This essay seeks to examine the breadth of donor-funded, open source, federated social networks as technical alternatives to commercial online environments like Facebook and Twitter as measured by their usersâ overall satisfaction with them as means of social interactivity over time. Following recent debates and confusion regarding the ethics in the practices of the organizations which built them and the extent of their complicity in the radical cultural consequences of digital communication surrounding the United Statesâ Presidential Election in 2016, it proposes that greater rhetorical and legislative attention be invested in the tangible, documented design decisions across their productsâ history as the most crucial, relevant, and effective means of understanding the whole context, within which it will define open source software development and federated networking in contrast to the guarded industry establishment which the dominant services have transitioned from disrupting by design to entirely exemplifying thus far in the century.
Very possibly the best dictionary app on the platform. Depending on your purpose for a dictionary app, this is the best one on iOS. I use mine to both look up established words and store words Iâve âcreated.â A lot of the words I want to store come from @HaggardHawks on Twitter, and most of them are both 1.) actual words, often from history and 2.) not in any established dictionaries.
Magical, irreplaceable. As developer Anders Borum originated professional-grade git integration on iOS with Working Copy, which remains unmatched, Secure Shellfish remains the reference standard for remote filesystem access across the board on this platform, despite how many competitors have arisen since its introduction.
I must admit: I overlooked Secure Shellfish for years and I’m not entirely sure why. I’m glad that ended last year, though, as I’ve actually since acquired a fair amount of remote file management in my day-to-day working life.
FX050 An artificially-generated verse about my virtual airline flight. From Memphis skies, we take to flight
Our journeyâs set, destination in sight
To Denverâs heights, weâll soon ascend
On board FX 050, our adventure begins.
The engines roar, the ground fades away
The rush of wind, our spirits at play
Above the clouds, a new world we find
As we soar across the horizonâs line.
The miles fly by, the time ticks on
The notable boundary-pusher in the iPadOS/iOS local command line. There are now quite a few terminal emulator-esque apps on the App Store, but I’ve been using a-Shell since it was joined only by Blink (from which it was forked) and iSH. As it was then, a-Shell remains the only one of these with which one can actually accomplish command line tasks locally beyond screwing around. I am ultimately not a command line native, and I don’t have the basic theory beneath my use of Python scripts, yet I’ve been able to accomplish startlingly powerful things within this app, thanks in large part to gracious and immediately-available support via the project’s Discord server.
I Am No Longer Afraid of JSON All of Simonâs apps are genius and wholly unique, but Jayson will always have a special place in mine own heart as the single application which finally killed my phobia of JSON, in general. It is by far the most elegant and intelligent means of manipulating JSON dictionaries Iâve ever seen on any platform. Iâve worked with both the iOS and macOS apps, now, and both are - dare I say it - a genuine joy to use.
Having broken my beloved Varmilo VA108M (which I absolutely intend to fix one day in the near future, FYI,) months ago and just last week completely totaled the period (.) key on my Absurdly Overpriced Toilet Professional iPad Keyboarding Apparatus, I decided to buy an on-sale variant of Keychronâs K2 with the loudest switches (the blue ones) available, assuming that surely no keyboard could be truly, disruptively loud.
I was very wrong.
I know a lot of the reviews here express discontentment with TextExpanderâs support on iOS. I hear that, but - as a Bear and Drafts user - I rarely encounter this as a limitation. I also use an external keyboard with my iPhone, though, which makes calling the TextExpander keyboard anywhere else somewhat inconvenient. (Keyboard switching is done with the function key, if you were wondering.)
From what I understand, though, TextExpanderâs SDK is quite easy to implement, so itâs also a question of other developers acknowledging that itâs a worthwhile and desired addition to their applications.
One of the app's most universal 'native' advantages, revisited. I've spent more cumulative time playing with my Obsidian configuration in the past 24 hour hours than the sum of the whole I'd spent doing so in the 3(?) years since I installed beta (or was it alpha?) one. While I still find it janky as hell and deeply untrustworthy â among far too many other woes â I must admit that the bulk of shear hype surrounding its existence has indeed resulted in enough developer attention to achieve some technically interesting capabilities.
*Or at least until I can regain a reasonable editorial perspective of current happenings.
As I touched on in my 2021 overview of The Psalms, this blog has undergone some very significant â and mostly involuntary â changes of late. This summer has abruptly brought some life happens which will inevitably contribute further changes to a degree that warrants a very bloggy sort of Update Post.
Most importantly, perhaps, is that I've found myself with a real, tangible, full-time Big Boy job as a nighttime custodian of my actual elementary school.
The most magical configurables I've ever created for iOS by a long way. Though I don't believe I've ever discussed it, here, the continuance of the fandom for Houston music legend, DJ Screw, on into the 21st century is an issue I remain very invested in. I doubt you want to hear much about it, but the issue of actually obtaining audio files from the Screw collection is a worthwhile one to engage for context's sake.
macOS Ventura Wallpaper Siri Shortcuts These two Base64-Bound Baddies might simplify your yuppie existence for another few weeks. Somehow, I managed to find myself in possession of two Very Large image files: the(?) new dark/light wallpaper pair coming in macOS Ventura. (Here they are in full, light and dark, so weâve got that out of the way.) I donât actually remember where they came from, so I hope that doesnât matter much to you.
A modified shortcut to query live program information from your NPR station. This past month, MacStories hosted a community Siri Shortcuts contest called Automation April. One of its winners â a shortcut called âWhat's on KUTX?â credited to Jack Wellborn â caught my eye as a lifelong dependent upon National Public Radio. Via John Voorhees' comment:
The solution Wellborn came up with is ingenious. It turns out that KUTX uses a web API that can return information about the currently playing track.
Sorry Iâm so late with this but I forgot I had something to contribute lol.
My first and only dedicated mp3 player was a first-generation iPod Shuffleâââwhich was not only the most elegant looking USB drive one could find at the time, butâââimoâââremains the single highest-value mainstream consumer tech product Iâve ever owned. It was a 512mb stick with playback controls and a 3.5mm audio jack at one end.
The ideal means of On The Go participation in The Tildeverse.
I was completely unaware of the Tildeverseâs origin story â documented in a Medium post by WIRED Editor-in-Chief, Paul Ford â until this year, somehow, though I knew of its existence as far back as 2018. I was living in an unairconditioned Portland apartment, then, and had found myself stuck with Linux for the first time in my adult life.
Imagine running shortcuts from anywhere you can place a link. There seemed to be a bit of confusion regarding a shortcut I posted on RoutineHub a few days ago entitled âGenerate Shortcuts Run Links List,â so I thought Iâd attempt to overview how Iâve come to use Shortcutsâ URL scheme as my primary method of calling shortcuts across both iOS and macOS.
The basis of the whole shit is shortcuts://run-shortcut?name= and shortcuts://x-callback-url/run-shortcut?
A quick review of Apple, Incâs first venture as a textile company. Now that Apple, Incorporated is a textile company, I thought it might be pertinent of me â someone with incredibly filthy hands â to review its first textile product, the Rag. Back in my day, we were taught not to touch the screen. Itâs not good for it, theyâd say. Now, thatâs all we do, and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
