Well, that was weird. Something had gone wrong with my little PHP script for adding items from my list at reading.am to my WithKnown-powered stream. It ran, reported no errors, and yet produced nothing at the other end. Gorgeous Saturday morning, blue skies and sunshine; what better way to spend it than indoors debugging?
Month: March 2019
👓 Monthly report: February 2019 | Jeremy Cherfas
February was a pretty good month. Or maybe it's just that I have a lot more reminders of how good it was.
Our Daily Bread
Fear of rejection utterly justified; the agent says publishers want something less bitty, "a biography of a commodity, like Kurlansky's Cod". In sales terms, I'll bet that's what they want. But it is not at all what I want to write. So, back to making self-publishing a reality, ASAP.
Jeremy, if this is the response an agent and publishers have given you and you’re even remotely considering the self-publishing route, please do let me volunteer to help you in the endeavor. I have a tremendous amount of experience in the publishing area and also have a lot of overhead (including a massive block of ISBNs) in place to help you out along the way.
It’s the least I could do since I feel like I may be at least partially responsible for starting you down the primrose path of Our Daily Bread… I also suspect that what you’d like to write is going to be far more interesting and nourishing a project.
Finally, I have succeeded in importing all the podcasts I have listened to with the Overcast app, at least as far back as May 2018.
Congratulations! I have to say I’m a bit jealous, but sadly Overcast is Apple only…
Michael Bishop (Miklb Mindless Ramblings)Want to trip yourself out, sync your phon to a Bluetooth speaker @ forget about it until your trying to figure out what that noise is (keyboard clicks from phone)
I’ve done this several times before. Never fails to freak me out before I realize what’s going on.
You don’t know how liberating this feels. (yes, I backed up 13 years of cruft first) screen shot of pinboard.in with all bookmarks & tags removed.
Congrats!
I wanted a simple self-hosted read-it-later service, something akin to Instapaper and Pocket, but without the overheads involved in running something like Wallabag.
Failing to find one, I wrote my own, and have just released it to the wilds.
It is very very simple, and uses Andres Rey’s php port of Mozilla’s Readability.js to grab pages for reading. There’s no interface to speak of, just a lightweight api with POST and a DELETE calls exposed. All files are saved as flat html, with a json index. No databases.
While writing it I’ve been prototyping it on my own site, and have been loving the experience. Its like the web, but the way it should be. If anyone else finds it useful, that’s a bonus.
I’ve been happily noodling around the interstices of the web of late.
I’m still super happy with my nanoreader and using it everyday has reminded me of the beauty of plaintext. Text is content.
In that spirit, I’ve gone back to using gopher. I’ve finally got what I missed when I wrote about this three years ago - text doesn’t need to be the web! Text can just be itself, text should just be itself. My previous effort missed this fundamental principle, and looking back now, I can see that this was largely to blame for my walking away from that experiment.
Coming back to the idea of gopher, with that in mind, has been liberating.
Some of my content (not my microposts) is available on gopher, as this post will be. I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, feeling my way into an area I once knew well, and I’m satisfied with the results.
I’d love to hear from anyone else who’s using gopher, or who’s using older text-focused network systems in interesting ways. I still want to love the web. I still want to find communities working to deliver on the promise there once was in this technology.
I seem to be seeing a lot of resurgence around Gopher in the past couple of months…
Got to be honest, every time I see someone’s blog in their bio or profile, then click through only to find the most recent post was in 2016, or worse, I die a little inside.
I’m in much the same boat, but I die a lot. It’s depressing.
👓 Following Twitter peeps in an indiereader with granary.io and Microsub | Neil Mather
Neil Mather (doubleloop)My online social experience is mostly through the indieweb. For following people and blogs, I use Aperture, a Microsub server, to subscribe to various social feeds. And then I read and interact with those feeds in various clients – e.g. Indigenous on Android, and Monocle on the web. Although I don...
I haven’t migrated over to a microsub-based reader yet, but this is an excellent description of some tools for freeing yourself from reading friends and family in Twitter.
👓 Photos | Tom MacWright
My photos are on macwright.org now: /photos. I don’t like Instagram. I know that other people like it: they found a community there. They keep in touch with family. They share interests and life events. But I just don’t: I don’t like how browsing Instagram makes me feel. I don’t like how it shapes my photos, how it works as a product. I don’t like that it’s a Facebook company. How it doesn’t have critical APIs. You can’t cross-post to Instagram without using the app. By creating my own place to post photography, I can start to like taking photos again. I can feel like my process of taking film photos, scanning them, and putting them on the web is worthwhile. That learning how to tweak camera raw in Capture One is fun. I can post just a photo or two a month. I don’t want to engage, I want to create.
Tom has a great sketch for how he’s owning his own photos on his own website.
Bookmarked The ultimate guide to DuckDuckGo - BrettTerpstra.com (BrettTerpstra.com)If you don’t already have the scoop, it’s the search engine that can serve as a complete replacement for Google (and Bing and whatever else you like), except it respects your privacy and security. And while Google does some cool tricks, DuckDuckGo does some even better ones.I switched over to DuckDuckGo for searches a few months ago. There’s a lot of stuff here I didn’t know about especially “bangs” which look really useful.
👓 The worst design of 2016 was also the most effective | Duncan Stephen
The worst design of 2016 was also the most effective — Diana Budds, Fast Company
Why Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again hat, was a wildly successful design, despite being reviled by gatekeepers of good-taste design.
The “undesigned” hat represented this everyman sensibility, while Hillary [Clinton]’s high-design branding — which was disciplined, systematic, and well-executed — embodied the establishment narrative that Trump railed against and that Middle America felt had failed them. “The DIY nature of the hat embodies the wares of a ‘self-made man’ and intentionally distances itself from well-established and unassailable high-design brand systems of Hillary and Obama,” Young says. “Tasteful design becomes suspect… The trucker cap is as American as apple pie and baseball.”
This reminds me of the story that the most “tasteful” office spaces are less productive. When given a clean-looking office cubicle, people fill it with garden gnomes.
I don’t agree with the article’s premise that this challenges the idea of design thinking. Surely it means that Hillary Clinton’s designers simply didn’t do a good enough job at it (because nice typefaces ≠ design thinking).
But this does provide a challenge to the received wisdom of what good design is, and whether tasteful design is desirable.
Malcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)Ok I totally stole the title from this article, which was really good and help me fix my problems so I wanted to link to it. I recently upgraded all my servers from Jessie to Stretch, which was long overdue. The catalyst being that certbot from Let's Encrypt started complaining about the security I...
👓 Random passwords; Not easy to see | jeena.net
Jeena (jeena.net)Even if you look really close.
👓 Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours | Ryan Barrett
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)It was winter 2014. Pharrell had just dropped Happy, the Rosetta probe landed on a comet, President Obama was opening diplomatic relations with Cuba…
…and here at Color, the bioinformatics team had a problem. Our pipeline — the data processing system that crunches raw DNA data from our lab into the variants we report to patients — was slow. 12 to 24 hours slow.
This wasn’t a problem in and of itself — bioinformatics pipelines routinely run for hours or even days — but it was a royal pain for development. We’d write new pipeline code, start it running, go home, and return the next morning to find it had crashed halfway through because we’d missed a semicolon. Argh. Or worse, since we hadn’t launched yet, our live pipeline would hit similar bugs in production R&D samples, which would delay them until we could debug, test, and deploy the fix. No good.