Independent Space Writer & Journalist ~ Author of Moon Monday ~ Invited Speaker ~ Slow thinker ~ Human | Blog: https://jatan.space | Email me: hey@jatan.space
Musings
* Complain about disposable cutlery and water bottles * Fly Business class in domestic flights * Spend the whole day at the conference venue but sleep only at 5-star hotels * Do not have virtual participation, and then give out grants to 1% of attendees * Give talks so public-safe they could’ve been a
Social Networks
You know how LinkedIn shows where we work and what our position there is below our names on every post we make? What it should show instead is whose stock we own, who has contracted our company’s work, and which activities we fund in order of their magnitude and
Newsletter for friends
To human readers of my personal blog, Today I’m starting this little monthly newsletter for my friends on the Web, further embracing my foray into living a simple digital life. In part inspired by Philip Thomas, it’s a calmer way to stay in touch against the slurp of
Life
This week I moved from Mumbai, the city where I was born and grew up, to Bengaluru. I like many things about Mumbai but I’ve longed to live in Bengaluru for a while now, and below are the major reasons why. * Bengaluru is the space hub of India. Majority
Social Networks
It actually happened. Meta’s social networking app Threads joined the Fediverse! And I have a few thoughts. 1. This is a big deal. For the first time in history, you can not have an account on a Meta-owned app but still be able to follow and soon interact with
Social Networks
Mastodon and most Fediverse platforms may be better than traditional social networks at interoperability but they don’t do much about other issues. In fact, they largely copy these issues straight from the social media giants. Most Fediverse platforms, including Mastodon, publicly display follower counts, like (favorite) counts, and share
Social Networks
Many of us are familiar with the feeling of investing time and effort on a particular social network, only to either see it become irrelevant over time or do something stupid or malicious that scatters people over to half a dozen platforms. And so you start over, with all your
The Web
In today’s Web, being online seldom means being present. Browsing doesn’t mean reading. Following hardly means connecting. Posting certainly doesn’t mean articulating. Commenting rarely means conversing. Listening doesn’t mean comprehending. Watching never meant absorbing. And likes don’t mean anything anyway. We largely live an internet
Reading
RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is a website reading technology nearly as old as the consumer Web itself. And yet it can keep you on top of news and perspectives in ways social networks can’t. How it works is really simple yet smart: 1. Blogs and websites publish an
Apps
I’m impressed by the Bear app’s ability to import and export an exceptionally wide range of file formats compared to the 20+ note-taking apps I looked into. Last year I was on a quest to find an app that can reliably import entire blog archives as well as
Fediverse
The ongoing drama concerning Ryan Barrett’s upcoming tool that will bridge parts of the social networks Mastodon and Bluesky led me to a rabbit hole. A reading dive into the norms and expectations that factions of people and communities have within the decentralized social Web, which currently mostly exists
Podcasts
I rarely listen to podcasts. They are hard to discover in web and app searches. Articles are much easier to find, even good ones. There are four more aspects where I find podcasts to be lacking against articles. Links: Podcasts typically don’t provide sources for whenever guests or hosts
Poems
Here’s a little poem I wrote for one of my close friends a few years ago when he had embarked upon a new journey in his teaching ambitions. For every child that dares to dream and every spark of curiosity within For their bold endeavors in jest and that
The Web
The “modern” Web, especially when served via our phones and social media, makes it too easy to live without intent. Hour after hour. Days at a time. Cumulatively months even. Maybe for years. While most of us have a job, family, and friends, how much of our daily time and
Life
I had one day to spare in Hyderabad so I decided to visit some historical places of interest. My similar day out in Indore recently was fun, and so a similar plan sounded like a good idea. I first went to Charminar, natch. As a structure built in ~1590, it’
Life
I went on a round-the-city, day-long tour of Indore that was fun to see executed almost exactly as I had planned. I first visited the Central Museum, which hosts unique Paleolithic tools natively excavated from Madhya Pradesh. In the same vein, the museum hosts artifacts of an independent Bronze age
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