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Purism’s explanations for removing various safety features from Librem One’s social network sound like someone explaining why they removed the mirrors, brakes, horns, seat belts, airbags and signals from the cars they’re reselling, because they know those cars are only ever going to be driven on a track where they’ll never have to change lanes or negotiate with other drivers.

Even though there’s a bunch of driveways on that track, connecting to the public road system.

If a collision does happen, we can call in the tow trucks and ambulances. But giving drivers tools to avoid collisions or reduce injuries? That would be interfering with their freedom!

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Smudgy clouds, colors enhanced to bring out a straight rainbow effect.

I could barely see any colors in the cloud at all without my polarized sunglasses, and when I took a photo through them, I still had to bump up the saturation.

Thin clouds and contrails cross the sky. A bright rainbow-like ring circles a spot just out of view above the frame. A fainter rainbow-like line runs across the sky below it.I’ve seen several of these over the years. The brightest one was nine years ago, while the longest was just last year. It’s a solar halo caused by reflections inside ice crystals (near ground level or higher up in the atmosphere) that in theory could circle the entire sky parallel to the horizon. In practice, it’s rare for ice crystals of the right shape and orientation to cover more than a small area from any given viewpoint, so mostly people see fragments of them.

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Wow, that shoe dropped sooner than I expected. Verizon is already shopping around to sell Tumblr. I figured it would be toward the end of the year, not the middle.

After Tumblr’s ham-handed ban on adult content last fall purged a bunch of accounts, sparked a lack of confidence, and triggered an wave of users leaving in digust, it became clear that Verizon had no idea what to do with Tumblr (not that Yahoo! had much more). If they hadn’t already started the death spiral, they’d at least knocked it out of orbit.

I’ve never been super-active on Tumblr, but I interact with a few people, and I used to occasionally post things there that weren’t reposts from my blog, or Flickr, or Instagram, or wherever. So, just in case, I backed up a full archive, imported some of the original posts, and pared down all the old duplicates and outdated signal boosts so that when Verizon inevitably gave up monetizing the site, it would be easier to find the pieces I wanted to keep.

Honestly, I’d rather Verizon sell it than shutter it and sell off the data (you think Verizon wouldn’t?). But it depends on who buys it. If anyone wants it.

Here’s hoping Tumblr finds a suitable buyer who understands what they’re getting and is willing to invest in the community, not someone who just wants to squeeze out the last few drops of cash before sending it to join GeoCities in the great Internet Archive in the Sky.

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wWooden balcony with patio furniture and plants.I’ve been going through old scenic photos that either never made it online or I only posted low-res versions on my blog and uploading the ones I still think are decent (or at least interesting) to Flickr. Which has got me wondering: When did I start using it?

Other social networks are easy. I signed up and wrote a Hello World post of some sort.

But the oldest photos I have on Flickr are some test posts I made from my RAZR flip-phone (remember those?) using the post-by-email gateway, in mid-2008. Before I’d even joined Twitter. I was looking for some way I could upload photos directly from my phone instead of waiting until I got home. I don’t remember how many other test posts I made and deleted, or whether there were any older ones. But that’s not important either, because…

I have several blog posts where I linked to or embedded someone else’s photo on Flickr going back even further. The oldest I could find was on the batch of Hawaii photos I posted here in 2005, and just posted on Flickr a few days ago! I was looking for the name of a small valley I’d photographed on the side of the road, and found someone else’s photo from the same spot. I asked him if he remembered where it was, and he was able to look it up and give me the name.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think I may have signed up on Flickr to ask that question.

And then three years went by before I started seriously posting my own photos to the site!

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Protecting the environment isn’t just about saving the planet. It’s about saving ourselves. It’s about being responsible custodians of nature not just for its own sake (though that’s important too), but so we can keep relying on it…instead of sucking the life out of everything we can like there’s no tomorrow, leaving a world that’s too inhospitable for us to live on in any sort of comfortable civilization.

Tens of thousands of years on, the planet will recover from just about anything we throw at it, as long as we stop messing things up at some point (like, say, dying back to subsistence level as famines and wars over the remaining resources kill us off). It may take longer for biodiversity to recover, but it will happen eventually, as it has after each great extinction event — though always taking new paths to replace the possibilities that didn’t make it.

But I don’t have 10,000, 100,000, or a million years to wait for things to recover, and neither do you.

I miss the optimism of the 1990s, when the message I got was “Things are messed up, but we can fix them.” Remember when we were more worried about running out of oil than about the effects of burning it? Now the message I keep seeing is, “Too late! We’re all screwed!” Especially with large entrenched interests trying to not just fight the gains we’ve made since the 1970s, but actively roll them back.

Maybe we can’t solve the problem completely anymore. But at least we can try to mitigate it a little.

Indignant geese.

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I’m thinking about social media backups again after Prismo lost all its data, and after one of my own test blogs crashed.

I can and do automate backups on the VPS where I host my main blogs.

I can manually backup my social media accounts, but IIRC none of them offer automatic scheduling. I have to remember to run a backup, log into the site, find the right control panel (which sometimes changes!) and request a backup.

I’d like to be able to schedule recurring backups on Mastodon, Twitter, etc. Send me an email each month with a link when it’s ready.

OK, you don’t want to keep generating backups for abandoned accounts. Here are some ideas:

  • Skip the process if I haven’t posted since the last archive.
  • Instead of scheduling a recurring job, schedule a new one 30 days out each time I download an archive.

Refine as needed.

Now, those of us with a little more tech savvy can automate some things with IFTTT. Not the native backup process, but we can set up rules to listen for new posts and automatically save the content somewhere else. But while I can reliably save the text of every post from Twitter, Mastodon, etc., saving media depends on what I’m saving it to. Often the best you can do with IFTTT is embed, not copy. (And that’s if the media is even available in the source feed. Pixelfed’s RSS doesn’t include image URLs, and Mastodon’s RSS/Atom includes them in a way IFTTT doesn’t recognize.)

Eh, maybe I should just read up on ActivityPub and see if I can make a subscribe-to-archive bot.