🎞️ Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Watched Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) from Warner Bros.
Directed by Mel Stuart. With Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Peter Ostrum, Roy Kinnear. Charlie receives a golden ticket to a factory, his sweet tooth wants going into the lushing candy, it turns out there's an adventure in everything.
I remember watching this twice a year every year at Hopkins. I miss those Rocky Horror-esque performances with massive amounts of candy. Throwing nerds across the room in the path of the projected light when Mike Teevee was sent in a million little pieces was so gratifying.

It’s been a few years since I watched this, but even the “Cheer up Charlie” song doesn’t grate on me like it once did. I used to think it was the worst part of the film and now it’s vaguely tolerable–still not great–but tolerable at least.

I had re-read the book last year and put a tracker on the film version. Netflix just added it to their mix last week, so it’s now available there for a while.

Watched on Netflix

Rating:

📺 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 1 Episodes 1-4)

Watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Season 1, Episodes 1-4) from Amazon Originals
Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino. With Rachel Brosnahan, Alex Borstein, Michael Zegen, Marin Hinkle. A housewife in the 1950s decides to become a stand-up comic.
This is more fun and entertaining than I would have expected it to be.

My one disappointment so far: The first couple episodes has some stronger and better written characters that seem much more true to themselves. By episode four/early episode 5 they’re feeling white washed and almost caricatures of themselves. Certainly by episode four Mrs. Maisel has somehow morphed into a somewhat older Rory Gilmore (from Gilmore Girls). All the characters eventually seem to have the same witty banter and methods of speech (including the time period) which mirrors Amy Sherman Palladino’s work in Gillmore Girls. Some of Mrs. Maisel’s grittiness from the early episodes simply disappears, and not as an evolving result of her character arc.

While I can appreciate that the writer certainly has a “voice”, she should be able to modulate it to better differentiate her characters going forward. I’ll keep sampling it through the end of the season, but if the tenor doesn’t improve, I’m sure to give up on future seasons.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

📖 Read pages 95-110 of Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary

📖 Read pages 95-110, Chapter 6: The Baddest Witch in the World, of Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary (Scholastic Book Services, , ISBN: 0-590-04493-1)

I’m skipping around a bit in the plot since it’s not entirely linear…

I really appreciate the sophisticated philosophy of a kindergartner loosing her identity by wearing a mask. This idea was certainly something I find intriguing.

I’m pretty sure I read this book in my youth, but I’m finding that I honestly don’t recall any of the plot for some reason.

🎞 Miss Sloane (2016)

Watched Miss Sloane from EuropaCorp
Directed by John Madden. With Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Stuhlbarg. In the high-stakes world of political power-brokers, Elizabeth Sloane is the most sought after and formidable lobbyist in D.C. But when taking on the most powerful opponent of her career, she finds winning may come at too high a price.
This was certainly a well constructed script though some of the turns weren’t subtly executed enough to have confounded me as well as I would have liked. Still there was enough unexpectedness in the telegraphing that I suspect most were caught unawares, which makes it a fantastic film.

There were far more supporting characters here than in a typical studio picture, but that actually made it more interesting and gritty somehow. Generally well acted by everyone, though Michael Stuhlbarg and Mark Strong stood out to me as incredibly solid here.

Though Elizabeth Sloane doesn’t seem to have much of a character arc, like most of her life, she’s living it out internally so that it really isn’t seen until the last minute when everything is revealed. It’s nice to see a painfully flawed central character as a lead.

Reply to Annotating Web Audio by Jon Udell

Replied to Annotating Web Audio by Jon UdellJon Udell (Jon Udell)
On a recent walk I listened to Unmasking Misogyny on Radio Open Source. One of the guests, Danielle McGuire, told the story of Rosa Parks’ activism in a way I hadn’t heard before. I wanted to capture that segment of the show, save a link to it, and bookmark the link for future reference.
Jon, this is certainly an awesome and interesting way to target audio on the web, which can be tremendously useful.

Given what you’ve got here, I suspect that you may be unaware of the W3C spec for media fragments which may make portions of what you’re attempting to do a bit easier (and also much more standardized). The spec is relatively broadly supported by most browsers, so it immediately makes things a tad easier from a plumbing perspective.

Some people will be somewhat familiar with the targeting technique as it’s similar to the one used by YouTube which lets users hot link to specific portions of video on their platform.

To summarize the concept, on most audio and video files one can add a =XXX the the end of a URL where XXX is the number in seconds into the file where one wants to start. One can target stretches of audio similarly with the pattern #t=XXX,YYY where XXX is the start and YYY is the stop time for the fragment, again in seconds.

As an example I can use it to specifically target the audio  on a particular standalone audio file like so:

https://media.martymcgui.re/70/d5/f1/77/975194c74454dc7a3ef71586bf98612a94bcb5685f7e7d3ca60dc183.mp3#t=269

With some clever JavaScript, one can go a step further and implement this at the level of targeting audio/video as embedded on a particular page which may contain a wealth of additional (potentially necessary) context. As an example of this, we can look at the audio above in its original context as part of a podcast using the same type of time fragment notation:

https://martymcgui.re/2017/10/29/163907/#t=269

As an added bonus, on this particular page with audio, you’ll notice that you can play the audio and if you pause it, the page URL in your browser should automatically refresh to indicate the particular audio timestamp for that particular position! Thus in your particular early example it makes things far easier to bookmark, save, or even share!

For use within Hypothesis, I suspect that one could use this same type of system to directly annotate the original audio file on the original page by using this scheme, potentially by using such JavaScript within the browser plugin for Hypothesis.

It would be nice if the user could queue up the particular audio segment and press pause, and then annotate the audio portion of the page using such a targeting segment. Then one could potentially share a specific URL for their annotation (in typical Hypothesis fashion) that not only targets the original page with the embedded audio, but it could also have that audio queued up to the correct portion (potentially with a page refresh to reset the audio depending on the annotation.)

The nice part is that the audio can be annotated within the page on which it originally lived rather than on some alternate page on the web that requires removing the context and causing potential context collapse. It also means one doesn’t have to host an intermediate page to have the whole thing work.

For more information on the idea, take a peek at the IndieWeb’s page on audio fragments which includes a few examples of people using it in the wild as well as a link to the JavaScript sample for doing the targeting within the page itself.

I’m curious if the scheme may make putting all the smaller loose pieces together even easier, particularly for use within Hypothesis? and while keeping more of the original context in which the audio was found?

I also suspect that these types of standards could be used to annotate audio in much the same way that the SoundCloud service handles their audio annotations, though in a much more open way. One would simply need to add on some additional UI to make the annotations on such audio present differently.

Just for fun, this type of sub-targeting on web pages also works visually for text as well with the concept of fragmention. As an example of this, I can target this specific paragraph with this link http://boffosocko.com/2018/01/07/reply-to-annotating-web-audio-by-jon-udell/#Just+for+fun, and a snippet of JavaScript on the page creates a yellow highlighting effect as well.

Reply to Aaron Davis’ Reply to IndieWeb Press This bookmarklets for WordPress

Replied to Reply to IndieWeb Press This bookmarklets for WordPress by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I have been using Dave Winer’s Radio3 platform/bookmarklet, but would rather a process which would allow me to store bookmarks on my blog and POSSE them. I was therefore wondering about creating a similar bookmarklet that generates ‘Bookmark’ post-kinds, as well as the possibility of posting from mobile? Am I going down the wrong path, especially as WordPress tinkers with ‘Press This’?
Aaron, the IndieWeb PressThis version bookmarklets are certainly a laudable solution for bookmarking things (even as WordPress moves the functionality of the original out of core), but I suspect you may find a more robust solution given some of your current set up.

Post Kinds Bookmarklets

A screen capture of my browser bookmarklets for my WordPress site with emoji for easier visual use.

A screen capture of my browser bookmarklets for my WordPress site with emoji for easier visual use.

Since you have the Post Kinds plugin set up, you might consider using that for a lot of the distance it can give you instead. I’ve written up some basic usage instructions for the plugin along with screenshots, but you’ll probably be most interested in the section on Bookmarklet Configuration. I’ve created a dozen or so browser bookmarklets, with handy visual emoji, for creating specific bookmark types for my site.

As for mobile posting, I’ll mention that I’ve heard “rumors” that David Shanske has a strong itch for improving the use of Post Kinds with a better mobile flow, so I would expect it to improve in the coming months. Until that time however, you can find some great tips on the wiki page for mobile posting. I recommend reading the entire page (including the section on Known which includes tools like URL Forwarder for Android that will also work with WordPress in conjunction with Post Kinds and the URL scheme described in the Bookmarklet Configuration section noted above.)

Using these details you should be able to make bookmarklets for your desktop browser and an Android phone in under an hour. If for some reason the documentation at these locations isn’t clear enough for you to puzzle out, let me know and I can do a more complete write up with screenshots and full code. (It’s still a piece of the book I need to expand out, or I’d include it here.)

Email

WordPress has the option of setting up an email address by which to post to your site. You can configure this pretty quickly, especially for mobile use to send URLs to your website that way. I typically use this method for quickly bookmarking things to my site for private use at a later date.

PESOS Options

There are also services that do bookmarking and include RSS feeds to your content which you could also potentially use to trigger IFTTT.com actions to post to your website. I have something similar to this set up for Reading.am which I’ve described in the past. You could certainly use this in combination with Diigo, which I see you use. Again, here more often than not I use these methods when I post things to my site as drafts or private posts.

cc: Indieweb Press This Bookmarklets for WordPress

🎧 This Week in Google 436 I Married a Stormtrooper | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google 436 I Married a Stormtrooper by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, Joan Donovan from TWiT.tv
Facebook's facial recognition software will alert you when someone posts a picture of you, even without being tagged. Snooze your friends. How to use meme wars to run for President. Google Maps has a 6 year lead on the competition. Google AI finds two new planets. Google kills Tango. Twitter hate crackdown. Republican "Net Neutrality" bill. Magic Leap reveals its AR headset. Amazon Echo Spot unboxing. Joan Donovan's Pick: Exploding the Phone Jeff's Number: Elon Musk Tweets His Phone Number Stacey's Thing: Wink+Sonos Leo's Tool: Amazon Echo Spot

https://youtu.be/Bk4MBBZeU2o

Why More Linear Algebra? by David Austin

Bookmarked Why More Linear Algebra? by David Austin (More Linear Algebra)
The main purpose of this blog is to share updates about the open-access, open-source textbook Understanding Linear Algebra. Though work is continuing on this project, the HTML version of the text is now freely available, the forthcoming PDF version will also be free, and low-cost print options will be provided. The PreTeXt source code will be posted on GitHub as well.
h/t Robert Talbert

🎧 This Week in Google 438 Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google 438 Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Marks from TWiT.tv
Say farewell to Pixel C, YouTube on Alexa, and decency on YouTube. Say hello to Trump's big button, SWATing, and corporations as malevolent AIs. Google Images knows how you'll vote. Ads coming to Alexa. Amazon is not really going to buy Target, are they? Equifax gets off scot-free. Facebook's new Center for Deleting Content. Leo's Tool: What 3 Words: a new way to navigate Jeff's Number: Million Short: search links without the top million results Kevin's Stuff: IndieWeb, Homebrew Website Club, and Micro.blog

https://youtu.be/7SF7HvvmME0

Bret Victor, beast of burden

Bookmarked Bret Victor, beast of burden by Bret Victor (worrydream.com)
Bret Victor has been provided by the management for your protection.
This is awesome looking website. The transitions between pages are quite lovely and not the same as everything else out there.

I love what happens when you click on the tagline under the site name multiple times. Then keep on clicking… be careful though.