Thank Dewayne Hendricks for Wi-Fi. Hell, thank him for what Bob Frankston calls ambient connectivity: the kind you just … assume. Like you are now, connected to the Internet without wires. That item was my biggest take-away from the 3+ hour memorial zoom we had yesterday for Dewa … | Continue reading
Rush Limbaugh started it. Dozens of wannabes filled the rest of talk radio with it. Fox News took it to cable. And now Rushians rule the News Commentary roost on Apple Podcasts, and score well overall. It’s not much different on Spotify: As Michael Tomasky puts it in The New Repu … | Continue reading
If you’re tired of moaning (or celebrating) the after-effects of the U.S. election, or how all of us seem trapped inside the captive markets of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and other feudal powers, take in a talk about something constructive that’s nowhere near any o … | Continue reading
In a vote for “Senior Superlatives” among his 36 classmates at Concordia Prep, Paul Marshall won in several categories. The yearbook staff, however, limited the Superlative distinction to one per student, and Paul chose to be recognized for his wit, which was boundless. He was al … | Continue reading
It used to be When. But that was yesterday: election day in the U.S. In California, where I voted (by mail), it’s still 10:30 PM., and the Blue folk are especially blue, because the whole thing is over. Trump hasn’t won yet, but he will. I correctly predicted a Trump win in 2016, … | Continue reading
While I am extremely pleased and grateful that 26 years of writing on Linux Journal survive online without being 404’d, I also realize that this condition probably won’t last forever. Also, some pieces are now missing their images and other graces. This is one of them. It is also … | Continue reading
“Agentic” is hot: As an adjective, it is typically used as a modifier for AI: Not surprisingly, Gartner puts it atop its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025: Here is one explanation, among many: Theme No. 1: AI imperatives and risks drive organizations to protect themselv … | Continue reading
I shot the comet this time with a real camera: my Sony a7iv with a FE 70-200 mm F2.8 GM OSS II lens set at f3.5 at 135mm for 10 seconds on a shitty tripod I got at a thrift shop for $5. (I have good ones elsewhere.) This was at 8:40pm, just as the […] | Continue reading
Tonight was the first completely clear sky in a while, almost perfect for hunting Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, which for a few more nights will be gracing our evening sky. With a full moon high in the eastern sky, and plenty of light pollution from the town around me, the comet is ha … | Continue reading
This is from an email thread on the topic of digital identity, which is the twice-yearly subject* of the Internet Identity Workshop, the most leveraged conference I know. It begins with a distinction that Devon Loffreto (who is in the thread) came up with many moons ago: Self-sov … | Continue reading
I need to install gear in these two structured wiring cabinets in the garage of the new house we are finishing. I don’t know exactly what to put in them and seek advice. The installed cables are: Blue CAT-6a Ethernet cables go to outlets (RJ-45 jacks) in four rooms. Internet will … | Continue reading
Holding the mic in this shot, taken with my new iPhone 16 Pro Max, is Mitch Teplitsky, a documentary filmmaker based in Bloomington, Indiana. Mitch has been reading this blog for the duration, and reached out when I showed up in town. The scene is the Pitchdox award event yesterd … | Continue reading
I got an iPhone 16 Pro twelve days ago. I have two more days to swap it for an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which will cost me $100 above the mint I already paid for the Pro with 1 TB of storage. Why so much storage? I want to maximize storage because this thing is […] | Continue reading
Fifteenth in the News Commons series. This semester’s Beyond the Web salon series for the Ostrom Workshop and Hamilton Lugar School at Indiana University is themed Think Globally, Eat Here—Small Solutions for Big Tech Problems. I will give the opening talk, about the News Commons … | Continue reading
Write once, publish everywhere Dave turned me on to Croissant today. Looks good. I’d even be willing to pay the monthly fee to post once across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Xitter. But it appears to be only for iOS mobile devices. I have some of those (including a new iPhone 1 … | Continue reading
Would a blog be a blog if it went behind a paywall, or if you needed a subscription to read it? Of course not. Blogs are on the open Web, and tend to stay there so long as they don’t move away from their original location. Same should go for podcasts. “Wherever you get your […] | Continue reading
Helene was Western North Carolina‘s Katrina—especially for the counties surrounding Asheville: Buncombe, Mitchell, Henderson, McDowell, Rutherford, Haywood, Yancey, Burke, and some adjacent ones in North Carolina and Tennessee. As with Katrina, the issue wasn’t wind. It was flood … | Continue reading
A watershed* is land that drains through a river to the sea or into an inland body of water. That’s what came to mind for me when I read this from Dave Winer: If you want to help the open web, when you write something you’re proud of on a social web site like Bluesky […] | Continue reading
Fourteenth in the News Commons series. The main work of journalism is producing stories. Questions following that statement might begin with prepositions: on what, of what, about what. But the preposition that matters most is with what. Ideally, that would be with facts. Of cours … | Continue reading
Now that AI is a huge thing, it’s worth visiting what intelligence is, and how we mismeasure it—for example, by trying to measure it at all. I’ve been on this case for a while now, mostly by answering questions ab0ut IQ on Quora. My answer with the most upvotes is this one, to th … | Continue reading
In the late ’70s, I worked for a while at the Psychical Research Foundation, which then occupied a couple of houses on Duke University property and did scientific research into the possibility of life after death. My time there was a lever that has lifted my life on Earth ever si … | Continue reading
Thirteenth in the News Commons series. I grabbed the spottedhawk.org domain after hearing Garrison Keilor read this passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself over Leo Kottke improvising on guitar: The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering … | Continue reading
In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman says each of us is born with as much of a destiny, calling, mission, or fate, as an acorn has within it an oak tree. He also says “Reading life backward enables you to see how early obsessions are the sketchy preformation of behaviors now… Readin … | Continue reading
Twelfth in the News Commons series Last week at DWeb Camp, I gave a talk titled The Future, Present, and Past of News—and Why Archives Anchor It All. Here’s a frame from a phone video: DWeb Camp is a wonderful gathering, hosted by the Internet Archive at Camp Navarro in Northern … | Continue reading
So I went to the ChatGPT website to ask a question and got hit with a popover promo for the new Mac app version. So I got it. Here is the dialog that followed my first question (which is boring, so we’ll skip it), copied over from the ChatGPT website, where I went after this […] | Continue reading
I wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019, the final years as editor-in-chief. After ownership changed and the whole staff turned over. The new owner, Slashdot Media, agreed to keep the server up so nothing would be 404’d. I am grateful that they have kept that promise. I shoul … | Continue reading
Eleventh in the News Commons series. all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Ulysses News flows. It starts with what’s coming up, goes through what’s happening, and ends up … | Continue reading
—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. You need one for every website that provides a service, plus your Mac or Windows computers, your Apple or Google-based phones, your home and mobile ISPs. Sure, … | Continue reading
It was a derecho, or something like one. The gust front you see in the third image here looks a lot like the storm front in the image above (via Weatherbug, storm tracker view). I’d experienced one twelve years ago, in Arlington, Mass. It felt like a two minute hurricane, and whe … | Continue reading
I don’t think it does. Not for everything. We already have personal AI for autocomplete. Do we need Big Compute for a personal AI to tell us which pieces within our Amazon orders are in which line items in our Visa statements? (Different items in a shipment often appear inside di … | Continue reading
Nobody’s talking about this, so I will: Jayson Tatum is playing a decoy. More to the point, he is playing Jokić, Dončić, or a bit of both. Not all the time (such as when he’s doing one of those step-back threes with lots of time on the clock, but enough). So let’s call him Jayson … | Continue reading
My father, Allen H. Searls, was an archivist. Not a formal one, but good in the vernacular, at least when it came to one of the most consequential things he did in his life: helping build the George Washington Bridge. He did this by photographing his work and fellow workers. He s … | Continue reading
Here is me, trying to get ChatGPT (version 4o, which I pay for) to give me an illustration to use in my last post here, titled The People’s AI. But don’t go there yet (if you haven’t already). What I ended up using there is a punchline at the end of the dialog that starts […] | Continue reading
People need their own AIs. Personally and collectively. We won’t get them from Anthropic, Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft. Not even from Apple. All of those companies will want to provide AIaaS: AI as a Service, rather than AI that’s yours alone. Or ours, collectively. The Peop … | Continue reading
Newsletters are all the rage now. In recognition of that, I blogged here two years ago about the idea of writing a solo newsletter. Since then I’ve been co-producing this one with Katherine Druckman at Reality 2.o. It’s a Substack one, so I know how that game works on the product … | Continue reading
There is a war going on. Humanity and nature are on one side and Big Tech is on the other. The two sides are not opposed. They are orthogonal. The human side is horizontal and the Big Tech side is vertical.* The human side is personal, social, self-governed, heterarchical, open, … | Continue reading
Among all artists, writers alone suffer the illusion that the world needs to hear what they have to say. I thought that line, or something like it, came from Rollo May, probably in The Courage to Create. But a search within that book says no. ChatGPT and Gemini both tell me May d … | Continue reading
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this: The directory idea made sense, because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a … | Continue reading
Doc Searls: A dark review for United’s Boeing 787. | Continue reading
The Santa Barbara News-Press was born in 1868 and died in 2023 at age 155. Its glory years ran from 1932 until 2000, when the New York Times sold it to Wendy McCaw, who rode it to hell. That ride began with the Santa Barbara News Press Controversy in 2006 and ended when Ampersand … | Continue reading
Journalism as we knew it is washing away. But the story is bigger than journalism alone, and bigger than a story alone can tell. (Image borrowed from the brilliant Despair.com.) We who care about journalism are asked to join the Save Journalism Project, and its fight against Big … | Continue reading
Contrails form behind jet aircraft flying through the stratosphere. Since high-altitude aviation is happening all around the earth more or less constantly, planes are painting the sky everywhere. (Here is one time-lapse.) Many contrails don’t last, of course, but many do, and tog … | Continue reading
Artificial is AI’s frst name. And Intelligence is a quality, not a quantity. You can’t measure it with a dipstick, a ruler, or an IQ test. If you could, you’d get the same result every time.* But being artificial doesn’t mean AI isn’t dangerous, fun or both. It is, and will be, w … | Continue reading
I think I will be the last person in Bloomington to try getting free over-the-air TV from what’s left of all the major networks. But that’s just my style, so roll with me while I explain how I’m hoping to do it, with the antenna above, which I’ll need because here is what the Sea … | Continue reading
Two things worth blogging about that happened this morning. One was getting down and dirty trying to make DALL-E 3 work. That turned into giving up trying to find DALL-E (in any version) on the open Web and biting the $20/month bullet for a Pro account with ChatGPT, which for som … | Continue reading
When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the city: a hundred miles of rooms and corridors now called The Catacombes. It was from th … | Continue reading
I just returned to DALL-E 3 after using its Microsoft version (currently called Copilot | Designer) for a while. But I can’t get in. See how it says “Try in ChatGPT↗︎?” When I do that, it goes to https://chat.openai.com/. After I log in there, it offers no clue about where DALL-E … | Continue reading