Techcrunch has a really great essay by Natasha Lomas that I think got missed, The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling.

Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.

Someone asked me the other day who my favorite rappers were, here they are in no particular order:

Pre-2000: Big Pun, Jay Z, Nas, Ludacris, Method Man.

Post-2000: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye, Childish Gambino, J Cole, Drake.

We’re trying something new this year: instead of WordCamp San Francisco being the main WordCamp event of the year doing a WordCamp US in a rotating city. I’ve heard some great in-person pitches for places like Phoenix already. Do you think your city would be the coolest place in the 50 states for the first ever WordCamp US? Submit your city in this new survey. It’s open until the end of the month.

Unsubscribing from Newsletters

Asides

When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.

There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:

I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.


var i = 0;
function unroll_me_unsubscribe() {
// Bail if share modal (indicating free limit reached) is encountered.
if ( jQuery( '#fb-root' ).length > 0 ) { return; }
var unsub_link = jQuery( '.LetterList a.uicon-set-unsubscribe:first' );
if ( unsub_link.length > 0 ) {
document.getElementById( unsub_link.attr( 'id' ) ).click();
if ( i++ < 6000 ) { /* Upper limit in case something goes wrong. */
setTimeout( unroll_me_unsubscribe, 1500 );
}
}
}
unroll_me_unsubscribe();

view raw

gistfile1.js

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.

Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.

― Douglas Adams

 

On the recommendation of my friend Timothy Young I checked out the book The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir. Think of it like Shackleton’s Voyage (a great recommendation from Toni) but on Mars. I really enjoyed the book, and if you like geeky, science-filled novels you will too.  One thing about the publishing I thought was really cool, as the Wikipedia puts it:

Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans he made an Amazon Kindle version available through Amazon.com at 99 cents (the minimum he could set the price). The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling science-fiction titles, where it sold 35,000 copies in three months, more than had previously downloaded it for free. This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for six figures.

I was hoping it was on a WordPress blog, but it appears to be more of a static HTML site (his official site is WP-powered) and includes some awesome short vignettes like Meeting Sarah.

When I spoke in Ireland yesterday someone asked if I would blog about them today. I am, but not the best story: Ireland’s media silenced over MP’s speech about Denis O’Brien. Because of an injunction, no media in Ireland can report on alleged corruption, laws I think set up with good intentions (preventing libel?) but being twisted now to prevent the vital functioning of the fourth estate. The country showed amazing mettle in their Yes vote for gay marriage last week, perhaps censorship could be the next thing the populace tackles. (Also I really enjoyed my visit to Dublin, if you want an amazing meal check out Forest Avenue.)

In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.

The New York Times answers Why Do We Experience Awe?

The John Biggs article on Why I’m Still Wearing My Apple Watch almost perfectly describes how I’m feeling about the watch right now. It is a very personal device, I’ve gotten attached to the little fellow, and I should probably start selling all my mechanical watches.