I accidentally said “hey Shirley” instead of “hey Siri” to my phone this morning and now it is stuck in airplane mode.
The AirPods Pro 2 noise canceling is amazing. Not amazing just for earbuds, amazing even against over ear headphones.
So this is pretty neato. One of my partners at work also has Disney as a client, and has worked with the Walt Disney archives to create a VR version of Walt’s office. It was really well done.
(the exhibit had furniture that was the recreations from Saving Mr Banks)
Looks like Capital One has brought back a Freebird style service if you book through their online travel portal!
I’m being told that due to a problem at Southwest Airlines, 2023 will be delayed to no sooner than late next week.
Here is a picture of Kermit sitting in my IKEA chair.
Have a nice evening.
My travel gear problem is bad enough that it knows about my tech problem 😂
I’ve seen this feature work exactly once, and oddly enough, it doesn’t even seem to work with orders from Apple themselves. Seems like it would be more useful if widely adopted.
Remember when Hershey opened a carousel themed food & drink establishment a couple of years ago?
1) The new Disney 100 intro is really cool 2) Strange World is also really good
Among the Information’s 2023 predictions…Kevin Mayer will return to Disney.
(warning, paywall) www.theinformation.com/articles/…
🐻 🎄
RIVERBOTTOM NIGHTMARE BAND
Looks like Castaway or Aulani are our best bets.
If you use LastPass, unfortunately this is almost as bad as it can get. You should change your passwords stored inside of your vault ASAP.
A password manager is still important to stay safe online, so take a look at 1Password, Bitwarden, or Dashlane as alternatives.
Well, guess I can cross doing that upgrade off my winter break to-do list
Some thoughts on new social media platforms
It wasn’t all that long ago that you could only send and receive text messages from people on the same mobile carrier as you. Even worse, if you wanted to change carriers, say from AT&T to Verizon, you’d need to get a new phone and a new phone number!
Thankfully, technology, regulations, and consumer behavior has changed that and now you can communicate freely to basically anyone with a phone number, and if you don’t like your phone carrier, you can change (relatively) easily.
What does this have to do with social media? Well, today, if you sign up for a service, you can’t easily move to another one, and you certainly can’t communicate between them. There are no comments that flow from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to anything else - each is an individual island controlled most likely by a corporation.
For all its warts and rough edges, this is why I like Mastodon. Mastodon is built on a number of standards, including one called ActivityPub. So what?
First, within Mastodon, you can pick and move between any server you’d like and take your followers with you. So if you sign up on the server I run, worldkey.io, but later decide you don’t agree with the way I run the server, no problem. You can easily create an account on any other server and move all of your followers to that server. Your followers and presence belong to you, not the server operator.
But the real exciting part here isn’t just moving between servers. It is that entire services can talk to one another. Mastodon is having its “moment” right now, but there are other services that already use ActivityPub. Pixelfed is one such service. It is similar to Instagram. Because it supports ActivityPub, anyone on Mastodon can follow me on Pixelfed, like posts, comment on photos from Mastodon, and they show up on Pixelfed! There is another network called Peertube, which as it sounds, is similar to YouTube. Post a video there, and you can boost (retweet) it to all of your Mastodon followers to see and get comments and likes. Other existing social networks, like Tumblr, have announced they are working on ActivityPub support. Micro.blog is an existing blogging service that supports it. All of these can “see” each other, eliminating the need to have multiple accounts and reducing lock-in to a specific service.
It’s exciting to see other networks like Hive and Post get attention too. But why aren’t they supporting ActivityPub right out of the gate? Why would I want to post my content there if it will then be forever locked into their platform and I can’t easily leave due to any followers I build up? How are they going to make money - and what if I don’t agree with that plan?
A lot of this admittedly gets pretty technical, and it is still early days of this technology. But should this continue to grow and evolve, the use of standards based networks could make this the last time there has to be a migration from one platform to another. Whether it was AOL, MySpace, Friendster, or now, Twitter, moving pain and lack of interoperability need to be things of the past.
Thinking about building one of these this weekend for no particular reason ✈️
Tried the new Apple Music Sing karaoke feature and midway through “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, Siri pops in and says “don’t quit your day job” 🤣