I went to the Apple Store to look at the new Watches and iPads. That was a poor decision.

Did anyone bother to watch House of Cards season 6?

Walmart is doing an excellent job earning my business. The best prices, free grocery shopping/pickup, automatic refunds for recalled items, free upgrades for out of stock items. The best!

We use data to make Google products like Search and Maps as useful as possible. We also use data to serve more relevant ads. While these ads help fund our services and make them free for everyone, it’s important to clarify that our users’ personal information is simply not for sale.

On Google’s privacy principles page, they make the bold and reassuring claim that they never sell your personal information. Except that’s not entirely true.

Their language is precise. They’re not going to take the massive amounts of data that they’ve scrapped about you from across the Internet and the data that you’ve given them, put it in a spreadsheet, and put it up for auction. They’ve got a better plan.

They take all of that information, build out your profile, and then leverage that profile to sell to advertisers and “partner websites.” Hard to find out just who those partners are, by the way.

The truth is, your personal information is for sale, just not in a spreadsheet. Google, Facebook & Instagram, Twitter, and every other company that runs a “free” service is in the business of selling your profile, which inherently includes your personal information. These guys stalk you across the Internet and in ways that are far from transparent. You’d have to inspect every website’s source code or install an ad blocker to show you just how many trackers are on every website.

They’re creeps. But we let them do it.

How can we make it stop? Stop using their products. Close your accounts. Use macOS Mojave and iOS 11+ and enable every privacy setting in Safari. Advertisers hate the technology, so consumers should love it.

Here’s the real pain point. If you value your privacy and want these losers to stop, you’re going to have to start paying for services. Email, RSS readers, blogs, apps, software. There’s a cost to privacy, it’s slight, but its enough to keep most people happily forking over their personal information so that they can have free stuff. Not me, not anymore.

Microsoft Edge coming to Mac next year:

We also expect this work to enable us to bring Microsoft Edge to other platforms like macOS.

Don’t waste your time.

I wrote this back in March as I deleted my social media accounts:

There’s something very powerful about the concept of a social network… The problem comes when these networks have revenue targets to hit and shareholders to please.

I don’t go on BuzzFeed often, but when I do, I fail their quiz about “important” events that happened this year and I’m validated in my life choices.

Emoji + Things App = 👨🏻‍💻

Happy Feast of St. Nicholas!

I hate when big box hardware stores close entire aisles during business hours.

Got all of the leaves mulched before the heavy rains. Feels good to get the lawn back into shape.

One of the things that I miss about Twitter/Instagram are the digital friends that I made. I wish there was an easier way to keep in touch with them, but I’m not sure that I’m willing to recreate those accounts just to stay in touch.

Merry muggin’

Manton likes to talk about how owning your domain means that you own your own content. In fact, that’s the major selling point behind Micro.blog. I completely agree with him. When I post to a blog at a domain that I own, I control the content, and how it’s presented, from here forevermore.

I started a blog called Catholic Husband back in March of 2013. I launched the blog in the run-up to my transition out of the workforce and starting my new job as a stay-at-home dad. With just an infant to look after, I wanted to fill my time thinking and writing. It’s my longest running, and most consistently updated, blog. I’m coming up on my 800th post, almost all of which are over 500 words.

I care passionately about the design of Catholic Husband and how readers see the content, even posts that are nearly six years old. That’s why I’m working my way back, through every single post, and updating the blog photo to match a standardized format. I’m using Unsplash, and the visual upgrade that those premium photos bring to my posts cannot be understated. This process is tedious and multi-step, but that’s okay. I’m in the driver’s seat and I think that the effort is worth it.

My ability to reach back nearly six years and manipulate every single post is almost unheard of in today’s Internet silos. I don’t need to wait for the content host to decide to create a tool to make it easy, because I’m in control. I simply open my web development app, make the changes, and hit publish. Try doing that with a Facebook post from Summer 2013.

I don’t know what the Internet will be like in 20 years, but I can be confident that as long as I own my domain and control my content, it’ll be available, if I so choose.

Hulu/AT&T plans for ads in 2019:

Streaming TV services offered by companies like Hulu and AT&T are testing the waters for a new type of advertising called “pause ads” The idea… ads that play when they choose to pause a show…

Nope.

I did three different 2018 tax calculators (Turbotax, eFile, H&R Block). The same numbers gave me three answers with a huge swing. I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens!