This morning I was posting a link back to my Mastodon account on Twitter and got this message: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
It looks as though this new ban applies to most if not all of the major Mastodon instances that are out there. This means that any link to a Mastodon account or a post on those instances are not even allowed to be posted on Twitter.
This comes in the wake of Elon Musk banning the “Elon Jet” account that was keeping track of the whereabouts of his private jet using publicly available ADS-B data. ADS-B data comes from a transponder required to be installed on most aircraft that transmits the airplane’s tail number, position, altitude, etc. These transmissions can be picked up on the ground with cheap hardware and free software as I demonstrated in this video (tune in at at the 8:53 mark).
Musk says that realtime doxxing (publicly posting private information about a person’s whereabouts) is not allowed and that any account doing it will be removed. He also extended the ban to accounts that link to that information elsewhere. Twitter took this action after Musk says a car carrying his young child was followed home from the airport and potentially blocked by a stalker. Musk posted a video of the alleged stalker along with the alleged stalker’s license plate but did not file a police report as of the time of this writing.
The question to be asked here is whether or not those owning and traveling in private jets have a reasonable expectation of privacy – especially as the position of those aircraft are broadcast unencrypted to other aircraft and stations on the ground.
This move runs counter to the “free speech” direction Musk says he wants Twitter to take. Additionally it appears to be counter to the free market principles that Musk purports to believe in. They could have blocked individual Mastodon links to the Elon Jet account as opposed to restricting any links to the entire fediverse – a competing network that is attracting many Twitter users.
Let me start by saying I’m a huge proponent of electric vehicles (EV’s). I’ve been driving electric for the last twelve years, starting with a Chevy Volt and now in a Tesla.
Range anxiety is still a big issue for electric vehicles. Despite massive developments EV’s charge relatively slowly vs. a gas powered vehicle fill-up and charging stations for non-Tesla vehicles are few and far between. A bulk of the publicly available EV chargers are mostly “feel good” installations that charge quite slowly. My local grocery store’s charger for example will get me maybe 5 or 6 miles back in the tank after 30 minutes in the store.
For the last decade most EVs have been cars or crossover SUVs built on car platforms. Over the last year manufacturers have introduced electric pickup trucks and SUVs to the market, with Ford, Rivian and GM shipping their vehicles right now and Tesla’s Cybertruck right around the corner. These vehicles are much larger and heavier than the typical electric car, which means they need larger batteries to get the same range as a comparable electric car would. And those big batteries take longer to charge – if you can find a charger at all.
The buried lede in Rich’s video was how hard it was for him to actually get down there. Check out his adventure here, like all of Rich’s videos it was very entertaining:
Because Rivian doesn’t have its own charging network, Rich had to rely on publicly available chargers. Some were very slow. Others were not where they said they would be. At one point he had to ask the owner of a bed and breakfast if he could plug in for a little while to get to his next destination. And when he did find a faster charger the cost to use it was often the equivalent to a tank of gas in a traditional vehicle.
Tyler Hoover from Hoovie’s Garage didn’t fare much better with his purchase of a Ford F-150 Lightning EV pickup. Tyler is actually the prime candidate for an electric pickup – the type of driving he does is typically not far from his home. But he found even short trips back and forth to his mechanic towing a vehicle left him pretty close to empty.
His range anxiety was exacerbated by the cold weather in his home state of Kansas that reduced range even further. It was so bad that Hoover and a friend who co-owned the vehicle decided to sell it and try something else.
They ended up choosing an electric Hummer that Hoover says addresses many of the range issues by using a much larger battery pack with twice the capacity of the Ford. We’ll have to see how it fares after Hoover has had more time in the Hummer.
These range and charging issues indicate that just building and marketing an EV is not enough. Without a charging network that makes the vehicles practical it’s really just half a car.
Tesla addressed this issue a decade ago when they started building out their super charger network. After 8+ years of Tesla ownership I’ve never come close to running out of juice, mainly because there’s always a supercharging station nearby wherever I may be.
Tesla Superchargers
Tesla has experienced growing pains with the network (especially in areas like Silicon Valley where there’s a lot of Tesla ownership) but in my experience I’ve always been able to get charge when I needed one here in the Northeast US. Charging is still a bit slower than filling up a gas tank but much faster than even some of the fastest chargers available for other vehicles.
Tesla typically charges drivers market rate for the electricity but they occasionally use the supercharger network as an incentive to clear out vehicle inventory. When I purchased my car, a prior model-year leftover, they gave me “free gas for life” in an effort to get me to sign on the dotted line. Not a bad deal!
At this point I don’t believe the national goal of EV’s representing 50% of vehicle sales by 2030 to be realistic unless some major efforts are made to improve both charging speed and availability – especially for those who do not have the convenience of being able to plug in at home.
As the saga of deficient utility poles in my town continues I’m pleased to say that some progress has been made!
First the roped together pole at the end of my road was fixed – it likely would not have been had I not raised a stink. I learned that the only thing the power company does to coordinate with the other companies is put the pole in a database. No phone calls, no other coordination.
I’ve since been passing information about other deficient poles over to our state regulator. A few of the worst offenders have already been addressed but they still have a lot of work to do.
So far Frontier the phone company dealt with this tri-pole monstrosity that was blighting my beautiful small town for years:
Frontier also addressed a very dangerous looking strapped together pole that was looming over main street. This one had been like this for the better part of two or three years. They recently put new fiber on the pole even though it was about to fall into the road!
What is clear throughout this mess is that the utilities are not coordinating with each other on pole replacements. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get everyone on site and do it at once? Sure, but only if customers mattered to these monopolies.
The utility companies of course cry poverty complaining they can’t possibly fix all of these problems and meet their minimum guaranteed profits. But if they addressed these issues when they happen vs. letting them rot for years they wouldn’t have the deferred maintenance. This issue also exposes how utility companies have gutted their workforce and rely mostly on contractors to do the bare minimum maintenance required.
I’m working on an op-ed with some solutions that I think will light a fire under utilities to refocus their attention on customers. Stay tuned!
Like everyone else I’ve been playing with ChatGPT – a natural language chatbot that can do some pretty amazing things when it comes to summarizing text and even writing computer code.
I thought it might be fun to see if it could make summaries of my YouTube videos. ChatGPT can’t yet transcribe directly from a video but you can give it the transcript that YouTube generates automatically.
Here’s what it came up with for my recent video on Mastodon:
Pretty good right? And this is with all of the errors that YouTube automatic subtitles introduce into the text. While not perfect it’s definitely a good start and certainly better than a writing prompt.
I was also curious how it would do with a product review. Here’s what it came up with for the Kindle Scribe:
Here it missed some of my complaints that largely centered on the software-side of the experience mainly how its handwritten notes in books can’t be written on the pages of the book itself, and some of the shortfalls with note synchronization across platforms. But again, pretty good start with nothing but a YouTube transcript to work with.
The explosion of these consumer-facing AI apps we’ve seen over the last few months is stunning.
All of the options are set in the environment criteria so you don’t need to map anything storage-wise. Just be sure to adjust the date variable each time you start the container up so it doesn’t post too much at once!
Since the Elon Musk takeover my Twitter analytics continue their significant upward trend. Here’s where I’m at at the end of November vs. the same time in October when Musk took ownership.
I do think there has always been an algorithmic advantage to the blue checkmark which is likely contributing to the upswing in performance here. We’ll check back in next month and see where things are at. I have a feeling we’ll see a bit of “settling down” over the next few weeks to a more normal cadence.
But I have been playing around with Mastodon and I really like the vibe. It’s now a part of my posting routine too. You can find me at http://lon.tv/mastodon.
While it’s good this issue is resolved my community is unfortunately still littered with blighted, neglected poles all over the place. Today Frontier is in the neighborhood running new fiber and is attaching their new cables to old poles – this even when a new pole is standing right next to it.
The battle is won here, but we have a long way to go to get these companies to prioritize customers over shareholders.
My local fox affiliate, Fox 61, covered my woes related to the condition of utility poles in my neighborhood. You can see it here.
While the linesmen did great work getting the pole that caught fire rebuilt quickly my issue is that their management did not coordinate with the other utilities to find a timely resolution to the problem.
Comcast did get their portion fixed after they saw one of my Tweets, but I think it’s clear that if they’re finding out about this from Twitter nobody from Eversource ever reached out to them. Apparently Eversource uses some kind of software package as opposed to actually picking up a phone and coordinating. Once I heard back from Comcast they came out over night to reattach the cables.
Frontier had their contractors running fiber in the neighborhood today but they did not reattach their cables. I think tomorrow they’ll be working their way towards the area where their wires are hanging so I’m eager to see what unfolds there.
I picked up the Atari 50th Celebration collection (affiliate link) the other day and found it to be a wonderful tribute to Atari’s contributions to video game history. It has a mixture of emulated games along with documentary material presented in an easy to follow timeline.
You can see it in action in this livestream I did on Amazon. The gameplay starts around the 13 minute mark. I am playing the Switch version but it’s also available for just about every current gaming platform.
The games and documentary materials are organized into eras that take the user step-by-step through the development of Atari’s arcade games, home consoles and computers. It keeps track of progress as the user works through what feels like a museum exhibit. They produced some videos specific for this release along with additional archival footage and documents from Atari’s archives.
The game emulation feels pretty solid. Digital Eclipse, the developers of the collection, added some really solid filters to the emulation that come very close to capturing the look and feel of CRTs of the era on a modern television.
I was especially impressed with how they depicted the arcade version of Breakout. The original game used a black and white CRT but had a colored overlay placed over the picture tube to add color. Digital Eclipse’s depiction of it looks pretty spot on – note how the blue band runs through the borders of the play area on the bottom:
Unfortunately some of the games that were designed around specific control surfaces (steering wheels, spinners, etc) don’t translate very well to modern game controllers. Analog sticks work well with games that originally used joysticks but Breakout is pretty hard to control without the precision of a spinner or paddle controller.
But to add some additional value Digital Eclipse and Atari did produce six modern interpretations of 80’s era games, including Breakout. They’re all a lot of fun and capture the feel of vintage games while being much more friendly towards modern controllers. I especially liked VCTR-SCTR which is a modern homage to the vector games of the early 80’s that plays like a medley of Asteroids, Lunar Lander and more. These definitely add some value lost by control issues on some of the vintage titles.
A bigger shortfall is that the history feels incomplete without Activision games like Pitfall, the 2600 ports of Pacman & Space Invaders, and of course the infamous ET game that some credit with causing the 1983 video game crash. While most of these important milestones get mentioned in the timeline, the games are missing due to licensing issues.
Atari is a shell of the company that dominated the video game market in the 80’s so they probably couldn’t come up with the budget to license the Atari ports of other popular games.
Activision gets a mention in the collection, but no games can be played due to licensing issues.
But the collection does manage to deliver a nice sampling of popular games across every console Atari released including the 2600, 5200, 7800, the 800 home computer, the Lynx handheld and the Jaguar. All in there are 103 games in the collection with five 2600 games that are unlocked by achieving certain milestones in the other games. There’s a full list and unlocking instructions over at IGN.
There’s definitely something for everyone but I would have liked to have even more games included even if they didn’t make it to the historical timeline. For example my Dad and I used to play Atari bowling quite a bit when I was 3 or 4 years old and it would have been great to have that included here even if it wasn’t historically significant.
The bottom line? The Atari 50th Celebration is a lovingly curated exhibit of video game history that ends up a feeling incomplete. The six new games included do make up for that a bit but it’s a shame that the full Atari story can’t be told due to licensing restrictions. Hopefully I’ll live long enough for all of this stuff to find its way into the public domain so we can get a full collection for the 100th celebration!
I’ve long been a critic of my local utility monopolies because they’ve put their own profits ahead of doing right by customers and taxpayers. Last night was another example of this.
The top of a utility pole owned by electric monopoly Eversource caught fire around 6:00 p.m. due to their lack of attention and maintenance to their infrastructure. The pole was replaced sometime overnight but the communications cables were still attached to the old pole.
Eversource’s solution was to cut the top and bottom off the old pole and tie it with a rope to the new one. I kid you not. The communications backhaul for me and thousands of Comcast and Frontier customers literally hangs by a few threads.
Eversource owns the pole so they won’t reattach the communications cables. Comcast and Frontier outsource most of their fiber optic line work to contractors and lack the staff to actually deal with it in a timely manner. And they can conveniently point to Eversource as being uncooperative. Who knows if Eversource even tried to coordinate with Comcast and Frontier that evening to get the pole fixed correctly?
Part of the problem is that none of these companies shoulder any responsibility. It’s so much easier to pass the buck – their mutual customers be damned.
And this pole is not alone in my neighborhood.. Five poles down and this is what you’ll see:
It’s been strapped together like this for at least a year or two. The power company added a second pole for power but nobody ever took the communications cables off the old one. Frontier was even coming through here running fiber and left everything on the old pole.
The kicker here is that these monopolies are granted access to public and private property to run the wires that they profit from. In fact I have utility pole on my property and wires running underneath my driveway that go to other homes with a right of way they can use for free in perpetuity.
It’s time these companies put the needs of their ratepayers first and fix this mess. Enough of the finger pointing. For more on why Eversource is the worst company ever see my analysis piece here:
Despite being fully exonerated following Twitter’s misidentification of my rocket video as porn, there still a mark on my record. Earlier today I tried to join the community notes program where Twitter users can provide context for people/organizations that are not fully telling the truth. Unfortunately I was denied:
Apparently that 12 hour suspension is still on my record as a recent Twitter rules violation. My concern is that this may also negatively impact my algorithmic placement too.
The NASA SLS rocket’s boosters burn at around 3000 degrees fahrenheit / 1649 celsius, so it’s no surprise the mobile launcher that supports the rocket on the ground took some damage. Here’s what it looked like the afternoon of the 16th following the launch:
One thing I noticed at the NASA press site was that the launch tower definitely had a color change after the rocket blasted off earlier that morning. NASA released some images this afternoon that details the more notable damage the tower took at liftoff:
This area is where the rocket boosters take off from – there was some definite damage around the area but nothing critical that can’t be repaired in time for the second SLS flight for Artemis II.
This next photo is likely why it took so long for NASA’s ground teams to clear the area around the pad – the elevator doors for the launch tower blew out due to the massive pressure during launch! This prevented a quick inspection of the launch tower’s overall condition.
But at a press conference held this evening NASA officials said the hardware is working exceptionally well with just a few “funnies” the team are tracking. They currently have more fuel than they anticipated remaining after their recent burn to whip around the moon and they’re generating more power and using less than anticipated.
There’s still a lot of time left in the mission but if things keep tracking this well a crewed flight around the moon won’t be far behind.
With all of the talk of this decentralized platform called Mastodon I decided to set up an account myself. I went with the indieweb.social “instance” as I have an interest in reviving the independent web. You can find me at @lonseidman@indieweb.social.
Mastodon is not a centrally controlled social media platform, rather it’s a network of federated servers that all communicate with one another. You plant your flag on one of them and you’ll have access to all of the users on all of the other federated servers. To some degree this reminds me of how the bulletin board system (BBS) network FidoNet has worked for decades.
But Mastodon has a few weak points. First, can their federated network scale at the volume of Twitter with hundreds of millions of users? That remains to be seen.
A big problem I see is that if your instance goes *poof* so do you. Migrating to a new instance without losing your identity requires the old one being available to release you to the new one according to this post. If your originating instance disappears one day it’s not clear if you have a way of importing your presence elsewhere without having to start over.
I’m also struggling with automating ingesting my content from elsewhere into Mastodon. For example I’m using Zapier to automatically post my YouTube content and blog posts to other platforms, but Mastodon doesn’t work with Zapier at the moment.
My advice for those looking to “cut the social cord” is to get a blog with an RSS feed. You can control it, own it, and because RSS is still largely the connective tissue of the modern internet it’s relatively easy to link it to other things.
It’s funny how we really solved this federation problem back in the early 2000’s with content management systems and RSS. It’s how podcasts work to this day. And yet we’re still trying to reinvent the wheel every time a centralized platform has a crisis. There is no need to reinvent the wheel IMHO – we just need to make it easier to get started and federate!
I once again joined Brian Shactman on WTIC AM radio to discuss my Twitter woes and the successful launch of Artemis 1. Listen here! I appear about 30 minutes into the broadcast.
Twitter has reinstated my account after it somehow determined that my video of the Artemis I launch was pornography. They also republished the post they took down back to my feed. You can see it here.
I’m not the only one this impacted. The BBC reports that an astronomer had the exact thing happen to her the other day. However in her case they shut down her account for 3 months, not the 12 hours they hit my account with.
Twitter has an appeal process but they don’t give the alleged violators a link to access those appeal tools. I only found out they existed when I googled it!
For what it’s worth Twitter says “it appears we made an error” and determined that my account committed “no violation.” So I’m now fully exonerated!
So early this morning I was here at the NASA press site covering the launch of Artemis I. Following the launch I uploaded this video to share the experience with followers on Twitter along with YouTube And Facebook.
Right when the video finished uploading my account was immediately suspended for violating Twitters “rules against posting or sharing privately produced/distributed intimate media of someone without their express consent.” Clearly their AI misinterpreted the scene and threw down the ban hammer immediately.
Twitter does have an appeals process that they don’t make clear unless you Google it. The communications from Twitter basically told me to chill out for 12 hours before I can gain access to my account. Other people can still see my account but I’m completely locked out of the service.
And oh yeah, I am a Twitter Blue subscriber. That $8 is not taking me very far today!
I should be back up by 2:30 p.m. eastern time today, November 16th. But if you’d like you can Tweet to @elonmusk , @twittersupport and ask them to restore the @lonseidman account!
My Twitter analytics continue moving upward without any real changes on my part beyond going to the Blue tier. This could be due to more overall activity on Twitter, but I suspect the gatekeeping disadvantaged smaller voices on the platform prior to Elon Musk taking the company private and extending the reach of blue check marks. Have a look:
My impressions (how often my tweets appeared in feeds) went up 83.9%, profile visits are up 57.1%, and mentions are up 51%. Over this same period I lost 44 followers – either they don’t like me anymore, left the platform, or were bots that were cleared out.
Perhaps I’m a glutton for punishment but I am once again heading down to Florida for the Artemis I launch. The next launch attempt will be at 1:04 a.m. on the 16th which means Tuesday night I’ll be camping out at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. How cool is that?
I was really disappointed my initial video from the Kennedy Space Center didn’t do all that well but perhaps a first person perspective with an actual launch in the piece will do better.
Since so many other outlets (including NASA’s own channel) will have much better close up views, my goal is to show you what it’s like to be there in person. I noted that a live stream I did with my phone showing people around the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center press site generated twice the views with far less effort! I will also present the launch without commentary.
Also coming up I have a review of Twitter’s Blue tier (I paid for it so you don’t have to) along with some balanced analysis of where I think Twitter is headed next. I’m also hoping to shoot a review of HP’s new ARM based Chromebook x360 (affiliate link) later this afternoon before I start packing up gear for my journey.
It looks like today is the day that Twitter rolled out blue check marks for anyone who pays for the $8 “Blue” tier of service. I got mine this afternoon.
There was some controversy earlier in the day as Twitter rolled out a two tier checkmark system that would give some people a white “official” checkmark to designate them as a VIP in addition to the blue one they paid for. But that was reversed by Musk later in the morning:
But it looks like Twitter is instead going to embed a description for why the checkmark is assigned to a user if you tap on it next to the username. So for example my check mark says that I’m verified because I’m paying.
But if I look at an official government account like @POTUS, it’ll indicate that “it’s notable in government, news, entertainment or another designated category.”
Is it worth paying $8 for just a checkmark? Definitely not. But I like the idea of treating every user equally insofar as how far their content gets pushed out by the algorithms. Twitter’s prior policies shut out smaller independent creators and put them at a disadvantage. The blue check marks could even choose to ignore non-blue check mark people further deepening their echo chamber.
If Musk is serious about leveling the playing field $8 a month to extend the reach of my content is fine by me – especially if my mainstream competitors are having to pay for it too.
But ultimately I hope they really work to improve the consumption experience for Blue subscribers. The edit button and extended video lengths are a nice bonus but I’d love to have a completely ad free experience and better tools for consuming and posting content.
Twitter is not the only social media platform I subscribe to. I get a lot of value out of YouTube Premium as it provides a completely ad-free experience along with the full YouTube Music library. And the channels I watch are compensated for every minute I watch.
I’m also paying for LinkedIn’s Premium tier that offers a lot of useful benefits and guess what? A gold badge too!
Stay tuned as I’ll be doing a video soon about the added features you get with the subscription now and what I’d like to see out of it in the future.
First, don’t forget to vote tomorrow (Tuesday, November 8) if you are in the United States! I found Vote411.org run by the non-partisan League of Women Voters to be an excellent resource for voting information.
This week we’re going to take a look at the new Apple TV, likely in two videos. I picked up the new one over the weekend and have already put it through its paces with Plex and general usability. You can watch me attempting to unbox it here. Spoiler alert – it’s not much different than the prior 4k models. I’ll be working on that device today.
Also this week will be a review of the new more expensive “iPad.” Apple used to call their entry level iPad just “iPad.” They still do that but they’re also selling the prior generation one at a lower price and still calling it “iPad.” I bet they’re sitting on a glut of excess inventory of that low-end device.
We’ll likely take a look at the new Roku smart home products that are really Wyze products in disguise. There are a few usability differences vs. the Wyze versions that we’ll cover once I get a few questions answered by the Roku folks. In the meantime you can see me unboxing them here.
I’m hoping to get caught up on reviewing a pile of laptops so look for a review of one of them too.
Finally I’m wrapping up two paid sponsorship projects, one for Mevo and the other for Synology. So you’ll probably see those videos this week or early next.
