Blaise Alleyne @balleyne@floss.social

Public discourse is too dependent on private platforms.

The online public square is a shopping mall. You don't fix that by moving to a sketchy plaza down the street.

We need to decentralize the internet, not look for "liberal or conservative" platforms.

https://blaise.ca/blog/2021/03/04/defending-against-deplatforming-the-three-ps-of-protecting-free-speech-online/

Can't believe it's taken me a year to make this connection: Whereas September 1993 was the Eternal September ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september ), March 2020 should be known as the Eternal March

I just bought a Grandstream DP750/DP720 cordless SIP phone, and now it's setup with our VoIP.ms account. 10.5 years in, we have a home phone.

Clearing out my RSS subscriptions, it's like a ghost town of blogs that stopped publishing 6 or 7 years ago...

My LUG is meeting on Zoom... 🤦‍♂️

I recorded an acoustic cover of San Holo's 'lift me from the ground' with a string quartet
https://blaise.ca/blog/2021/02/07/lift-me-from-the-ground-san-holo-cover/

Created using Rosegarden (string arrangements), Ardour (recording/mixing), and Kdenlive (video editing)

Weekend rentals - viola and cajon

In which I rant against simplistic answers to social media censorship and resist the urge to pull out my open source violin:
https://blaise.ca/blog/2021/01/13/no-easy-answers-to-social-media-censorship/

Okay, this is too funny... I got so fed up with COVID conspiracy theories that I started making fun of them, and then I got suspended on Twitter!

Just used MuseScore, Piano From Above, and OBS Studio to create a quick falling piano notes video in about an hour. Very cool!

Fascinating conversation with Mike Masnick about all things internet as all tech policy issues get sucked into the black hole of the current political moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwE7EhGJaHc

You would think that a company selling a "Live Chat" plugin would have a Live Chat plugin enabled on their own support website...

Reading up on what's happening with decentralized network protocols feels like reading up on OpenMoko Freerunner operating systems back in 2009. There was so much fragmentation, and no rallying around any one option, that none of them matured enough to be usable.

From thinking about Waco, I found this short doc on Ruby Ridge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wncvHvUujX8

It tracks the law enforcement side to John Joe Gray, but if you track the armed government resistance side you get to Timothy McVeigh...

Yesterday I was thinking, why didn't people leaving Twitter go to something distributed like Mastodon? Instead of another single point of failure like Parler?

Today I find out Amazon's taking Parler's servers down.

n the Spring, it was HBO's Chernobyl mini-series that I couldn't stop thinking about. Now, it's Waco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlocXTpy-gs

Silent Night - vox/acoustic 2008, electric/bass/drums 2018, mix 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb3xQvz9YjA

One of the personal silver linings of 2020 is that I’m making music again.

In a way, I had never really stopped. But in a way, I had never really started.

https://blaise.ca/blog/2020/12/24/i-dreamed-i-saw-a-star-again/

A little 2020 recording project of mine involved completing a 2009 recording session that I had long since abandoned and left for dead - a cover of Weezer's The World Has Turned and Left Me Here
https://blaise.ca/blog/2020/12/23/the-world-has-turned-and-left-me-here/