It's time to be less plugged in

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Thinking about minimalism and digital stuff

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I’m not sure I share the optimism from this piece about a resurgence of old school web sensibilities. I will say that the new Hey email service looks absolutely amazing. Seriously, go take the tour and check out the features. As you all know I 100% support paying for …

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Like everybody else, the pandemic is "top of mind" 24 x 7 for me. I'm writing to help myself not internalize all of it. You can find other posts in the series at https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/tag/coronavirus.html

I don't have Google analytics or any tracking codes on …

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Like everybody else, the pandemic is "top of mind" 24 x 7 for me. I'm writing to help myself not internalize all of it. You can find other posts in the series at https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/tag/coronavirus.html

This is a really great point

Nowadays especially it's nice …

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Earlier this week a long time Internet friend posted that she had found her old Hypermart site. Hypermart was "Geocities for businesses." I knew the three founders from my first Internet job. They started the site with one server and in less than a year (IIRC) they had sold it …

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Book Review: How to Do nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

I get the feeling that her publisher titled the book, as “How to do nothing” is not a descriptive title. I was expecting a how-to book more along the lines of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. Instead …

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It's not paranoia if they really are watching you.

Yesterday I bought this plumbing part at Lowe's. I did not search for it online, watch a YouTube video or in any way disclose online that I had a need related to plumbing repair. It's a $7 part and I knew …

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In my 12 years on Twitter I've gone viral twice. The first time was 2015 and it was a stupid Dilbert cartoon. At least this time I added a line of my own commentary to a retweet. My tweets self-destruct after 14 days so this is mostly just to save …

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Less Internet = Better Honeymoons?

It’s not often I write a blog post and the world validates my opinion so quickly the next post is on the same subject. But here we are. This NYT article is nuts. It’s about some couples who feel like they ruined their honeymoons …

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I read an article over the weekend about how the overwhelming number of choices you get when using Amazon and other sites is causing people to turn away from those sites. I just spent 15 minutes trying to find that article again and I can’t. So maybe I dreamed …

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I don't produce content. Nobody cares about content.

• I write stories.

• I share photos.

• I rant

• I make a point

• I try to be funny

• And yeah, occasionally I even troll.

So please don't invite me to consume, share, or otherwise interact with your content. I don't care about content …

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Brands are imaginary constructs. Proctor and Gamble has 32 laundry detergents that have mostly the same chemicals in them. Branding is how they convince you to pay more for Tide. Branding is why you pay $3 for a coffee at Starbucks when the $1 coffee at Wawa is actually better …

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This interview with Cal Newport about his new book Digital Minimalism is really interesting. I really want to believe we are at a tipping point where people start to push back against the encroachment of digital technology in our lives.

He makes an interesting analogy between the tech world and …

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Inspired by this post from Jason Kenny, whose old site is on the blogroll, I pulled my old blogroll from a 2005 version of the blog and pasted it below. I have no idea how many of the links still work. I definitely see a handful that I still visit …

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I've got a little over 1000 LinkedIn contacts. A lot of people would claim I have a network. A lot of people would wrong. The vast majority of the contacts are random people I chatted with once for 5 minutes at a conference, and have never spoken to again. Or …

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Effective with Firefox 64, which is the current version as of December 28, 2018, the Firefox browser no longer supports RSS feed discovery or preview. Chrome killed that functionality a while ago. Less than .1% of users used the RSS functionality of Firefox so I guess I can't really blame …

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A friend was discussing this story about the impact of dating apps yesterday. He was wondering if dating app algorithms may actually be more important to the future of civilization than anything Twitter or Facebook is doing to us. It's an interesting thought and one worthy of more consideration.

(Note …

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A series of blog posts from Jason Baker on opensource.com has motivated me to try to do more on the command line. I'm already keeping a journal using Nano and just saving the updated text file every few days. I'm not trying to work out any serious issues with …

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I let my Amazon Prime membership expire in late November. I honestly expected to miss it. I haven't. It turns out some of the regular health and beauty type stuff we had on auto ship with Prime is actually cheaper from Walmart.com. I managed to complete my Christmas shopping …

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