On Tuesday, I attended (virtually, of course) an International Association of News Media (INMA) talk given by Benedict Evans on the future of news. I like Ben’s approach, which is basically to keep reminding news people that putting all their eggs in the basked of Google and Facebook was a bad idea, and no amount of begging them for money is going to make it better.
As Cory often points out, the problem isn’t Google “stealing content” – it’s that Google and Facebook have an effective duopoly over online ads. They are stealing money rather than content. Focusing on MOAR COPYRIGHT isn’t going to fix that.
I spent far too much time this week futzing around with technology rather than doing anything productive with it. Tech is my absolute best (worst) prevarication method. Instead of just getting on and doing stuff with the tech, I spend time farting around with it, installing this, playing around with that. It gives me the illusion of doing something constructive when I’m actually doing nothing of the sort.
One thing I did was to change my contract with Ionos, which I use to host and hold the various domains I have. Back in the old days, I used to self-host WordPress, which I stopped doing when I managed to corrupt an entire database and lose about a decade’s worth of posts. I was still paying for services which I no longer needed, including legacy support for outdated versions of MySQL, so managed to cut down my costs quite considerably. I should have done that sooner.
One project which I might embark on is to trim back my online presences and consolidate into one site. I currently have my tech blog, this site, and also a Substack. Oh, and a small site on Writing.as for short fiction. I’m tempted to merge them all into one, on WordPress, which would be cheaper to run and potentially make more sense.
But I am definitely not embarking on this for a while. Too much other stuff to do.
One project which I really do have to get to grips with is consolidating all my files into a single, coherent place. Every time someone has launched a new online file storage system, I have tried it out. That used to be excusable – it was my job to know about stuff like this – but now it’s not, and it’s in desperate need of consolidation.
I have files on Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and two different OneDrives. There’s a lot of duplication, but the structure of all of them is quite different. It’s going to be a semi-manual mess to work out how to get it all in one place.
And that’s not even thinking about which place it should be. My main rule is that everything must be stored locally on at least one machine, which then gets locally backed up, and as the ThinkPad is the device with the most storage that rules out iCloud. OneDrive seems reluctant to store everything locally, even when I tell it to. That leaves Dropbox.
But that means paying for another storage service, which seems silly when I have a lot of OneDrive storage space. I have a personal Microsoft 365 account, for access to Word/Excel/PowerPoint, and that gives me 1Tb of OneDrive storage, effectively thrown in for nothing.
I have the free version of Dropbox, but because I have had it for a long time and they have done a lot of “get free storage” promos over the years, it gives me nearly 9Gb of free space. That’s enough for a decent-sized “working documents” folder, storage everything that’s in use. Everything else can be be archived easily.
So perhaps that’s a good first step: get everything on to the ThinkPad, which is easily done, sort all the files, and use Dropbox for “working documents”. Sounds like a plan.
But not for today.
Three things which caught my attention this week
- Timothy Burke is a journalist who had his devices seized by the FBI in an investigation into “leaked” Fox News footage. Having paid Google a lot of money over a long period for storage, he’s now been told Google is basically going to close his account and he has seven days to move hundreds of terabytes off their servers, or they will delete it. This is the danger of cloud storage: if you don’t have local copies, your files are not your own.
- Related, Cory wrote about how DRM allows companies to simply force you to accept downgrades to service. Which a bunch of PlayStation users found out the hard way when Sony simply removed content they had bought and paid for.
- Steven Levy wrote about Google’s NotebookLM, which is a service that lets you upload content and use a large language model to query it. This is a smart application of AI, but I want this to be local: I don’t want to have to upload my content into someone else’s servers.
This week I have been reading
Michael Jecks, thriller writer and pen expert (no really) has a new book out – the first that he’s self-published. It’s called One Last Dance Before I Die and as with all Mike’s books, it’s a well-constructed pacey read, which I would highly recommend if you want something fun and light.
I’ve also been reading Richard Skinner’s Writing a Novel, which is pretty good even if he is a bit snotty about genre fiction.
This week I have been writing
Remarkably little because I have been futzing around too much with technology. I did, though, write something last Sunday about resurrecting my MacBook Pro. The only downside I have found to that machine is that, compared to everything else I use, its keyboard really does suck. I’m so glad that Apple went back to proper switches.
