Weekly output: Internet Archive, Roblox parental controls, Google travel-search tools, T-Mobile yanks free WiFi from United flights, Mark Vena podcast, talking to local user groups, AST SpaceMobile

LAS VEGAS–I’m typing this from a press room in the Las Vegas Convention Center barely three months after I spent too much time in that facility for CES. Credit or blame for this trip goes to a different Washington-area trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters. Tuesday, I will be moderating an NAB Show panel about the state of content creation that features two people who are better at Instagram than me: Juliana Broste and my fellow former USA Today columnist Jefferson Graham.

4/13/2026: Journalists Applaud the Internet Archive’s Role In Preserving the Public Record, Fight for the Future

A staffer with Public Knowledge e-mailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I would be willing to sign a letter supporting the Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve the history of the Web and possibly provide a quote about how I’d used the Archive. Having repeatedly relied on the Archive’s Wayback Machine to link back to my own past published work, I said I would be happy to do that–having already donated $100 to that San Francisco non-profit in January.

4/13/2026: Roblox Adds Account Restrictions for Younger Users, Expands Age Verification, PCMag

I attended a press roundtable Monday morning featuring some Roblox trust-and-safety executives, allowing me to enrich this writeup of the platform’s changes with quotes from that conversation.

4/15/2026: T-Mobile Grounds Free In-Flight Wi-Fi Benefit for United Airlines Passengers, PCMag

I had the dumb luck to see this change firsthand on a flight from Denver to San Jose Tuesday, then needed the rest of that day to get some responses from T-Mobile and United. The airline’s switch to free Starlink connectivity will fix this problem, but we are months away from that rollout reaching a significant fraction of United’s mainline fleet.

4/17/2026: Like It or Not, Google Wants to Be Your AI Travel Buddy This Summer, PCMag

I wrote up this post off an embargoed copy of Google’s announcement that we had to correct the next day because I had missed two of the finer points of this bundle of news. In my halfhearted defense, it is more work than you might realize keeping track of Google’s ongoing efforts to infuse AI into its existing services.

4/17/2026: How NTT Research’s Upgrade 2026 Helps Silicon Valley Get Ready for The Future, Mark Vena

My industry-analyst pal had do a quick video from NTT Research’s Upgrade conference in San Jose, Calif.–with that firm covering my travel costs–about some of its initiatives.

4/18/2026: 2026 Consumer Electronics Show and Lots More!, Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society/Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Personal Computer User Group/Washington Apple Pi

Despite that title–picked by the organizers at PATACS, pronounced “Pat-Aces”–I spent more time talking about other topics. Among them: my switch from Evernote to Obsidian just in time for CES, the sad state of tech policy in Washington, and my takes on self-driving cars and what’s befallen the Washington Post. As I have in previous appearances before these folks, I showed up with a bag of trade-show swag and gave away all of it.

4/19/2026: Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Then Loses AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Satellite, PCMag

I watched the third launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on my phone as I was walking up to the security checkpoint at Dulles early Sunday morning, started writing up what I thought was a successful launch, then learned–via painfully slow inflight WiFi–that New Glenn’s second stage had failed to deliver AST’s mobile-broadband BlueBird satellite to the intended orbit. This is a real black eye for Blue that should outweigh its achievement in reflying a New Glenn booster and then landing it on a barge in the Atlantic.

This could happen anywhere in Australia:
Biodiversity conservation going to the dogs

Somewhere in crowded suburbia is a small creek with a bit of bush left behind by accident. It is a refuge for swamp wallabies, blue wrens and many other species of the biodiversity kin.

‘User groups’, that is locals and their dogs demand that the last bit of green is for their ‘recreation’ and not Australian flora and fauna. Pet owners allow that their roaming dogs destroy the last small fragmented refuges where native wildlife can survive.

Recently a council voted to fence dogs out of the park "to manage the growing dog population in the municipality." There are “problems with dog behaviour…They (swamp wallabies) are threatened and chased and killed by dogs.”

Anger and vandalism followed. Local pet owners demand to "make the park off-leash for dogs.” The dispute requires 'conflict experts’ from outside to get involved.

In a place where everything is 'dog friendly’ and where half of Australian households own at least one dog, they implicitly ‘voted with their paws’ to be 'wildlife unfriendly'.

* Conflict experts called in following a dispute over a dog fence in Coburg >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-09/merribek-calls-in-conflict-experts-about-coburg-dog-fence/106541266

* A 'balancing act' as council votes to fence dogs out of park, sparking safety concerns >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-21/merri-creek-dog-fence-swamp-wallaby-coburg-victoria/105675854
#biodiversity #wildlife #conservation #UserGroups #dogs #pets #roaming #DogOwners #TheBush #recreation #parks #FOMC #fences #UrbanEcology #extinction #councils #WildlifeUnfriendly

New blog post!!

CodeMash 2026 #codemash #usergroups

https://barretblake.dev/posts/conferences/2026/01/codemash/

The Importance of Having In-Person User Group Meetings.

https://joeydantoni.com/2025/06/05/the-importance-of-having-in-person-user-group-meetings/

#devcommunity #usergroups #developers #database #itpro

Finally got around to reading a really good article from @curtispf / @curtispf titled "Engineers don't make public squares. People do."

https://cpf.sh/blog/2025/01/25/engineers-dont-make-public-squares-people-do

Some choice comments:

>The bigger sociotechnical challenge, though, that would absolutely be necessary to solve to make this viable in practice would be making this kind of setup not only possible but absolutely trivial - trivial to set up, trivial to use, trivial to manage, and trivial to back up and restore. For this kind of setup to ever take off, it has to be the kind of thing you could give to your grandparents and have them be able to use at least as easily as an iPhone.

I really like the idea of giving everyone an "Internet Box" of sorts; plug it into your network and power, and off it goes. And I don't think we necessarily need to make it trivial to manage. I believe we can delegate that responsibility to more technically inclined people that the owner trusts. It feels an awful lot like the BOINC project: install the software, and let other clever people write the code that does socially useful computation on top of your device. Only, for the Internet Box, it is instead "choose which entities you want to give shell access to."

>Bluesky users may not know or understand what ATproto is, or what PDS they’re on, or how their messages are federated - but, they are on federated social media, and they are (at least moderately) happy about it.

[Not really](https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/):

>However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.

Moving on...

>That being said, I think we’re overlooking that these people do exist. I’d actually really like to see organisations like Mastodon gGmbH use some funding not just on development, DevOps and DevRel, but what I’d like to call CitRel: citizen relationships. We should be focus grouping onboarding strategies to get people to choose their communities; we should be designing communications toolkits for people to talk about federated social media; hell, we should be producing memes on centralised social media that push people over!

I like the concept of CitRel. Part of me suspects that the computer education I received as a child -- what is a file, what is a filesystem, what is a network connection, what is a program, etc -- is no longer given, instead relying on "intuitiveness" from major players. Perhaps starting User Groups back up is an option for establishing a more "competent computation baseline" for citizens.

#fediverse #fedi #PublicSquare #UserGroups

I’m posting this here to make sure PHP developers in the Minneapolis area are aware…

Tonight was the first meeting of the new PHP user group in Minneapolis!

Dave Hicking spoke, and @macbookandrew said it was a “great talk.”

I think @benholmen organizes it, so I’ll defer to him for more details.

If you’re in the area, you should check it out!

#PHP #Laravel #Minneapolis #PHPxMSP #UserGroups