windows)) on the desktop

    I'm not a very Windows-focused computer user. In fact I think the last era I used it really extensively, with any expertise, was in the 16-bit era of Windows 3.1 - 3.11. I quite liked those versions, which operated somewhat more like an integrated interface SDK for MS-DOS than an independent operating system. As the commercial internet boom took hold, and work became focused almost entirely on building web applications targetting UNIX-like deployment environments, (typically linux), I shifted over to working natively in that environment, and never looked back. So, I don't really know how to use modern Windows at all comfortably, and I don't have any personal ease when working with it's native interface.

    How I typically organise my development environments

    Normal development tooling for me is a simple GUI windowing environment, running on Debian linux. I (still) use GNU emacs or increasingly zed for almost everything that isn't in a web browser, alongside a handful of running terminals, an email client, and some kind of file browser, and music player and that's about it. My development projects I tend to isolate into containers, using lxc/lxd and more lately, incus, to give me "lightweight" virtual hosts nested on my computer, connected with a virtual ethernet LAN. It effectively is a local 'cloud', offering dependency and process isolation for your work, and powerful features like snapshot/checkpointing, image templating. What I particularly like about the incus approach, compared say to other container systems, like docker, is the abstraction is well suited to longer-lived, stateful development systems - you partition one linux system into a few dozen smaller more specialised linux systems with the state hidden from each other. The unit of containment is 'operating system'. Whereas with docker-like containment, I think the unit of abstraction is something more like 'one process, with all of it's dependencies bundled', which makes more sense to me for one-shot tasks, or often as a deployment target.

    Previously

    Back in the 90s(!), when computers were a lot less powerful than they are today, I commonly used to use emacs 'tramp' or Ange-FTP modes, to develop remotely on a development or staging server, from a thinner client. Now I use the same approach, and the same tools, to develop on my container environments, effectively treating them like a 'remote' host, even though they're only conceptually remote. Tramp, just like most of emacs, is a kludgey wonder - it encodes the information about remote endpoints using pseudo-paths, like /ssh:user@host:/path/to/something , and emacs just works out how to edit your files. Under the hood, it strings together a glue of subprocesses and temporary file copies and the like, to take your editing and reflect it on the remote environment. And not just files. This is emacs! Almost everything in emacs works tramp-aware, so you can browse the remote filesystem using dired - launch processes for compilation or linting, use git workspaces with magit-mode, run interactive shells and debuggers, build and run your projects, it has extremely high levels of DWIM. The main price you pay is occasional latency, as things shuttle back and forth, or buffer in and out of pipes, but I’m very used to this. And compared with the days when I used to use tramp to work over dialup(!) links to servers, this modern container approach is practically turbo-charged. Eat my dust!

    Zed simililarly offers remote editing using ssh connections, with a slightly different architecture. The zed remote feature is a little more modern, like VSCode - it downloads a headless install of the editor on the remote after you ssh to it, and then proxies to that backend using it's own protocols over ssh. The net effect is the same though, you work on your local keyboard screen and mouse, but your working environment is in the remote hosts. An advantage zed offers over tramp's elegant hackaround is that the latency is considerably reduced, it's not copying files backward and forwards and slowly lauching tasks in shells. A disadvantage zed offers, is that it's not emacs and it's tooling for lots of things (like git, or file browsing) are not as advanced or comprehensively scriptable. It's not uncommon for me to have both zed and emacs buffers attached to the same remote development context.

    So, that's what development tends to look like to me. One or two graphical editors, on my main desktop. Many persistant projects mapped to running containers (and maybe remote hosts), with various different projects open in them for work. I get a persisting, consistent user interface over diverse projects, all of them in a full linux environment, each completely isolated from the others, but networked.

    Windows re-enters the conversation

    In my current job, we're using Windows, and the whole Microsoft business stack, and we have a IT managed network. It's a bit of a change from what I'm used to. But, unlike a lot of software developers, I've found that I like change! (Often, you learn stuff. So what have I learned?)

    I've been issued with a pretty nice Microsoft Surface branded laptop. The hardware, at least, is nice (and higher spec than any of my own current computers). The software is, of course, Windows, which I remain suspicious of using. The surface runs it like a champ, of course.

    Interestingly enough, modern Windows understands that the majority of software deployment is now to linux, or linux-like environments, and the developer tools include an integrated linux-based toolchain. It's called 'Windows subsystem for Linux' and it's on it's second major version - WSL-2. WSL-2 basically integrates a virtualized linux kernel running inside the windows enviroment, which can be used much as I've described my container approach above - you have a virtual linux host, with it's own filesystem and processes, and a convenient interface between this and the host system.

    You can run your graphical applications, and even your IDE (Visual Studio Code, presumably :-)) , and browser (Edge, your AI-powered browser!) in your graphical desktop, and have a local 'server' for developoment. WSL integrates with Docker Desktop for Windows, allowing your docker containers to run natively in the linux environment, and you can even install and run multiple instances of WSL containers to have different isolated linux 'back-ends'. It's a compelling work narrative, but it is founded on the idea that your goal state is using Windows for all your user-facing software and interface. Howerver -- What if you don't want to?

    It's a UNIX system, I know this!

    Because the WSL environment is an optimised full linux VM, it seemed to me that I might even be able to treat the WSL environment like a remote linux system, and move my existing workflow over - use a linux desktop to remotely access a local linux "server", that just happens to be Windows, and run development inside there using my typical approach of multiple contexts isolated into separate system containers. That's more like my idea of best of both worlds - my work computer can be a locked down managed enterprise client, I can get good use from the fancy hardware, but still maintain the toolchains and client interfaces I'm most comfortable using. Assuming, of course, that I could get it all to work...

    Well, it took a bit of fiddling, but I'm here to say it works, well! my Windows Laptop runs on my desk, my software projects run on it inside incus containers, and I access them from emacs or zed or terminal windows, on my ancient creaking linux desktop system. I can easily run as many of these containers as I can fit into my 24GB of WSL (actually quite a lot of headless containers, in my experience) - voila! My Windows laptop is now a cloud host provider!

    Here's a detailed walkthrough of how I set it all up. Please note that you will need a local Windows admin account to make some of the necessary configuration changes to the Windows side of things, but aside from a couple of privileged config changes, all of this can be then run as a non-administrator user account, which is another great benefit.

    (Because I set this up originally a year ago, my instructions are written from before Debian 13 was promoted to stable, which is why you'll see me using 'Bookworm' in a few places.)

    The setup

    First: Setup WSL

    Firstly, you need to install a WSL2 environment. I picked Debian (which is supported), and I initialised this. I then system upgraded the Debian installation from bookworm (12/old-stable) to trixie (13/testing) using apt, because incus is packaged as part of trixie. I was then able to install incus using apt, and follow the incus initialisation and setup instructions from the project configuration page. I quickly launched a couple of bare bones containers to check that things were working as expected.

    Inside your WSL shell, assuming your user account is in the incus and incus-admin groups (check this with the id command), you should just be able to run incus launch images:debian/12 - this should download a base debian image, and launch it with a generated container name.

    You can see it running with incus list , and launch a shell within it with incus shell <container-name> - Please read the lovely docs for more such hints, this post is not intended to be an incus user guide ;-)

    The next thing I did was add some additional WSL configuration by creating a .wslconfig file in my User home directory on Windows - this is a plain text ini file. I was pleased to find that Notepad.exe still exists in 2024, and can be used to create this file :-) 


      [wsl2]
      memory = 24G
      nestedVirtualization = true 
      networkingMode = "mirrored"

    this is relatively self-explanatory - I'm giving most of my 32GB of RAM to the linux VM (because i'm not really using the windows side), I'm enabling nestedVirtualization, although I don't think this is a prequisite for running incus containers, it sounds like something I'll probably use at some point. Finally, and most importantly for this case, I'm setting the networkingMode up to use 'mirrored' networking mode - this replicates the windows networking devices and configuration inside the linux VM, meaning we can connect directly to the linux system from the network, without having to set up port forwarding or anything like this.

    Once you've created the file you need to restart WSL in order for it to take effect. The easiest way to check if it's working is to look at your available system RAM in linux using free - it have changed to be 24GB. The next stage is to setup windows to allow client connections from the LAN.

    Windows Networking

    We also want to be able to connect to our virtual linux box conveniently from the LAN. This requires a few things. Firstly, we need a stable network address or name. Secondly, we need to allow incoming network connections. This part requires enough Admin privileges on the Windows host to change networking settings.

    I redefined the network adapter settings in Windows to use a static IP for this LAN, and added a DNS name for it in my local resolver. I set this network configuration up as a 'Private' network profile. The next step is then to configure the Hyper-V firewall on windows to allow incoming connections to pass to the VM. Running a powershell window as admin, I added firewall rules to allow this for the private network profile. In this way, I can ensure that the host is only accesible like this on trusted networks.

    The WSL vm has a fixed identity string (the VMCreatorId) , a GUID, which is 40E0AC32-46A5-438A-A0B2-2B479E8F2E90, so the command you need is something like 

     Set-NetFireWallHyperVProfile -Profile Private -name '{40E0AC32-46A5-438A-A0B2-2B479E8F2E90}' DefaultInboundAction Allow

    Now incoming connections on the windows IP interface will be receivable in the WSL VM. Enable sshd on the WSL environment, and then check that you can ssh to the network address. You should get a login inside the WSL environment. If you run incus list here, you should see any running incus instances.

    Bonus networking: Setup ssh proxying, and multiplexing

    You can now access incus containers on the WSL instance from a remote emacs, if you use the incus-tramp method, and tramp pipelining. Access a path like /ssh:[email protected]|incus:me@container-name:/path/to/project in emacs and everything should be there. Relying on additional tramp stages for proxy chaining, although it's a very neat trick, can bring problems with performance, and reliability, and it is more simple to push the extra hops into the ssh layer.

    This involves a bit of glue code, which looks hideous, but works very well.

    The ssh glue

    Setup 'Control Master' for ssh, which allows repeated ssh connections to the same host to re-use an established ssh session. This will speed up the time taken to open new sessions, and noticeably improve the responsiveness of tramp for ssh remotes. Secondarily, use a ProxyCommand directive to connect a single ssh connection to a proxy session. Finally, you can use wildcard rules with a host suffix matching a certain host pattern straight through into an incus container on a specific host. Here's the relevant entries from my ~/.ssh/config 


      Host *.wsl
           ProxyCommand ssh my.windows.box incus exec $(echo %h | sed 's/.wsl//') --user 1000 -- /usr/bin/nc -q0 localhost 22
           ForwardAgent yes
      Host *
          ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%h:%p
          ControlMaster auto
          ControlPersist 10m

    In ssh configuration files, the first applicable setting is the one that will be used, so we should order the file from most specific towards most general.

    Here, we're using a fake 'domain' of .wsl, and then converting the command to an ssh to the windows host, that immediately launches incus, getting the container name by chopping off the '.wsl' from the provided hostname and running 'netcat' in the container to proxy our ssh session to the ssh server inside the container. With this little piece of ugly glue, we can run ssh container-name.wsl and immediately get an ssh session directly into the running container called container-name

    The control master block ensures that we re-use an established ssh control session for all connections to the same host, and persist it for 10minutes after the last connection exits, to improve reconnection times.

    With this piece in place, we can access files, shells, and processes from emacs buffers, using a tramp path of /ssh:my-container.wsl:/path/to/project - or laucnch a zed session in a remote project directory, using their ssh 'remote project' feature.

    Surviving restarts

    The main, and perhaps the only real downside of this approach is that Windows likes to restart, often. Usually in batches once or twice a week. This is a combination of updates from remote IT and Microsoft I suppose. Rather than get too aggravated about it, I prefer to think of it as a free chaos monkey.

    I can alleviate most of the pain points by making everything as restart-able as possible. WSL can be set to start as soon as you login by tweaking a few settings in the cmd.exe application

    • set the default shell to be Debian to match my WSL container session
    • set cmd to start on login

    This means that after a boot all I have to do is login to resume the WSL state

    • The incus container can be set to automatically start at boot with incus config
    • I have assigned both the incus container and the windows machine static IPs on my LAN, so they reboot with a stable address.
    • In WSL I have caddy set to reverse proxy from Debian to the incus address, and this is configured in /etc/caddy and run from a systemd unit, to restart on boot

    The local "staging" version of any webservices I am working with I typically run in Docker , inside the inucs container (as my user account) - i usually write a shell script to launch docker with the right port forwarding and data persistence flags for whatever I want to be running (for more complex setups this could be a docker compose configuration) - I simply put this shell script into my user crontab, using the magic @reboot trigger directive to launch this script after multi-user init, as me, with just a one-liner.

    with these configurations in place, all I need do is login to Windows (with my face 😘) to resume running services where I left them.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  15. 2012-09-13

    If you've ever tried to take over somebody else's detatched screen sessions, by using the su command to assume their login identity, you've probably seen an error message something like


     Cannot open your terminal device /dev/pts/3

    This is because your pseudo terminal device is allocated when you login to the session, and remains owned by the user id you logged in, after you've changed your effective uid by su -ing. 


    You can try and kludge your way around it by chmod -ing your pty device file to make it more arbitrarily readable, but that's ugly and stupid, and needs escalated privileges. A slightly smarter way to work around this is to force a new pseudo terminal for the assumed login session. A really simple way to do this that I've recently discovered is to use the script  utility. script is a useful tool intended to preserve a transcription of an interactive terminal session.   To do this, it creates a new pty device for the current user id. So you can use it to help you recover a detatched screen by typing this


     su - someuser

     script /dev/null

     screen -r somesession

    Passing /dev/null to script just means that the transcript is discarded.


     

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  17. 2012-09-10

    Founding Omni : Wil Shipley recalls the origin of The Omni Group.

    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  19. 2026-01-26

    GoToSocial?

    For the past year and a bit, I've been relying on a one-user GoTosocial server for my fediverse participation. Fediverse is the 'well, actually' technically correct name for the social network protocols that power an overlapping set of free, distributed social networks that a lot of people just call 'Mastodon'. Mastodon is the largest and most popular server software used in this network, and got a significant bump in popularity when that crazy space junkie guy started hacking on twitter.

    Monoliths vs Microliths

    Mastodon is a large Ruby on Rails project, with the typical kind of architecture you might expect from a classic LAMP-adjacent dynamic web thing that's used in production to run instances with thousands and thousands of active posting user accounts, and a hefty server footprint.

    Gotosocial is a fediverse server that specifically targets a lower footprint installation. It's written in Go, which while not being the kewlest platform to build a modern web server application in, is to my eyes, a pleasingly pragmatic choice. (Something I often like to say is 'Go is actually kind of a DSL for building small network servers in'). It also targets full mastodon compatibility, so it's a drop in replacement for a mastondon account, and much simpler to run if you were interested in having your own fediverse service.

    WASM-azing!

    Whilst Gotosocial has a modest footprint, and a few moving parts, it's not without some interesting technical architectural decisions. In one of its simpler installable forms, rather than use an external relational database like PostgreSQL, it just uses good old SQLite3 😍 - and rather than pay the CGO / boundary penalties for linking directly into SQLite as a shared library, it can actually run SQLite as a contained WASM process inside the go application, using the Wazero runtime

    I adore everything about this approach, it's exactly the kind of mad science I'd try to get a simpler working service. End result is you have a single static binary that you can run and install, and it manages its own fully compatible SQlite3 database store in-process, without any install-or-link-time dependencies.

    So it's super simple to install for me on linux, I simply need to unpack a binary linux release tarball and then launch the newer binary with the old database file. Gotosocial applies database migrations on startup.

    Official upgrade procedure

    Here's their offical upgrade instructions taken from codeberg for the binary release

    • Stop GoToSocial
    • Back up your database! If you're running on SQLite, this is as simple as copying your sqlite.db file, eg., cp sqlite.db sqlite.db.backup
    • Download and untar the new release, including the web assets and templates, not just the binary
    • Edit your config.yaml file as necessary (see the release notes)
    • Start GoToSocial
    • Wait for migrations to run.

    It's about as simple as a manual upgrade can be.

    My Tweaked upgrade procedure.

    Well, aside from scripting it, I think there's one small improvement that can be made. So far as I know, GoToSocial doesn't (yet?) run auto vacuum on its SQlite database. VACUUM on SQLite is a necessary maintenance procedure that's used to refresh, compact and optimize the database backing store after it's been amended in use for some time. You can think of it a bit like a 'defrag' or a 'garbage collecter' for your database.

    Without auto-vacuum, vacuum is necessarily a blocking operation, you will block all other database changes until the vacuum is done. As such it's ideal for downtime. So vacuuming your GoToSocial database when you upgrade is a good idea, although it does extend your service downtime by a couple of minutes.

    So, as well as copy your database to a backup, I suggest you also connect to it, with the sqlite3 command and run a complete VACUUM. But wait, we can be even cleverer.

    VACUUM INTO

    Vacuum already makes a complete copy of the database. Go back and read the VACUUM documentation I linked above. You might also notice that SQLite VACUUM supports a 'VACUUM INTO' form, which materializes this vacuum copy information into a fresh database file.

    so my amended system upgrade is like this, pretending for the sake of example that it's a manual process.

    • chdir to my gotosocial directory /gotosocial
    • download the new tarball release
    • stop gotosocial with systemctl stop gotosocial
    • rename the old gotosocial binary to a versioned backup
    • untar the new release and assets into the directory
    • rename gotosocial.sqlite to a versioned backup name e.g. gotosocial.backup.sqlite
    • connect to the newly renamed sqlite database with the sqlite3 ./gotosocial.backup.sqlite command
    • run VACUUM INTO 'gotosocial.sqlite' (i.e. re-creating an optimised gotosocial database)
    • start gotosocial again systemctl start gotosocial
    • watch the migrations and startup with journalctl -f -u gotosocial
    • profit!
    posted by cms on
    tagged as

  21. 2012-09-08

    It's not exactly the done thing on today's web, but I'm a huge believer in paying for web services. I've never been comfortable with the ad-supported web. When pure advertising is the only revenue stream supporting a product or service I worry about the deleterious effect upon that product or service.


    I don't like the implication that they're really working for their sponsor's interests ahead of mine. I don't like the mental effort of hunting down all the opt-outs, of second-guessing potential consequences of the creepy data-mining and covert information sharing with networks of 'trusted partners'. More straightforwardly, for many cases, I suspect the numbers don't really balance; I find it difficult to rely heavily on something with a potentially precarious revenue stream. I don't want to push too much content into, or build infrastructure around things that won't necessarily be around in a year or two.


    Paying directly for things makes everything seem more explicit and straightforward. I'm the customer. I can make informed decisions about the cost and usefulness of the thing. It's in the better interests of the service provider not to abuse the relationship. A product unspoilt and unhindered by commercial marriages should stand a better chance of evolving towards it's essential form. So I'm a relatively easy sell as a consumer. Offer me a useful service, at a reasonable price, and I'm quite likely to pay you for it. 


    The flipside of this is that I'm really cautious about the reverse. Purely ad-supported sites, especially ones that seem to be offering far too much  for free without being noticeably saturated with advertising make me feel slightly paranoid. I like to see which way the money flows.


    Here's a list of the sort of internety things I currently pay for, and will happily endorse. 



    • Spotify - I'm a long-time tenner a month customer. I think it's too expensive, but I somehow never quite unsubscribe.

    • Flickr - I have a pro account for photo hosting. 

    • DynDNS - I have a paid account, which gets me DNS zone hosting as well as a dynamic hostname

    • Pinboard.in - I like this bookmarking service. I was a very early adopter, and therefore my account cost a pittance due to the unique way pinboard is funded. 

    • Lastpass - I like this service so much I subscribed, just to do my bit to ensure they stay in business

    • Linode - my internet hosts are linux virtual machines hosted with this service. Linode is excellent. 

    • Word Podcast : I subscribed to the (now sadly folded) Word Magazine, primarily to access their very enjoyable podcast.

    • Metafilter : I don't use this site very much any more, but back in the old days, I got so much surfing out of it, I eventually bought a paid account just to contribute back.

    • Reddit : Similarly, I bought a founder Reddit Gold account when they appealed for cash, because I really enjoyed Reddit back before the eternal September.

    • iTunes : I use iTunes for quite a lot of things, apps, movie rentals and purchases, music purchases, and I have an iTunes Match subscription. If you have enough Apple gear to make an 'ecosystem', it's a good service.

    • Amazon Prime : I love Amazon. Some days, I wish I still worked for them.

    • Netflix : Most of my TV watching these days is netflix via Apple TV

    • App.net : - I signed up for an app.net account the second I heard about it.


    It's not a huge list. I'd like it to be larger. There's whole categories of things I'd probably cheerfully pay for should they exist. I'd pay a subscription for a decent search engine that wasn't a front for a creepy advertising juggernaut. I might pay for a subscription 'social' network, maybe something like a family-focused Yammer . I'd love something like a cheaper netflix that just focused on pre-1960s movies and archive TV. I'd like something like the old programming.reddit or hacker news. I'd love a smart news aggregator, and if I can't find one to pay for soon, I may have to invent one.

     

    In the olden times, there was a lot of talk about internet micropayments , and about how they couldn't possibly work, or how they were imminent and essential to safeguard the future of the web . They never really quite happened, and the shiny allure of the internet as a huge content pipe of free everything triumphed over all, but lately it feels to me like the mood is perhaps shifting a little.

     

    People seem to be wising up to some of the privacy considerations of infinitely free stuff that is only ever paid for covertly. The mobile app store culture has engendered a user community more acclimatised to fee-paying for services. Kindle is powering a minor revolution in self-publishing . Finally, there's Kickstarter , which is perhaps the most interesting current development in internet financing.

     

    There's nothing particularly new about the thinking behind Kickstarter. Through a combination of great execution and timing, it seems to have hit critical mass over the last 12 months. In the midst of all the long-tail nerd-bait (I recently signed on for my first funding )  and snake oil there are signs of some interesting funding efforts converging towards the mainstream. Champion self-publicist Amanda Palmer recently powered her project past the magical $1,000,000 mark, to flurries of 'old media' press interest.

     

    App.net is a manifest demonstration that I'm not completely alone in this line of thinking. Launched slightly before  twitter's recent frantic, shark-jumping, repositioning of it's terms of service , it seemed a futile, quixotic gesture when I signed up to fund it on it's kickstarter-esque ( apparently kickstarter's TOS precludes funding things like ongoing businesses, so they rolled their own thing ) signup page . I fully expected it to fall short of it's goal, but maybe pick up some positive news coverage as it flamed out, much like Diaspora did before. To my surprise it charged past the funding target ahead of the deadline, and closed way ahead of the target figure. Since then, they've launched the API, and built a sort of twitter clone built across it at alpha.app.net , which is busy enough to be an almost useful, slightly cliquey chit-chat network of it's own. It seems like app.net has the potential to self-host itself as at least a niche social network for privacy nerds and web developers. For some, that might be good enough, but I suspect the real power of app.net lies within it's potential to become a kind of ad-hoc real-time message bus for higher layered services over it's API. It remains to be seen if it can gather enough developer / user mindshare to deliver on the potential.

     

    The most high-profile campaign I've yet seen is the Penny Arcade Sells Out . High profile, high traffic funny-picture sites are the gold-standard of high volume ad serving, with content that massive audiences enjoy, but are used to reading for "free".  Although they fell short of their more extravagant targets, including the 'complete ad removal', they hit their funding target, and raised half a million dollars. An A-lister website demonstrating the ability to generate competitive income with top level ad-sales entirely from direct user funding? Nearly. Is the tide turning? I don't know, but I can feel it pull.

     
    posted by cms on
    tagged as