In Part 1 of my more-personal-than-usual style of Honorary Unsubscribe for my friend (and long-time reader) David J. Farber, I ended by saying that next, I’d talk about how his own email “newsletter” of sorts, Interesting People, commonly referred to as IP, started. Also, what is the future of news delivery? Let’s jump right in.
Online Life
Dave Farber, Grandfather of the Internet
This is a very unusual Honorary Unsubscribe as it’s going to be quite long (several parts), and in a different, and personal, format: I knew Dave Farber, and spoke with him at length over the course of several years about his legacy.
Text with Jesus
I think readers will want a place to discuss one of the stories this week. Heck, I want to talk more about it too. I’ll start with the story itself.
If Gmail Picks Up Your Domain’s Mail, Read This
Back when I wrote Spam Primer book (2012!), I recommended a powerful way to cut down on spam if you have your own domain: let Gmail retrieve your mail by POP, filter it, and then you pick up the cleaned messages from Gmail. It was elegant, reliable, and — importantly — free.
Connections
I Love Little Coincidences.
Google’s Ads Banned from Honorary Unsubscribe Site
I’ve “Had It” with Google Ads! Again.
I ripped the ads out of the True site many years ago. Now I’ve also banned them from the Honorary Unsubscribe site. Here’s why.
Ask Me Anything 002 …Whose Idea Was This?!
Episode 2 and I’m already behind schedule!
Uh Oh, J.Lo
A story in this week’s issue brings up an important legal issue. Let’s start with the story, by True contributor Alexander Cohen:
Easy as ABC?
A Good Sleep Saturday night, as we were headed to Bonaire for a two-day stay, was great since I do most of my writing and editing of the stories on Sunday; other parts of the newsletter are done Monday, such as the Honorary Unsubscribe, and I send the newsletter late in the day Mondays as soon as it’s done.
Why You Don’t Want to Use Email Forwarding
This is complicated and geeky, but I’ll try to explain this in a way most of you can “get” it. You already have a problem if you automatically “forward” your email from an address like Newsletters [at] YourOwnDomain.com to, say, GMail.
Dan Sokol 3: Pranking Woz
Dan Sokol 2: Behind the Scenes of Personal Computing History
In Part 1 of my interview with Premium True reader Dan Sokol, I told you of Steve Wozniak’s long-time friend, how they met back in the earliest days of personal computing, and how he was the “World’s First Software Pirate”. This is the long-delayed Part 2.
Dan Sokol: a Barely Known Computer Pioneer
Dan Sokol has been a This is True reader for more than 25 years. He’s a friend of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. (Woz, as of this month, is a 26-year True reader.)
Coincidences
I Love Little Coincidences. First, this one is about names. Yes, the previous post is about incident over names: another person named Randy Cassingham.
An Obliviot by Any Other Name
This Won’t Be a Shock to some of you, but Verizon Wireless is absolutely obliviotic. Let me count the ways! And reveal something shocking.
Damned If You Do
Discussion about the small-town Missouri school teacher who has an account on OnlyFans.
Find the Problem, Implement the Solution
“I’m So Tired!” — Lily Von Shtupp (Blazing Saddles, 1974)
“‘Exhaustion’ has been a recurring theme lately. It’s mostly due to a serious but correctable medical condition.” —Me in last week’s newsletters.
Let me explain.
A.I.-Roller
Or, the Continued Challenges of Artificial Non-intelligence.
I was in Denver last week for the first in-person meeting of my online entrepreneur mastermind group since Covid. One point of discussion was to use “A.I.” large language models to proofread articles.
My Interview with an AI Chatbot about… Thinking
What happens when you talk to an artificial intelligence language model about the value of something it can’t actually do? Thinking, I mean.
Oh No, JATO?!
Last Week’s Blog Post asking that readers Be Smarter about phishing emails was read thousands of times, but apparently not by one long-time reader who sent me (yes, he sent it, not malware) an email with the subject, “O. M. G. -----The Darwin Awards are out!”