A hand flashes the V for Victory sign

This is the personal website of Nick Simson, who writes about books, websites, and other stuff.

  • roadpeckers

    My two year old calls these birds “roadpeckers.” 😂

  • This Machine…

    In reply to Woodie Guthrie – American.

    This Woody Guthrie biography is on my books-to-acquire-and-read list…hopefully by the end of this year!

    A few years ago I read Searching for Woody Guthrie by Ron Briley, published by the university press where I used to work. That one was OK, but I’m eager to get my hands on a copy of the biography by Joe Klein.

  • Innovation cultures

    Likes What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? by Brian Potter.

    Unfortunately, the conditions that made Bell Labs so successful were highly historically contingent and not the sort of thing that could be deliberately recreated. Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most other industrial labs. Prior discoveries in quantum mechanics provided a wealth of new phenomena that Bell Labs could harvest for new technology, and WWII both pushed technology forward across the board and turned Bell Labs into an organization poised to capitalize on it. In the end, Bell Labs was ultimately undermined by the very technologies that it had created. The world that Bell Labs thrived in no longer exists: to push technological progress forward, we’ll need to understand both why Bell Labs worked and why it no longer could.

    I was glad to see The Idea Factory by John Gertner cited so much in this mini-history of Bell Labs. That book was a pretty compelling read.

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  • What was Web 2.0?

    Likes Don’t Lie To Me About Web 2.0.

    Social media wasn’t web 2.0, it’s what killed Web 2.0!

    You might think I’m arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn’t. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.

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  • IV

    The Ordinary Things have a new album out this weekend! It’s called “IV.”

    I just updated their website, but you can listen to it on Apple Music and Spotify, and hopefully the other places where you buy/stream music?

  • zuberfizz dot com

    I had a Durango Soda Co. (Zuberfizz) root beer with today’s lunch, celebrating 14 years of marriage with Eleanor (our anniversary was earlier in the week). So tasty and refreshing, exactly what you’d want during the summer.

    I linked to the Zuberfizz website, but its a bit of a mess: cookie notices, popup chat windows, two different terms and conditions links in the footer… hire me to do your website, Zuberfizz! You deserve something as good as your soda.

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  • A typeface is more than a tool

    Likes Kris Sowersby: “I don’t know what a typeface is”.

    I think [a typeface is] more than one thing. I haven’t got it totally figured out and I probably never will, which is good. I think it can be quite a few things all at once but mainly it’s a human creation, it’s a little piece of somebody’s soul, it’s functional, but it mainly acts as a material.

    It’s something that you will use to make something else. And when you use it to make something else, it’s in that product. Whereas if you use a hammer to bang in a nail as a tool, you can’t see the hammer in the final building, maybe traces of it but not the hammer itself. While the typeface becomes a part of the new thing, it’s like an ingredient in a dish.

  • job searching

    Likes Job searching in 2024 is horribly broken by nico’s blog.

    I’m trying to be gentle and helpful to all my pals who are looking for work right now. Because it is tough out there. Leave it to a network engineer to find all the security and system failures with the current job sites and hiring tools.

  • The origin of “nsmsn”

    Every web account requires you to register some kind of username, and I’ve been using “nsmsn” everywhere for more than a decade now. I registered the domain name nsmsn.co and have it currently pointed at my omg.lol profile, since that destination kind of collects almost all of my various accounts with the same handle.

    I don’t think I’ve ever documented the “why” behind my dumb 5 character username, so here we go:

    It is short. Twitter used to be constrained by a 140 character limit, which included the @ symbol for mentions, anyone’s username, plus link addresses (hence the creation of short URLs in the pre-to-early 2010s). By the time I signed up for Twitter, I’m pretty sure my initials (NES) were taken, so I went my first initial and last name, sans vowels.

    That’s it. Boring. My username has nothing to do with msn.com or MSNBC, either.

    I’ve never read this book, but its cover was probably on my mind when I registered my username:

    Faster by James Gleick. The vowels are removed from the title and author on the book cover.

    I have kind of a common sounding first and last name, but my last name is often misspelled. I don’t even know if my dumb 5 character username helps anyone remember how to spell it correctly, since it itself is kind of forgettable.

    Twitter and GitHub users mrmrs and jxnblk have cooler, more memorable names and bigger followings than I will ever enjoy. But when I first encountered their works online, I felt like maybe I was in good company or doing something right with my identity.

    I’m no longer active on Twitter (sorry, X) but I kept my username there because for better or worse it is inextricably linked to my identity. I don’t want someone to take that handle over and post God knows what with it. I go by that handle on Mastodon now, and a few other places, too.

    I like that nsmsn is short. I like that it has a meaning, even if it’s just my name but shorter. And I like that it’s a palindrome, too. But it’s not really pronounceable (I always spell it out N-S-M-S-N, and the Ns often sound like “M”) or memorable, either.

    Now, more than a decade later, nsmsn is something that is usually available on new services, and something I’m probably stuck with as long as either these accounts or I personally continue to exist.

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  • send a friend a webmention day

    Just a friendly hello to some pals from Homebrew Website Club! Joe, Sara, Tracy, James, Benji, Angelo, David, Pablo, gRegor, Jo… I’m sure there are several people I’m missing.

  • A Quote, № 1

    We work to become, not to acquire.

    Elbert Hubbard

  • adventures in attention

    Likes How To Do Nothing Course by Chris Aldrich.

    I find myself thinking about Jenny Odell’s book often. Would love to audit this course based on her work.

  • The promise of social interoperability

    I learned about Openvibe from something Andy Bell posted the other day. Openvibe promises to combine your decentralized social media accounts (Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, and pretty soon Threads plus others) into one timeline.

    Interoperability between social networks? Sign me up. So, I thought I would download the app to give it a try.

    First of all, I don’t have a Nostr account, so I can’t speak to that user experience. I was able to sign in with my personal Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, though.

    Logging in to Bluesky on the app was a bit of a hurdle for me since I use a custom domain as my username, but my actual account is on the main bsky.app (or is it bsky.social?) host. I think I finally figured it out by using my email to sign in.

    I think the UI is almost there on Openvibe. Search and Notifications work great. I do wish they integrated the Mastodon “bookmark” feature within the timeline; here its completely hidden. I bookmark as much as I like or re-post. I’m also kind of wishing they went with the system UI font instead of… is this Nunito?

    It’s still funny to me see threads.net accounts showing up under a Mastodon heading (Follow Suggestions). Maybe this will all get ironed out once Threads is integrated into the app. But I think this could become my go-to app for reading and posting to both Bluesky and Mastodon, and I’m glad this exists.

    The Openvibe verdict: It is really refreshing to be able to read, post and interact with others on a single timeline.

    Then, I realized I might already be able to do this with Micro.blog. So I did a few quick tests during lunch and after work:

    I threw in that last one for fun, since I never tried seeing if my AP-enabled website could interact with the Mastodon timeline before. I always forget how AP-enabled WordPress sites work, and what the limitations are.

    So here’s the difference between Openvibe and Micro.blog:

    Openvibe is a way to integrate a few different decentralized silos and interact within those different silos, all while staying inside the same UI.

    Micro.blog is an application that supports several IndieWeb protocols as well as newer social protocols like ActivityPub, AT Proto and Nostr. Micro.blog is a great cross-posting app (I am using it to sync my WordPress blog to the MB timeline but also cross-post statuses from a different RSS feed to a Bluesky account), as well as a fun and wholesome social network unto itself. I enjoy reading and interacting with people organically in the MB app. But since I’m not using it to host my blog or my Fediverse (ugh, how I hate that word) profile, I don’t know if I can fully use all the cross-platform mentioning features.

    To be clear, I don’t fully understand Micro.blog’s integration with Bluesky. One day I discovered that my ActivityPub-enabled website’s profile had changed and was starting to include posts from Bluesky as well as from my blog. I can also find Bluesky accounts through the Discover feature. I’m following the Washington Post on Micro.blog now!

    If that isn’t enough, there are other projects promising interoperability. Ryan Barrett maintains Bridgy Fed, a “decentralized social network bridge” connecting the Fediverse, the web, and Bluesky:

    If you’re on one of these networks, you can use Bridgy Fed to follow people on other networks, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Likewise, they’ll be able to see you and your posts too.

    Maybe that’s more of the kind of interoperability I am looking for. I’m already using Bridgy on this site to enable commenting from Bluesky and Mastodon. What if I didn’t need all these accounts? What if I could just do this from my website?

    The web already works pretty well at allowing interactions between different entities—it’s most powerful feature is the hyperlink. And more recently, think of the phrase, “wherever you find your podcasts.” The reason you can use whatever podcast player you want to listen to most of your shows is because nearly every podcast feed uses the same RSS standard.

    I have pals on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog, but very few that are on all three. Some of my friends are still on Twit-er, I mean X, and some are only on LinkedIn. Most of these folks don’t care what protocols these platforms are built on. They’re there for the people, quality interactions, the jokes, shitposts, and the pics.

    I’m glad we’re getting closer to the promise of interoperability in the middle of this decade of the social media era. I’m tired of walled gardens. Lastly, if you happen to be someone building these kind of tools, please use standards, document your own stuff, and focus on delivering a great user experience.

  • (No title)

    In reply to https://social.lol/@nsmsn/112842482519453848.

    this is a quick test from an ActivityPub-enabled WordPress site.

  • statuses are ephemeral

    I have a personal statuslog now, powered by omg.lol. Here’s how I’m using it:

    1. I pick a Fluent emoji from the emoji picker and type something. The <h1> on my status page says “Nick is…” so I start each status in lower case to finish the sentence. The grammar gets a bit weird when it’s a mixture of third-person and “I” statements, but I think folks can still follow along.
    2. Since my Mastodon account is also part of my omg.lol subscription, I can automatically post my status to the Fediverse from status.lol.
    3. My statuslog has a built-in RSS feed. I pull this in as a source in Micro.blog and automatically cross-post it to my Bluesky account, too. If I end up using more than 300 characters in a simple status update, I am probably in distress. Send help.
    4. The status.lol service has a simple javascript widget you can embed on nearly any web page, so I am sharing only my latest status update on both my /now page and my omg.lol profile.
    5. Other than the embed, I am not currently creating a local copy of a status to store on my website. I’m treating statuses as ephemeral.

    Before last week, I didn’t think I needed a subscription to omg.lol. But I enjoy playing around with each little feature, and supporting something small that mainly exists for fun. I know I’ve certainly spent twenty dollars on stupider things.

  • now now now

    Made a couple updates to my /now page.

    This thing is now powered by several widgets pulling in stuff automatically, plus some blocks of text I update manually.

    From top to bottom:

    1. My latest status, powered by status.lol.
      (daily-ish?)
    2. What I’m up to these days, powered by the block editor.
      (seasonally)
    3. My current pile of books, powered by Literal.
      (monthly)
    4. Latest tracks from Last.fm, powered by this pretty good Vercel app.
      (daily)
    5. The current weather in Albuquerque, powered by the Location Weather plugin (which is itself powered by the Open Weather Map API).
      (hourly)

    I signed up for a Letterboxd account recently, and I might add a widget for that next if I can find a good one. But I don’t watch a lot of movies these days, so I don’t know how appropriate it is for my /now page.

    I like to think of a now page as a snapshot in time, and mine is a mix of things that are updated hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or on an ongoing basis.

    If I were a better programmer this would all be APIs, not this fragile mix of third-party widgets. What’s nice is that none of this third-party stuff contains ad trackers or cookies (as best as I can tell).