Micro.Blog

There are 176 posts filed in Micro.Blog (this is page 14 of 18).

Getting my HP printer to print black again

I recently bought some 902XL black ink cartridges for our HP Officejet Pro 6978 printer. After putting a new one in, the printer would not print in black – all colors worked fine. I ran the “Clean Printhead” and “Align Printhead” commands, no luck. I checked to see that the “vent” on the top of the black cartridge was uncovered (it was). I then starting doing general searching on HP forums and YouTube. I found a video that talked about using wet paper towels to clean up dried/excess ink on the bottom of the print carriage. I did that, then ran the “Clean Printhead” command twice, and was FINALLY able to get black ink text on the test page – whew!

Open letter to Dave Winer’s call to develop feed-based social media apps

On December 3, Dave Winer published a “call to develop” for a feed-based social media app (he mentioned Mastodon in his post, but could be any social media app out there in my opinion). Sounds great to me! I have a feed-based app using rssCloud for notification called MyStatusTool (link to Github repo and my install). It is implemented using Node.js, Express, and Embedded Javascript for templating. It inspired Colin Walker to develop a PHP implementation of the tool (Github repo, his install). We were able to use our tools to interop with each other (have a real-time conversation), and to follow other feeds using rssCloud for notification. I have tested my implementation with the rssCloud user feeds from FeedLand and WordPress.com in addition to Colin Walker’s MyStatusTool implementation, and verified the real-time performance (new posts showed up almost immediately).

Now, is MyStatusTool a fully-developed thing? Nope! It’s a bootstrap. It does use a number of Node packages developed by Dave Winer for feed generation and feed reading, and uses Andrew Shell’s rssCloud server for notification, so I think it falls into the “working together” category that Dave Winer wrote about in 2015: “When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else’s work, use it.”

I am ready to work for interop with whatever Dave develops. I don’t have any illusion that MyStatusTool is the epiphany of feed-based social media tools, but I developed it to see if one could be developed, and it spawned another implementation, so I think that is pretty cool. Let’s get busy and see what happens!

Was able to get the text of a previous post into the MyStatusTool editor window, but had tags appear in the post. Did some experimenting, then I could not decode the HTML entities – frustrating!

Dave Winer is musing about a lightweight social network. As Colin Walker and I have mentioned, I think that MyStatusTool would be a great fit (rssCloud for notification, can be used for small groups)! Dave has blocked me in most forums – can someone tell him about it?

Made a change to MyStatusTool to read the user posts in the Admin interface instead of the full set of user and subscribe posts. Next will be to use the edit button to copy the individual post text to the editor window….

The end of podcasting, chapter 60

Well, my faithful readers, it’s time for the next chapter of my ongoing documentary of the end of podcasting (it’s been over a year since I last addressed this topic!). I listened to a podcast on podcasting recently (saw it on Dave Winer’s linkblog), and suddenly felt myself turning into Keith Olbermann….no….stop…stop!….

Recently, I finished listening to an episode of the On The Media podcast, which had two stories about podcasting. The first story was something of an origin story, and was glad that Dave Winer and Adam Curry got a mention. It was interesting that Kevin Marks was a featured interviewee, as a person who created a script to copy podcasts to iPods back in the early 2000s. I have not thought of Kevin as someone who was a primary or secondary player in the development of podcasting, so it was curious how he made it into this segment. The show focused on the impact Apple has had on podcasting, with the main feature being that Apple maintains a directory of podcasts based on submissions from podcast producers. This is it? This is how Apple controls podcasting? The producers left out how there is another podcast directory maintained by Adam Curry and his group PodcastIndex.org. The producers also seemed to forget that there are some little things called…wait for it… search engines…I think one of them is called Google…The second story was about the business of podcasting, reviewing the ups and downs of the “podcasting industry” since 2014, and the cost of producing “prestige podcasts” (I had never heard that before!) or long-form journalism podcasts as opposed to “talk show” podcasts or other interview podcasts requiring much less resources to produce. I am sorry to have to bring this up – but – WHO CARES? Do people write stories about production company problems for television networks or streaming services? Do people get upset that Disney+ has not made a profit? Why do people think that the podcasting industry is a “darling” that should be mourned over or lamented about economic downturns? Get a life, people! If an organization is spending more money than it brings in income, they either figure out ways to increase revenue or cut expenses, or say goodbye! The technical term, I believe is called “business”. Whether it is a publicly funded organization (NPR, WNYC) or commercial companies (Spotify, Gimlet Media, iHeart), the business aspects are the same. Let’s get out there and compete people! Come on!

Keith Olbermann taking over this post…

Whew…what happened? Hmm, looks like someone named Keith left me a podcast….wonder what it sounds like?