Category Archives: Web

Two examples of why the CDC is the Keystone Kops of disease control

I want to give two examples, one medical and one technological, of the kind of buffoonery that the CDC is engaging in that continues to make them untrustworthy as a disease-control organization. Medical buffoonery Here are some things that COVID-19 research and recently collected epidemiological data are telling us at the moment: Here is what… Read More »

How to protect your anonymity online when the services you use could be breached

Twitter is in the news again with another security breach in which 235 million users’ email addresses, phone numbers, and Twitter handles were exposed. These seems like a good opportunity to talk about what you can / should do to protect yourself if you need to maintain anonymity online. The basic rule is this: if… Read More »

Your data is yours: backing up your Mastodon data to protect against server failures and account suspensions

Long-time readers of my blog will know that I am obsessed with backups and with keeping control over data that belongs to me. For example, in additional to a comprehensive backup system I built myself, I have an archive of (legally obtained) music files and movies because I don’t trust any of the cloud music… Read More »

“Archiving Your Tweets at Archive.Org” for Dummies

I’m all done with Twitter, but I also didn’t want to just delete my account and remove over a decade of content that I created from the internet. I’m not so arrogant as to believe that anyone’s ever going to want to look at my tweets again, but (a) maybe I will want to link… Read More »

Recent addition and changes in the comics aggregator

Several comics have been added, changed, and removed recently in my comics aggregator. Here’s a round-up: Also, I’ve fixed the aggregator so that if a comic is removed in the future, the link you’ve saved to your comics in the aggregator will keep working and just display a warning about the missing comic that’s in… Read More »

Why I’ve removed “Pearls Before Swine” from my comics aggregator

Today, I removed the comic strip “Pearls Before Swine” by Stephan Pastis from my comics aggregator. Here’s why… Over the years, Pastis has run many strips whose basic theme can be summarized as “Both sides in American politics are the same.” He ran one like that just a few weeks ago. Then, yesterday, he ran… Read More »