Month: June 2019

👓 Adversarial interoperability: reviving an elegant weapon from a more civilized age to slay today’s monopolies | boingboing.net

Read Adversarial interoperability: reviving an elegant weapon from a more civilized age to slay today's monopolies (Boing Boing)
What made iWork a success—and helped re-launch Apple—was the fact that Pages could open and save most Word files; Numbers could open and save most Excel files; and Keynote could open and save most PowerPoint presentations. Apple did not attain this compatibility through Microsoft's cooperation: it attained it despite Microsoft's noncooperation. Apple didn't just make an "interoperable" product that worked with an existing product in the market: they made an adversarially interoperable product whose compatibility was wrested from the incumbent, through diligent reverse-engineering and reimplementation. What's more, Apple committed to maintaining that interoperability, even though Microsoft continued to update its products in ways that temporarily undermined the ability of Apple customers to exchange documents with Microsoft customers, paying engineers to unbreak everything that Microsoft's maneuvers broke. Apple's persistence paid off: over time, Microsoft's customers became dependent on compatibility with Apple customers, and they would complain if Microsoft changed its Office products in ways that broke their cross-platform workflow.

👓 Craft beautiful equations in Word with LaTeX | Nature

Read Craft beautiful equations in Word with LaTeX (Nature)
Manufacturers are ditching equation editors in word-processing software in favour of the LaTeX typesetting language. Here’s how to get started.

👓 Track changes with latexdiff | TeXBlog

Read Track changes with latexdiff (texblog)
Track changes is a popular tool in Word. If you are looking for something similar for LaTeX latexdiff is the answer. For example if you are an academic researcher submitting papers to journals, you…
This looks cool. I should play around with it a bit.

👓 Why Women, but Not Men, Are Judged for a Messy House | New York Times

Read Why Women, but Not Men, Are Judged for a Messy House (New York Times)
They’re still held to a higher social standard, which explains why they’re doing so much housework, studies show.

👓 Man Still Without Tow Truck After Repossessing NYPD Officer's Car | NY1

Read Man Still Without Tow Truck After Repossessing NYPD Officer's Car (ny1.com)
Rodriguez is due back in court June 26.
I would think the mayor’s office and internal affairs would be all over this…

👓 Does the news reflect what we die from? | Our World in Data

Read Does the news reflect what we die from? (Our World in Data)
There is a large disconnect between what gets covered in the media and the day-to-day reality for most. How do causes of death in the US match with media coverage and what people search for online?
Some interesting ethical and moral questions here relating to public health and how it’s covered in the media.

This could be a nice interview segment for On the Media.

Read 10 Things That Scare Me by Chris Lott (Chris Lott)

One of my favorite new podcasts is WNYC’s 10 Things That Scare Me, a “tiny podcast about our biggest fears.” The premise is simple: someone (the guests, sometimes famous, often anonymous, are unidentified until the end of the show) shares—directly into the mic—ten things that scare them, each with little bit of narrative.

Sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, mostly brutally honest…there’s just something beautiful in the simplicity of this direct sharing of fears. To get a taste, here’s a random sample of fears from recent episodes:

  • climate change
  • the marionette in my mom’s bedroom
  • my Google search history being made public
  • becoming irrelevant
  • hospitals
  • breathing tubes
  • being shot by law enforcement.

Also, the relatively lo-fi (but very much intentionally so) format and editing fit the idea perfectly.

Best listened to without looking at the title of the show which, unfortunately, gives away the guest’s identity.

Read Digital Citizenship, Again, Always by Chris Lott (fncll.org)

Summer is here and, with it, I again have the privilege of teaching a grad class with the (mouthful of) a title “Digital Citizenship, Intellectual Property, and Internet Legal Issues” AKA “Nousion” because…shorter titles FTW. It’s a small class (12-weeks, a half-dozen students) about big ideas. Any one of the clauses in the title could be a semester-long class, a PhD dissertation, or a book!

But we start with digital citizenship because, as problematic as the concept is, I think it works to have everything else in the course be part, or a function of, it. And the questions there are perennial:

  • What does the word “digital” mean and do here?
  • What is citizenship?
  • How do we live and work online, individually and together?
  • Where does digital literacy fit?
  • What about identity?
  • What about privacy?
  • Whose data?

You get the idea. I love exploring this topic every summer with a cohort of engaged students even if by the end of each term the most important lesson I’ve learned is just how much more I don’t know and if the only answers to those questions are more questions.

Read May Movies by Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)
I have to be better about posting my movie “reviews” more quickly. I get overwhelmed thinking that I need to write something about the movie when really the whole point of me doing these reviews is just to record what movies I’ve seen. So this month, I’m writing very little about each of these viewings.

Acquired The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version 5th Edition

Acquired The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version 5th Edition by Michael Coogan (Editor), Marc Brettler (Editor), Carol Newsom (Editor), Pheme Perkins (Editor) (Oxford University Press)

For over 50 years students, professors, clergy, and general readers have relied on The New Oxford Annotated Bible as an unparalleled authority in Study Bibles. This fifth edition of the Annotated remains the best way to study and understand the Bible at home or in the classroom. This thoroughly revised and substantially updated edition contains the best scholarship informed by recent discoveries and anchored in the solid Study Bible tradition.

· Introductions and extensive annotations for each book by acknowledged experts in the field provide context and guidance. 
· Introductory essays on major groups of biblical writings - Pentateuch, Prophets, Gospels, and other sections - give readers an overview that guides more intensive study.
· General essays on history, translation matters, different canons in use today, and issues of daily life in biblical times inform the reader of important aspects of biblical study.
· Maps and diagrams within the text contextualize where events took place and how to understand them.
· Color maps give readers the geographical orientation they need for understanding historical accounts throughout the Bible.
· Timelines, parallel texts, weights and measures, calendars, and other helpful tables help navigate the biblical world.
· An extensive glossary of technical terms demystifies the language of biblical scholarship.
· An index to the study materials eases the way to the quick location of information.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible, with twenty new essays and introductions and others--as well as annotations--fully revised, offers the reader flexibility for any learning style. Beginning with a specific passage or a significant concept, finding information for meditation, sermon preparation, or academic study is straightforward and intuitive.

A volume that users will want to keep for continued reference, The New Oxford Annotated Bible continues the Oxford University Press tradition of providing excellence in scholarship for the general reader. Generations of users attest to its status as the best one-volume Bible reference tool for any home, library, or classroom.

Hardback book cover in red with white/red text
Ordered on Amazon on 6/13/19 for use as reference with Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature (Yale-RLST152) which I’ve been watching recently.

Quickly making watch posts on my website

I was reading about how Cathie LeBlanc sometimes felt overwhelmed about logging the movies she’d recently seen:

I have to be better about posting my movie “reviews” more quickly. I get overwhelmed thinking that I need to write something about the movie when really the whole point of me doing these reviews is just to record what movies I’ve seen. So this month, I’m writing very little about each of these viewings.

I always had this problem too and finding quick and easy ways of posting them before I forgot became part of the solution. I’m not sure I’ve fully documented what I’ve been doing, but it’s slowly changed over time, so I thought I’d take a moment to write down some of the faster methods I use or have used.

One can always use the WordPress mobile posting app, bookmarklets in conjunction with Post Kinds, or even posting via email, but it usually takes a few minutes and can distract from conversations and family/friends when they’re around. Generally I’m looking to immediately capture the title of the film/tv show, the date/time stamp, and maybe the location. Later on, when I’ve got a few extra minutes, I’ll come back and optionally add details/context like poster art, cast, crew, etc. and a mini review with a rating. The method you use will depend on what kind of display you want and how much detail you’d like. At the end of the day, do what works best for you.

Checkin Method

I’m a relatively avid user of the Swarm app (fka Foursquare), so I’ll often take a photo of the movie poster, ticket, theater/other while I’m at the theater and then quickly checkin on my phone. Swarm typically has some interface to indicate which movie I’m seeing when I check into movie theaters. Otherwise it’s pretty easy to manually type things in while I’m waiting for the show to start. Once the movie is over I can discretely can go back to the checkin and add a few quick comments and a rating without disturbing the rest of the party, otherwise I’ll revisit it later.

To get this all on my website I’ve set up the Micropub plugin and configured OwnYourSwarm (for public/private posting–you choose), and the service takes care of posting all the data for me as a checkin so that I don’t forget. In the end it’s usually less than 10 seconds, and I’ve got the data I need as it happens.

Traditional PESOS watch method using IFTTT

This alternate PESOS method can be done using popular services like IMDb.com or Letterboxd.com and relies on using RSS feeds from them to pipe content to my site using IFTTT.com. (Other silo services may be able to do this as well.) Most often I send the URLs of movies/tv shows of what I watch from IMDb to my Reading.am account which has an RSS feed to trigger IFTTT.com that, in turn, creates a draft post on my website. (If only IMDB.com had a usable RSS feed, I could skip the Reading.am account. Typically I’ll search for the movie on IMDb, share that from my browser to may email client and email it to a custom Reading.am email address that autoposts it to my Reading.am account.) Later I can peek in on it, add a mini-review and rating if I like, and publish publicly or not. Letterboxd can be used similarly, but it has the added benefit of having a rating system built in so it can send that data as well.

Hopefully they’ll resolve with a logged in account, so here are the two IFTTT.com recipes I’m using as reference:

(If you can’t access the recipes to recreate your own, let me know, and I’ll manually delineate all the relevant settings.)

Both methods will work without it, but I’m also using the Post Kinds plugin to create explicit watch posts which have a nice contextual presentation which I kind of like. It also has the ability to parse URLs to create the context quickly, so if you put in an IMDb or Letterboxd URL, it will fetch artwork, cast, description, etc. automatically and there’s no need to cut/paste.

Examples

To get some idea, here are some interesting examples of these methods.

If others have better/faster methods, I’d love to hear them or see them documented. Perhaps one day someone (or maybe even IMDb or Letterboxd) will build a custom Micropub client specifically for watch posts (something akin to Teacup for food/drink or Indiebookclub for reading) that will automatically poll the data related to a film/television title and post it to one’s site?