Ever wondered what kind of trackers are on any given site? Check out Blacklight, a web-based tool to reveal specific user-tracking technologies on a site. I stumbled on this via The Markup and thought it might be interesting for privacy minded folks. (See: " How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector" from 2020.) I ran it on a few sites just to see what I got back. GNOME’s extensions website was clean....

To follow up on yesterday’s post about word processors, here’s a new entry for keyboard enthusiasts: The Cube Keyboard. It’s a keyboard that’s… a cube. I don’t think he’s going to win any typing speed contests with this one. Hat tip to Lobste.rs for this one.

This week I took a little trip down memory lane when a friend posted a meme or something about Stephen King’s Wang word processor in the 1980s. That was early for me, but sometime in 1993 or 1994 I bought my first word processor. Not a general purpose computer with a word processor, but a Brother Word Processor. It was substantially less profit-generating for me than King’s Wang. Then again, it wasn’t a five-figure investment, either. Maybe $250, certainly no more than $300. At 23 or 24, though, that was a major investment. I’ve owned cars that cost less.

Writing and editing are taught widely in schools and professional programs, but content review is a neglected and unloved (and rare) skill that I’ve never seen taught or even acknowledged – but it’s widely required in jobs throughout the tech industry. If you’re a product manager, product marketer, comms professional, content writer, developer advocate, community manager – take your pick – you probably need to participate in content review as part (or most) of your job, but do you feel confident you’re doing it well and efficiently?

Ars and The Register (and probably others) are reporting that Google and Mozilla are working on “browsers that break current App Store rules.” You know, browsers that aren’t dependent on Apple’s rendering engine. Actual full-fledged browsers. For various reasons I use iOS as the least-bad option (for me) between Android and iOS. But this is a thing that’s bugged me a long time. To be honest, I don’t really understand Apple’s reasoning here....

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, and tend to agree with him on most things, but this screed about Netflix changing its “family” settings is not one of them.

The fediverse is a grand improvement in many ways over walled gardens like Twitter, but there’s plenty of room to improve. For example, federation does little good for users on a site that unexpectedly shuts down without time for users to migrate.

Art museums are a holy place for me, like good book stores and record stores. Little bubbles where we curate our attempts to communicate, to make others feel something. Or, simply, to create. Art museums are where yesterday and today meet, and the dead tongues and hands of our past selves live again for a moment. Stand here, look. Gaze into someone else’s heart and mind for a time. If humans have a purpose, surely art is a crucial part of it....

While startups are busy trying to put (more) people out of work writing or doing artwork, how about turning some attention towards the DMV?

I’m probably late to the party, but Distrobox has to be one of the best open source projects to drop in the past few years.