Remote

James Creel

@jsc@hcommons.social

hometown 4.5.18+hometown-1.2.1

Working in Scholarly Communications. Not necessarily reflecting opinions of my employer. On the Fediverse seeking to advocate for a more humane information ecosystem.

16 Followers

134 Following

7 Posts

Joined December 02, 2025

pronouns:

he/him

javascript.enabled:

false

GitHub (for now...):

https://github.com/jcreel

Stepping on:

Legos

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mariafarrell The situation is atrocious. I have a semi-self-hosted email account through HostGator. I chose to abandon Gmail many years ago for obvious reasons. More and more, I find that people do not receive my emails - important emails that are clearly not spam. And I do not receive an error message from the recipient server! No failure notification! But, sure, the big email providers are more than happy to accommodate spammers who want to flood your inbox anyway. It will be a sad (and preventable) state of affairs if emails turn out like telephones - such that you won't even pick up anymore.

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@libreoffice@fosstodon.org I love me some LibreOffice. What an outstanding platform that just helps people and makes them happy! Have been a user for about a year now. Such a good product. C.f. FOSS, y'all.

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@masek@infosec.exchange It is quite sensible to maintain separate email addresses per service, although a lot of overhead. Worth it in my opinion. Seems every website you go to now is like, "Log in with Google! Log in with Facebook!" No thanks! It would also be nice if there were such a way to reasonably manage privacy with phone numbers and credit card numbers. I think phone numbers especially are getting to be a key identifier for data brokers.

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 4mo ago

Some of y'all might remember around 2020 when everyone was coming down with coronavirus and some of us (non-essentials) got to stay home. Including kids in school. Well, In those days I was super fastidious about internet hygiene and I had google.com blocked in my hosts file. So, time came for the kids to do online classwork to keep up appearances and stay enrolled, right? And they couldn't log in to anything. And, with a sinking feeling, I knew I had to go edit that hosts file. And I realized that public education was in the tank for big tech. I wish we could do better. Education is under attack from a lot of vectors.

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 5mo ago

Hello, everyone. A slightly urgent question - has anyone seen a diminution in the quality of commercial VPN services? I am on NordVPN, which has proven excellent, but things have been getting wonkier just of late.

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 6mo ago

In my weaker moments I have uttered profanities inappropriately. I fear that with age I may do this with less volition and more impulse. Yet, I am sure that I would not do so from public office on "Truth Social" unless I were completely demented.

James Creel @jsc@hcommons.social

· 6mo ago

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Many swords were sent to test this - but with much tribulation, humanity grew in wisdom and technology.

Unfortunately, it then turned out that the centralized corporate social-media app was mightier than the pen.