Category: Microposts
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
Icro looks like a great iOS app for micro.blog. I just started using it and it is very smooth and pleasant so far.
After years of tweeting/posting, retweeting/boosting, liking/faving, quoting, inserting GIFs/images/videos/songs, and other ways to express thoughts, ideas, opinions and states of humor, the by-design focused/limited functionality of micro.blog is both soothing and frustrating.
I’m so happy I was able to build my About me page in three languages, with a distinct card for each of them and hyperlinks that lead to each of the languages. My HTML knowledge is very, very, very basic. I really hope it’s user friendly, I tried to make it visually appealing since the plain text was too long otherwise.
I’d appreciate any feedback, beautiful people in the fediverse ☺️. Thanks.
#TenDaysTenFilmsTenFriends
Día 3
Una imagen cada día de una peli que te impactase, sin pósters ni explicaciones. Con un/a amigo/a invitado/a a hacer lo mismo.
@sergiojimenez@mastodon.social
🚀
> Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, published a letter on Tuesday describing an arduous transfer to his new penal colony in the Arctic, the first time his supporters had heard from him in three weeks. > > Mr. Navalny’s comments, posted on his social network accounts and written with a heavy dose of irony and humor, highlighted his good spirits and seemed intended to assuage concerns among allies who had grown anxious about his health and status since his sudden disappearance from the public eye on Dec. 5.
#eng
#TenDaysTenFilmsTenFriends
Día 2
Una imagen cada día de una peli que te impactase, sin pósters ni explicaciones. Con un/a amigo/a invitado/a a hacer lo mismo.
Big news from @manton at the Core Intuition podcast. New and definitive feature coming to micro.blog in January. He’s keeping it secret even from @danielpunkass. Not that he wants to overhype it, but I’m already overhyped 😉
Successfully followed a Bluesky account from micro.blog for iOS. Thank you, @manton
🚀
> In the 32 years since Justice Thomas came through the fire of his confirmation hearings and onto the Supreme Court, he has assembled an army of influential acolytes unlike any other — a network of like-minded former clerks who have not only rallied to his defense but carried his idiosyncratic brand of conservative legal thinking out into the nation’s law schools, top law firms, the judiciary and the highest reaches of government. > > The former clerks’ public defense of the justice was “unparalleled in the history of the court,” said Todd C. Peppers, a professor of public affairs at Roanoke College and the author of “Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk.” “It’s frankly astonishing.” > > An email sent by Virginia Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of the Supreme Court justice, to a listserv of former clerks. > > For Justice Thomas, the letter came at a time of both trial and triumph. He had become the face of long-simmering questions about the high court’s ethical guidelines. But he was also at the height of his influence. The court’s senior justice, he had spent years on the losing side of cases, writing minority opinions grounded in his strict originalist interpretations of the Constitution. Now that former President Donald J. Trump had given the court a conservative supermajority, Justice Thomas was a guiding voice for a new judicial mainstream. > > He was playing a long game, and his former clerks were among its most important players. The Thomases did not respond to requests for comment, but in a 2008 interview, the justice said, “I tell my law clerks that we’re not writing current events — we’re writing for a much longer period,” adding that his opinions were based on “principles that are locked down and that will be here when the tides turn” in 50 years. > > Now the tides have turned, and at least 18 of those former clerks have served as state, federal or military judges, nearly three-quarters of them appointed by Mr. Trump to federal courts, where they have ruled on issues like voting rights and access to the abortion pill. Roughly 10 more served in Mr. Trump’s administration; nearly a dozen made his Supreme Court short lists. Former Thomas clerks have argued, and won, several of the most momentous Supreme Court cases of recent years. > > The network also includes a number of “adopted clerks” who never worked for Justice Thomas but are invited to events and receive clerk communications. Among them are high-profile conservatives including Leonard Leo, the judicial kingmaker of the Federalist Society, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Alex Azar, a Trump cabinet secretary. > > Supreme Court clerks are, by definition, the sort of ambitious lawyers likely to wield significant influence in their post-clerk lives. What makes Justice Thomas’s clerks so remarkable, in large part, is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular ideology. Indeed, an examination of what the justice and his wife call Thomas Clerk World, based on interviews with people in and around it and a review of private emails and the Thomases’ public statements, shows how meticulously the couple have cultivated the clerk network over the decades. > > It is common for justices to maintain close ties with their clerks, but Stephen R. McAllister, a former clerk who served as the United States attorney for Kansas during the Trump administration, said Justice Thomas was “quite extraordinary in terms of keeping in touch with his clerks, helping clerks and having everyone be in touch with each other.” > > The Thomases have tended to their network through monthly lunches at Morton’s The Steakhouse or the Capital Grille in Washington, open to any alumni who happen to be in town. They have hosted clerks and their families at ski resorts and summer retreats, complete with inside jokes stenciled on T-shirts and swag bags with Thomas-themed challenge coins, stress balls and playing cards. The justice has encouraged camaraderie through group screenings of the film version of Ayn Rand’s manifesto of individualism “The Fountainhead” and pilgrimages to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. > > At the heart of the organizing is Mrs. Thomas — jokingly designated “law clerk emeritus” — who manages the network’s discourse as a sort of den mother. Hers has been a particularly active role for a Supreme Court spouse — overseeing production of a directory with a page for each clerk, as well as the email listserv and a private Facebook group. All of it, she has said, is meant to build “connective tissue across and throughout this amazing community of leaders.” > > Mrs. Thomas, whose right-wing political activism has included involvement in efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election defeat, has insisted that she and her husband operate in separate lanes. But some of her interactions with the clerk network show the degree to which theirs is, in fact, a shared ideological project. She cheered when Mr. Trump appointed members of the Thomas clerk roster as judges: “Thank God,” Mrs. Thomas told an interviewer, rattling off other appointments. “He used to tell them, ‘You’re going to be future leaders, it’s coming your way, you’re going to be next.’ And now they are.” Last year, she encouraged clerks to start an email thread in which participants shared articles celebrating the court’s decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. > > The network has found its own ways to celebrate Justice Thomas and his legacy. In 1998, one of the justice’s clerks hunted down and presented him with a memento from one of his first Supreme Court opinions: a mounted taxidermy lobster. > > When Justice Thomas speaks of his clerks, he tends to refer to them as his “kids.” As he put it in a talk a decade ago at Harvard Law School, “I really love my clerks.”
It’s scary. #legal
🚀
> This weekend I added limited support for following Bluesky users in Micro.blog. This isn’t federating with Bluesky yet. Instead, it uses a combination of Bluesky’s RSS feeds and the AT Protocol. > > To follow a Bluesky user who has an account username in the form username.bsky.social, just search for the username in Micro.blog. It doesn’t work for custom domain usernames in Bluesky, because Micro.blog will think you want to follow the user’s blog instead.
Even if it has some limitations, it’s great to know that there’s ever more bridges to connect different platforms. I have a few dear friends and interesting accounts in Bluesky that I’d rather follow from my place in micro.blog. Being able to interact with them will be awesome. #tech #eng
🔗 How to turn off click to reveal desktop in macOS Sonoma
> ## How to turn off macOS Sonoma’s click to reveal desktop > > 1. Open Settings > 2. Choose Desktop & Dock > 3. Scroll down to Desktop & Stage Manager > 4. Under click wallpaper to reveal desktop, click to change from Always to Only in Stage Manager #tech
🔗 European Commission: “Dear Mr and Ms Claus, We are …” - EU Voice
> Dear Mr and Ms Claus,
>
> We are happy to confirm that your gift delivery service meets our #DigitalEU and Data Protection rules:
> 
No record of personal data breaches
> Valid consent obtained via kids’ letters
> Naughty kids have the right to be forgotten
> Transparency and accountability remain the game’s rules
> Fair and open treatment of toy makers or parents as per #DMA
>
> We hope you enjoy a smooth and safe journey over our Single European Sky.
>
> The social media team 
#eng
This is very annoying, having the Threads favicon look like there’s some notification or update. When I go to see what’s up, there’s nothing new. It’s a fixed red dot. So bye, Threads, I won’t keep your tab in the background anymore.
After long consideration, I finally decided to stick to a micro.blog experience and migrated my last Mastodon account to my Activity Pub micro.blog user. I think I might miss boosts, likes and lists, among other Mona-like app’s goodies, but I’m committed to giving it a good shot. Micro.blog FTW.
I made a floating card on my home page, for a short presentation of the site, in three languages. It also shows my avatar. I wanted to put two more sections: one for a featured article, the second one for the most recent posts, but it didn’t work. I’m still happy with the result: umerez.eu
This is how the TheBetterTouch tool for ChatGPT rewrote the former text in a better English:
I created a floating card on my homepage to provide a brief overview of the site in three different languages. The card also displays my avatar. Although I tried to add two more sections, one for a featured article and the other for the most recent posts, I encountered difficulties in doing so. Nonetheless, I am still pleased with the overall outcome.
Opinion | Would Trump be a dictator? And can he be stopped? - The Washington Post
Robert Kagan in a harrowing article:
Yes, I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t. The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t. Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much more difficult, but they didn’t.
Throughout these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally, spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters. In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate, would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers? Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best, people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer the latter.
This essay is really scary. It might be spot on, though. It’s worth reading through it all and keeping a copy for future reference. What are we going to do in Europe with our own wannabe Trumps?
You can follow me on my Mastodon account @eumrz@esq.social or you can subscribe only to my blog @eumrz@umerez.eu #tech #eng