Highlights from Smiles’s Character

“The very sight of a great and good man is often an inspiration to the young, who cannot help admiring and loving the gentle, the brave, the truthful, the magnanimous.”

Post from January 22, 2017, filed under Everything Else.

Privacy, Obscurity: Randomizing New Tabs

You want to leave a less predictable online trail? I wrote a little browser extension for Chrome that accomplishes that: the New Tab Traffic Randomizer. The extension requests a random URL every time a new tab is opened…

Post from November 10, 2016, filed under Everything Else.

A Note on meiert.com Feeds

There are a number of ways to follow what I write on this website, from a very low volume newsletter for German publications to an enriched account on Google+. The most reliable and focused option, however, is to subscribe to one of this site’s RSS feeds.

Post from July 11, 2016, filed under Everything Else.

On Rationality, and Love

Philosophy can be heart-breaking, or is it the other way around.

Post from July 2, 2016, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

Interlude

Minding the gap.

Post from April 13, 2016, filed under Everything Else.

198 Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Action

Just when one wonders how many options there are exactly.

Post from April 6, 2016, filed under Everything Else.

The Reminder Trick

This tool is so powerful and at the same time so trivial to make a routine that I ask everyone who regularly employs it to transcend their disappointment—I’m mentioning it for the people I meet who don’t use it.

Post from March 1, 2016, filed under Everything Else.

Personally Speaking

After my eternal travels I’ve had entered a new stage of my life. Now that I and the dust have settled a little, the position that I assume in the world is a bit more clear, at least for the next couple of years. A few notes…

Post from October 30, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Rules for the Media: Independence, Transparency, Accountability, Comparative Reporting

I’ve suggested to opt out of following news for the simple reason that “news” rarely constitute reliable and actionable information, and in the spirit that even ignorance may be preferable so to at least keep an open mind. Now, what would make me change this view?

Post from October 10, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Media: The Choice Between Misinformation and Uninformation

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”—Our media, generally speaking, are not trustworthy. They are not trustworthy because of conflicts of interest…

Post from October 6, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Love Reciprocity

Love! What a wonderful topic. My mind would instantly turn into a good number of directions, from love in our personal lives to different forms of love, to the powers of love, to the possibly universal character of love. Let’s be more specific.

Post from August 26, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

The One Belief to Cultivate

There’s a particularly important belief, habit, or trait for us to cultivate: that whatever it is we want to be or master, we can learn how to be or master whatever it is we want.

Post from August 11, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

On Conspiracy Theories

These days, many a serious inquiry into significant events leads to something marked a “conspiracy theory.” Use of the expression “conspiracy theory” has gone as far as to be used as a blanket dismissal…

Post from June 2, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Business Practices, Reframed

Ideas for the next performance review.

Post from May 6, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

The 1% Hypothesis of Mass Surveillance

A few weeks back I read this security article about how it’s odd that no one has ever suspected and detected anything related to all that mass surveillance we learned about through Edward Snowden. In particular, physical manipulation of devices…

Post from April 13, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

No

Have we stopped killing yet?

Post from April 11, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

News Headlines I Want to Read

A brainstorming with assumptions and implications. We shouldn’t use our creativity to come up with ever horrid scenarios; we could use it to envision awesomeness.

Post from March 2, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

A Population Control Primer

An incomplete, roughly sorted sketch of actions, methods, and developments that don’t serve us, that instead divide, distract, confuse, manipulate, exploit, demotivate, control, and dominate us. We have a lot of work to do.

Post from February 24, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

On Age

Age is wonderful. Aging is wonderful. Age is wonderful for in a life reasonably lived, in a life not exclusively spent idly or hedonistically, age signifies the accumulation of experience and knowledge, and perhaps even wisdom.

Post from February 4, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Love

Love is vulnerability. First and foremost, love is vulnerability. It took me many years to recognize this. Many years in which there wasn’t much love in my life, even permitted in my life. I had locked it all out, out of fear to be… vulnerable.

Post from January 15, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Character

A couple of weeks ago I read Samuel Smiles’ Character, a book extraordinarily useful and important. I think you’d like it. “Character is one of the greatest motive powers in the world. In its noblest embodiments, it exemplifies human nature in its highest forms…”

Post from January 12, 2015, filed under Everything Else.

Ground Rules for Working with Web Agencies

After we identified inherent problems of working with agencies, let’s look at some of our options. We may still need to hire an agency after all, or make the best out of an existing project. The leg work we’ve done in the first part will help us keep this brief…

Post from December 15, 2014, filed under Everything Else.

The Problems of Working with Web Agencies

I started my career in a small agency, I later worked for a big agency, and I at other times collaborated with or managed agency staff. I’ve never enjoyed working for nor with agencies. That was not because of the people, but because of some inherent issues…

Post from December 11, 2014, filed under Everything Else.

Questioning Electronic Data as Evidence

We need better defenses against assaults on our rights and privacy. In a world in which most happens electronically, one such defense gets surprisingly little attention: Everything electronic can be forged.

Post from October 29, 2014, filed under Everything Else.

Interlude

I’m quite fine with jumping from something trivial to something very serious, but not the other way around. So this post is intentionally left blank.

Post from September 21, 2014, filed under Everything Else.