You may have noticed cubicgarden.com has gone through a bit of change since I left BBC R&D. After setting up a Cubicgarden ltd, I quickly made some changes. One of them, is a quick page before you see this blog.
However I have finally got my Yunohost setup working thanks in a small part to Gemini, which filtered my queries down to something more understandable (It was a combination of a Yunohost bug which was fixed in the latest update, SD cards wear and reinstalling and DNS problems)
However, I now have moved things around to different domains.
We now have…
Cubicgarden.com = My personal blog Cubicgarden.uk = My business site – Needs work Cubicgarden.info = My mixgarden/Dj site – Still need to upload my many mixes, anyone know how to add the ability to subscribe and copy a channel with yunohost peertube? Datingmanifesto.cc = The online dating manifesto – Still needs work and I need to move from Github to Codeberg too.
Over the last few years things have slowed down when it comes to blogging on my own site. Don’t worry I’m not stopping as its been over 20 years of blogging but life has caught up with my limited spare time.
My task list is pretty huge and although I have lots I want to write about including getting the replace for my old Oura ring in a plastic bag, some of the micropayments changes and my thoughts on AI partners in regards to loneliness and isolation. I just don’t seem to have time.
The biggest draw on my time right now is writing my dating book, which is in its later stages of drafts. Right now I’m running through at least 1000 changes with grammarly. Although its very tempting to just accept all, it would ruining all the work which has been done. Plus its restructuring of some of the sentences are just plain wrong within the contexts of whats being said. Its a slow slog through all the suggestions but means I’m not blogging as much and heck not even doing many mixes right now.
Ah, SEO link spam e-mails. If you have a blog that’s been online longer than, say, three years, you know what I’m talking about:
Hey,
I read your article at <link-to-a-blogpost-of-mine> talking about <actually-not-the-topic-of-the-blogpost>. I think your readers would benefit from a link to <link-to-an-irrelevant-or-trivial-piece>.
Would you consider linking to our article?
For a long time I just ignored these, flagging as spam and moving on. Obviously I am not going to link to some marketing crap that’s there only to drive up SEO of some random site.
But then that one spammer showed up in my mailbox, and he was persistent. Several e-mails and follow-ups within a month. I decided I needed a better strategy.
To be fair Rysiek does lead with a large disclaimer but I do like the crowd sourced proposed strategy.
In short, offer a counter offer which makes up for the time of posting a post with their link using rel="sponsored nofollow" surrounded in a blog post pretty much tearing down the linked content.
I’m tempted to do this by creating a page on this blog and listing them as requested but with a clear sign saying they paid a lot of money for the crappy placement. Not exactly what they wanted but I’ll be upfront about it all. An alternative was to back date a blog post, so it would be on the blog but never appear on the aggregated page/rss unless you were searching for it.
As Rysiek says, its more about getting rid of the endless requests for placement on this blog. Its kinda clear get lost and beats marking all those emails as spam.
For many years I have written about the problems at Islington Wharf. Part of the reason for writing about these flats is to force some change in my way, while others try other things. A lot of people don’t like its all out there for all to read but franklyits been out there for over a decade. The most important thing is to get the latent defects fixed to the comfort of all the people like myself who bought or are renting. Its been way too long!
Waterside places came to the Islington Wharf committee with a proposal after the last one with Laing O’Rourke which was awful didn’t pass. It took some time but after the meeting in April, we were all ecstatic. The next day a email was to everybody
In short all the work which was planned with Laing O’Rourke would go ahead but with Morgan Sindall Construction. They will not use the garden as their workers yard instead use part of the old central retail park and phase 4 space, which is next door. They will do all the latent defect work in 18months instead of 2 years and the best part is they are going to replace all the glass, not stick a film to the outside. The cost of this all to the residents? Zero! Yes no cost. Lets be frank Islington Wharf has a ton of glass, so this is no cheap operation but was always needed. It would likely be easier if done years ago because now phase 2 & 3 makes access much more tricky.
Imagine replacing all that glass
Now you can see why we were ecstatic! This is a massive win and I find myself very fortune I am in the position where this is a option when so many flat owners are having to pay to replace their cladding.
The next part is to get agreement from all the flat owners they will allow access. As you can imagine with support from the committee and mailshots, emails, fb, etc. We have pretty much everybody in agreement. Although some haven’t replied back, likely forcing Waterside places to consider legal action to gain access.
28c while working away with two fans and window wide open
This is most likely the last summer of heat (hopefully), which would be great as I’m experiencing 28c heat while working at home and its 24c outside.
Once things get going, I’ll start updating the older blogs as I do get the occasional press attention, which was the point of writing.
Update (Monday 14th June)
I was prompted to wrote this blog just after being interviewed by the Times journalist Emanuele. I had meant to write it for a long while but being interviewed pushed me to do, mainly to set the record straight and give a fair update of where we are now. I see the article went live in the Sunday Times thanks to a friend’s mum.
It's #NotJustCladding that affects millions of new build home owners across the country, it's excessive heat and the consequences that stem from decades of shoddy & cheap building work.
— End Our Cladding Scandal (@EOCS_Official) June 13, 2021
Although not quite what I said, its mainly there and glad the last part was included about the developer (Waterside places) agreeing to fix the latent defects.
Airbnb’s rules allow cameras outdoors and in living rooms and common areas, but never in bathrooms or anywhere guests plan to sleep, including rooms with foldout beds. Starting in early 2018, Airbnb added another layer of disclosure: If hosts indicate they have cameras anywhere on their property, guests receive a pop-up informing them where the cameras are located and where they are aimed. To book the property, the guests must click “agree,” indicating that they’re aware of the cameras and consent to being filmed.
I do find it really interesting because Airbnb class listening devices such as Amazon Alexa as cameras too. I did think this would be very difficult to police. The transparency is welcomed, as before you had to search pictures for anything which looked suspicious.
In January, Bigham discovered cameras in his rental that he says were never disclosed. After he reached out to the Trust & Safety team, representatives told him he and his family had in fact consented to the cameras because they were visibly displayed in photos on the listing. After Bigham’s blog post on the ordeal went viral, Airbnb apologized and refunded his money.
But Bigham says customer-service representatives for Airbnb twice sided against him before reversing their original decision, and only after his blog post was widely shared online.
“No one really seems to know what they’re doing,” Bigham said in an email. “And it seems like it’s only going to get worse.”
In a statement, Airbnb said: “We have apologized to Mr. Bigham and fully refunded him for his stay. We require hosts to clearly disclose any security cameras in writing on their listings and we have strict standards governing surveillance devices in listings. This host has been removed from our community.”
As usual the public stink causes Airbnb to actually do something. I wonder how many complaints get shoved under the carpet?
Since I wrote the blog last year, a lot has happened. Someone in the social media team picked up on this blog post and got in touch with the owner. The owner (Marie) then got in touch with me and we met one morning in the Home Sweet Home at the great northern. We talked through things and she explained the Northern Quarter kitchen is a lot smaller, the chief may not have felt comfortable with cooking for me; but none of that was an excuse for being turned away. Especially since I was happy to take the risk after everything was explained to me by the manager on the day.
She brought along the current allergy menu (as things change every few months) and I went through it with her and a couple chief’s (I wasn’t quite sure if one of them was from each restaurant or not) to see what I could and couldn’t have. After the exchange, I dashed off to work with a copy of the allergy menu. We then kept in touch over email and we double checked different foods for allergies. I was very confident about what would be fine.
I had always planned to revisit home sweet home after our exchange but with the winter holidays, etc, didn’t quite make it. I also got into the habit of making a big salad from bits from the supermarket on the way to werewolf at Madlab. However this month I arrived back from Liverpool early and decided I’ll finally test Home sweet home again.
This time I was shown to a single table and I asked for the allergy menu. I was asked about my allergies and I produced the allergy card. This was passed on to the manager who took my order and warned me about cross contamination. I said it was fine and she went away. She came back pretty soon afterwards and told me the beans are obviously a problem but what would I like instead? I laughed I would love halloumi instead, she said not a problem and went away.
It took a while, which is fine as I had time on my side. The Wifi was a little bit of a pain as I had to register for it. But generally I sat and drank my cocktail. Then the moment came, chicken fajitas with halloumi. It was very nice and came with dips which I wasn’t sure about, so left them as it was great without them
I paid when I finished and gave quite a big tip for a cocktail and main, but I was impressed not to be turned away again and was happy with the service.
The blog post had certainly helped and I’ll be back at Home Sweet Home more often now. Thanks Marie and the team!
What Ade is tackling is the notion that app stores or the walled gardens are bad and more native fuctionality is heading out on to the web. He ponders if this is a good thing or not?
I know the recent Web USB draft certainly got a few peoples noses out of joint; for good reason to be honest, especialy on security grounds. However I’m personally not convinced by the legacy background Adewale mentions.
Yes that was then and this is now. I clearly remember the pain of installing apps on my PocketPC devices. It was painful and clearly early adopter like myself were the only ones who would put up with it. However legacy isn’t a good reason to back an closed garden model? Its a call card for the open web right? I mean Adewale’s reasoning is good…
give an obvious place to find apps that have particular functionality (try searching for “games that don’t need wifi” in the Play Store)
give developers an obvious place to find large numbers of users.
give developers a structured mechanism for exposing the features of their app so that users can filter the set of available apps for apps that have those features.
give users an obvious place to review apps.
give developers an obvious place to accrue reputation for their apps.
give platform vendors a place to assert policies that drive developer behaviour.
give every app on a platform a canonical URL ( for example here are iOS and Android URLs for the same game).
But its merly a step in the right direction, and to be fair most these features are just merely cracks in a flaw model of the walled garden or the garden trying to emulate the web? However I do also think there are lessons which can be learned from them.
Instead of ‘cargo culting‘ the app stores we should be asking what web-centric solutions to the problem would look like. For me that means lots of competing and opinionated PWA directories rather than one central PWA Store or even a popular search engine.
This is the start of not only a good workshop at Mozfest, but also the start of a good exhibit/experience/dilemma. He (or someone) really needs to submit a proposal for Mozfest before August 1st.
Its amazing to read back through the caringbridge entries my parents made (with Sarahs help). I had planned to post or tweet them at the time but I thought better of it, plus I have no idea what happened in the first 2 weeks (my last blog post doesn’t even close to whats about to happen). So here’s what happened in week 3, while I was in hospital in the early days.
Good news today! The doctors do not think there will be further surgery because the angiogram was ‘clear’. We think this means the bleeding has stopped. They are planning to try to wake Ian up tomorrow.
Lots of messages and cards are coming in and we appreciate them all. At the moment, visiting is limited to close friends and family. We will let everyone know when he is able to receive more visitors.
I spent most of the afternoon and evening with Ian today. They have taken him off the medication that was keeping him asleep and his condition is fair. He’s opened his eyes and is able to communicate with me by nodding. He is still on the ventilator but he is starting to breathe naturally. They want to keep the ventilator in for the moment in case he isn’t responding properly.
He had tears in his eyes while I was reading all the get well messages to him. So far he will only open his eyes when I ask him to, but he will not do it for the nurses.
At the moment it is still just family allowed to visit as Ian gets very tired quickly. His dad and sister will be back with him tomorrow, and we hope to see some more improvement.
Ian’s dad, his sister and I have been to see Ian today.
Ian is off the ventilator and sedation drugs. He is breathing on his own with oxygen. He is still drowsy, but recognises everyone and is able to respond to instructions and understand us. He is opening his eyes a lot wider and for longer today.
His throat is probably very sore from the ventilator, so it is a bit hard to understand him. He can speak at a whisper, but we have told him to rest his voice for the moment.
Ian wanted to know what happened as he cannot remember falling ill; his sister has explained it to him. He then wanted to know what the doctors said so I’ve told him about having the bleed on his brain. He was listening and nodding to say he understood.
He is quite tired, but we are hopeful he is on the mend.
Yesterday Ian had to go back on the ventilator as there were concerns about his breathing. I did tell the doctors his breathing is a bit laboured normally and they should take that into account. They have also been sedating him again just to make sure he can relax and rest. Because it is very difficult to get the ventilator in, they want to leave it in until they are certain Ian is ready to breathe on his own.
I still feel very confident that Ian is going to make a full recovery. Today he smiled and squeezed my hand, and he laughed when we told him a joke. He knows where he is and recognises his family.
He is still quite tired and drowsy, but I am reading him your get well messages when he is awake enough to listen. Alvin and I had no idea how well known Ian is until we saw the messages coming from all over the world.
I am staying at Ian’s flat in Manchester and am pleased that I have figured out how to turn on his television!
Ian is making good progress today. He was asleep for about an hour after I arrived, but then woke up and stayed awake and responsive for all the time I was there.
I held up some of his cards and messages for him to read. Ian wrote on a piece of paper asking for an article about Google, and one had been sent to him so he got to read it (thanks to the sender!).
The doctors are hoping to to take him off the ventilator again tomorrow and see how his breathing is doing.
I was told a conference in Boston recorded a get well video for Ian. At the moment, devices to play it for him are not allowed in ICU, but I will tell him about it and know he will get to see it eventually.
