Weekly Thing 274 / Gibberish, Happyfeed, Airshow
Weekly Thing 274 with thirty links and thirteen journal entries shared between Jan 12, 2024 and Jan 26, 2024. Double issue! Sent from Minneapolis, MN, United States to 1,380 incredible people.
Hello there! 👋
It has been a few weeks! It took a couple links to limber up my fingers and get the words rolling.
I hope you had a great holiday season filled with everything you wished it was. We celebrated Christmas, even though Covid decided to introduce some difficulties we persevered. We welcomed 2024 with our typical family traditions playing Blokus and Clue, making fondue, and then screaming the final countdown to New Year at the top of our lungs. I celebrated my 52nd time around the Sun and upgraded to Jamie v5.2.0!
Sadly though we also had a loss. On January 17th we lost Tammy's Dad to a long battle with COPD. He was a very good man and will be missed by so many. I've archived a copy of his obituary. You are missed Don. 😢
There is a lot packed into today's email — you may need an extra cup of coffee for this one! ☕️ In addition to many great links you will also find an interview I did with Erik Halaas, the creator of the 612 Series.
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." — John Muir
Featured
Hypercritical: I Made This
I’m a big fan of Siracusa. For years I savored every page of his Mac OS X reviews. He mostly podcasts on very long podcasts now, but occasionally we get a gem of a blog post like this. Siracusa takes a run at the challenge of intellectual property ownership behind Generative AI.
He frames this up in exactly the same way I have many times.
A human's creative work is inextricably linked to their life experiences: every piece of art they've ever seen, everything they've done, everyone they've ever met. And yet we still say the creative output of humans is worthy of legal protection (with some fairly narrow restrictions for works that are deemed insufficiently differentiated from existing works).
Some say that generative AI is no different. Its output is inextricably linked to its "life experience" (training data). Everything it creates is influenced by everything it has ever seen. It's doing the same thing a human does, so why shouldn't its output be treated the same as a human's output?
He ultimately doesn't feel that this is a sufficient way to look at the problem. I agree, and how he breaks down the related topics is really good and interesting. Worth digging into and thinking about for yourself.
I love how he closed.
I'm not sure what the right answer is, but I think I'm getting closer to the right question. It's a question I think we're all going to encounter a lot more frequently in the future: Who made this?
It is the right question, but in the age of AI what if it isn't answerable because there is no "Who".
null made this?
Assessing the Health of Bitcoin - Lyn Alden
Alden is a notable proponent of Bitcoin, and what makes her work unique is that she is also an engineer and an independent financial analyst. In short, she combines strong technical depth with a rich background in macroeconomic concepts and theories. In this article she assesses Bitcoin based on five major factors:
- Market Capitalization and Liquidity
- Number of Conversion Points
- Technical Security and Decentralization
- Quality of User Experience
- Legal Acceptance and Global Recognition
The whole article is a good read, and doesn't require any previous knowledge of Bitcoin. It is a reasonable primer for anyone.
She addresses the topic of Bitcoin volatility and frames it in a way that clarifies how to interpret it.
Bitcoin's notorious volatility is unlikely to diminish much until it's more liquid and more widely-held than it is now; there's no fix for bitcoin's volatility other than more time, more adoption, more liquidity, more understanding, and better user experience with the wallets, exchanges, and other applications. The asset itself is only changing slowly; it's the world's perception of it and the leverage built on top of it or ripped away from it that goes through manic and depressive cycles.
She also looks at the underlying technical functions of the network.
Bitcoin isn't magic. It's a distributed network protocol. For it to continue to be valuable, it has to function through opposition and attacks, and has to be the best and most liquid way to do it. The concept of Bitcoin is insufficient to really matter for anything; it's the reality of Bitcoin that is important
Two things I learned here were:
- The Bitcoin network has had 100% uptime since 2013. That is remarkable.
- Bitcoin has a 32-bit Unix timestamp issue, but it is an unsigned implementation so sometime before the year 2106 Bitcoin will need to figure that out. I’m not worried. 😁
In the last section she talks about the legal risk and government threat to Bitcoin. This is a lengthy excerpt, but I liked how she framed this topic up.
Instead, the biggest legal challenges for the Bitcoin network ahead are likely in the area of privacy, and by major governments like the United States. Governments really don't want people to have any sort of financial privacy, especially at scale. Financial privacy was the default for most of history, but in recent decades it's increasingly not.
The premise from their perspective is that in order to prevent the 1% of bad people from doing terrorist financing or human trafficking or other bad things, 100% of people have to give up their rights to financial privacy and allow the government to surveil all transactions between all parties. In addition, governments have shifted much of their revenue toward income taxes, which rely on ubiquitous surveillance of all payment flows to enforce. But of course, such a thing can lead to massive overreach, and with grave consequences.
In addition, we live in an age of surveillance capitalism. We are offered myriad free services by corporations if we sign away our digital soul, meaning all of our data. What we look at, and what we spend on, is very valuable commercial information. And governments enhance this and help make it the norm because they plug into the back-end and collect that data too. Sometimes it could be for national security reasons, and other times it could be to try to control the whole population (e.g. China's social credit scores).
Ultimately she gives it a grade of A-. Alden's recent book Broken Money is on my shelf for an upcoming read.
Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 | Ars Technica
Network Time Protocol is one of the many critical systems that we never really think about on the Internet. When you sit down at your computer and see that the time is exactly right, you are benefiting from Network Time Protocol (NTP).
NTP provides the solution by allowing clocks of computers over a network to synchronize to a common time source. This synchronization is vital for everything from data integrity to network security. For example, NTP keeps network financial transaction timestamps accurate, and it ensures accurate and synchronized timestamps for logging and monitoring network activities.
I have a fondness for NTP. For reasons I have no recollection about at some point in my Unix journey I had to compile NTP from source. I also had to figure out how to configure it and read about the different "stratums" of time servers. The fact that there were this series of computers around the world that were directly attached to atomic clocks and providing Stratum 0 time was really cool. And then to see how NTP analyzed your computers clock, and determined it’s "drift" over time so that it could self-correct was mind blowing.
Add on top of this that Mills went blind due to glaucoma and had to transition the software to another maintainer. I don't know if he ever made a dollar off of NTP, but it is an amazing show of the impact that one person, focused on a topic, can have.
Thank you David Mills. 🙏
Currently
Reading: I’m currently reading Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park by Conor Knighton. Both Tammy and I are reading it. It is one of a handfull of books that cover all of the National Parks, and I like it thus far.
Installing: I’m giving Kagi's Orion Browser a try. I use Kagi for search, and Orion uses the Webkit engine and has privacy features baked-in while also supporting most Chrome and Firefox extensions.
Excited to be at Timberwolves v Grizzlies game! 🏀
Jan 18, 2024
Target Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
💬 Interview with 612 Series creator Erik Halaas
In October 2022 I found the 612 Series by Erik Halaas. This NFT collection resonated with me as a Minneapolis resident. I knew nearly all the landmarks and had fond memories of many of them. I decided to purchase five of them, which turned out to just be the start. I also shared the collection with others and even sent one as a gift. Eventually I acquired a complete set of the landmarks and got to know Erik, the creator of the 612 Series and StayNftyMpls. Erik even agreed to donate a collection for Minnestar to give away in a POAP drawing at Minnebar 17.
I had some questions about the 612 Series so I asked Erik if he would be up to do an interview to dive a little deeper. He was happy to, so here we go!
Q: What was your inspiration to create the 612 Series?
A close friend of mine extended a loose invitation to an art opening in NYC in the fall of 2021. Being cooped up in the midst of the pandemic, I was itching for an adventure and didn't need much of an excuse to hit the road. I loosely heard of art “on-chain” and the growing energy around NFTs but knew nothing of the artist, Jeff Davis co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Art Blocks, or the folks orchestrating the show, Bright Moments a DAO curating, promoting, and producing unforgettable physical showcases centered on creating art live, on-chain, in real life.
NYC would be the 2nd stop on their 10 city journey around the world, an effort to build a thriving community of “CryptoCitizens.” At face value, it was a growing collection of simple and silly pixelated characters but there was something more there. Folks were having powerful shared experiences in person (this meant a lot in 2021), being exposed to seasoned and often unsung artists, and learning together by exploring uncharted territory (e.g. crypto, NFTs, generative art).
Long story short, I left NYC with a strong desire to replicate this energy back home -- to dust off my long-dormant creativity quelled by kids and full-time work; to build community with fellow creatives, curators, and collectors; to explore this new world of digital art, NFTs, and the value of content on-chain; but to do it in a way that was specific to my home, Minneapolis. As we waited for the plane, we were talking about the immense pride folks have in the city of Minneapolis and how we might capture it. We joked about “the 612” and something clicked…
What if I made 612 Minneapolis characters? Unique snapshots? Landmarks? What if we leaned into the pixelated energy of the era and confined the creation of each landmark to only being 612 pixels?!
The project was born from there.
Q: How did you pick the landmarks to include? Do you have a favorite?
The first was the Witches Tower -- a favorite landmark from my childhood growing up in Prospect Park and one of the most beloved block prints I created years ago. I had played around with a pixelated version of the tower before the NYC happenings. With all that in mind, it is probably one of my favorite 612 Series landmarks.
From the Tower, the landmarks were essentially pulled from personal or shared Minneapolis memories. The city skyline, favorite parks or lakes, iconic bridges, memorable events, concerts, or shows. Whether historic Minneapolis landmarks or simply places I had visited and revisited with family and friends at various points throughout my life, these were all places etched in my memory as representative of home. I thought about crowdsourcing folks for key landmarks but the following for the project just wasn’t there.
A couple of fun notes…
- There are a few of my son’s pieces mixed into the series titled “Little Man Specials.” This was a nod to those parents out there fighting to keep the creative spirit alive. He was captivated by the project and inspired to start plugging away on his own versions.
- I also had some heavy hitters that didn't quite make the cut… Matt’s, CC Club, Electric Fetus. I can't remember why exactly they weren’t included. I felt a sense of pressure to get the work out there and be one of the first Minneapolis inspired collections on-chain.
- While there was beauty in the limitations of the 612 pixels, there were also some challenges in getting the landmark at the right scale / perspective.
Either way… there are definitely some could’a, should’a, would’a landmarks out there.
612 Series Landmarks: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Guthrie Theatre, Lowry Ave Bridge, Stone Arch Bridge, The Walker, Witches Tower, Cherry and Spoon, I-35W Bridge, Hennepin Ave Bridge, Lake Harriet, Lake of the Isles, Minnehaha Falls, Basilica of Saint Mary, Bde Maka Ska, Lake Hiawatha, Lake Nokomis, Washington Avenue Bridge, Martin Olav Sabo Bridge, Campbell Mithun Tower, First Ave, Capella Tower, Foshay Tower, Gold Medal Building, Goldy Gopher, Grain Belt Sign, IDS Tower, Midtown Global Market, Northrup Chair, Riverside Plaza, Target Headquarters, Wells Fargo Center, Al’s Breakfast, and The Kid’s House from Purple Rain.
Q: What software and tools did you use to create the series?
Funny enough, the work was all created in Excel. As someone who has traditionally worked with relief block printing as a creative outlet the switch to digital was a stretch and, thanks to work, Excel offered a familiar toolkit. I had also heard of other artists using excel for their work -- be it code-based generative art or simply documenting cross-stitch patterns.
I decided to put the project on the Ethereum blockchain because it was something I was familiar with given Bright Moments and ArtBlocks use, and OpenSea, which operates on Ethereum, was growing in popularity at the time, offered a no-code entryway to the market, and supported “lazy minting” which allowed me to put the collection up at no cost by deferring the gas fees associated with minting the piece to the buyer (“minting” is the process of officially writing the piece onto the blockchain).
Q: What plans or ideas do you have to bring the 612 Series beyond pixels? You’ve done some paintings?
I worked with a group of folks a little over a year ago to explore the interplay between digital and physical work. We hosted a dozen local creatives, half of which had a presence on-chain and the other half with no experience with NFTs, crypto, web3, whatsoever. The end result was a curated experience weaving traditional 2D and 3D mediums in with a variety of tech forward, digitally inspired content at the Hewing Hotel gallery. You can learn about the artists and get a flashback via this collection of Instagram Stories. It was a blast!
To highlight the 612 Series, I shared the initial relief block print of the Witches Tower that inspired the imagery for the series alongside an Infinite Object frame displaying a variety of the 612 Series Witches Tower NFTs. The show actually motivated me to revisit the original block printing method but reimagine the landmark in its pixelated form. I have gone on to create a few more of the landmarks in both the original and pixelated block print form (including one for you!) and would love to continue exploring how the pieces can be reimagined in the physical.
Q: If you fast forward a decade how would you like the 612 Series to be thought of?
I took great pride in being the first Minneapolis-centric NFT collection. Part of the importance of that to me was experimenting with blockchain technology and the capacity to track the work over time. Putting the pieces on chain memorialized this moment of creative inspiration and will allow me to track how interest and engagement with the collection grows, changes hands, ebbs and flows, is valued, etc. I know, for example, the exact moment that first piece moved and will know if, when, and loosely to whom that piece is handed off to down the line.
I would love to see this added narrative behind the original work build beyond simply documenting transactions -- perhaps a way for holders to document and share the stories, memories, experiences that connected them to each of the landmarks they own. There was some of that starting to take place on social media.
Ultimately, these softer social interactions were the real impetus behind the project: to build community and spark creativity. This has been realized through “in real life” experiences like the show at the Hewing Hotel, collaborations with you at Minnebar 2023, connections with MN Blockchain, and so on.
My hope is that the project will continue to inspire local folks with a shared interest in the arts, technology, and community to connect, collaborate, and create locally!
A big thank you to Erik for creating this series and for sharing more about it. I wonder if we will ever see a 2nd collection of the 612 Series with a new set of landmarks? Or maybe some ability to work with Erik and create a special 1 of 1 for a set of unique landmarks in the 612 Series. How cool would it be in fifty years to see bronze plaques setup at the various landmarks highlighting these early NFTs that commemorate that spot.
Want to own a piece of this collection? There are still many 612 Series collectibles available to buy! 🛍️
To connect with Erik you can find @ErikHalaas on X, his LinkedIn profile, or via StayNftyMpls.
Notable
Bottled Water Contains Previously Undetected Nanoplastics - Bloomberg
The more we learn about plastic the more problematic it is, and yet we keep putting our food in it.
To overcome that challenge, the study’s co-authors invented a new microscopy technique, programmed a data-driven algorithm and used both to analyze roughly 25 liters of bottled water purchased from three popular brands in the US. (The researchers declined to specify which brands.) They found 110,000 to 370,000 tiny plastic particles in each liter, 90% of them nanoplastics.
This article made me think "I should go read the original study that is cited." I did find it, but it was long and pretty impenetrable for me. If you needed another reason to avoid plastic water bottles, here is a good one.
And these nanoplastics that can pass into your blood stream? Yikes! 😳
SEC.gov | Statement on Omnibus Approval Order for List and Trade Bitcoin-Based Commodity-Based Trust Shares and Trust Units
We finally have SEC approval to move forward on Bitcoin-based ETFs. This statement from Commissioner Peirce criticizing the SEC's process with Bitcoin is an interesting read. She highlights many negatives that came from the SEC sitting on this for a decade.
We squandered a decade of opportunities to do our job. If we had applied the standard we use for other commodity-based ETPs, we could have approved these products years ago, but we refused to do so until a court called our bluff. And even now our approval comes only begrudgingly, as demonstrated by our continued insistence that these products satisfy a correlation test we have not demanded of prior commodity-based ETPs.
Good that we finally have this approved.
ArchiveBox: Open source self-hosted web archiving
One of the features I pay extra for with Pinboard is archiving the full contents of any URLs that I save. This is a stand-alone solution to do that for anything.
ArchiveBox is an open source tool that helps you archive web content on your own (or privately within an organization): save copies of browser bookmarks, preserve evidence for legal cases, backup photos from FB / Insta / Flickr, download your media from YT / Soundcloud / etc., snapshot research papers & academic citations, and more…
I think I'll add this to my "Someday, Maybe" list to setup. It would be great to have this to archive the parts of the web that I care about.
ISDN History: Why It (Mostly) Failed To Make A Mark
I had ISDN service to my apartment in the early 2000's. For the time it was fast, but the gear was always finicky. At MarketWatch at that time we also had ISDN lines for all of our videoconferencing systems because our Internet connections were not stable enough and had too high of latency. We also used ISDN for our MarketWatch Radio network.
Sadly this article doesn't reference at all the only ISDN remnant that I still thoroughly enjoy — Future Sound of London's album ISDN, released in 1994. I just started playing it. 🎶
Up Ahead Lets You Track the Important Things in Life – The Sweet Setup
I purchased a year of Up Ahead and have been using it. Up Ahead is probably the third or fourth application I've tried to use that does a really simple thing, track events that are coming up and count down to them. I've found a few apps that do this, but sadly there isn't one that works the way I ultimately want.
What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | The Guardian
Our kids have told me countless stories of kids in school using their cell phones all the time, not listening to the teachers. The problem is amplified when every student also has a Chromebook and access to the web. The distractions are nearly limitless. Is banning phones the right thing? I think yes. Is taking computer out of the classroom also right? That is a harder problem.
Making Apple Vision Pro - YouTube
A quick 80 second video (ad?) from Apple showing the machining process for the new Vision Pro. Nobody does this stuff like Apple. I can't wait to get mine on Feb 2nd! Also see the Apple Vision Pro Guided Tour.
Microsoft Actions Following Attack by Nation State Actor Midnight Blizzard | Microsoft Security Response Center
Initial information on Microsoft security event.
Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents.
Highlights how all public endpoints matter, production or not.
Reducing our AWS bill by $100,000 - Fathom Analytics
Great writeup how Fathom went, service by service, and identified excess costs to reduce. This is a great highlight of why FinOps (financial operations) in technology teams is so critical. The flexibility of the cloud comes with a lot of complexity, and managing the costs associated with that capacity is not trivial.
Daft Social
Daft allows you to create short posts on a "blog" by sending email to a unique address and specifying the text in the subject. It is kind of weird really. I created an account and made sure I was "so very daft". There is no authentication other than making sure you don't share the special email address that is created for your username. Each site has an RSS feed.
I thought it would be fun to make a new Daft Social page for this issue of the Weekly Thing and share the submission address here, but received this message:
New signups are currently not possible due to overcapacity. Try again later.
So it seems folks thought it was fun enough to try. 🤷♂️
Happy 40th Birthday, Macintosh
This is a great website to celebrate the 40th Birthday of the Macintosh.
To celebrate this milestone, mac40th.com showcases every Macintosh desktop and portable Apple has ever made with hundreds of the photos taken as part of the work creating the coffee table book ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation (3rd edition now available up to date as of the end of 2023). The site also includes photos taken by Kevin Taylor, Forest McMullin, Carl Berkeley, and others (including video) that I've collected over the past 14 years.
Wonderful photos and a ton of memories for long-time Mac users.
Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers
Several years ago I was talking with a product lead. This leader was making the case that his product needed more engineers. At one point in the conversation he attempted to justify this by exclaiming that his backlog was so large that it would take too long to work through. My reply was something like this — the size of your backlog is irrelevant to the amount of investment we should make, investment is driven on driving growth and customer engagement.
When I saw this headline I was like "yes"! But I love how Siddiqi goes into much more detail and further reasoning.
There is no point to having a large backlog because the bigger the backlog, the higher the unvalidated assumptions, and the lower the chance that it creates any customer value. I have made too many mistakes assuming that something is valuable, when nobody cares about it. A large backlog should be looked at with an extremely high degree of skepticism, as the size of your backlog is inversely proportional to how often you talk to customers.
Do the next thing. Test with customers. Repeat. Forever. ♾️
Journal
It might have been better if I never would have found out about these Bailey's Irish Cream Minis. Delicious.
There is certainly some luck involved with Microsofts early investment and partnership with OpenAI. However, the strategy they have built to bring AI to “where work happens”, productize it through Copilot, and create enterprise-ready capabilities to build off of is truly impressive.
Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company. Microsoft was valued at $2.89trn as markets closed on Friday; Apple at $2.87trn. The iPhone-maker has been the most valuable listed firm for most of the past 12 years. But Microsoft’s investments in artificial intelligence have helped it catch up. The software giant last closed above Apple in 2021. -- The Economist (Jan 13, 2024)
We all went to the new Mean Girls movie tonight. I had seen the 2004 Mean Girls a long time ago but didn’t remember that much of it. The musical interpretation was fun and had good moments.
New POAP Onboarding Process
Jan 14, 2024 at 2:01 PM
A year ago (exactly!) I shared my POAP Wishlist which included three areas that I felt would be great additions to POAP. It is a year later and I still think POAP is a wonderful product, and I continue to issue and collect these proof of attendance tokens.
One of the areas that I called out was Web2/3 Onboarding. Specifically I noted that while token claim codes could be used to reserve a POAP (not minting it), the reservations themselves weren’t actionable. There was no email engagement to encourage the person that reserved it to mint the token. I also highlighted that POAP should make it easier for people that do not otherwise have an Ethereum wallet, and create a non-custodial wallet for them to use instead.
A couple weeks ago I noticed that POAP had a new beta onboarding process so I requested to be part of it, and they activated it for my 52nd Birthday drop. I gave it a try myself and I was excited to see that they had addressed everything I had wished for in this process!
Let’s take a look at the new process!
New Onboarding
Just as before, when you get a claim code you are presented with the option to get the token and you can provide a wallet address or Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name to directly mint it. You can also provide an email address to reserve the token to mint in the future.
With the new onboarding process when you provide an email address to reserve the token you get an email informing you of the next steps. Critically it presents options for you to act on!
Smartly they use language that people should easily identify with. Rather than saying “I don’t have a wallet” instead saying “Create an account”. To give this a test I chose to Create an account.
After clicking on this you are presented with a page where you can setup your account, which really means you are creating a brand new wallet address. I love that you can even specify an ENS name. I created thingelstad.onpoap.eth which got a brand new address 0xb81B…2056.
Behind the scenes this is powered by Privy to create an embedded wallet. The flow worked really well. After creating my new wallet I was then able to easily mint my POAP directly into that new wallet. Magic! 🪄
So this is great, and for a lot of people that only collect POAPs and do nothing else with crypto this is probably all that they ever need to do. But now that this wallet exists, I wanted to get access to it directly. After creating the wallet POAP send another email and this one includes those steps, and even points you to downloading Rainbow if you don’t know where to start.
I followed the directions, copied my private key, and was able to easily add the new wallet that POAP had created for me into Rainbow. 🌈
Conclusion
I'm incredibly happy about this new onboarding process. I’ve created 58 POAPs and most of my events are distributed to people that have never done anything with Ethereum before. I even created my own how to claim a POAP instructions to give people.
However, even with that it has proven too difficult for most people. With this new process, people will be able to claim and mint POAPs with nothing other than an email address! This is a big deal! I also think there are many crypto native people that may choose to do this as well. I isolate by crypto assets so I keep all my POAPs in an address just for them. Having POAP manage the wallet for me would be an even easier way to do that.
I'm eager for this new onboarding process to be the default and I think I can get rid of my “how to” page and simplify POAP distribution significantly. With this new process, POAP ease-of-use is much improved!
Wallet of Satoshi Stops Serving US Customers
Jan 14, 2024 at 9:25 PM
It was about a year ago that I made my first purchase with Bitcoin Lightning. It was a tasty cappuccino from a vendor at Bitcoin Miami. I had read about Lightning but hadn’t had an opportunity to use it before. I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to do realtime, peer-to-peer transactions. The first Bitcoin Lightning wallet I used was Wallet of Satoshi.
I’ve continued to use Bitcoin Lightning. Unfortunately not for payment of goods. But my son has a Lightning wallet and we exchange funds with Lightning regularly. I’ve also onboarded at least 20 different people to Bitcoin by having them install Wallet of Satoshi, and then I put 1,000 sats (Satoshis, or 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin) in their wallet. It is simple, fast, and an eye opening experience.
All of this is to say that I was sad to hear about a month ago that Wallet of Satoshi is not going to operate in the United States anymore.
Here is an excerpt from their post on Nostr:
We’ve dedicated ourselves to providing the best Bitcoin experience with Wallet of Satoshi, being at the forefront of Lightning usability and adoption. However, we’ve made the difficult decision to remove our app from the U.S. Apple and Google app stores, and will not serve U.S. customers going forward.
They aren’t specific about why they are doing this. I suspect it likely has to do with Know Your Customer requirements. Wallet of Satoshi doesn’t require anything. You can just install it, receive funds, and send funds. It is super simple.
Since they are not allowing transfers into US accounts I sent all my sats from Wallet of Satoshi to my Strike account, via Lightning of course. It was fast and free. No worries. I'm going to keep Wallet of Satoshi installed and hope that someday in the future I can again start using my favorite Lightning wallet. ⚡️
Have the next round of books to read for my book club assembled. 📚
- Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Tim Parks
- The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
- The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby
- Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Pual Scharre
- Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
I’ve been finding micro.blog a bit noisy lately. I was contemplating what to do about it and then I remembered that there is an option to “Show posts but no replies” for the timeline. I switched to that and am finding it much more relaxing again.
Exciting morning -- warming up my fingers to get the Apple Vision Pro ordered!
✅ Pre-order complete with pickup scheduled at Apple Store on Friday, February 2nd. Purchase process with face scanning via the iPhone was simple and easy. Ordered the 512 GB storage option along with the travel case.
360 video from the #TeamSPS 2024 Social!
It just dawned on me that one of my favorite drinks and favorite donuts have the same name: Old Fashioned. 🤷♂️
Let's play hockey! My cousin Quinn joined us. Early lead with Minnesota Wild 2-0 over Washington Capitals. 🏒
Tammy and I saw American Fiction tonight at the Edina Theatre. I liked the movie and thought it was both funny and pointed in the message. There is a surprise in the end that keeps you wondering too.
Weekly Thing Forum 🆕
Join garrickvanburen, Jim Cuene, Shawn Liu, Andre Burgaud, Lee Zukor, and many other Weekly Thing readers in the Weekly Thing Forum. Recent topics include:
- Bluesky Invite Codes
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Briefly
Walmart is using Generative AI in some interesting ways. → Walmart unveils new generative AI-powered capabilities for shoppers and associates - The Official Microsoft Blog
Crowdsourced blocking rules for uBlock Origin. I used 1Blocker for blocking. I highly recommend running some form of content blocker in your browser. → Let's Block It!
This is shameful Microsoft. Your email client should not be surveilling you. → Outlook is Microsoft’s new data collection service | Proton
When I was running a link blog I did pretty much the exact same thing. I use Pinboard as a CMS, and then you can export from that to other systems. I may create a link blog again in the future, but if I did I want it to not be blog-date-centric but instead content-keyword-search centric. → How my link blog works · ./jm
This is a great feature add for Feedbin, and one that I've never seen any other feed reader do. This found 6 feeds in my subscriptions that had moved to new URLs and let me get them updates with a couple clicks. → Fixable Feeds
Good culture considerations for any team. Does HBR always have 5 sections to these articles? 😏 Still good content. → How High-Performing Teams Build Trust
Airshow is a Podcast player made by Feedbin, and uses Feedbin for the sync system. As an avid Feedbin user I decided to give this a shot instead of Overcast for a while. The user interface is nice. → Airshow Updates
Everything is connected and it all becomes the same? → The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same | The Guardian
Wild how important one CPU method bfloat16 is. 🤓 → Why the M2 is more advanced that it seemed – The Eclectic Light Company
What if you could author a blog with a text messaging interface? That is what Gibberish is trying. It does not seem compelling to me, but I love that they are trying something so different. → Gibberish Is Now Available on TestFlight - Gibberish and Stuff
I've kept a gratitude journal in Day One, but this app is just for gratitude alone. The compelling feature is to join small groups of friends to share gratitude notes amongst each other. Interesting and very special purpose. → Happyfeed - Daily Gratitude Journal App for iOS and Android
I have typically created an S3 bucket to redirect domains. It is very hard to find services that will do this with SSL, but this one does. → Domain redirect service hassle-free - redirect.pizza
Work through over 800 chess scenarios. ♟️ → CheckmateChamp.net: Chess Tactics Trainer
If you are looking for information on feed readers. I've used Feedbin for years and highly recommend it. → The top five RSS readers for keeping up with your news feeds - The Verge
Nice feature addition to 1Password! 🔒 → Keep Your SSH Keys Safe with Watchtower | 1Password
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
There is a fly on your nose. 🪰
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Giving this comment thing a go.
However, to one of your items I have been giving Gibberish (Gibber.blog) a try just to see how it works. I find it interesting as well but I am not 100% sure that is how I write things. I can see how for short posts that might be it type something out like you are texting a friend, add a picture and there it is on the web. However, that is my one feedback for them by making it like that it would be nice to have posts with out titles (I probably post to many like that but maybe that is why I really like Micro.blog).