New York Times
"They also began raising concerns about safety in Amazon’s warehouses at the start of the pandemic. Amazon fired Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham last April, not long after their group had announced an internal event for warehouse workers to speak to tech employees about their workplace conditions."
This is powerful. When employees speak to each other it can lead to realizing that they have common interests--even when they work in different parts of the organization that don't normally interact. Firing people advocating for safety during a pandemic is a bad look.
HBO
This documentary uses firsthand video from people who were on the Diamond Princess cruise in February 2020. It’s quite a record of the early pandemic and a reminder of how little we knew and how poorly we handled it in the early days.
The Atlantic
"Over the past decade, the blockchain has become a refuge for people who need another place to rest their assets. For global tycoons, it’s just an alternative to parking their money in some real estate they would never visit."
Anil Dash (father of the NFT?!) on its origin and the current state of his problem child.
photo of an orange south by southwest music festival wristband in the spine of a book
Found this ghost of festivals past used as a bookmark in my copy of Snow Crash because my 13 year old son is thinking about reading it.
SXSW2K
The Atlantic
"The good news is that this one is different. We now have an unparalleled supply of astonishingly efficacious vaccines being administered at an incredible clip. If we act quickly, this surge could be merely a blip for the United States. But if we move too slowly, more people will become infected by this terrible new variant, which is acutely dangerous to those who are not yet vaccinated."
Excellent snapshot of where we are with covid-19 and some good information about where we're headed, like this:
"Herd immunity is sometimes treated as a binary threshold: We’re all safe once we cross it, and all unsafe before that. In reality, herd immunity isn’t a switch that provides individual protection, just a dynamic that makes it hard for epidemics to sustain themselves in a population over the long term. Even if 75 percent of the country has some level of immunity because of vaccination or past infection, the remaining 25 percent remains just as susceptible, individually, to getting infected."
tl;dr: lots of light at the end of the tunnel but we're still in the tunnel.
daniel.haxx.se
"Small and quick decisions done back then, that would later make a serious impact on and shape my life. curl has been one of my main hobbies ever since – and of course also a full-time job since a few years back now."
curl is one of those ubiquitous tools that all developers use. It's just part of the water we swim in and I forget that tools don't just spring from Earth fully-formed. This is a fun look at where curl came from and where it's going. These hobbyists, amirite?
istheshipstillstuck.com
Helpful single serving site about that ship that's stuck in the Suez Canal. I will never get tired of this story.

Update (3/29): No. Bon voyage Ever Given.
Flickr Blog
"What a strange, unexpected delight to be asked to return with the express goal of researching what the Commons has become and understanding how cultural institutions around the world have evolved through being a part of it. We want to design a stronger future for the program, with enduring longevity at its heart."
Great to hear this! The new Flickr owners are investing in its Flickr Commons program.
Axios
"Just as he passed the $1.9 trillion COVID rescue package with zero Republican votes and zero regrets, his team sees little chance he's going to be able to rewire the government in his image if he plays by the rules of bringing in at least 10 Republicans."
Republicans made it clear right out of the gate that they are there to block anything proposed. Good to hear Biden is considering moving forward without them.
The Atlantic
"In short, McConnell recognized that the modern filibuster introduced a serious flaw into the code of American democracy. Far from fostering compromise, the current filibuster has given a unified minority party every incentive to block legislation, no matter how many Americans support it."
This is a good summary of the problem with the filibuster which still isn’t widely known. That’s why it works so well at blocking progress without blame where the filibuster still applies.

How I Consume RSS in 2021

I was just looking at my iOS Screen Time report and noticed that I spend a good portion of my phone time reading RSS feeds. I'm guessing that's unusual and I thought it might be good to share my latest setup.

When Google Reader shut down in 2013 I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on an AWS server and used that regularly in a desktop browser without really touching it again until 2018. (Beyond regular OS updates.) I wrote about that update—Newsreader Update—which opened up reading feeds in a nice interface on my iPhone. I figured I'd go another five years without touching it, but no. Some quirk of the app was annoying enough that I looked at updating tt-rss and there has been a big improvement: Dockerization.

The salty folks who created and maintain tt-rss have packaged everything up with Docker so it's easier to maintain. Here's the tt-rss docker compose version. Now I have this running on a $5/month Digital Ocean server and the code updates with every reboot. The one piece I wasn't sure about was configuring the web server inside Docker. But it turned out to be pretty easy by setting up a reverse proxy on the host OS.

Anyway, I realize that not everyone is going to want to reverse proxy their way to reading RSS on their iPhone. But you can consume RSS feeds in 2021 with a little work. I still think having control of your primary news feed without all of the sorting, attention, and social alogrithms is the best way keep up with the web.

Open Web Analytics

A couple weeks ago I read Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast and it was the straw that broke the steady drumbeat camel of not using Google Analytics on this site's back.

I looked around at alternatives and settled on Open Web Analytics. It runs locally without a complex install and you can add custom events. The interface isn't as slick as Google Analytics but since I can query the data directly I should be able to write my own report pages.

The main thing is that it's one (admittedly tiny) meal that Google doesn't get to eat. And this site is one less place that Google knows you visited. Sneaky! (If you weren't blocking GA already, which you should.)
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