Sci-Hub, often referred to as the "Pirate Bay of Science," lost three of its domain names this week. The suspensions are likely the result of the lost court case against the American Chemical Society. Despite the setback, Sci-Hub remains resilient, pointing out that there are other ways to access the site including its own custom DNS servers.
Month: December 2017
👓 The Beauty of the Block | Audrey Watters
“Block with abandon.” That’s Andy Baio’s New Year’s Resolution. “I spent far too many emotional cycles last year on people arguing with me in bad faith, diving i...
I’ve switched over to David Shanske’s IndieWeb-friendly fork of the TwentySixteen Theme tonight. Liking it a lot so far. Can’t wait to see what little surprises I run across under the hood and how we can potentially make it better for the community.
👓 The Propaganda behind Personalised Learning | Long View on Education
“Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who ...
👓 Paranoia grips Capitol Hill as harassment scandal spreads | Politico
Lawmakers and aides are consumed by one question: Who's next?
🎧 This Week in Google 435 Worst Queso Scenario | TWiT.TV
RIP Net Neutrality. Patreon listens to critics, scraps new fees. How to fix media. Facebook is unfixable. Google Home Max unboxing. "Appsperiments" is our new favorite word. Tweetstorms are officially Threads. Don't download that baby poop video. Stacey's Pick: Alexa, Turn on Christmas Jeff's Pick: Tasty One Top Leo's Pick: Silicon Valley's Worst Apologies of 2017
https://youtu.be/Uh9jubxXOvQ
👉 Poking David Shanske
👉
Sadly, Facebook doesn’t seem to make it possible to syndicate a poke… hmmm.
Checkin Dunsmore Park
Afternoon walk — with Lily
📅 RSVP for IndieWebCamp Baltimore – Jan 20-21, 2018 – Baltimore, Maryland
IndieWebCamp Baltimore 2018 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
I really want to go to IndieWebCamp Baltimore not only for the IndieWeb portion, but it’s in one of my favorite cities!
If you’re interested in some of the most interesting things happening at the bleeding edge of what the web has to offer, this is the place, and these are the people. Bring your ideas and creativity for an excellent Bar Camp style weekend of fun!
👓 Excluded from Confoo Speaker Dinner – What Happened and How It Made Me Feel | Part of a Whole
I was an invited speaker at the Confoo YVR conference in December 2017. I gave two talks, both on accessibility. I was the only speaker presenting accessibility-related topics. There was a dinner organized for all the speakers. I was precluded from attending that dinner because the organizers selected a venue on the second floor, with no elevators. There was no way for a wheelchair user to access the venue. I felt embarrassed, and angry.
Wow this was pretty shitty…
👓 Spooled Twitter Thread: OK Third-Party WordPress, We Need To Have A Come-to-Jesus Meeting About Your Accessibility Flare | Amanda Rush
This post originally started as a Twitter thread. Since those can be difficult to read in some circumstances, and since this content is I think valuable for more than just WordPress Twitter, I’m spooling it up and re-sharing as a complete post. I’ve also added a link and a video to this. OK thir...
Accessibility on the Web
I certainly don’t go out of my way to follow the topic of accessibility, though I do think about it occasionally. It’s apparently bubbling up more frequently as something in need of some dire attention on both the web and in real life.
I ran across three different pleas in less than the span of an hour, so it’s something I’ll commend to everyone’s attention. Rachel’s tweet has some nice linked resources. I’ll have to take a closer look at what I can do to better support these ideas myself.
I’m glad that WordPress.org has a feature filter checkbox for “accessibility ready” on their themes page, but they should begin using that flag to filter out those which aren’t and just not showing them. It would be nice to have that type of functionality to be able to sort plugins by as well, or to leverage plugins to support it against the threat of being de-listed.
Dear #WordPress,
Going forward, I’ll only implement or recommend themes/plugins that are accessible or show me they’re working on it.
I’ll even help and create PRs.
If we’re going to power 30% of the Internet, we have a responsibility to build a better web.
— Rachel Cherry (@bamadesigner) December 18, 2017
I highly recommend these two additional articles I saw that touch upon two different areas:
Excluded from Confoo Speaker Dinner: What Happened and How it Made Me Feel by Nicolas Steenhout
Spooled Twitter Thread: OK Third-Party WordPress, We Need To Have A Come-to-Jesus Meeting About Your Accessibility Flare by Amanda Rush
👓 A Critical Analysis of Bob Dylan's 2017 Xmas Lights | Vice
For almost a decade, I have had an unhealthy obsession with the Christmas lights on Bob Dylan's Malibu home. Here's what I learned from this year's display.
👓 Investing in Skills | Collin Donnell
I’m pretty comfortable on the command line. I can move about, issue commands, edit my profile, pipe things around, all that. However — and I’m probably supposed to admit this with a little shame — I’ve never really learned how to write shell scripts. Usually I’d write a Python script, a small command line app, or hack something together with Automator. It did the same job, but not being able to write a bash script from scratch felt like kind of a blind spot.
👓 The ABC conjecture has (still) not been proved | Persiflage
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) …