John Gruber commenting on the Techcrunch 'Instagram caught selling ads to follower buying services' report.

At the time Facebook acquired Instagram, Instagram was by far the nicest social media experience I’d seen. It is now quickly descending into a cesspool of crap — bad design, bad experience, way too many ads, and a haven for scammers. I fully expected Facebook to Facebook-ify Instagram, but it’s sad watching it happen.

While I'm not on Instagram myself, my wife is, and I do hear her complain almost daily about it. I'm not sure if she's more annoyed with the ads or the algorithmic timeline? Last night she went to show me a photo our nephew posted only to somehow lose the picture? Instagram had literally reshuffled her timeline in the space of a click back. Madness.

The morning fog clears soon after.

A nice surprise to learn this made Flickr's Explore for today.

First package delivered to an Amazon Locker near our house. Was cheaper and delivered faster than regular shipping. With no risk of porch pirates. To a place we drive by to get home. And in other news, I have new headphones.

Going to make a conscious effort to actually read in 2019. I've even found the kindle and everything.

Because you can never have too many "it's cold here" posts.

Into the desert 2018.

It's 37° out today and raining. Just north of here it's snowing.

Andre Torrez wrote a blog post about creating a feeds.txt.

My friend Adam Mathes posted an idea called 'feeds.txt' back in August where he decided to publish his current subscriptions to a human readable text file.

Intrigued by the idea I was inspired to write my own generator. It runs nightly in cron and generates both a feeds.txt and a feeds.html file.

Turns out I still have a lot of cruft in my subscription list that I should clear out. Lots of blogs have disappeared into the ether. Shame that.

Good.

Over the years I've had an on and off relationship with Muse. The Black Holes And Revelations album from 2006 is great, Map Of the Problematique one of my favorite songs of all time. Their albums following that had a couple of songs I liked, but as a whole they were all a bit lackluster. So when I heard they had a new album out it was a bit like hearing U2 had a new album. You know, mildly interested for nostalgia value, but in no hurry to actually listen to it. This week I decided to give it a whirl.

First a little note. About 18 months ago I wrote about how I'd discovered the music genre known as retro electro or synthwave. Kids making albums that sound like soundtracks to 80s movies & TV shows. Since then I've become fully enamored by all those bands and they're on high rotation in my headphones.

So yeah Simulation Theory. The first thing I noticed was the album cover. It's is almost an exact copy of everything in the retro electro genre. I wondered if that was a teaser for what was to come. It was. It seems Muse have also listened to a lot of those same bands I have in the last year.

And that's not a bad thing at all. I'm only on my second listen through but I'm really liking it so far. Seems like a welcome return to form.

Actual rain in the desert. Not much, but every little helps.