From [Truthdig - Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion](http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/power_and_the_tiny_acts_of_rebellion_20101122/):

wherein I likely get added to a few more watch lists... the article is specifically about corruption of the political process in the US, but since we are tied so closely to them, much applies here as well.

*on the shift in power from democracy to corporations:*

> The complete surrendering of power, however, to corporate interests means that those of us who seek nonviolent yet profound change have no one within the power elite we can trust for support. The corporate coup has ossified the structures of power. It has obliterated all checks on corporate malfeasance. It has left us stripped of the tools of mass organization that once nudged the system forward toward justice.

More notes on Langdon Winner's *The Whale and the Reactor*, published in 1986. A decade before the internet really began to take off.

Chapter 6 deals with "mythinformation" or the myth that increased access to information via computers and networks leads to increased individual democratic power.

On the great equalizer:

> The computer romantics are also correct in noting that computerization alters relationships of social power and control, although they misrepresent the direction this development is likely to take. Those who stand to benefit most obviously are large transnational corporations. While their "global reach" does not arise solely from the application of information technologies, such organizations are uniquely situated to exploit the efficiency, productivity, command, and control the new electronics make available. Other notable beneficiaries of the systematic use of vast amounts of digitized information are public bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, and an ever-expanding military, organizations that would operate less effectively at their present scale were it not for the use of computer power.

I took each photograph in my [2010/365photos set](http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/sets/72157622990714979/), and combined them using ImageMagick's `convert *.jpg -average output.png` command to produce an image representing the average of all photographs. This is how a typical moment in 2010 looked:

stupid russian spambots are hammering this blog from multiple IP addresses, and getting through Akismet like a sieve. So, instead of trying to combat the mouthbreathing cretins using l337 script kiddie tools to pump their crap into the comments section of my blog, I'm disabling comments (again) until Akismet stops sucking.

thanks, komrades.

not a navel-gazing retrospective. suck it.

In 2010 I wrote 273 posts and added 7 pages to this blog, with 144 attachments in total.

Evan and I watched Gojira (1954) last night (thanks, Netflix!). We had fun reading the subtitles, and watching Gojira do his thing. A fun movie, with some surprisingly deep cultural subtext (the society of post-atomic Japan, a scientist conflicted over his creation of a doomsday weapon...).

But... There was a scene in a fishing village on the Island of Oda Island, where an elderly man was describing the rituals they used long ago to ward of Gojira. Human sacrifice. Ritual dances.

This is a long, rambling, incomplete blog post that's been rattling around in my head for a week. I decided to try to just put something in writing to see if I could make it less unclear. Caveat emptor.

If people are to manage their own content, forming their digital identities, they need a way to host software and content that doesn't require obscure and detailed technical knowledge.

Us early adopters are not normal. We've been so close to technologies, for so long, that we forget what it's like to be new to the stuff. Or not to live and breathe tech every day. Most people are not like us. They don't know what HTTP is. It's just some silly letters before the address of a website. They don't know what DNS is. They don't know what FTP is. They don't know what SSH is. Or MySQL. Or PHP. Or Perl. etc...

>The basic idea is this: an Unhosted app lives on a web server and contains only source code. That source code is executed on a user's computer and encrypts and stores data on another server. That data never passes through the app server. Therefore, the app provider doesn't have a monopoly on your data. And since that data is encrypted, it can't be exploited by the data host either (or at least, it probably can't).
>
>The data can be hosted anywhere. "It could be in your house, it could be at your ISP or it could be at your university or workplace," says de Jong.

I can't put my arms down!

It [looks like](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/) Yahoo! is going to kill/merge/mangle/whatever the delicious.com bookmarking service. Hysteria! Madness!

I've used Delicious for over 6 years. I've got 3,298 bookmarks stored there, with 16,669 tags. There's a handy dandy [XML exporter](https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all) that let me grab them all in one file.

Then what? I could import easily to another third party service. But it's likely that people will migrate to different services, so the network effects from Delicious are already evaporating. And any third party service will eventually die anyway.

Jim asked how it was done, so in the spirit of sharing DIY tricks, here's the basic steps I followed to make the [TRON ASCII video](https://darcynorman.net/2010/12/13/tron-ascii/).

Basically, it was tying together two separate programs, in a GUI pipe.

I grabbed the .mp4 video file from YouTube, to use as the source.

The hard work of rendering the video as ASCII art was done by the command line movie player `ASCIIMoviePlayer`. That program was a technology demo by Apple at one of the WWDCs I went to (a long time ago), and it works great. It's been updated as the open source [QuickASCII project](http://sourceforge.net/projects/quickascii/), which is cross platform. It has some nice features added, including scaling and support for colour. Seriously. Coloured ASCII art, rendered in real time from any video file. Insane. It seems to work on any Quicktime-capable format - here's the output of the [Reverend Devilhorns](https://darcynorman.net/2010/12/14/reverend-devilhorns/) animated GIF, as ASCII: