Michiel Scholten @diginaut@mastodon.social

"People who bemoan the lack of secret passages in modern homes and offices," a voice behind me said, "never think about the meaning of the word 'secret'."
The wall behind me is solid. At least, I was sure it is solid.
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

Somebody told me about linux today so I’m burning an install disk.

Not sure how this is supposed to work but it sure is pretty 😍

I fucking love O'Neill Cylinders

A spaceship landed, and an alien emerged. It hammered down a post, and mounted a sign: "Robot reservation, no organics allowed."
On Earth, NASA's controllers watched the video feed from the Curiosity rover in disbelief.
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

He looked out of the window on New Year's Day and saw flying cars. He summoned his digital assistant.
"What future is this?"
"It is 2019."
"Doesn't narrow it down much."
"It is a future that can be changed."
"For the better?"
"For the better."
"Right, let's do that."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

kill -9 2018

Cleaning up a customer's PC, I made the mistake of leaving a tab open on Yahoo's home page. Only 1 minute later: malvertized. Sunuva...

I did it again to pin down the cause, & indeed it's Yahoo's ads breaking out, taking over the page, & loading scary messages that make it difficult to leave.

I can't stress enough, folks, that an ad blocker is Internet SECURITY software.

"What is it like to be human?" the visiting alien asked.
"What is it like to be an alien?"
"Bewildering, feeling you don't fit in."
"Same."
"But interesting, and there are times you do fit in."
"Yeah."
"So... It's like being people?"
"It's like being people."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

Gotta get around to writing a blog post about how companies built around surveillance capitalism can and should feel the cost of their data collection practices.

I've spent the last year basically trying to build the same thing as https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history-update-privacy-targeting-data-collection but for download and not deletion, built on the same (FB built) technologies, and boy HOWDY is it tough. It lets me derive a cost per user-year of data collected & even for a company not in data capitalism it's ... not cheap.

I think this also comes up when trying to explain Mastodon or the fediverse to a wider audience. They just have no frame of reference for this kind of stuff. "Where's the app in the App Store?" "Why do I have to choose an instance?" "What the heck's an instance?"

It's just expected that Mastodon is a startup in California somewhere, and it's got millions of dollars of VC money and bus ads saying "get it on the App Store, get it on Google Play." How could things possibly be anyway else?