Elon Musk is a vote and some due diligence away from owning Twitter outright, think carefully before you quit Twitter, all about Mastodon, the bad news story that is Insteon.

Elon Musk will be taking Twitter private

Twenty-one days after revealing he’d acquired a chunk of Twitter stock, accepting then declining an invite to be on the board, and wondering out loud if he should just buy the company, Elon Musk has an agreement to acquire Twitter.

In a press release announcing the agreement, Musk said, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

This is not a done deal, of course. Twitter shareholders could vote down the plan. Musk could still back out as he learns more about the company and its books.

Other assorted thoughts.

• Under Musk’s private ownership Twitter will not subject to shareholders. He will be free to set his own rules.
• Musk will be beholden, however, to those who provided financing – up to two-thirds of the $46.5 billion according to Reuters – and which includes Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays. Musk has put Tesla shares up as collateral.
• I expect that Donald Trump’s lifetime ban will go away. Just as the U.S. mid-term elections are heating up and the 2024 presidential election is on the horizon.
• I’m curious to know what will happen to Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, which has been working with community organizations to “improve the health of the public conversation”.
• Having your speech be free does not mean your speech is free from consequences.

What to do first if you’re ditching Twitter

The joke that quitting Twitter is the new moving to Canada after the presidential election was everywhere on Monday.

But if you’re going to leave Twitter, you should first download your twitter data.

Then you can delete your account.

But there’s a suggestion that you shouldn’t actually delete your account, because you can’t be sure that Twitter will actually delete your information. Here’s sound advice from University of Michigan professor and author Ebony Elizabeth Thomas.

Free advice from a longtime friend I can't because they&#39;re an atty (this is not legal advice): make sure that you do your research before deactivating permanently. Your data will still be owned by his company, only you won&#39;t have access to it anymore.</p>&mdash; Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (Ebonyteach) April 25, 2022

Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter

Mastodon is another social network you’re going to be hearing about. It’s not a single social service, but a platform that can be used by any community.

And there are thousands of organizations and groups using Mastodon to stay connected.

Mastodon’s software is free and open-source (Elon Musk says he wants to make Twitter’s code open-source), and the entire initiative is free of advertising.

What this means is that your community can be a pure – or as nasty – as you want it to be. But that also means you need to do the work to find the community that you want to belong to.

Which is a significant barrier to Mastodon being a true replacement option for Twitter. If Mastodon can figure out how to make it easy for people to browse the communities that are available, maybe people will move to Mastodon.

But I suspect that Mastodon will remain a good solution for groups that already exist and who want to create their own little garden of conversation.

Insteon’s demise is a cautionary tale for home automators

Insteon was an internet-of-things and home automation tech company. I say “was” because the company abruptly shut down last week.

And it isn’t coming back.

Insteon provided a home networking system and hardware that many people had installed in their homes to control things like lighting, wall outlets, and thermostats.

People with this equipment may not be able to get it working at all, in part because with the required servers now shut down, there’s no way to configure the devices because the smartphone app is offline.

Just a cautionary tale to all of us.

This week on The Shift, guest host Scott Shantz and I talked about Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and the importance of Machete Order, the Rivercraft mod for Minecraft, the new Eero Pro 6E mesh routers, and the uTure talent show.

Kitting out your home with Wi-Fi 6E mesh routers and how you can become a YouTube star.

New eero Pro 6E proves how home mesh networks continue to improve

We’ve all got more devices in our homes using wireless connections to the interwebs. Mobile phones, game systems, smart speakers, tablets, streaming devices, smart TVs, thermostats, light bulbs …

When it comes to being happy at home, and not screaming at your siblings to get off the Wi-Fi because your professor keeps freezing during the lecture, there are two things to keep in mind.

The first is how many devices are connected to the network. The second is your distance from the main router.

Mesh networks are designed to help with both of these things, and they keep getting better. Take, for example, the two new mesh systems from Amazon’s Eero.

Both systems work on the new Wi-Fi 6E standard, which enables better wireless traffic in places where there are lots of devices connecting (“dense environments”).

The Eero Pro 6E is a tri-band device, which means it operates on three different wireless frequencies, and has been designed to support high-speed fibre internet connections.

The Eero 6+ operates on two wireless frequencies (dual-band) and can support gigabit internet connections.

These mesh systems are dead-easy to set up using a smartphone app, and they will connect to older Eero devices you might have. And they all work together to expand the mesh net that is created.

We’ve been using the Eero Pro 6E for a couple of weeks and are getting download speeds over Wi-Fi that rival what we get over a hard line. And as more devices that are in our homes support the Wi-Fi 6E standard, this system is the one that is more future proofed than others.

And with three Eero Pro 6E mesh routers, you can cover 6,000 square feet of real estate. When you move from one area to another, you get handed off seamlessly so you don’t suddenly get a dropped signal.

Eero also supports home automation, because each Eero device is also a smart home hub.

Eero Pro 6E is available in a three-pack for $999 and a single device is $429. This seems expensive, but is almost half as much as some other Wi-Fi 6E mesh systems available.

The Eero 6+ is available in a three-pack for $429 and a single device is $199.

Apply for the uTure Global Talent Show

YouTube broadcaster Ali-A has 17.5 million subscribers is looking for new video streaming talent.

uTure, pronounced like “future” without the “f”, is a global talent show designed to find those people.

Anyone in the world can submit an application by creating a 60-second or less video that demonstrates gaming in some way. It should be vertically-oriented (at a 9:16 ratio), which is what you’ll get when filming using a smartphone, and uploaded to YouTube Shorts.

Ten finalists will be selected to take part in a nine-week talent show with the winner getting a $100,000 prize from YouTube Shorts.

Submissions need to be posted by May 8.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is pretty fun, Rivercraft is an interesting Minecraft mod, and Ron Gilbert is returning to Monkey Island.

Play through all nine Star Wars films as a Lego minifig in the Skywalker Saga

The Lego video games from TT Games (formerly Traveller’s Tales) are an institution unto themselves. The first one, 2005’s Lego Star Wars, collected scenes from the first three films in the franchise (Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith) and established a clever, winking tone that conveyed the story and its characters without a word of dialogue.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, from Warner Bros Games, gives us that same sense of humour even as it gives us fully voiced characters (which you can disable if you’re a purist).

This is a veritable encyclopedia, not just of Star Wars characters and lore, but also of game mechanics and Lego builds.

You’ll be navigating environments, solving puzzles, seeking out hidden Lego bricks and collectibles, and getting into battles with all the expected villains.

And you can play all of this in couch co-op with a friend.

You can even choose to play through the movies in your order of preference. The correct choice is, of course, Machete Order.

And by the time you get to the end of the ninth film you can have more than 140 characters in your roster.

This game is loaded with easter eggs, too, including one remembering Rick Moranis’ role as Dark Helmet from the Mel Brooks satire, Spaceballs.

The Skywalker Saga is dazzling in its representation of one of the most important film franchises of all time.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is available now for Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Rated everyone 10+.

Rivercraft gets kids addressing the realities of flooding

I’ve written before about how Minecraft has been used in educational settings. There’s the Anishinaabe world, for example, that demonstrates what what is now western Manitoba looked like prior to European contact.

A new world that’s been created is Rivercraft, which presents players with a digital version of Preston, a community in Lancashire, in northwest England, a community that can be seriously impacted by floods.

In Rivercraft, players can create flood defences to see what does and doesn’t work to control the water. They can also explore how they can impact climate change and affect flood risk.

Beloved Monkey Island franchise getting a new game later this year

Legendary adventure game designer Ron Gilbert is returning to his beloved Monkey Island franchise. Return to Monkey Island is the third game in the series wth development led by Gilbert, following Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.

The first two games were point-and-click adventures developed in the 1990s by a group of game designers working for LucasArts. They were remastered and rereleased in 2009 and 2010 and are playable on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S (only $10 each for Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2).

The new game is scheduled to be released this year and is being published by Devolver Digital.

This week on The Shift, Shane Hewitt and I talked about the winners at the Canadian Game and Indie Game Awards, the new game Weird West, Remedy’s Max Payne remakes, and the Windows 11 Future of Work seminars from Microsoft.