I’m writing on that fateful day, 20th January 2025. I stopped using Twitter more than two years ago, judging then it would only get worse under Musk – and I was sadly proven right. Today I am ending all association with Meta tools, due to Zuckerberg cosying up with Trump. […]
One of the interesting aspects of all the “officialising” the Ursula von der Leyen Bluesky account stuff is how it has created a discussion about verification of identity on social networks and – although seldom expressed as such – posed the question of what the social network itself (or the […]
Back in October 2023, when Bluesky was a fledgling invite-only network, I set up the account @vonderleyen.bsky.social for a few reasons (and I wrote about the experiment then). First, it seemed like a reasonable bet that Bluesky would grow into viable Twitter alternative for EU politics. Second, it was better […]
Just over a year ago I wrote this post, drawing on lyrics from The Who and the Rolling Stones to explain my lingering scepticism about Bluesky. After being fooled by Elon Musk, should we trust Bluesky? I wasn’t fully convinced then, was more convinced in the past 12 months, and […]
A Gaggia Classic coffee machine – the second I have owned – has sat in my kitchen since 2013, reliably making espresso coffee every day since. It is however one of the original pre-2009 Classics (see the different generations in this video). However this summer it developed a peculiar fault. […]
OK, so you’re really, really sick of Musk’s antics now and finally want to make the leap to something else. Here’s your super quick guide how to do so. Do you need to close your Twitter account? Your choice, but not necessarily – my account is still, technically, there but […]
When Donald Tusk, then President of the European Council, wanted to send a public message to set the tone of the Brexit negotiations in 2018 – he took to Twitter, and quoted Freddie Mercury. It was clever, it was culturally astute, the message could be conveyed in 280 characters, and […]
I have long struggled to design a smooth and efficient workflow for the photos and videos I take on an everyday basis. I had combinations of photos stored in the cloud and stored locally, was spending too much on cloud storage, and could never find the photos I needed when […]
No. Is that it? Pretty much. If you have done even basic thinking about the issue, that ought to be the answer. Can you explain this in graphical form? Sort of – there’s a flow diagram here in the post. You can find it on Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn as […]
Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo has today announced she is leaving Twitter/X (her announcement in Le Monde here, news story from Politico here). I think she rather overdoes the rhetoric, but that’s not the central point – she is an important politician deciding to abandon the platform, and that is […]
I somehow stumbled across this 2016 piece by Giles Wilkes last week. The economic blogosphere, he writes, is like “eavesdropping on clever people arguing”. Those words are perfect, and if you can get past the paywall, the whole piece is worth reading. It might have been the very worst of […]
NOTE: this post has been superseded by this one. However the post below has been left unedited – it is as it was on 11 October 2023! Yesterday a post popped up on my timeline on Twitter alternative Bluesky purporting to be from European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry […]
