For those who read this blog and haven’t yet exhausted their enthusiasm for Trojan Room Coffee Pot nostalgia, Peter Leigh has just produced what is perhaps the best video about it yet, on his ‘Nostalgia Nerd’ YouTube channel.
(Direct Youtube link, for those reading by email)
You’ll have to get busy skipping YouTube ads, but it’s very nicely done.
This might be a little technical for some readers, but don’t worry, it’s not actually the technical detail that’s important…
On my home server, I run about half a dozen services that I need to access via a web browser, so they’re all behind a Caddy reverse proxy which connects me to the right one, depending on the name I use in my browser: ‘homeassistant’, ‘unifi’, ‘searxng’, ‘octoprint’ etc. (All of these names are aliases for the same machine.)
One of these services is Nextcloud, which has user accounts, and I was thinking it would be handy if I could use those accounts to authorise access to the other services. Can I allow someone to use my web search frontend only if they have an account on my Nextcloud server, for example?
I thought I’d try out an AI system to see if it could speed up this process, because they’re often good at this kind of thing – Google Gemini, in this case. And, to my delight, it gave me pages of detailed instructions.
It knew that Nextcloud supports the OpenID Connect system, told me how to set it up, and then how to use the oidc directive in the Caddy configuration file to connect the two, so that Caddy could ask Nextcloud whether the user should be allowed in. It gave me nice examples of oidc actually in use, and the parameters you’d need to configure when using it to talk to the Nextcloud instance.
“Great!”, I thought, and grabbed a coffee, went upstairs to my machine, and started typing code to try it out. And it was then that I discovered…
Caddy doesn’t actually have an oidc directive.
Back in about 1996, I was attending a conference in San Francisco. As we walked into the Moscone centre to register, we were all given not only the usual branded bag and bits of paper, but something much more exciting: a box containing what was to become my first true pocket-sized mobile device, the recently-released Palm Pilot.
I don’t know whose idea it was to give these to everybody attending the conference, or how the finances worked, but it was a brilliant move. Not only was it an exciting surprise, but we immediately had an application for it: the conference proceedings were available on it, and you could slip it into your back pocket; something you certainly couldn’t do with the paper equivalent. And there was something more important, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
But for those less ancient than me, I should perhaps explain that what was brilliant about the Palm Pilot was the things it didn’t try to do. It had been preceeded a couple of years before by the Apple Newton, for example, which was a lovely device, but just tried to do too much and was thus expensive, large and heavy on power. The Palm guys realised that what people really wanted was just a cache, in their pocket, of the stuff they had on their PC. (Laptops were heavy, and expensive, with a short battery life, and you had to wait for Windows to boot up before you could check someone’s address. You might have one in your hotel room, but you probably wouldn’t carry it around.)
With the Palm devices, though, you would create and manage most of the content on your computer, which had a proper keyboard and screen. When you got back to your desk, you’d plug the device into its cradle, press the sync button, and any changes would zip to and fro, after which you could unplug it and put it back in your pocket. If you had migrated away from paper diaries and address books to keeping data on your PC, this allowed you to have that information back in your pocket again.
But you did have to plug it in to its cradle periodically, where it could talk to the PC using an RS-232 serial port. This was before 802.11 (the standard which, several years later, would become known as ‘WiFi’) and the Palm Pilot had no other networking. Well, almost none.
And that was, I think, really important.
You see, the lack of WiFi meant that it couldn’t distract you all the time with incoming messages. You could read email on it, but only the email that had been received on your PC when you last plugged the two together. So you would actually listen to what was being said at the conference: something almost unheard of these days!
But the device did have one further trick up its sleeve: it had infrared capabilites. It could exchange information with other Palm Pilots (and later with some other devices), using the same kind of line-of-sight connection that TV remotes used. That meant that for me to get your address and you to get mine, we needed actually to have met and collaborated in the exchange. I could send you my contact details across a conference table or while having a drink at a bar, in much the same way I could give you a business card, but it was so much more convenient because there was no need to transcribe the information afterwards if you wanted it in digital form.
This did require both of us to have Palm Pilots, of course, so what better way to kick this off than to make sure that, at a few key tech conferences, almost everybody you bumped into, for several days, would have one in their pocket?
~
Back in the early days of LinkedIn, there was a similar culture of only linking to people you actually knew; in fact, not only knew, but endorsed. I joined the beta release back in early 2004, and to this day I normally only link to people I’ve at least actually met, though in more recent years I’ve extended that to include ‘met on a video call’ or ‘had really quite a long phone call with’.
Nowadays, I do sometimes wonder why I’m still on LinkedIn, since it’s the source of more spam in my inbox than anything else. I’m not really out hunting for jobs. I’ve always joked — and it’s almost true — that I’ve never got any job I applied for and I’ve never applied for any job I got. And I’m not recruiting people either at present. LinkedIn is very much a work-related system, but having dropped in to the website just now for the first time in ages, I must confess that there was more interesting content on there than I expected, perhaps because it is linked to people I actually know in real life.
(Increasingly, social networks are things I visit in the same way I might visit parties; drop in for a while, see what the atmosphere is like, leave if it doesn’t appeal, but maybe visit again a few weeks later. I’ve just deleted the Twitter app from all my devices because I realised I could still drop in there using the web if wanted, but I didn’t need its content, or its notifications, delivered to my pocket.)
~
Anyway, I was thinking about all of this as I read Ev Williams’ article, Making “Social” Social Again, in which he announces the launch of Mozi. This is meant to be a social network to help you with your actual social life (and not a ‘social media’ platform). It’s about getting and maintaining up-to-date contact information for your friends, and knowing about their travels so you could meet up with them.
I don’t know whether it’ll succeed. There’s always the problem of bootstrapping a network when you can’t, say, give several hundred people a sexy new device that they’ll all be carrying around in their pockets for a few days. But it would be good to have something that is primarily about contacts rather than content, and yet isn’t primarily about work.
And he reminded me about Plaxo:
As I was making my birthday list, another, more practical, thing struck me: I had no go-to source for knowing who I knew. No online social network reflected my real-life relationships. The closest thing, by far, was the contacts app on my phone.
And, boy, was that a mess. I’m guessing, yours is too.
Why?
Twenty years ago, there was an internet company called Plaxo. There have been others like it, but Plaxo was the first big online address book. I remember thinking it was one of those simple but profound twists on an old product that was now possible because of the internet, i.e.: Why do I have to keep details up to date for hundreds of people in my address book? Now that we have the internet, you can update your address in my address book, and I only have to keep mine updated.
It was an obvious idea. And here we are, 20+ years later, with address books full of partial, duplicate, and outdated information.
Anyone encountering the same problem while writing Christmas cards?
The problem with Plaxo was that it required you to upload your address book to their servers, and I always felt uncomfortable with that. When someone gives you their details, their is an element of trust involved. They might not want you to broadcast their home address to the world, and they’re kind of assuming you won’t.
But nowadays, most people do this anyway, they just often don’t know that they’re doing it. It’s one of the reasons that, for a long time, I didn’t want to have anything to do with WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. But I abandoned my principles last year when I realised that all those friends I was trying to protect were already using those services and so all of their contact information was there anyway. And, because of them, so was mine. GDPR, eat your heart out!
Signal, in contrast, has a much better system which allows them to discover whether your contacts are on Signal without actually uploading your address book. In a world where we have these kind of techniques, and end-to-end encryption, and protocols for sending contact information, why is it that I can’t give you the permission to update your entry in my address book without my address book being stored on someone else’s servers?
I don’t know if Mozi will enable that. If they do, then I’ll believe we’ve made some progress from last millennium, when I could send you my current information with a couple of clicks and a beam of infrared.
I liked this:
People have too inflated sense of what it means to “ask an AI” about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of “asking an AI”, think of it more as “asking the average data labeler” on the internet.
…
But roughly speaking (and today), you’re not asking some magical AI. You’re asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful of course. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you’re not asking an AI, you’re asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.
Thanks to Simon Willison for the link.
Today, I got yet more evidence that the web is sinking in a world of AI-generated slime.
Our otherwise-fine Dualit toaster has, after many years, started to have occasional hiccups with its timer… I think the clockwork has become a little dodgy. So I did a quick search to see if others had the same experience, and I got this page back as one of the top hits:
I quote: “Nowadays, there are so many products of dualit toaster timer keeps sticking in the market and you are wondering to choose a best one.”
There’s a danger that we may soon move past the time of useful online search — Peak Google, if you like — and the alternative approach of trying to ask questions of an AI will only make things worse, since studies have already shown that training AIs on AI-generated content quickly leads to madness (for the AIs, that is, not the users, though that too would probably follow soon afterwards).
So making the most of online content in the future may depend, more than ever before, on being able to ensure that it comes from a trusted human source. Who’s old enough to remember when the web was small enough that human-generated indexes were the best way to find things?
But this is also why, as John Naughton nicely reminds us in an Observer piece this weekend, the best human-generated and human-curated content out there is often available via your RSS reader, not your search engine. (I happen to like News Explorer, and have used it for a few years.)
RSS — a system for telling you when your favourite sites, especially blogs, have been updated without you needing to go and look at each one every day — has existed since long before Facebook and these other trendy things now called ‘social networks’ existed, and I suspect will still be around after they’ve gone. But if RSS doesn’t appeal for some reason, much of the best content — including, of course, John’s blog and this one — is also available via an even more time-tested channel. Your email inbox.
For a long time, it has both bugged and bemused me that, though the first webcam ran for 10 years taking photos of our departmental coffee pot, there are almost no original images saved from the millions it served up to viewers around the world! I had one or two.
Then, suddenly, in a recent conversation, it occurred to me to check the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’, and, sure enough, in the second half of the coffeepot camera’s life — from 1996-2001 — they had captured 28 of its images. I wrote a script to index and download these, and turned them into a slideshow, which you can find in my new and very exciting three-minute video:
About a decade ago, my friend Richard wrote a short blog post entitled “This is what the internet was invented for“. In it, he linked to “Ian’s Shoelace Site“, his point being that if you suddenly realise you’ve always laced your shoes in a particular way without really wondering whether it was the best way, then there’s probably someone out there with sufficient interest in shoelacing that they’ll have compiled everything you need to know about how to lace your shoes… and this turns out in fact to be the case. Ian Fieggen lives in Melbourne, Australia, and his site is wonderful.
Well, in a minor way, this changed my life, because I went and perused the Shoelace Site at the time, and so for the last ten years, most of my shoes have been laced using the Double Helix Lacing method.
Now, it’s pretty rare that I buy a new pair of shoes, and after my latest purchase, I forgot about this undeniable improvement, and left them laced in the way they came from the shop, can you believe? For several months! Well, while polishing them at the weekend, I realised the error of my ways, and immediately pulled the laces out and re-did them, and now my tensioning and untensioning is smoother, easier and more satisfying.
There are so many ways in which the internet is getting worse, and making life worse, all around us, that it’s nice to be reminded, from time to time, of all the ways in which it can also make things better.
Do you use one of those ‘free’ email services, which make money by reading your emails so they can sell things to you, and sell you to others? Or do you get it from your ISP, which makes it hard for you to change supplier and possibly quite complicated when you move house? Or do you pay for a proper email account?
I’ve been doing the latter — using Fastmail for all my personal, family and business email — for a dozen years now, and have always been very happy with the service, accessing it through standard email programs on each of my various platforms. They’ve also always had a very nice webmail interface, but in general I prefer to use native apps rather than websites where I can.
This week, though, I’ve been experimenting with some features that turned out not to be quite so easy using my particular favourite apps, but were available through the site. One example is ‘Snooze’, which takes an item out of your inbox now but brings it back at a time you specify — this evening, for example, or next weekend. Things like this are nice to have, but there was another feature that was becoming a bit more essential to me.
I have a pretty large array of email addresses, which I use for various purposes. Some of them are just aliases on my main account, and some are separate email services provided by the university and other organisations. But I arrange that everything ends up at Fastmail, where it’s under my control and can be centrally searched, managed and archived. I either forward mail from each other remote service, or configure Fastmail to go and fetch it periodically.
Aside: I was bitten once in the past by having an email account at one of my previous companies, to which I still had access through being on the board for a while after I left, but when the company was closed down rather suddenly, the GSuite account was deleted almost instantaneously before I knew about it, and quite a bit of my email from that period simply vanished into the ether. I have the majority of my email stretching back as far as 1991, and I value that archive, so this was a bit of a blow. If you also value your data, make sure you look after it yourself!
Anyway, it’s becoming ever more important, in the battle against spam, that when you send mail, you send it using a server that is properly configured to be officially associated with the ‘From’ address you’re using. Some servers, especially GMail, are pretty fierce now about rejecting email purporting to come from, say, myuser@statusq.org but are actually sent using my account at the university. (There’s a range of technical standards such as SPF and DKIM which help a receiving email server assess the claimed provenance of an email message.)
And I often do need to send using different From addresses, so I normally have my email apps set up to talk to all of my email accounts (currently whittled down to just Fastmail, iCloud, Gmail and University, though I used to have rather more), and once all of these are set up on all of my many devices, in general they’re pretty good about sending the right message through the right service. But it’s a little untidy, and I end up with a lot of mail folders even if most of them are empty. And when I want to set up a new alias, I need to make sure it sends from the right place on every one of my devices…
This week, though, I hit one more issue.
There’s a service I’ve been using even longer than Fastmail, and that’s Pobox. This is one of those email-address-for-life services, and ‘quentin @ pobox.com’ has been the email address I’ve given out to people since roughly the turn of the millennium, ever since I realised how important it was to have an email address that would outlive any particular employer or ISP, but before it was easy to do so using your own domain (which is, of course, the best option now). There’s also a great deal to be said for having an address that is easy to dictate to people: they’re always grateful not to have to copy down something like my.long.surname4356@hotmail.co.uk, as I am whenever I have to type or write it down myself! (Even with my nice pobox address, I have keyboard shortcuts on all of my devices so that ‘qpo’ automatically expands to my email address. Highly recommended, if you don’t do something similar already.)
Anyway, Pobox now offers various services, but the basic one I’ve been using for 23 years simply forwards my mail to wherever I ask them, after having filtered out the most obvious spam. I don’t actually store any email there, and I don’t have an IMAP account with them.
And this is where I was starting to come unstuck, because I do now need to send email using their SMTP service, whenever I want it to appear to come from pobox.com, but my normal favourite Mac email app, for example, though amazingly powerful in other ways, only really understands the concept of email servers which have both incoming and outgoing services. Perhaps understandably, it, like many other apps, doesn’t cater for a complete email server that’s only used for sending, can’t receive, and for which any incoming emails appear in another account! Not yet, anyway!
All of which is a long explanation about why I’ve been using the Fastmail web interface again, because Fastmail does allow you to select a different SMTP/Outlook/Gmail/whatever server for sending depending on your outgoing From address. And it does allow you to retrieve email from multiple accounts without having to set them up on each of your devices. And it offers a range of features that should satisfy the requirements of most power users, all without having to sell your soul to, say, Google, or use nasty proprietary systems like Outlook/Exchange. Yet your email is still completely accessible using standards-compliant IMAP etc when you want it. And my Pobox emails do get sent using Pobox. And my university mails get sent using Exchange without me having to touch Exchange for anything else. Perfect.
But what about the fact that I prefer to use native apps instead of web sites for this kind of thing?
Well, there are official Fastmail apps for iOS and Android which work pretty well, and on the Mac I’ve been rather pleased to discover FMail2: a thin wrapper around the web interface but implemented as a local app, meaning it can be your default mail program, handle `mailto:` URLs, see an icon in the menu bar, etc.
All of which helps ensure that if I send you an email from my favourite email address, you’re less likely to have it filtered out as spam.
Lucky you.
I’ve been doing an experiment which I fear will end up costing me money. And this is in response to the observation that so much of the online world we see is filtered through Google. I have nothing against Google, but this means that the starting point for most online exploration is filtered through Google’s business model.
Suppose I viewed the world through somebody else’s business model instead?
Building a search engine is hard. Building one that can come close to competing with Google is really hard.
For a while, on some of my machines, I’ve been using the popular DuckDuckGo, and it’s been pretty good. (The only way to try these things properly, I think, is to set them as your default search engine and then see how often you find them falling short.) The name was a mystery to me, never having heard of the children’s game ‘Duck, duck, goose’ before, but the business model and the appeal is simple: they do run ads, but not as many; they do much less tracking, the ads aren’t targeted, and they help block other companies from tracking you as well. It has many devotees.
But this weekend, I came across something better: Kagi. No ads. No tracking. Nice and fast. Elegant layout, and lots of customisation options. And, having used it as the default on my desktop, laptop and iPad for a few days, very good results! But of course, there’s no such thing as a free search, so the catch here is that you have to pay. For most people, the $5/month plan, which gets you 300 searches per month, will be sufficient, but there are lots of variations. I think the Duo family plan, which gives two people unlimited searches for (effectively) £10/month, sounds appealing.
So, would I pay £120/year (or £42/year, for the individual basic plan purchased annually) for something which I could get for free? Well, their free trial, which got me 100 free searches, has made me think that I probably would. Search is such a key part of day-to-day life, that this seems a modest premium to get a better version where you don’t have to start by scrolling past the sponsored links.
Here’s a short video showing a few of the extra bits you get for your money:
Definitely tempted.
I’ve written before (e.g. in May) about the importance of the Internet Archive, which I was fortunate enough to visit in its early days. It’s a hugely valuable resource for many reasons, not least in giving some protection against link rot through its ‘Wayback Machine‘.
What I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know until recently, or had forgotten, is that there is also a UK Web Archive at webarchive.org.uk . It’s a very nicely-done collaborative project of the UK Legal Deposit Libraries, and performs a similar task for UK-based websites.
It’s been going for 10 years now, which is a good span but not nearly as long as the Internet Archive, so if, say, you were feeling gloomy about the situation in the UK and needed to be cheered up, you could go and look at the old News of The World site and be grateful that it ceased to exist 12 years ago. For that, though, you would need to go to the Internet Archive.
The UKWA is a great initiative,and worth supporting. If you have a UK-based site which isn’t already indexed, let them know. It’s another good way to try and ensure it outlives you, and they try to update their copy at least annually.
And if you want to know more about the UK’s Legal Deposit Libraries which are behind the project, Tom Scott (of course) has a nice new video.
Oops. At the start of the holiday weekend, I managed to cut the optical fibre providing our internet connection. I realise that it’s one of our most important cables, one of the thinnest and most vulnerable, and pretty much the only one we have that I’m incapable of repairing myself!
In case you’re wondering, the hedge wasn’t there when the fibre was installed, and had since grown up to cover it. I would have been alright if it weren’t for the fact that optical fibres can’t be bent around tight corners, and so had to bulge away from the wall before going through it…
A day that shall live on in infamy. Though not as much infamy as it might have had in the absence of phone-based backup connections.
I’ve been contemplating how to achieve immortality. I’m sure you often do the same thing over breakfast on a sunny morning.
It has often occurred to me that, since so much of my output is in digital form, it may vanish without a trace once I’m gone, since nobody will be paying the hosting fees. Had I written more things that had made it into print, they might at least have lingered in the dark recesses of a library somewhere for a rather longer period. Perhaps even gather dust on one or two people’s bookshelves. Probably nobody would ever read them, but it would be comforting to know that they were there!
In reality, of course, digital data should last a lot longer, as long as it’s maintained. If I were really wealthy and cared enough about this vanity project, I would leave behind an invested sum big enough to pay for web hosting in perpetuity plus one day per year of an IT consultant’s time to update the formats, check the backups, etc.
Fortunately, though, I have some hope that my 20+ years of blog posts won’t just vanish into the ether when Rose forgets to pay the web hosting bill after I’m gone, partly because there are periodic snapshots on the wonderful Internet Archive. (Here’s what Status-Q looked like in early 2001.)
Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Archive, was good enough back in 2005 to give me a tour of their headquarters, which was then located in the Presidio of San Francisco. Brewster’s an inspiring guy doing important work, and a much better use for my hypothetical legacy would be to leave it to them. I wonder if they would guarantee, in exchange, to keep my memory alive, in much the same way that donors to religious organisations used to get prayers said in perpetuity for their departed souls….
But then I started wondering about the next stage.
If you were to train an AI system on all of my blog posts, YouTube videos, academic papers, podcast & media interviews, etc… how convincingly could you get it to respond to questions in the way that I would have done? Perhaps a deepfake video character could even give future interviews on my behalf? I can’t quite decide whether that’s exciting, or thoroughly creepy.
But I tell you what… I do think it’s inevitable.
Perhaps not for me: I imagine that when I’m gone a few friends will shed a quiet tear and everyone else will breathe a huge sigh of relief and switch the servers off. But for others; those more prolific, more wise, more entertaining, I think this is bound to happen. You will be able to ask questions of Mother Theresa, or Christopher Hitchens, or the Dalai Lama, or Warren Buffet. You’ll be able to get Handel to compose your wedding march, and Peter Ustinov to speak at the reception afterwards. And for a bit of spiritual advice, you could always ask God. Or a ChatGPT engine trained exclusively on his revelations to mankind from whichever source you prefer them.
Today’s systems would, of course, do a very fallible job, but what will the AI systems be like in 100 years’ time? That will only help you, of course, if they still have access to your data, in non-proprietary, open, standard formats. In the past, if you had sufficient wealth, you might have chosen to spend it on Cryonics. I can’t help feeling that to achieve immortality now, a better bet would be to spend it on good, globally-accessible backups of your data.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments