I normally don’t mess with the colours this heavily, but this was after dark, shot on a 3 second exposure. There’s no such thing as naturalistic colours…
Storm near Singleton, Boxing Day 2020
That’s what little girls are made of
March 2020
The end of March was the season of the five reasons. It was also the beginning of the ongoing wet year. Each day we met our exercise (and general outdoor) quota by walking down to the nearest park and cycling: in V’s case riding his new mountain bike over wet turf and in A’s case, carefully paddling and balancing her pushbike as she learned to ride carefully down a hill.
On the way home on one trip, we heard, metres behind us, a small voice saying crossly “I bet that little girl”—A—”is allowed to…!”
I assumed that the question was about seeing friends or grandparents or having competitive sneezing parties, so called back to them to ask what they wanted to know. The father said not to mind but I insisted and he said “she wants to know if that little girl is allowed to eat mushrooms growing on the street”, allowing me to comfortably assert that A is not allowed to eat mushrooms found growing on the street. Neighbourhood norms, cemented.
Not at work
July 2019
Lorikeet paradise
Mythical creature
A plane! In September 2020!
I exaggerate, of course. They’re rare enough to draw attention, but they’re pretty frequent. Like this plane, they are almost all carrying cargo, not passengers.
Kanimbla, April 2019
In the old days, when you just put the sun in the shot, dammit.
Apple picking, Mayfarm Flowers, April 22 2019
Most of the apple orchards around Orange, once the major growing region in Australia, have been converted into vineyards, or in the case of Mayfarm Flowers, a flower farm. Their crop of apples from the doomed trees was storm damaged in 2019, and so they opened them up for picking, with most of the apples being shipped to Sydney for donation, and pickers allowed to take away others for free.
Autumn leaves, Orange, April 2019
Green drought, April 2019
Not as dry by far as it was to get later. Impending doom is the fashion in New South Wales and has been for a while. (There’s been good rain this winter, in the plague year.)
Delete your free Slack backlogs!
Why delete Slack backlogs?
Slack and other chat software tend to retain conversation history so that you can see and search what was said in the past. This can be very helpful for historical context and avoiding repeat conversations, but there’s all kinds of reasons why you don’t want to retain backlogs indefinitely:
- people who join some time after the Slack is formed may find themselves being discussed in backlogs in terms that are uncomfortable now they can see it
- the relationships of people in the Slack may change over time and previously friendly conversations may be weaponised by members
- any malicious person who gains access to your Slack (whether by hacking or by being invited) gets the entire history of everything said there to bully or blackmail people with
- the contents of the Slack might be subject to legal discovery at some point in the future and be used to win a lawsuit against members or owners of the Slack, or else simply dumped into the public record
Learn more in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Slack privacy campaign: What if All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?, Slack should give free accounts control over retention.
How to delete Slack backlogs.
If you pay for Slack, you should use their message and file retention feature.
Update September 2024: as of 2022, Slack allows free workspaces to configure deletion after 90 days (otherwise it will hide the messages/files), and as of 2024 all data from free workspaces is deleted after a year and cannot be retained without paying. The below script is now mainly useful if you wish to retain data for less than 90 days in a free Slack workspace.
If you have a free Slack, you can do it yourself. If you are using the free plan, you can delete messages through the API. Here’s a really simple sample Python script any admin of your Slack can use, which will delete most messages posted more than 6 weeks ago. (Instructions.)
Alternatively, slack_cleaner2 is nicely flexible if you want to develop your own script. Or members could delete at least their own messages with eg the Message deleter for Slack 2.0 Chrome extension.
Script caveats
You will need owner or administrator access to your Slack instance (or else you cannot delete messages other users wrote).
The script operates with the credentials of the admin who runs it, and will not be able to delete other people’s messages in 1:1 DMs, or any messages in any private channel that admin is not in.
The script will not delete messages older than the 10,000 recent messages that free Slacks have access to (even deleting the newer messages doesn’t restore access to these). Yet these older messages are retained by the company and could be accessed if, eg, someone pays for the Slack in future or if a discovery motion is granted. Unfortunately, you will need to pay for Slack, at least briefly, to access these older messages for deletion.
Delete your free Slack backlogs! by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.