The Register: Time to examine the anatomy of the British Library ransomware nightmare.

First I’ve heard of this. Look forward to scanning the report. So many folks are relying on older systems, hardware … valuable or sensitive information left to disappear due to inertia. Big lessons here.

I value paper more, as a result!

Wired: Some of the Most Popular Websites Share Your Data With Over 1,500 Companies.

“A WIRED analysis of the top 10,000 most popular websites shows that dozens of sites say they are sharing data with more than 1,000 companies, while thousands of other websites are sharing data with hundreds of firms. Quiz and puzzle website JetPunk tops the pile, listing 1,809 ‘partners’ that may collect personal information, including ‘browsing behavior or unique IDs.’”

Fifteen minutes of linkfinding.

ReadWriteWeb: Apple iMac could be set to try out touchscreen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After I use my iPad, it drives me crazy when I try poking my laptop or desktop’s screen.

Paris Review: Backyard Bird Diary. Always wanted to create one of these kinds of diaries. Been a long time since I’ve sketched. I should buy some colored pencils.

Capital+Main: Power of the Pulpit: How Conservative Congregations Scale the Church-State Wall to Political Victory. Listen to what Bible scholar Dan McLellan says about this.

AppleInsider: Neil Young tries excusing his return to Spotify by saying Apple Music is now as bad. Water-drop torture is the same, no matter the brand.

PVC: Podcast playback: immersive reading + italics on website-desktop & mobile. I know there are rules for use of italics; I use them when they make the most sense for emphasis. Keeping their ‘power’ is paramount.

Vox: Biden is not “waging war” on American energy. He’s boosting it. Yet OPEC still has its heavy hand on prices. Seen that recent $0.30/gallon price increase?

DP Review: Nikon Z9 gets firmware v5.0 with portrait processing options and feature refinements. A Z8 or Z9 is on my dream wishlist.

SciAm: How the Solar Eclipse will impact electricity supplies. Paywall keeps me out. If you’ve got a subscription, enjoy.

CNet: Do You Need a Screen for a Projector? As an A/V professional, I can tell you that you’ll be blown away by the quality of a good projection screen. The materials have advanced so very far. Contrast and color are exponentially better than they were just a decade ago.

Zeldman: Open-source moderation.

Ever hear of "zettelkasten"?

The latest rabbit-hole I’m diving into. My Evernote has become a black hole of thousands (15,000+ tags alone) of aged content. I need something better. Been looking at The Archive and have downloaded Obsidian. Longtime readers will recall my experiences with The Brain (too pricey now), also.

I’d really like to have a filing system to back up my grey matter in a more useful, Google-Search-like manner. But moreso, to save some of my longer writings. I’m discovering lately that blogging has ‘built’ me for longer form pieces, and I’d like to categorize and save them in useful (quick recall) formats. So many times, when composing a longer blog post, I recall a piece of writing from the past. I can’t tell if I’ve stuffed it in Ulysses, Drafts, IA Writer, Evernote, FreeMind, Notes, Omni Outliner, Open Office, Google Docs, OneDrive, Yojimbo, Highland 2, Scrivener, Word, Pages, Textedit, or wherever. After decades of writing for the internet, I’ve got good things stuffed in every nook and cranny on my hard drives, depending on what latest whizzy app or app update I was fiddling with, in order to give a salient comment on the blog.

I’ve been terrifically disorganized with my longer writings, and now I need to pay the piper. I really wish I’d come up with some dazzlingly brilliant method of naming files, but alas … it never crossed my mind until now.

Consider this a ‘spring cleaning’. Thought others might want to peek, too.

The Atlantic: You’re Looking at TikTok All Wrong.

I find TikTok has a fiendishly clever interestingness algorithm. It morphs as I use it, in ways that other such channels can’t match. You want to talk about AI; TikTok feels like there’s a machine presence on the other end of the line trying to psychoanalyze … watching, learning, recording. I used the word ‘fiendish’ purposely!

One observation: if you categorize your favorites, it uses the names of your categories as keywords when you actively save something, feeding you more using those keywords with the very next video. But the ‘lead’ wears fast as you deviate from the keyword. Fiendishly fast. It adapts to our shorter modern attention spans. I am fascinated.

Driving all over hell and high water today.

I’ve got some scheduled posts in the queue. I’ll see if SS behaves as I dip in and out of cell ranges. Any clients who read here, I’ll get back to you later this afternoon.

Later: Jesus, the winds. Drive your lowest-profile vehicle today. I’m navigating the XTerra along the roads, dodging other cars and tumbleweeds … even TREES … like it’s a demolition derby where God is a toddler gripping your roof and going ‘vroom vroom’, shoving you in the midst of toy chaos.

The Verge: When does a journalist become a hacker?

“The story begins with Tucker Carlson’s extremely cursed interview of Kanye West in 2022. Most interviews are edited for clarity; in this case, the interview was cut to exclude a rambling, antisemitic rant. That unaired clip and others made their way to Vice and Media Matters through Burke, who downloaded them from LiveU, a streaming service that media companies use to share video files. The FBI raided Burke’s home last year, seizing phones, laptops, hard drives, and notes.

Something for we bloggers to remain aware of, if we run across sensitive materials online.

Tedium: Create for yourself.

“If you’re a creative person, one of the most important actions you can take, full stop, is to take some ownership over your work. Maybe, if you want to have a financial upside, you can’t own all of it. Maybe you have to pick and choose what your ownership picture looks like. But own some of it. Make it yours.”

Damn straight. No selling one’s soul to just afford an occasional latte. That’s beyond the pale.