Now #003 - Ham Radio Course : Standard Chinese (Again) : Mages & Modems

hello [at] robyn.digital (robyn) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:23:27 -0600

Learning

Ham Radio Operator Basic Certification things!
Standard Chinese / 普通话 / “Mandarin”

I wrote a whole entire blog post on those two (which started out as a Now post and then became waaaaay more than that.)

Reading

vga256’s "Mages & Modems"

This book has been my “palate cleanser before bed” reading for a couple days now, and so far, I am really enjoying it. I would recommend it to folks who either were actively participating in the age of early home computing (the 80s, roughly speaking) for a shot of nostalgia; OR those who were not quite sentient yet in those years, and would like to know how it all started. There’s another very enjoyable layer of life in the Canadian North / life on the Canadian prairies as well, so if you have some familiarity with either of those, you’ll probably get even more out of it.

Now #002 - Switching Hosts : Enshittification : Where to From Here?

hello [at] robyn.digital (robyn) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:23:27 -0600

Oh! Happy New Year. I was almost going to add, “same sh*t, different year, hey?”, but then I figured I didn’t want to start the year off that negatively.

Anyways, currently, I am:

Working On

Switching website hosts. I am trying to put my money where my mouth is, and am currently working on switching to a Canadian host (plus, one that will hopefully let me actually verify my mastodon account. I’m still salty about that.)
- Yes, the host may still use AWS (as an example), but I am trying to take small steps that reduce our reliance on US tech - and the hosting provider part is a piece I can control.
Coming up with a “strategy” (that’s too big of a word) for blogging and other digital engagement tasks. See also: Thinking About.

Enjoying

Cory Doctorow’s excellent missive titled Enshittification (StoryGraph | Indigo.ca). You may have heard of it.
- If not: It deals with the, well, enshittification of basically every app and every platform under the sun, plus a host of other topics (digital sovereignty, interoperability, privacy, all that good stuff). My highlighter was red hot after a couple chapters.

Thinking About

Where to go next, essentially, in the digital realm. Not in the sense of hosting providers, although that’s part of it too. More abstractly, in the sense of:
- What can we do to bring back pieces of the old, good internet? Blogging, Mastodon, what else?
- How can we contribute to dis-enshittification? Unions play a part, as does worker power more broadly, as well as regulation.
  - How can we contribute to furthering regulation?
- How can we speak up effectively against the cruelties of the day?
  - What hazards are associated with speaking up against the cruelties of the day?
- How can we contribute to furthering digital sovereignty?
  - On that note, see Senator Paula Simon’s valiant efforts on getting the Canadian Senate off of Twitter (I will never call it “X”): Mastodon

Following

The inimitable Senator Paula Simons - https://mstdn.ca/@Paulatics
Cory Doctorow - https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Now on robyn.digital