Technology – HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

THERE’S ANOTHER WAY

“But what if there’s another way? We’re clearly starving for something different online. A 19-minute ambient song with a static image of a whale has 3.1M views on YouTube – people choosing to spend nearly 20 minutes with literally nothing happening while the rest of the platform optimises for peak stimulation. This is evidence of a deep hunger for ‘digital quiet’. Online spaces that offer contemplation instead of consumption.”

This from “The Restaurant with No Music” by Simon James French.

He also linked to this Google Doc called ‘Ambient-ish music to do work to,’ with all sorts of links to playlists and albums and.. Plants.fm??

That’s right – there’s a device you can buy called Plant Wave.

“PlantWave measures biological changes within plants, graphs them as a wave and translates the wave into pitch.

With PlantWave, every single note you hear is a real-time expression of a shift in a plant. The more active a plant is at any particular moment, the more notes you’ll hear. When a plant is less active, it will often drone or even stop producing notes.”

I literally just want to hook one of these up to a plant next to a creek, set up my camera, and take a nap for an hour.

I bought my parents this iMac back in 2008. They’ve both passed, and now it’s mine. I was able to retrieve most of the old photos and such from it, but without the iCloud password I wasn’t able to update anything, or even allow some location service settings.

I tried to reinstall OS X Leopard, but even finding the right file was difficult. Then trying to set up a “bootable USB drive” became a nightmare. Formatting, terminal stuff, nothing worked out.

Then I got curious and started to look to see if I could install another OS, and well, turns out installing ChromeOS Flex on the iMac was super easy.

Setting up the boot disk was easy. Then rebooting the iMac to the thumb drive was a snap, installation was a breeze, and now I have a machine where I can update it and make it secure as needed – at least for a Google OS machine.

I’m mostly going to use it to display Weather Star 4000 while working. It’s just so soothing having that going in the background. I may also use it for notes and such for Zoom calls. Something that’s not tied directly to the machine that I use for my growing Zoom call meetings.

PLAY THE PLATFORM GAME AT YOUR PERIL

It all comes back to the web:

“The web platform … offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”

In this piece Robin Sloan also speaks of choosing to pay to send his newsletter, rather than doing it for free via Substack. Ahem.

That last part, though… how the web “offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”

That’s where we hear the biggest whining. Oh, how it’s so difficult to be found, to be discovered. To do so, you must play the game. You must be a part of the casino, and the house always wins. And even if they lose, so do you (unless you built an email list in the process).

Now, if you just want to send a tiny newsletter, blog a bit, sure… have at it. Just know that there are forces at play consolidating and monetizing every pixel and every button. You won’t get bit today, but there’s no promise you won’t get bit tomorrow.

I’m on Substack long enough to move my original posts to my own WordPress site. I export my email list near daily at this point. My paid membership is now handled by Memberful. Someday my email list will be moved to Buttondown.

Yes, my website could go down. So could Buttondown. The power could go out. The sun will someday expand to engulf planet earth, too. This isn’t about perfect systems, it’s about creating a system I can live with, and feel okay about. Capitalism is rotten, and I wish I didn’t need to make all these moves and pay all this money, but this is reality, and groceries ain’t getting any cheaper.

Link via Brad Barrish

LEAVING MORE OF SUBSTACK BEHIND

When I saw how fragile social media was, I knew I needed to exit. It was terrifying to see people lose access to their accounts. I can’t imagine how isolating it would feel to wake up and be unable to reach your fans or readers.

When I saw Lucy Werner’s Substack experience, how an inadvertent click destroyed most of her work, including her paid subscriber base, and being told there’s no way to fix it? No way.

I used to believe in having everything under one roof. One website for everything. Now I’m not so sure.

I signed up for Transistor to host my interviews. You can’t embed Substack podcasts on your site. That makes sense to drive people to Substack to increase subscriptions, but what about my own site?

I moved all my paid subscribers to Memberful, which I’ve used before. They’re owned by a solid company (Patreon) and do memberships. I pay them monthly, so if anything goes wrong, I have one company with a dedicated support team to contact.

Next is my email list. Linking to Memberful violates Substack’s terms of service.

“You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.”

True, I don’t “charge a subscription fee for your publication,” but I could wake up one morning to find my account suspended for linking to an “alternative method to collect subscription payments.”

This means I can’t promote my weekly Zoom calls to the 6,500 people on my email list.

In early 2024, I wrote “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Putting all our marketing eggs into the social media basket wasn’t a great idea, and I’m beginning to think the same of Substack.

DELETING MORE APPS

Thought provoking piece from Joan Westenberg:

I deleted everything.

Every note in Obsidian. Every carefully crafted “second brain.”

Every Apple Note.

Every to do list.

Every article on my “read later” list.

Every productivity system I’d built over years. Gone in seconds.

And I felt zero panic. Just an overwhelming sense of relief.

Got talking about this on Alex’s ‘BAT WRITE’ co-writing hang out recently, and he made a good point of actually saving the thing, to have it as reference for later. I like doing that with this blog, and I also have a running note in my Bear app, too.

But again, here we are – I’ve added this to my blog. I can see this a week from now, or five years from now, and I love that.

SOUNDCLOUD AND AI

New SoundCloud terms of service just dropped:

We will not use your content to train generative AI models that aim to replicate or synthesize your voice, music, or likeness without your explicit consent, which must be affirmatively provided through an opt-in mechanism.

What a wild time is for music right now.

EMPIRES ARE STUMBLING

This bit from Jon Gruber who writes Daring Fireball:

“Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.”

Apple might not like how critical Gruber has been in recent months, but I also don’t like how Siri will let me keep adding “bananas” to my Groceries List, and never once tell me that it’s already on the list. In 2025.

And did you know that when you say, “Siri, turn on my 6am alarm” it will just keep adding 6am alarms, over and over again? I had like 50 of them last time I looked.

I hope Apple execs will be staying back at the office fixing that, delivering their “Apple Intelligence” offerings that they promised months ago, and maybe stop fighting with independent app makers and charing them 30% of every god damn sale for eternity.

‘Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution‘

Another how-to on untangling ourselves from the tech giants, but yowza, this one is a bit above my head!

Category: Technology