rarelyneeded

Maciej Cegłowski of the Pinboard fame writes or speaks not too often, but when he does, it’s always solid gold:

No two companies have done more to drag private life into the algorithmic eye than Google and Facebook. Together, they operate the world’s most sophisticated dragnet surveillance operation, a duopoly that rakes in nearly two thirds of the money spent on online ads. You’ll find their tracking scripts on nearly every web page you visit. They can no more function without surveillance than Exxon Mobil could function without pumping oil from the ground.

So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?

Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy. That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.

Maciej Cegłowski

Be sure to read the whole essay about online privacy.

Yeah, so… as a geek I like to fiddle. Too long has gone since I last wrote anything to my public journal of sorts that this website attempts to be. For some reason a few days ago I got the itch again, the itch that can only be scratched by hacking away ssh’ing on a VPS, tuning things, installing and updating software. It feels like an incremental game to me for some reason, watching the updates fly by.

As a geek I like to fiddle. This Saturday I wondered how difficult it’d be to transition this blog from WordPress over to Jekyll, the transition containing both the old posts and the theme.

Continue reading “From WordPress to Jekyll”

I’ve been using Spotify for a long time now, practically from the beginning it was available in Finland. Today I unsubscribed. Why? Glad you asked!

Continue reading “Album art vs. search box”

Getting excited and starting new things is always super easy for me. I tend to get easily excited and quickly burnt out and lose interest on things that just don’t stick. One example is video games; I have a quite respectable collection of PS3 games that I have started but are now gathering dust in the closet. In case of games continuing them gets even harder when time passes, as it’s often hard to recall the controls (the tutorials are long gone) and remember what was happening during the storyline.

Continue reading “Habits & focus, my nemesises”

Yes, thank you. I know WordPress is 11 years old. I know it’s not that rare that someone finds a gaping hole in WordPress¹. I know PHP isn’t exactly the new hotness (especially 5.2.4, which WP still uses). To be totally honest, I used to be a big believer in custom-built software, that is, building admin-UIs and APIs from scratch using Grails or Node or what have you.

Continue reading “Investing in WordPress”

Me and my pal Jarkko started a tech podcast called Tyyppimuunnos (Typecast in English). It’s in Finnish but I thought I’d still write my thoughts about it here.

Continue reading “Castin’ Some Pods”