Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Category: Internet (Page 2 of 39)

Sedecordle is the best -rdle

You’ve been playing Wordle the past few months, haven’t you? Who hasn’t? It’s a great little game, a couple of minutes of diversion, deep thought and great satisfaction. I play it almost every day.

To everyone’s delight, Wordle quickly spawned knock-offs, all in the open-source, free-to-play spirit of the original. I play a bunch of them. There are all sorts of variants, from words to maps to songs to movie stills. They all have their charms, and the internet is a little more fun as a result.

As someone who likes word puzzles, I’ve spent most of my -rdle gaming time on the letter games, espeically the spin-offs. Wordle begat Dordle, which is two wordles solved simultaneously; that led to Quordle, and the multiplying went from there: eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four. Many of them even use the same codebase.

You can play them in order, which is fun, or you can just hit the best ones: Wordle, the original, and Sedecordle.

Wordle is a brain teaser, great for all the well-documented reasons. Sedecordle is a puzzle: 16 words, 22 total guesses, each attempt painting in different parts of each grid. It is part word search, part crossword and part jigsaw puzzle, requiring dexterity and clever construction to find every word in time. It takes a few more minutes than Wordle, but like any good word game, the satisfaction that comes from completing it is great.

Sedecordle is inherently solvable, but not easy. I try to crack it in as few as 18 rounds, but I still lose outright maybe once a week. A word with multiple uncommon options (PATCH, MATCH, WATCH) can quickly undermine the day.

The others? All worthy, just not as satisfying. Dordle is a great little trifle, as is Quordle (although their word choices are much more esoteric). The 32- and 64-word options are noble but more of an endurance exercise than a game; they use every single letter, and with patience it’s just a matter of filling in words. Octordle alludes to the promises of Sedecordle, but the eight word grid is not as compelling as sixteen.

So: sedecordle. Enjoy.

Ring ring ring (ha ha hey)

Basic services are often compromised when living on an island. Living on, say, Nantucket, one probably gets used to losing power or phone service every now and again when the weather gets in the way.

That’s not supposed to happen when the island is Manhattan. So when our phone line went down for two full weeks, without notice or apology from our provider, we decided to switch our service.

This is kind of a big deal in my household. We possess a 212 phone number that we don’t want to lose, so doing a successful number port between service providers is critical. And more notably, until our switch, we still had a phone line served on copper.

I have long espoused maintaining an old fashioned land line. It doesn’t use electricity! In a blackout or an emergency, we can still make calls! (And, yes, tradition.) Heck, even during the signup for VOIP you have to acknowledge that your phone may not work in all circumstances—not true for copper.

And yet, pretty much everyone we call has a cable triple play now, and heck, maybe the police department does, too, not to mention the people and places that dropped their centralized phones entirely, in favor of their cell phones (of which we now have—gah—four. Although the children live on text and video chat, and barely need a number at all, but that’s another blog post).

So we accept the march of progress, and the roughly $700 a year in savings, and we move not-so-boldly into the future. I called Spectrum (with whom I have cable TV and internet service, through a bulk rate building package) and added our phone to it. There was lots of waiting for my rep to cheerfully set me up, then lots of saying “yes” to an automated verification system, then more waiting while Verizon and Spectrum did their number portability dance, and without fanfare, the phone would begin working through the cable modem instead of the copper line.

That led to an additional six weeks of limbo, as Spectrum needed Verizon’s signoff, and Verizon was unsure about our personal signoff, so nothing happened. Secondary prods didn’t help on either side, until we got billed by Spectrum for a month of nonexistent phone service, which prompted an impatient call from me, demanding a refund. That miraculously unclogged the pipes, and two days later, our phone number switched services.

Credit where it’s due, literally: Verizon was helpful after the switch, voiding our last month’s bill, and even sending a $2.93 debit card for a slight overpayment relative to the transition date. Spectrum fixed its extra bill, too.

And now? Our phone seems exactly the same as before, with the added perks of on-screen Caller ID if we’re watching cable TV when the phone rings, and a special ring sequence if the call is from our building lobby. These are not innovations, but they’re new to us, and still amusing. Otherwise, it’s the same old same old.

Until the power goes out, at least.

Looking back

Last month, the Ideapad turned 20. Twenty years is a long time to do anything, as many of my fellow early bloggers can attest. Those who have kept at it since the turn of the century have my appreciation, not only as like-minded fellows, but also for maintaining the independent spirit of the early web, where our dreams were self-made and limitless.

I have on my server a bookmarks list, saved out of some version Netscape or Internet Explorer, that is now fifteen years old (May 6, 2003, to be exact). It’s a nice flat HTML file so all the links in it are clickable. To celebrate two decades of blogging, I thought I’d republish the list as-is, click through to all the blogs I once had bookmarked, and report on them here. Let’s see how the independent web of 2003 has persisted to 2018! (Hint: it’s doing pretty darned well, all things considered.)

Key:
Still publishing!—has posted in the past 12 months
Maybe still publishing—live with posts, but none in 2018
In amber—not active, but defending the web from linkrot
N.B. Many of the links here are still active but don’t point to the pages they did back then. Caveat clicker.

Blogroll

37signals’ Signal vs. Noise Still publishing!
Anil Dash Still publishing!
Nick Denton
Boing Boing … Wonderful Things Still publishing!
kottke.org Still publishing!
WebWord.com
megnut In amber
Noise Between Stations Maybe still publishing!
The Morning News Still publishing!
sippey.com Maybe still publishing
Mighty Girl Still publishing!
whatever, whenever
nothing, and lots of it Still publishing!
Textism
Andre Torrez Still publishing!
b-may
Ftrain_ Main Ftrain Maybe still publishing
defective yeti
Witold Riedel NYC Still publishing! (over here)
bazima chronicles
hello, kitten.
DS.ORG
Izzle! Izzle pfaff! In amber
MrBarrett.com
Mastication is normal
petit hiboux .. the owl in winter. In amber
peterme.com Still publishing!
Choire Sicha
East West Magazine

Not Updated Daily

Cardhouse Still publishing!
50 cups of coffee _ strange brew _ never the same girl twice
metascene– There ain’t no Sanity Clause
stating the obvious In amber
maybe i still am!
Acts of Volition Still publishing!
jeans and a t-shirt In amber
What Do I Know
SHARPEWORLD
Waxy.org Still publishing!

Meta

Take a penny, leave a penny. Still–er, never mind
memepool.com
FARK.com Still active!
Blogroots
blogdex – the weblog diffusion index
Daypop Top 40 Links
What’s Happening In amber
Metafilter _ Community Weblog Still active!

More blogs

ToT Days of Self-Contemplation and Soul Searching
ODonnellWeb Still publishing (an email)
evanrose
_usr_bin_girl _ ( just a digital girl ) _ blurbs from the web
somebodydial911
Backup Brain
Scripting News Still publishing!
dangerousmeta! Made it to April 2018
365 Days Project
shellen.com Still publishing!
caterina.net Still publishing!
Q Daily News
Living Can Kill You – saila.com In amber
Jerry Kindall
David Galbraith’s weblog
Nedward von Suckahs In amber
sylloge
muxway
eatonweb blog_ vomiting up the web
The War Against Silence In amber
what is a tigerbunny
Wrap Me Up in It
misc., etc.

Internet, Design, UI blogs

SAP Design Guild In amber
bBlog_ Business intelligence _ XPLANE
Boxes and Arrows
In My Experience… Home In amber
evolt.org
XPLANE _ xblog (The visual thinking weblog.)
Joel on Software Still publishing!
ia- news for information architects
holovaty.com Still publishing!
dive into mark
Daring Fireball Still publishing!

 

XOXO 2018

The biggest thing I can say about XOXO, having attended this weekend for the first time since 2013, is that I feel pretty much exactly how I felt the last time around, and I wish I had made it to all the ones in between.

Very few events of any scale manage to be open, accepting, encouraging, inspiring, surprising, energizing and downright fun. Despite lots of comments about how big the conference has gotten—two thousand attendees this year—I felt the same warmth and community (albeit with a bigger challenge to find old friends in the throng) as I had previously.

While I had to miss the last day, I soaked up a wide array of XOXO’s programming, including all of the conference’s first day, most of Art + Code and Story, and a good amount of the tabletop and arcade rooms. I was nearly overwhelmed with the amount of creativity and inspiration that surrounded me. The talks I saw brought tears to my eyes, both happy and sad, on more than one occasion. Like last time, the net result is like experiencing a sea swell on a boat: I’ve been pulled up to unexpected heights, and I’m wide-eyed as I see where it will take me.

And while I was thrilled to spend my time with familiar faces, the natural new connections make this event special. An XOXO attendee can successfully strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone wearing a badge. So when I’m there, that’s exactly what I try to do. Grab a meal with six people I’d just met? Turn people you admire into the people you know? Say hello to every person who sits down next to me, transforming unfamiliar faces into friendly ones? Yes, yes and yes.

Life in a broader sense doesn’t always work like XOXO works. Heck, we as people don’t work every day the way we function in this setting; I know I’m not always one to smile at strangers. Yet Andy and Andy continue to bring their universe to life, and I am again grateful for having been there.

Persistence

@20, by Paul Ford.

In two weeks, the Ideapad turns 19. The website itself is somewhat older—I don’t know the date, but I believe it was sometime in 1997, after I got tired of having a tilde-level user directory and long before I realized “netwert” was cumbersome and not something I’d necessarily want in perpetuity. My first ~werty dates to late 1995 or early 1996, I think; my critical writing dates to college, offline, and Nov. 1, 1998 in this space, where it has pressed forward in various fits, starts, ebbs and flows ever since.

Lots of folks chimed in to agree with Paul on his post via social media. But because much of what he wrote about his website is applicable here (indeed, for many of us borne of this era), I thought I’d address it in the most appropriate manner possible: with a blog post of its own.

Paul: Some days I want to erase this whole thing—much of the writing is sloppy and immature, and I was, too. But why bother to hit the red button? 

I actually have the converse opinion of my own site. Much of my writing from back then is immature, probably much more than Paul’s sophisticated, philosophical approach. Every blue moon or so I meander back into my archives, read a little bit, and find it alternately joyous an excruciating. But it never occurs to me to erase it. My old notes occasionally have relevance and create delight, and for as long as that is the case, I’m happy to have them persist.

Like Paul, and so many other writer-blogger-creators of the early Internet era, I don’t get nearly as much mileage out of my personal website as I once did. But for me, at least, it’s nice to come back to the old homestead once in awhile. See you soon.

On Ghostery

With all the recent industry fuss over ad trackers, I got responsible and reinstalled Ghostery on my browser, and I activated many of its blockers. This has had several interesting effects.

One is that active tracker blocking is invasive in its own way. I’m creating hardships in my own browsing experience that privacy hard-liners don’t mention. If I block optimization schemes too aggressively, I can break essential functions once in awhile, including a site I manage at work whose navigation is mboxed for Adobe Test & Target tracking. Visiting Monoprice with Ghostery on, I discovered today, gnarls their top nav, too, and their search box disappears. And so on.

Another is the level of awareness that Ghostery creates in the end-user. I know about ad networks and trackers, of course I do, I’ve been in this industry 20 years now. But I didn’t actively think about them all that often.

Then I turned on Ghostery, and I visited copypastecharacter.com, a humble little type-geek website that allows for quick unicode character finding. And in finding my ✔, I also found 87 trackers. Eighty-seven! I no longer wonder what purpose the site serves beyond its builders’ nerdy satisfaction: it’s a robust ad engine. As are many other websites for whom users unwittingly expose their usage details.

The full list, behind the jump, for posterity’s sake.

Continue reading

Why I became a Wikipedia contributor (and why you should, too)

Wikipedia is a part of everyday life for most everyone who uses the web. I personally cross-reference or poke around Wikipedia almost every day—93 times in the past 30 days alone, per my browser history. Millions of people are similar to me, if not more so.

Having become something of an institution, Wikipedia now faces a long-term struggle for its fiscal and editorial health. Most immediate is the need for cash flow. Wikipedia’s frequent pledge drives on its website do a good job of highlighting the organization’s monetary needs (and plenty of readers, thankfully, are listening).

More easily overlooked is its slowly dwindling volunteer workforce, the thousands of people who keep Wikipedia updated and objective.

Active editors on Wikipedia, from The EconomistWikipedia is only as strong as its contributors and editors, a team that peaked several years ago. The Economist did a great deep-dive into Wikipedia’s state of affairs this spring. It pointed out that the number of English-language editors on the site has dropped steadily for nearly a decade, to 30,000 volunteers this year, down from 50,000 in its heyday. That sounds like a big staff, but with nearly two billion pages to curate, and an almost entirely unpaid team, the math quickly gets sour.

Right around the time of the Economist article, I found myself disgruntled at yet another article speaking in the present tense about 2011. So, after a decade of lurking and leeching, I signed up for a Wikipedia account. And when I see a line like, “The band is slated to appear on the first week of Jimmy Fallon’s new talk show,” my annoyance now turns to utility, as I am empowered to fix that sentence, and a tiny bit responsible, too. As a longtime writer, editor and grammar hound it’s a no-brainer for me to pitch in.

I’ve only updated a handful of articles thus far, but I am quick to hit the Edit button when I see outdated or inaccurate text, most recently this morning, updating the status of a canceled program. Making updates to Wikipedia is easy, it’s satisfying, and it ensures that the site will continue to be a useful resource.

Wikipedia, of course, has been running on this model since its inception. But too many people, like me, take the labor behind the site for granted. My own contribution ultimately will be small, but it will be a contribution nonetheless.

Please consider doing the same. Even occasional edits help keep the world’s encyclopedia appropriately encyclopedic.

It happens too fast

Internet pioneer Eric Meyer and his family suffered a heartbreaking loss this weekend as Eric’s daughter Rebecca passed away of a brain tumor on her sixth birthday.

An early blogger, Eric harnessed the power of personal publishing for his catharsis, and in the process, he brought our entire community into his heart. I invite you to read about Rebecca (starting from last August, when Eric first posted about her tumor) and follow Eric on Twitter as well.

Then hug your kids, and spoil them a little, because life is too short, and surely they deserve it.

As all tragedies can have uplifting consequences, in recent weeks my world has been tinted for the better by Eric’s experiences, which serve as a reminder of the wonderfulness of childhood and a way to keep perspective as we collectively grieve for Eric’s loss.

This morning my six-year-old and I watched another parent deliver an aggressive, top-of-her-lungs rebuke to her child for a moment of forgetfulness. When she finished, she apologized—to the other adults. “That mom is really mad,” my son said to me quietly, eyes wide. I could only sigh. Life is too precious, our children too innocent, the world too cruel.

My three-year-old is off to his first “camp” experience later this month. All the children have to wear the same shirt every day. At orientation, the camp director told us, firmly and pleasantly: “If your child doesn’t want to wear the camp shirt, seriously—don’t force it. Your time with your child is too valuable to argue over what to wear. Just bring it and we’ll put it on later.”

Your time with your child is too valuable. We could append almost anything to that sentence, couldn’t we? I think about how I may chide my kids over relatively minor issues, and then I think about Rebecca Meyer, ten days younger than my own kindergartener, and it strengthens my resolve to make their lives as full of kindness and affection as my heart can find. The things we worry about pale in comparison to the issues most of us are fortunate not to confront.

Eric, my deepest condolences go out to you once more, as well as a note of thanks, for sharing your stories and a bit of your soul.

The real effect of surge pricing

While Uber is coming under a lot of fire (including from me) on its surge pricing, Wired’s latest piece on Uber’s situation clarified a point that is worth highlighting.

Surge pricing, according to Uber, is intended to stimulate supply and curb demand to ensure the two match. Otherwise, the logic goes, would-be riders are left stranded without a car. Last month, during the height of the backlash against Uber over fares reported at seven times the usual during a New York snowstorm, Kalanick told WIRED that the bad publicity his company faced over surge pricing would pale compared to the impact of Uber not being able to offer a ride at all.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is what Uber and CEO Travis Kalanick are doing with surge pricing: they’re getting the masses to back off. Anyone who’s encountered a surge pricing screen on Uber in the past few months has done so while trying to reserve a car that’s only a few minutes away, as usual. That car is available because of surge pricing—specifically, because higher prices get fewer people to grab at finite inventory, maintaining a decent supply.

Of course, Kalanick can’t say that out loud, so he talks at length about bringing more cars on the road. Yet that’s only part of the story, and he’s been challenged on whether surge pricing really aids supply. In truth, what surge pricing really accomplishes is throttling demand.

And this makes sense: if an Uber user tried to call for a car in bad weather, and the nearest vehicle was 27 minutes away rather than 6, or not available at all, what would the response be? Customers would give up on the service for lack of reliability, and return to hailing cabs and calling car services, which are equally imperfect but entrenched in society. Uber is not, at least not yet. To the company, “Uber doesn’t work” is a worse fate than “Uber is sometimes too expensive.” So premium fares continue.

Uber has decided that supply is the most important link in its chain, and is using surge pricing to maintain it. Which, while not the most satisfying thing to Uber users, is a rather logical approach.

Update: this wonderfully in-depth look at Uber’s economic and business decisions sheds additional light on the subject.

The bottom line is that the only real alternative to dynamic pricing is a ton of customers staring at screens that read “No Cars Available.” This is the fact that is least appreciated by Uber’s critics.

Creating vs. creating

Sploid, on Thomas Julien’s Instagram short film: “Seeing all these pictures in a pseudo stop animation you realize how similar all of our photos end up being. Nothing is original. We’re all just frames in someone’s next movie.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about our collective propensity to take photos, and wondering: why? Why do we need to chronicle a moment that is being captured by another? What is the intrinsic value of a photo that someone else can (probably more capably) take on one’s own behalf? It’s one thing to grab a picture of a loved one, or a sunset on an unpopulated beach, when you’re the only person that can take that picture. But when hundreds of fellow onlookers are snapping the same photograph, unless your DSLR skills trump the crowd, is there value to your taking a shot, too?

Jillian Edelstein, on the remoteness of photography: “It’s image taking rather than image making.”

What’s more, with the interconnectedness of social media, not only are those many other photos being taken, but in a matter of moments you and I can download and share them as well, rendering the multiplicity moot. Sometimes these efforts have value; last month, when a large fire raged up the block from me, I posted photos from my vantage point, then shared others’ images from different (and largely better) angles. But certainly my experience of the moment was interrupted by my fiddling with my iPhone, which, it should be noted, occurred while I helped my two young children stand on my next door neighbor’s radiator cover for a better view.

This can’t be where our future lands. Whether ubiquitous, wearable computing simplifies the media taking-and-sharing process, or whether we slowly learn to find the right moments to engage and disengage with our devices, or whether some other paradigms arise, I strongly hope that we evolve past the current heads-down phones-up phase. Because, if not, sooner or later we’re all going to miss something.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Ideapad © 1998–2024 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.