X

Tag: digital breadcrumbs

#45 August & September 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

Even though Facebook tried to brand its way out of its trouble: Meta is being sued for allegedly creating a tool for US hospitals which disclosed private patient information back to Facebook or Meta having to pay walkie-talkie app $174 million for infringing on its patents or Meta facing a new class action lawsuit that accuses it of tracking and collecting the personal data of iPhone users, despite features and policies made by Apple which are meant to stop that same type of tracking.

10 reasons why Brexit has been a pile of wank for the UK.

Why you should be worried about Amazon’s ‘surveillance purchase’ in buying Roomba.

How Tesla is also getting in on the ‘surveillance’ market when you own one of their cars.

Here’s the UN (two years ago) calling NZ’s housing conditions a “human rights crisis” (total agree, it’s a disgrace here and none of the local / national politicians do anything about it).

A tough read from a psychologist in the field who pulls apart their profession and their approaches.

Why a broken heart is the same as clinical pain.

How 100,000gk was removed from the great Pacific Garbage Patch “comparable to the size of Luxembourg or Rhode Island.”

About those doofuses who enabled Bitcoin to have a climate impact greater than gold mining.

WATCH

EXPLORE

This House Does Not Exist, an AI powered website that generates a beautiful new house every time which is not real.

Some rail announcements in Scotland plus some ambient tunes.

52 places you can visit and be part of the solution.

Vector Express to convert your vector files for free.

Palette, a vibrant AI colorizer (free online) app.

Nightdrive, trust me.

Image credit: A Small Fiction.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#44 July 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

What happens when someone looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects.

Amazing new apartment building in Amsterdam is new housing for wildlife, not just humans (easy to mandate for courageous councils / governments) plus Toronto has booted the silly data-grabbing Sidewalks Labs city concept to the curb for a more human-centred approach (tip: it’s not ‘smart’ to suck up peoples data and make money from it without them knowing or having the ability to opt out no matter what context).

Beta (ex-BookFace) is on the offensive again quoting studies to back it’s claims it doesn’t / didn’t have a negative effect on democracy although some journalists are having none of it.

Wonderfully presented and written piece about the rise of AI Created Fiction.

Great decision by Minecraft to not allow NFTs on its gaming platform.

There’s this “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): Beyond the Hype” white paper from the World Economic Forum (check out the strengths / weaknesses table as it’s a great summariser).

Why climate damage caused by growing space tourism needs urgent mitigation.

Earlier this year, NASA announced the discovery of the most Earth-sized planets (SEVEN) found in the habitable zone of a single star, called TRAPPIST-1.

WATCH

EXPLORE

Pixabay’s audio section for thousands of music and audio tracks, free for commercial and non-commercial use.

iColor Palette generates a color palette / swatches from image or image url.

Turn audio into amazing videos Astrofox.

All the ships in the sea.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#43 June 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

The Remarkables / Kawarau (from this weeks trip)

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

Did you know it takes ‘11,000 litres of water to make one litre of milk‘ in NZ and how it’s just not sustainable.

Read and listen to Yma o Hyd (the defiant Welsh folk song that’s been 1,600 years in the making).

Sheryl Sandberg has retired from BookFace (now meatr), what an awful legacy she has to take with her (like this: they banned accounts promoting disinformation, spam, or propaganda—and kept the money it made from ads).

The crypto industry is spending more on lobbying than the entire United States defense sector combined, don’t get involved in this corrupt space (if you do just be a watcher of the “hollow abstractions” from crypto advocates).

A cybersecurity researchers’ take on how Web3, NFTs, and cryptocurrency are dangerous to society and the planet.

In the USA, the federal government buys our cell phone location data, this is how.

In the UK here’s an overview of what’s happened in the six years since Brexit (spoiler: all bad).

An interesting take on the ‘pandemic’s social death‘ as it’s all become a little too quiet (as all the numbers keep climbing).

WATCH

EXPLORE

Open Source Alternative to… are 300+ popular open source alternatives to your proprietary software.

Switching to Firefox as they recently rolled out ‘Total Cookie Protection’ by default to all users worldwide.

Go full screen (trust me) and spend time with the top 100 Hubble images.

The economic state of every OECD country (here’s Aotearoa / New Zealand).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#42 May 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

The MIT Review exploring how cryptomining is affecting this New York Town (it’s not good all thanks to the greedy, vacuous pyramid scheme).

They just keep finding new ways to be utterly evil, Facebook held ‘the Facebook pages of Australian hospitals, charities, and emergency services hostage as leverage amid discussions with the country’s government regarding contentious reform proposals last year’, read ans shudder but also realise there are better ways to keep in touch / connected with people.

A report on how some videoconferencing apps may listen even when mic is off.

Really simple breakdown of the 6 principles to form healthy habits.

Interview with senior staff researcher and lecturer in computer science at UC-Berkeley, who’s been studying cryptocurrency for years, Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” (video of lecture below from same chap is well worth your time).

WATCH

EXPLORE

A massive curated checklist of tips to protect your digital security and privacy.

bloouikit.com is an all in one open source wireframe kit for quick design and prototyping your idea, free for commercial and personal use under CC0 License.

pixabay.com has over 2.6 million+ high quality stock images, videos and music for your creative projects (under CC licenses).

Find purposeful work & community around the Sustainable Development Goals via sdg.careers.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#41 April 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

This plain English argument against crypto you can share on to friends / family / colleagues.

‘Blockchain is Dangerous Nonsense,’ great summary of the issues by a computer studies student and then there’s this deconstruction of the argument against putting medical records on the blockchain.

Some scary first-hand insights from folk who worked at Facebook about how they don’t know what happens to the data it collects on its users.

Wikipedia community has decided to stop taking crypto donations due to environmental concerns which makes total sense.

A long read on how “social media has dissolved the mortar of our society & made America stupid” (found it hard to disagree and I used to make my living getting folks on to it all).

The recent news that there will be a return of the Auckland-Wellington Northern Explorer train shows how backwards the transport policy has been in these islands.

First Minister of Wales calls for the resignation of the Prime Minister of the UK, obviously.

For a hearing impaired human like me this is AMAZING: MIT Scientists Develop New Regenerative Drug That Reverses Hearing Loss!

WATCH

EXPLORE

Try magiceraser.io to remove unwanted things from images in seconds.

Over 1950 free and open source icons for web design via tabler-icons.io.

An array of free converter tools for PDF, Video, Images etc via tinywow.com.

If you use a Mac check out clipy-app.com, an open source clipboard management app.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#40 March 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Several things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

This annotated critique of a cryptocurrency piece in the New York Times by fifteen researchers.

An overview of the current state of the NFT & Metaverse space (it’s on a serious wane).

A technical look at how Web3 is not centralised and the shortfalls of it all.

Another two articles about how countrywide adoption of cryptocurrencies in El Salvador & Kazakhstan has failed (not to mention the incredible amount of ewaste & carbon emissions created by the ventures).

A court ruled that Sussan Ley (environment minister for Australia) does not have duty of care to protect young from climate crisis.

Another stark piece covering ice shelf collapse in Antarctica related to climate change.

Inside Finland’s plan to end all waste by 2050 through education.

If you use LinkedIn you probably have noticed how bad the content is nowadays and how you never see stuff from those directly in your network⁠—check out this illustration of me scrolling for over a minute and not seeing anything from those in my network, then this post where you can show your support for change.

WATCH

EXPLORE

A short audio piece from Radio 4 on Getting Better Acquainted with Words (featuring Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Charles Bukowski).

Another amazing BBCRadio4 piece this time on “Welsh Identities.”

Use for free, Spoke, a way to create 3D social scenes for Hubs, where you can meet, share and collaborate together in private 3D virtual spaces.

A BUMPER a list of free software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own server(s).

There’s Quodb if you’re ever struggling to find a quote from that movie you like OR find out where a specific quote came from.

A list of pricing psychology techniques.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit.
Published

#39 March 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Several things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

READ

March 1st is St Davids Day / Dydd Gwyl Dewi, did you celebrate in an appropriate way?

Just 15 companies are responsible for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand (and there’s no strategy to tackle this).

The boss of games platform Steam explains why NFTs are banned.

Got any little humans? Check out this child-friendly explainer on the Ukraine / Russia situation.

Read about Facebook’s African digital sweatshops.

A write-up on a NFT event here in New Zealand.

If you use Tik Tok you might want to read this.

‘Life would be very good without’ is the response from leaders in Europe when parent company of Instagram and Facebook threatened to shut down it’s operation in said continent.

WATCH

https://youtu.be/Qnxykf88sTk

EXPLORE

Play around with some happy, jumpy birds.

Driving around cities in the world whilst listening to local radio stations.

I Love PDF is where you can ‘merge, split, compress, convert, rotate, unlock and watermark PDFs with just a few clicks.’

An analysis and visualization tool to help readers better understand space situational awareness (SSA) data, with a focus on particularly interesting on-orbit activities, Satellite Dashboard.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#38 February 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Trawl through this cyber-assortments.

READ

How there’s a new stackable artificial leaf uses less power than lightbulb to capture 100x more carbon than other systems.

That Facebook & partners stole over $9 million from users across the Global South they preyed on specifically because they are low income (but don’t worry as you only use to stay in touch with friends and family, oh and how it’s parent company Meta might be broken up very soon).

You probably been reading about this metaverse thingy – read this: “I can’t help but wonder if these giant companies are so intent on selling us & the markets on the idea of a virtual future in order to distract us all from what they are doing to the real one.“

There’s also a salient deconstruction on how bad NFT’s are (why Mozilla has recently stopped using crypto plus some graphs on how bad the energy consumption bitcoins are).

How to claim your settlement from Zoom from it’s previous illegal data privacy operations (why I don’t use it and why others don’t plus why you shouldn’t).

There’s scientists who have made a new COVID19 vaccine and it’s patent free (which it should’ve been in the first place).

About HopePunk, an antidote we all need right now.

WATCH

EXPLORE

Iconoir, one of the biggest open source libraries (no premium icons, no email sign-up, no newsletters).

Template Maker: download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free

Did you celebrate ‘Dydd Santes Dwynwen‘ (the Welsh version of Valentines Day).

FakeYou: Deep Fake platform to say stuff by your favorite characters.

Nitter: a great way to grab an RSS feed from a tweetmailer.

10 design principles which could save the world.

Looptap is fun although a tad addictive.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#37 January 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Starting the year offering up a buffet of things I tweeted last month.

READ

A deconstruction of the negative things around the whole Web3 discourse.

My end-of-year-write-up on producing a unique, beautiful and independent video podcast.

Great piece about how most successful tech investments are not from the over-hyped ‘unicorns.’

WATCH

EXPLORE

These LEGO inspired home products.

A chilled web experience of walking in different cities whilst listening to local radio (which you can turn off if you wish).

THX Deep Note is good for waking up kids, scaring the birds / cats & for general awesome creative things.

Create random AI art from words and styles.

Townscaper is a procedural town building online toy.

Image credit: Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#36 December 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Spend some time rambling through these digital assortments which I tweeted this month.

READ

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin.“

“We see crypto as a mob of misguided fools repeating the ecological disaster of Easter Island on a global scale for the sole purpose of selling man-child themed Neopets.“

Ethical beauty brand co-founder shows courage by quitting Facebook which potentially means losing £10m.

Damn, investor calls for criminal charges and prison for Facebook execs.

Exploring the scary evidence which suggests social media is causing real damage to adolescents (especially teen girls).

A proposal in Scotland to ensure all new homes to be built to Passivhaus standard.

Satellites discover huge amounts of undeclared methane emissions.

Just 15 companies are responsible for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand.

UN announces plan to adopt Welsh approach on Future Generations legislation.

WATCH

EXPLORE

This website which presents a new icebreaker question every time you refresh.

Only works as a Chrome plugin but this online app helps you save time by automating repetitive tasks in your own browser or in the cloud.

A wonderful online tool where what you write triggers accompanying art.

DevTunesFM includes 18 stations and around 8k tracks to play in the background whilst you’re working.

Chosic is a fantastic resource to find royalty free music for your creative projects.

Excalidraw is a collaborative whiteboard / diagram maker which is fricking ace.

Unmodified complete collection of Mac Wallpapers (although will work on other laptops).

OUIGO Lets Play is a great online pinball game.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published