Back in February 2021, I wrote an article touting a well-curated RSS/ATOM feed collection as an alternative to reading news on Facebook (from the perspective of someone who does the former and not the latter). Some aspects of the article are dated -- I use different feed readers now than I did more than two years ago. But the reasoning holds up well and I have cited to it in subsequent articles building on the same ideas.
https://thenewleafjournal.com/around-the-web-rss-as-a-facebook-alternative/
#rss #feeds #facebook #news #socialmedia
I just mailed the 143rd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. Each addition of my newsletter links to the week's New Leaf Journal articles and adds other news and notes. However, even if we did not publish anything of interest to you in a given week (not that this is possible, of course), I publish 12 links from around the internet (as in things other people wrote) with each newsletter. I happen to think my curated link collections, which I gather from my feed reader and personal link saving system, are always on point. If you like the content, you can sign up to receive the Saturday newsletter by email or simply add its RSS feed to your favorite reader (no sign-up required for RSS option).
https://buttondown.email/newsletterleafjournal/archive/143/
#newsletter #links #aroundtheweb #buttondown #blogging
I came across a 2021 story about a prominent Colombo crime family figure having to turn himself in after his son tweeted a picture of him. He pled guilty yesterday. These stories inspired me to publish an article about what the mafia can teach people about social media over-sharing.
https://thenewleafjournal.com/mafia-social-media-over-sharing/
#OrganizedCrime #mafia #twitter #SocialMedia #Oversharing
If you want to follow my own projects (I'd personally recommend doing so, but that is just me), I maintain a list of all of my RSS/ATOM feeds (I need to add a few, actually...)
I submitted a list of some of my favorite RSS/ATOM feeds in response to an "Ask HN" Hacker News post. These are just a few of the many feeds that I follow, but they may be of general interest.
I published an essay in May taking the position that contrary to Substack's assertions, Substack Notes is a clone of Twitter insofar as it replicates Twitter's functionality. One issue I have with many alternative social media is that it copies the format and features of big tech centralized social media, which only makes sense insofar as one concludes that the only problems with the big tech options are centralization and ads (link to similar post about Mastodon in the essay). I am interested to see how Nostr develops since the practical way it handles identities and some of the applications built on top of it are novel and interesting. For whatever it is worth, I think those are far more notable selling points than portraying it as an alternative to Twitter.
https://thenewleafjournal.com/substack-notes-twitter-clone-war/
#substack #mastodon #twitter #bigtech #nostr
I read through an HN thread about the Steam Deck. Now note that I do not have a Steam Deck and do not plan to buy one (neat, but I have no use-case for it), so I was just reading out of curiosity. I saw some complaints about battery drain when playing AAA games. 2-3 hours! Oh no! I thought about my own history. These kids clearly never had a Sega Nomad. Now that was real battery drain, and by batteries I mean real AA batteries. Kids these days. It's all a matter of perspective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36586346
#VideoGames #Steam #SteamDeck #Sega #SegaNomad
My article on Calvin Coolidge's eloquent remarks to commemorate the 150th anniversary of American independence on July 4, 1926.
https://thenewleafjournal.com/calvin-coolidge-on-why-we-celebrate-independence-day/
#ushistory #history #CalvinCoolidge #4thofjuly #IndependenceDay
The New Leaf Journal hasn't made a big Hacker News splash since last August. But I occasionally share an article to page one. See the news about there now being a Delta Chat app for Ubuntu Touch with some comments (most of the comments are about Doom though, so only a few relevant ones).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36574128
#deltachat #UbuntuTouch #email #HackerNews
I'm looking forward to trying it a bit more, cool concept. With Mostr it also gets picked up by some Activity Pub clients fairly well.
In learned about the My Tiny Senpai anime back in March. It inspired me to write an article about height differences in anime romances. The thing is that My Tiny Senpai was only the inspiration for the article. However, now the article is doing well on Google (by our modest standards) thanks to the debut of the My Tiny Senpai anime. Now I looked into the series and am not particularly interested in it. Do I have to watch at least part of it now because it is bringing visitors to my site?
https://thenewleafjournal.com/leafbud/do-i-have-to-watch-my-tiny-senpai/
#anime #mytinysenpai #newleafjournal #blogging
I am working on reviewing almost all of the 31 freeware visual novels translated from Japanese to English for the 2005, 2006, and 2008 al|together festivals (all of the games remain freely available). I have 22 reviews done and am looking to finish in August. I am about to start working on review 23 with a publication target of tomorrow -- The world to reverse by circle 17.
https://thenewleafjournal.com/collection/altogether/
#visualnovel #visualnovels #freeware #NScripter #ONScripter
I have an "Around the Web" section in my weekly newsletter for The New Leaf Journal. I list 12 links from around the web with a short comment. In order to have links to share, I save interesting articles from my feed reader (Handy Reading off F-Droid) into a markdown file by sharing to Markor. I then copy the links I want to use into another markdown file with my full comment so I can use them in future newsletters (I move some links into a separate directory for use in articles). However, I let them pile up sometimes. I am still working on moving more than a month's worth of saved links. Need to stay on top of it more.
#AroundTheWeb #newsletter #blogging #rss #markor
I will add to my own note on Mastodon that the X/A/B/Y buttons are clicky. I had read some complaints that they were mushy. But again, just my first impression after opening the box.
#guilkit #nintendoswitch #videogames
I came across an open source project called NoPaste the other day. NoPaste is a client-side paste service that comes in the form of a static site. You use it like a paste bin but instead of storing pastes on a server, pastes are stored encrypted in a URL which can be decrypted by a NoPaste site. (I hope that was accurate...) In a new article, I explain how to set up a NoPaste site for free with surge.sh.
Article:
https://thenewleafjournal.com/deploying-nopaste-to-surge/
NoPaste repo:
https://github.com/bokub/nopaste
#nopaste #surge.sh #pastebin #nopaste #staticsite
Thanks for the tip. I would have missed it. Added to my ever-growing backlog...
If you happen to have issues with sending files to a wi-fi Brother printer from an Arch-based Linux distribution, these steps resolved my issue on EndeavourOS.
https://discovery.endeavouros.com/printers/printers/#network-printer
#linux #arch #EndeavourOS #printers #brother
I took up a fun new project. I am using PikaPods to run an instance of Memos, a self-hosted open source note-taking application with a Twitter-like UI and RSS support. So far so good, although I hope Memos makes it easier to style URLs in the future. Relevant links below.
My Memos profile: https://memos.emucafe.org/u/2/
Memos Repo: https://github.com/usememos/memos
PikaPods: https://www.pikapods.com/
#notes #memos #github #pikapods #selfhosting #notetaking #rss
My health insurance provider apparently uses Salesforce to manage payments. After I make a payment, it redirects me to a Salesforce login page. It's fine in terms of functionality - the payment goes through and I receive SMS confirmation (SMS confirmation isn't fine, but setting that aside). But why redirect me to a login page I probably don't have credentials for? Weird.
#paymentportals #ux #salesforth #healthinsurance