This is by way of a whinge, and the solution is at least straightforward. Learn how to do what you want to be able to do, dummy.

For a good long while, I've been feeling seriously underpowered when it comes to being able to do what I want to do online. I can't really date the start of it, I just know that I am no longer able to scratch my itches as once I was. That irks me. I know there are professionals and, even more valuably, amateurs who will scratch itches very similar to mine. But they're not my itches, and I'm not scratching them.

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Tom Lehrer, in the introduction to one of his songs, possibly National Brotherhood Week, complains that the only thing worse than people who say they can't communicate is that they won't shut up about it. The other side of that coin is that people who claim to be ace communicators make themselves hostages to fortune.

When I saw this little gem in my reader, I though, nah, it must be an error in the feed.

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Amazon Web Services has been my main depot for storing and serving online information. It is where all my podcasts live and where, for a long time, my offsite backups lived too.

Back in March last year I upgraded my DropBox plan to give me 1TB of storage. It was just a lot easier than juggling sev...

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Yesterday brought a tweet with an interesting angle on a scientific development. Accompanied by a herd of stockphoto cows, John Blue of Truffle Media tweeted

"CRISPR-Cas9 used to create genetically Tuberculosis-resistant cows could be 1st #antibiotic free livestock"

Killjoy that I am, I r...

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For a while now I've been concerned about owning my own data, in the spirit of IndieWeb. In June 2015 I started an experiment in the indieweb using a CMS called Known, and bits of that worked well enough. Trouble is, I actually have almost no control over the details of the CMS, which has meant that whenever I come across a little problem that might be within my capacity to solve, I generally can't even try. This frustration has finally reached the point where I'm prepared to do something about it, like host my own copy of Known rather than rely on Indiehosters.

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