Silly Con Valley (Steve Cutts)
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The Spinner*
“The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person.”
“You pay The Spinner* $29 (and the company) provides you with an ordinary link you then text to your friend. When that friend clicks on the link, they get a tracking cookie that works as a bulls-eye for The Spinner* to hit with 10 different articles written specifically to influence that friend. He or she “will be strategically bombarded with articles and media tailored to him or her.” Specifically, 180 of these things.”
KLOCKWERKS
“The beautiful steampunk mantel clocks and unique timepieces from KLOCKWERKS are all created by self-taught artist Roger Wood of Hamilton, Ontario. His clock-making process starts with perusing items at yard sales and flea markets to find great components to craft these beautiful and unique timepieces. Wood then uses other people’s discarded and unwanted items to find things that speak to him, things with a history. These items can be pretty much anything, from wheels and gears to musical instruments and feathers. Wood has assembled a massive collection of items, most of which is barely contained by the numerous drawers in his Hamilton, Ontario workshop.”
Sit Down and Shut Up
Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye
Amazon: “In Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by 13th-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogenâs enigmatic teachings in plain language, Warner intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, anger, meditation, enlightenment, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and pain of the punk rock ethos.”
This book got a lot of my highlighter. A few examples below:
“There are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it.”
“Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing.”
“Thoughts are nothing more than electrical activity, changes in the organic chemistry of the brain.”
“Words cannot capture what your life really is. […] All humankind’s problems today stem solely from our inability to see that words are just words.”
“Everything you ever do is always, always, always a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Mo the lap dog
This is Mo, our neighbor dog. Hattie (our Golden) is a very loving dog and loves to stretch out in Barb’s lap… but won’t get on mine, so this was a rare treat for me.
We’re In the Money
The original post got lost somewhere along the way and this clip from Gold Diggers of 1933 is one of my favorites. Ginger Rogers sining in pig latin? Oh yes.
Bosch returns April 19 (season 5)
Dana Carvey imagines John Lennon asking Paul McCartney about Kanye West
More apps caught sending personal info to Facebook
Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required. Here’s John Gruber’s post):
“In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.
Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.
Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.
None of those apps provided users any apparent way to stop that information from being sent to Facebook.”
So I’m thinking about apps that I use: TextGrabber, Scanner Pro et al. Are they sending my shit to Facebook (even though I don’t have an account?). Apple needs to stop this shit or at the ver least tell us which apps are doing this so we can delete them.
Light Phone 2
I’ve ordered one but it will be a few months before I get it. It got a mention in Digital Minimalism. Yeah, I could have got me one of those Jitterbug phones but I’m way too cool for that. This gizmo will work with my iPhone. Uses the same number.