The Offline Report

Thursday, Jan 3, 2019 The first 1,000 are the most difficult:     seths.blog 1,000 little steps:     seths.blog Life without plastic: pioneer families show how it's done:     theguardian.com Monday, Dec 31, 2018 "The importance of a human touch stood out when respondents were asked where they think their security organization should focus its future efforts."    securityboulevard.com Chico State and local businesses take the Strawless Challenge:     theorion.com Sunday, Dec 30, 2018 🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A comment on Beastie Boys' Cookie Puss video : ...it was 1991's ruling on the Biz Markie case: Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.. It wasn't so much that (c) laws changed, but rather our laws were CLARIFIED to account for sampling. Prior (70's & 80's) the laws addressed licensing, yet this new 'sampling' was unclear. Many (c) owners looked the other way because litigation is expensive - however, by late 80s, hip-hop records w/ samples were beginning to sell and chart, thus, enter the lawsuit as damages won could pay for all the attorney fees... ---------------------- Further Reading: "The digital music revolution took off when artists started converting their records from analog to digital form to make use of this new innovation."    homerecordingpro.com/history-recorded-music This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

If you have kids, subscribe to the paper paper. Paper is technology ! Get your kids started with the gateway drug that is the comics. Next get them hooked on a favorite columnist. Then they can read the sports section, or business and or the arts and entertainment section. Next get them into reading the letters to the editor. From the letters to the editor move to the OpEds and editorials. In 1791, Madison wrote that newspapers were needed to counteract “passionate, ignorant and irrational men who had been led to hold ‘counterfeit’ opinions by persuasive men,” according to “These Truths,” Jill Lepore’s outstanding new history of the United States pic.twitter.com/IoSoDFXZX1 — Joseph Lichterman (@ylichterman) December 29, 2018 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Friday, Dec 29, 2018 Instead of taking action to reverse climate change, people are starting "Climate Grief" groups to talk about how sad it makes them.    nbcnews.com Friday, Dec 28, 2018 AT&T and Time Warner merger is still pending, after Justice Department appealed: "The DOJ and AT&T already made an agreement to keep Turner’s assets separate unit until Feb. 28, so as to limit impact should the government prevail. That still seems like a long shot, but in the twists and turns of this case, it can’t be ruled out."    variety.com From 2014, but only "discovered" this holiday season in a verbal conversation - a billboard which catches people texting and driving and streams it live.    gizmodo.com The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual h...

" 50 Years Later, the Iconic Apollo 8 Earthrise Photo Still Gives Us Chills " - gizmodo.com. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The Electronic Frontier Foundation penned a letter to Congress this month asking them *not to pass federal privacy laws* of a certain type. "We will oppose federal legislation that preempts stronger state laws" the foundation said. Among the individual state privacy laws that have already passed, are: The California Consumer Privacy Act , which provides consumers with the "right to know" what personal information a company has collected about them; the right to delete that information; the right to opt-out of the sale of that information ; and the right to receive equal service and pricing from a company. The law passed and will be effective in 2020. The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act , which allows consumers to decide for themselves whether it is in their best interest to share their biometric information with companies. The Vermont Data Broker Act , which protects consumers from the fraudulent collection of their data and from their data being u...

BUNKERWALL iPad Mount Clear Shower Curtain Liner - 17 Touch-sensative Pockets - Waterproof Tablet or Phone Holder - Thickest 8 Gauge EVA Material 72x72 Bathroom. Available at amazon.com here . How did Walgreen's stores miss this trend? They sold those singing fish years ago. This is the perfect gift for 2018. Oh but wait, one customer is disappointed : Very disappointed. At first I was super excited about this item. Watching the iPad in the shower kind of awesome. But first there was a tiny hole in the bottom of the cell phone pocket no big deal it was small it still worked. This morning I woke up to my iPad crashing into my bathtub because the iPad pocket gave out. Very disappointing and frustrating. For the multi-tasking professional - type that email WHILE you wash up. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The Daily Mail reports today " Generation lonely: 1 in 8 middle-aged people have never wed amid decline in marriage ." Fair enough. A lot of people don't get married. Then the subhead of the article said, "the change threatens to impose a greater burden on public services because people living on their own cannot rely on a partner to help them in need." You know what? A lot of single childless people will never rely on public services. Single childless people are often control freaks who never wanted to share their lives long enough to commit to a spouse. Furthermore, a lot of married people have a spouse who is worse than useless when they are "in need." "Destigmatize the unmarried and childless" is a campaign we need to embark on in 2019! This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The November issues of "Poets & Writers" magazine (offline only) features an eye-opening article on the "digital slushpile." Literary journal founder Ronald Spatz expanded the writer submissions to his publication by signing up for an online portal called "Submittable." Until that time, Spatz only collected submissions via snail mail. "But as Spatz's experiment illustrates, by simplifying the submission process, online portals are also helping to push slush piles to unprecedented heights, resulting in staffing shortages, delayed response times, and vanishingly low acceptance rates for submitted work at many journals." Spatz said there were so many submissions through his journal's membership with Submittable "I had to shut it down." He said it was unethical to not respond to each submission in a timely manner. Spatz is back to accepting submissions only via snail mail. Also in this article is more evidence of GenZ or i...

Friday Dec 21, 2018 Bakersfield's 'Soul Chance' Goes Analog to Capture Reggae Sound    kqed.org Thursday Dec 20, 2018 A lot of this can be traced to Newt Gringrich’s destruction of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in 1995. He does not get enough opprobrium for that. — Ellen McDermott (@HeyNell) December 20, 2018 Tuesday Dec 18, 2018 Huge barrier isn't trapping plastic waste in Pacific Ocean:     abcnews.com "But when we communicate via email, text or social media, all of those unspoken signals are impoverished."    tonyrobbins.com Sunday Dec 16, 2018 In China, where censors are known to take a heavy hand, several artworks that look closely at technological breakthroughs have been deemed taboo by local cultural officials.    nytimes.com 🔗🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Here's a news story from Dec. 13th this reader only discovered in the paper edition. The SF Chronicle home page is lovely, but it's difficult to discern which stories are from today's paper, yesterday's paper, or last month's paper. In the paper edition AND the e-edition, however, the reader can flip through that day's edition and scan headlines of every story in every section. The story titled " 911 call logs reveal terrifying moments at onset of Camp Fire " covers both which residents received evacuation calls from regional authorities, and which residents placed calls. Particularly heart-breaking is the story of one 11-year-old who called 9-1-1 and remains unaccounted for. "Hundreds of calls rolled in throughout the day" the story says. "In Magalia, an 11-year-old child had stayed home from school, and her parents couldn’t get home to get her out." Evacuation call procedures, and their failures, have been covered by othe...

Thursday Dec 13, 2018 "It's too traumatizing to be around trees" a Butte-country fire victim, who hopes to move to the Arizona desert, told a reporter.    nytimes.com We on the #AdobeDesignTeam have been revamping our job descriptions and to that end, we've been playing around with @textio . Some of its suggestions are useful, but some are very, very bad. — Andy Welfle ✏️👨🏻‍💻 (@awelfle) December 12, 2018 Tuesday Dec 11, 2018 “'I’m embarrassed to tell you that I never thought of it — it never entered my mind' that the word processor might endanger women’s jobs, Ms. Berezin said in an interview for this obituary in 2017."    nytimes.com Uber allegedly ignored warnings before a driverless car struck and killed a woman in Arizona last year "a few days before Miller sent the message an Uber prototype swerved completely off the road and onto the sidewalk, where it continued to drive."    engadget.com This site "CS Unplu...

In the last decade digital technology has pushed analog off the cliff, and we're still tying up the loose ends from the severed analog connections. People over a certain age (40) remember analog telephones never needed a battery or any kind of power adapter. Among the half of households still using landlines these days, few of them realize their home lines won't work when the power is out, regardless of what kind of phone they have, because the underlying analog telephone networks have been replaced with digital networks . In 2018 KQED combed through 9-1-1 logs to identify some evacuation communications failures from 2017's fires , many of which have been fixed since their report. The L.A. Times this week reported more communications and alert failures in this article: Camp fire evacuations failed to reach more than a third of residents meant to receive calls . The L.A. Times also reported more state legislature calls to action toward closing the feedback loop in this ar...

A 60 Minutes segment called In the Path of Fire that ran just last year in May 2017, but many wildfires ago, described and showed the enormous difference fire-proofing a home can make. Just clearing a home's perimeter of debris goes a long way, as does installing ember-proof vents. Circled in the photo above is the unscathed California home of retired firefighter Fred Roach. Fred Roach: This house here was prepared. And did not need ... the air tanker full of retardant ... or the helicopter full of water ... or all the engines to protect it. It, it was, it protects itself. Voiceover: Fred Roach thought about fire when improving his home. And says anyone can do what he did. FR: The house was stuccoed about five years ago. And we stuccoed everything under the eaves, the entire thing. Steve Inskeep: Stucco's basically fireproof? FR: Uh basically. Close to it. And then we took all the redwood decking off the deck and replaced it with synthetic. SI: Which doesn't...

Dec 2: MAGALIA, Butte County -- Jaki Snead’s Hilltop Cafe survived the Camp Fire. But she has no customers:     sfchronicle.com Nov 25: "The blaze, which ignited Nov. 8 in Butte County, has burned 152,336 acres and is 98 percent contained.    sfchronicle.com Nov 25: How wildfires are making some California homes uninsurable:     sfchronicle.com Nov 23: Chico -- "Thanksgiving mix of gratitude, grief" by Lizzie Johnston. Celebrity chefs including Guy Fieri basted more than 7,000 pounds of turkey for fire survivors.    sfchronicle.com Nov 23: Netflix's "13 Reasons Why" season 3 filming in Vallejo, along with 30 shows filmed in Southern California was halted by wildfire smoke. "Location managers are used to natural disasters in California, but the scale of the recent fires and their effect on production is unprecedented, according to industry veterans."   sfchronicle via latimes . Nov 23: OpEd says sprawl ca...

Carole Masson, 68, one who successfully evacuated the Paradise, CA, town recently leveled by wildfire, told the SFWeekly that landlines in the area have been converted from analog to digital. A Harvard Business Review in 2014 reported the FCC was coordinating the replacement of analog telephone networks with digital ones . Analog phone networks worked when the power was out. Apparently digital phone networks don't: The main problem with the Camp Fire, she says, is that PG&E warned people they were going to turn off the power in the days leading up to it. When it did go out, it was because the fire blew out the transformers and knocked down power lines, but many residents thought it was simply their energy company taking precautions. As landlines are digital now, the minute the power goes down so do the house phones, destroying communication for those who don’t own cell phones. “We need either some kind of a landline system with remotes in people’s houses, because if they d...

Over a year after the Google "Pixel" smartphone's do not disturb mode was announced in Oct 2017 , the company today ran an ad for the smartphone's feature during the Sunday CBS morning show broadcast. The Pixel phone's mode activates two ways: 1) passive activation, when the phone detects its owner is driving, and 2) intentional activation, when the smartphone's owner wants to spend quality time with work or family. (We will post the ad when we can track it down on the open web.) This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Saturday Dec 8, 2018 Feds making it harder to launder cash through Bay Area homes:     sfchronicle.com Tech's invasion of our privacy made us more paranoid in 2018:     cnet.com "One thing is all but assured: For the first time since Cal’s student station paid $1 to briefly step in to broadcast A’s games in 1978, Oakland is unlikely to receive any money for the rights to air the games."    sfchronicle.com Friday Dec 7, 2018 Many homeowners rebuilding in Santa Rosa after last year's fires are choosing more fire-proof materials, but surprisingly governments not requiring them to.    npr.org Monday Dec 3, 2018 A police officer grew disillusioned with his job that became too much about "stats, guns, arrests" and not enough about "people, families, emotions" resigned and told his story.    medium.com "U.S. taxpayers have spent billions of dollars subsidizing chemically treated refined coal, but a Reuters...