Archives
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Niceday
Which it is, here in Southern Indiana. Was yesterday too. Spring! Getting strait A visual of marine traffic piling up on the two sides of the Strait of Hormuz. Also this story on transponder spoofing in Wired. Transponders are how one can see what ships are where, their routes, and other important facts for cooperative Continue reading
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Down and Running
I hit a storage crisis yesterday when I needed to copy a lot of fresh photos to my laptop’s hard drive, and it was clear that I would soon run out of room there. The laptop is a 16-inch 2023 M2 MacBook Pro with an 8TB hard drive—the most loaded and maxed-out computer I could Continue reading
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Our Chive
You start with a crater That’s how you make a town like this. Or, if you’re Canada, a reservoir. And exactly which one were you looking for? Anna’s Blog says Anna’s Archive has backed up Spotify’s entire music library: “This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique Continue reading
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Satur Daze
Nows [5 January update] For some reason, this set of posts I wrote last Saturday appeared on 20 November of last year. Dunno why. Anyway, right now I am in San Marino, California, where it is finally sunny and paradisal, after monsoons soaked the holidays. Tomorrow I’ll be back in Bloomington, Indiana, which (seriously) moved Continue reading
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Some Pix and a Few Words About IIW
I wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019, and have been involved with IIW since I helped start it in 2005. So, in an effort to help substantiate a future Wikipedia article on IIW, I wanted a list of all my Linux Journal contributions mentioning “IIW” and/or “Internet Identity Workshop.” (Never mind that my Continue reading
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Happy 79th Anniversary
Happy for my sister and me, who are both still alive and well. I’m also happy for the thirty-three years Eleanor and Allen made a life and a family together. They were great people, great parents, great teachers, great friends to many, and much more. Both are still missed. Some links: Their wedding Eleanor Searls Allen Continue reading
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A Cure for Corporate Addiction to Personal Data
I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update this anyway, here is a lightly edited copy of the original. Bear in mind that what you’ll read Continue reading
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Remembranes
Is there a word for failing to fail? Here's a Hmm: What if Flickr Fails? is getting a sudden burst of readers fourteen years after Flickr didn't fail. Also, according to my blog's stats, this post has had eleven reads. Cool is forever. Dig: New Livestream Brings Microfiche Digitization to Life for Democracy’s Library. Watch it happen live. Particulars: Continue reading
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Motherings
Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One: Aaaand,,,, Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here. I’m pointing to A look at broadcast history happening because it came up in a conversation about archives. Also because that history (especially concerning Continue reading
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Today’s Tabs
Overheard: "AI is bullshit's superpower." Big topic at IIW last week: What MCP’s Rise Really Shows: A Tale of Two Ecosystems. This may also relate: AI Agents x Law Initiative—A New Stanford and Industry Initiative Launched Yesterday. The best take on Adolescence I've seen so far. HT Dave Winer. My photos from Day One and Day Two Continue reading
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Coming Up: More History
But I'd orbit Saturn too, if I had the chance. Saturn has 128 more moons. I am a moon of my wife. And what will we call it? What becomes of democracy when it seems everybody has been herded into separate and opposed algorithmically assembled and maintained tribes, and when most of tech is run by Continue reading
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There They Go
Also, killing surveillance, finally, maybe. Kaliya lays out some good themes for IIW. My faves: S__olving the identities of AI agents and Proof of Personhood and First Person Credentials. Unsubscribe now and skip the 7-day free trial. Is there a term of art for Substack newsletters that hide half of what's written behind a tease-wall? (Maybe "teasewall" Continue reading
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A Christmas Gift to My Families
A few weeks ago, my sister Jan and I drove a cache of archival stuff from her garage in North Carolina to my office in Indiana. One plastic container was filled with boxes and carousels of slides nobody had seen for many decades. I also brought along my parents’ slide projector, and digitized each slide Continue reading
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Remembering Dewayne Hendricks
Thank Dewayne Hendricks for Wi-Fi. Hell, thank him for what Bob Frankston calls ambient connectivity: the kind you just … assume. Like you are now, connected to the Internet without wires. Dewayne wasn’t alone, of course. Far from it. But he was instrumental. I learned about that during the 3+ hour memorial zoom we had Continue reading
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Open-Source Journalism
Fourteenth in the News Commons series. The main work of journalism is producing stories. Questions following that statement might begin with prepositions: on what, of what, about what. But the preposition that matters most is with what. Ideally, that would be with facts. Of course, facts aren’t always available in the pure form that researchers call data. Continue reading
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The Future, Present, and Past of News
Eleventh in the News Commons series. all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in Ulysses News flows. It starts with what’s coming up, goes through what’s happening, and ends up as what’s kept—if it’s lucky. Facts take the same route. Continue reading
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Archiving a Way
My father, Allen H. Searls, was an archivist. Not a formal one, but good in the vernacular, at least when it came to one of the most consequential things he did in his life: helping build the George Washington Bridge. He did this by photographing his work and fellow workers. He shot with a Kodak Continue reading
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World Wide Whiteboard
Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this: The directory idea made sense because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a “location” or a “site,” containing something after the Continue reading