📖 7.44% done with American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

📖 Read loc 685-963 of 12932 (7.44%) of American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

Slow progress, but there’s some great material here. At times I wish there was actually more underlying material that I know they could have included to increase the strength of their arguments. I’m already seeing some anecdotal evidence that could be bolstered. It’s still very interesting.

The Last Bookbinder on the Lower East Side | Literary Hub

Read The Last Bookbinder on the Lower East Side: An Ancient Trade, Alive on Henry Street by Dwyer Murphy (Literary Hub)
Continue reading The Last Bookbinder on the Lower East Side | Literary Hub

The Transparency Bills That Would Gut the EPA | The Atlantic

Read The Transparency Bills That Would Gut the EPA by Ed Yong (The Atlantic)
Two proposed laws would sever the agency from scientific experts, and scientific expertise—all under the guise of honesty and openness.
Continue reading The Transparency Bills That Would Gut the EPA | The Atlantic

🎧 Criminal, Episode 61: Vanish (2/17/17)

Listened to Vanish, episode 61 (2/17/17) by Phoebe Judge from Criminal
People have faked death to escape criminal convictions, debts, and their spouses. In 2007, a man named Amir Vehabovic faked his death just to see who showed up at the funeral (answer: only his mom). It’s an appealing soap-opera fantasy, but actually disappearing requires an incredible amount of planning. How do you obtain a death certificate, a believable new identity, or enough money to start a new life? Today — the answers to those questions, stories of fake death gone wrong, and a man who spends his life bringing back the dead.

Brings up a lot of interesting “what if” questions. I’ll bet that if web browsers opened up some of their data, the data exhaust one spews on a daily basis could be easily used to track one down.

A reply to Kimberly Hirsch: Doing my part to fix the internet

Replied to Doing my part to fix the internet by Kimberly Hirsh
I have put all the tech in place that I need to, I think, for my publishing to happen here at kimberlyhirsh.com, go out to my various social places, and then have responses come back here.
Kimberly, Congratulations and welcome to the ! Interestingly, I’m seeing your post via Superfeedr piped into an IRC channel on freenode rather than webmention to my own site (since upgrading to the most recent version of Webmention for WordPress, I apparently need to re-enable exotic webmentions to my homepage).

I’m amazed that such a short comment that I wrote on my site back in November (and syndicated manually to another’s) should not only crop up again, but that it could have had such an influence. Further, the fact that there’s now a method by which communication on the internet can let me know that any of it happened really warms my heart to no end. As a counter example, I feel sad that without an explicit manual ping, Vicki Boykis is left out of the conversation of knowing how influential her words have been.

Kimberly, I’m curious to know how difficult you found it to set things up? A group of us would love to know so we can continue to make the process of enabling indieweb functionality on WordPress easier for others in the future. (Feel free to call, email, text, comment below, or, since you’re able to now, write back on your own website–whichever is most convenient for you. My contact information is easily discovered on my homepage.)

If it helps to make mobile use easier for you, you might find Sharing from the #IndieWeb on Mobile (Android) with Apps an interesting template to follow. Though it was written for a different CMS, you should be able to substitute WordPress specific URLs in their place:

Template examples
Like: http://kimberlyhirsh.com.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=like&kindurl=@url
Reply: http://kimberlyhirsh.com.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=reply&kindurl=@url

You might also find some useful functionality hiding at WordPress Bookmarklets for Desktop if you haven’t come across it yet.

As someone who works in academic circles and whose “professional and personal interests are intertwined, I choose not to separate the two” on my site either, to help people more easily subscribe to subsets of data from my site more easily, I did a few things I’ve documented here: RSS Feeds. Additionally, choosing what gets syndicated to other sites like Twitter and Facebook rounds out the rest.

There are a number of other folks including myself using their sites essentially as commonplace books–something you may appreciate. Some of us are also pushing the envelope in areas like hightlights, annotationsmarginalia, archiving, etc. Many of these have topic pages at Indieweb.org along with examples you might find useful to emulate or extend if you’d like to explore, add, or extend those functionalities.

If you need help to get yourself logged into the indieweb wiki or finding ways to interact with the growing community of incredibly helpful and generous indeweb people, I am (and many others are) happy to help in any way we can. We’d love to hear your voice.

App.net archive

Bookmarked App.net archive by Manton Reece (manton.org)
Linkrot and the lack of permanence on the web is a recurring theme for this blog. In the final days as App.net was winding down, I wanted to put my money where my mouth was. I spun up a couple new servers and wrote a set of scripts to essentially download every post on App.net. It feels like a fragile archive, put together hastily, but I believe it’s mostly complete. I’ve also downloaded thumbnail versions of some of the public photos hosted on App.net.
Interesting to see that Manton Reece created an impromptu archive of all of App.net before it shut down.​​

How to Curate Better Podcast Feeds

Read How to Curate Better Podcast Feeds (Degreed)
Originally, I just browsed for new stuff by scrolling through the top picks list on the iTunes Podcasts app. But that was time consuming. After trying out the search functionality on the app, I wished I could search a little better. I decided to look for other resources that I could use to further dial in my selections. Turns out there are some pretty good websites/apps out there to help you do just that. Here are a few of the best ones I’ve found.

My thoughts on what the article leaves out:

For podcast discovery, I love using Huffduffer. It has a simple browser bookmarklet which allows you to bookmark audio to listen to later and creates iTunes or other feeds you can quickly and easily subscribe to on most of the major podcatchers.

Even better it allows you to search for topics and people. Almost everything on the site (including individuals and even the lists of people you’re following) has audio RSS feed as well as other subscription services that you can subscribe directly to. Love Elvis? Search, subscribe, and listen.

As an example, want to know what I’ve been listening to? Check out my feed where you can see a list, listen to it directly, or even subscribe.


Continue reading How to Curate Better Podcast Feeds

🎧 Criminal: Finding Sarah and Philip

Listened to Finding Sarah and Philip, episode 60 (2/3/17) by Phoebe Judge from Criminal
In 2005, Teri Knight drove 650 miles on midwestern roads through Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Illinois, pleading with the public to help her do what law enforcement and the FBI had not been able to: find the remains of her children Sarah and Philip Gehring. An Ohio woman read about Teri Knight’s search in her local paper, and decided she would try to help.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/305874678″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

A short, but mildly odd drama. You know in advance how the story is sure to turn out because someone is bothering to tell it, but it’s just tenuous enough to make you wonder if that’s where it’s really going…

👓 WordPress Collaborative Editing | Ma.tt

Read WordPress Collaborative Editing by Matt Mullenweg (ma.tt)
I’m really excited about the new Google Docs integration that just launched — basically it builds a beautiful bridge between what is probably the best collaborative document editor on the planet right now, Google’s, and let’s you one-click bring a document there into a WordPress draft with a...

👓 If you do this and only this, today will be a good day. | John Henry Müller

Read If you do this and only this, today will be a good day. by John Henry Müller (John Henry Müller)

How I took back my day with a simple text document.

The very first thing each morning (after coffee but before email) I write three sentences in plain text then save this document to my desktop. I call it today.txt.

It is the only file I keep on my desktop to ensure it stays in my purview. The format is simple and looks something like this ...

If nothing else, today I am going to ___________.

I am going to do this by ______ then _____ then ______.

If I do this and only this, today will be a good day.

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

Read Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber by Susan Fowler (Susan Fowler)
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go. 

Continue reading Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

👓 Fans with typewriters | Pelican Crossing

Read net.wars: Fans with typewriters by Wendy M. GrossmanWendy M. Grossman (pelicancrossing.net)

Yesterday in Cambridge, the veteran journalist Charles Arthur held an event at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) that asked this:

Has the public been well served by technology journalism?

Arthur assembled a smart panel of long-serving folks: Andrew Brown, Carole Cadwalladr; and Ingrid Lunden. The notable thing they all had in common: none are specifically "technology journalists". Arthur first covered tennis, computing, and science. Brown made his name writing about Sweden and religious affairs. Cadwalladr is a generalist features writer for The Observer (part of the Guardian. Lunden came to TechCrunch from telecoms and art. I did The Skeptic, and began writing for computer magazines via a personal contact.

👓 Candidates for GCC board of trustees disclose campaign finances | LA Times

Read Candidates for GCC board of trustees disclose campaign finances by Kelly Corrigan (LA Times)

In the race for a seat on the Glendale Community College board of trustees, three candidates are competing for a seat to represent District 4 in the college's first district-based election.

Two of those candidates — Yvette Vartanian Davis and Rondi Werner — are nearly head-to-head in what they have raised and spent on their campaigns, so far, according to the most recent campaign disclosure statements.

District 4 represents all Glendale neighborhoods south of East Colorado Street, including Adams Hill.

👓 Analysis: Why Google has become a threat to sovereign law | Privacy Surgeon

Read Analysis: Why Google has become a threat to sovereign law » The Privacy Surgeon by Simon Davies (privacysurgeon.org)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lashed out at Google, accusing the advertising giant of collusion with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US State Department.

Assange believes that Google has entered into a partnership with the US Administration in which the company acts as a foreign policy enabler, influencing overseas governments and helping the White House achieve its global policy objectives. In the process Google has formed strong operational and policy bonds with America’s secretive three-letter agencies that go well beyond those of other companies.