Extra Roundup
Items of Interest
Welcome friends of the
, I’ve got another Roundup for this month. This is where I like to share items that have gotten my attention recently.If you’re interested in diving deeper feel free to check out the last roundup.
The last week has been more exciting (in all the wrong ways) than predicted.
To start, I’d like to share this call to make peace with others in our lives, online and offline instead of fighting. I’ll never pass up the opportunity to remind people that the way to truly fight tyranny is to rebuild the social bonds that were shattered to make room for egregious moves against people.
If you want a living example of someone who can face horrors and respond with grace and compassion I’d highly recommend learning more about Vera Sharav. I believe that if more people drew inspiration from her strength, the world would be a significantly better place. You can listen to Vera read
’s Poem Mistakes Were NOT Made in her piece in Profiles in Courage.
You may also want to check out these excellent Profiles in Courage:
I am thrilled to celebrate my first recommendation from a technical Substack.
Assuming this is not a mistake on their part, this is a significant milestone for this project. One of the small things that really makes me feel like the toil is worthwhile! Repairability is a fundemental part of Digital Autonomy.
It’s the little things that can make a huge difference. A trivial but meaningful repair I’ve done somewhat recently is replacing the pads on my headphones. I can say I’ve really liked this particular headset over the years precisely because many spare parts are available.
I already recommend their Substack, but would highly recommend giving them a look if you hadn’t already!
Given that it seems we do indeed live in interesting times, I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we’re striving for. I can personally attest that it’s very easy to get whipped up into frenzy and panic over chaotic events, and that it’s crucial to not allow that to overcome you. David shares his personal reflections on the broader connection between a strong faith and his capacity to endure the difficult journey. I really emphasize with David, having had my own share of health issues and personal tragedy come to a forefront during these times.
The intervening years have been profoundly challenging for me. My physical and mental health have suffered as a result of doing the research necessary to shine a light on evil, and for my troubles I appear to have lost the academic career for which I worked so hard. Meanwhile, I have had the horrors of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy to contend with in my nine-year-old son’s condition (diagnosed in 2019). Nevertheless, I have somehow been able to stand my ground and publish my books, and despite everything, I remain standing. Where the journey takes me next is anyone’s guess, but I have a deep sense of assurance that I am on the right path.
There have been some troubling developments in Firefox recently. In short, Firefox is attempting to implement “Privacy-Protecting Advertising”. While personally, I consider this a contradiction in terms, the plan seems to be to merely aggregate and do some form of anonymization before sending it along to advertising companies… including their own!
This behavior is partly why I already run Librewolf. I’m personally more-or-less tied to firefox-based browsers because of how dependent I am on the fancy bookmark features that I find very valuable.
In this video I show how you can use your bookmarks to autocomplete results in the address bar, but I also really like the “keyword search” that allows you to search specific sites with a simple phrase.
You’re so humble to think they mistakingly recommended you, but really your contribution to unshackling your readers with objective reviews is certainly subscriber worthy.
> Vera Sharav
Amen and she is so humble, compassionate and wise. I appreciate your pointing to her.