The WordPress admin interface is complex and jam-packed with exciting options, which is great for experienced users. But what if you're just starting out?
Meh… not as interesting or detailed as I would have expected from the title.
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
This Week in Google 383: The Spectacles Spectacular
Trump meets with tech leaders. Yahoo reveals a new hack of 1 billion accounts. Google's self-driving division is now a new Alphabet company called Waymo. Google Assistant will add Actions on Google. Android Things, Google's IoT platform, gets a developer preview. Is Magic Leap a hoax?
https://youtu.be/yhrgzgbgh8Y
🎧 Gillmor Gang: Unborn Child
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 26, 2016. Oh no, Volumetrics meets the Beatles in a trip forward down memory lane. Eventually we even discover the chewy center.
Note from 12/20/16: Like others commented on the show, the concept of the Unborn Child and the Living Dead in analogizing new technologies (at least from the perspective of venture capital) is a very interesting and useful one.
👓 Chris Aldrich is reading “A Blowhard At Large” on Deciphering Glyph
I don’t like Tweetstorms™, or, to turn to a neologism, “manthreading”. They actively annoy me. Stop it. People who do this are almost always blowhards. Blogs are free. Put your ideas on your blog.
A brilliant and short essay on why Tweetstorms are positively dreadful.
👓 Chris Aldrich is reading “How Donald Trump’s business ties are already jeopardizing U.S. interests”
The president-elect is issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from U.S. foreign policy, and benefit his family’s corporate empire.
Already, there is a situation in which the president of the United States could be blackmailed by a foreign power through pressure related to his family’s business entanglements.
And this from the candidate whose only real campaign message was to call his opponent “crooked” and insinuate with no clear lines or proof of any sort that she used her position of power to line the pocket of her non-profit and thus herself. Though he came far from beating her in the popular vote, he’s completely and soundly beat her in the appearance of corruption.
👓 Chris Aldrich is reading “There’s a secret trick to getting more Instagram likes — and every internet star knows it”
Genius. Did it work for you?
📖 On page 95 of 206 of The Science of the Oven by Hervé This
📖 On page 95 of 206 of The Science of the Oven by Hervé This
Oh, if only more of my cookbooks had fantastic sentences like this one:
Now the flow of a liquid in a canal varies as the fourth power of the diameter.
Then there’s this lovely statement, which is as applicable to jellies and consommés as it is to our political leaders:
Today, as heirs to the (political) ancien regime, we all want jellies, like bouillons and consommés, to be transparent.
I’ll note that chapter 4 has some interesting recipes as well as one or two long-term experiments which may be interesting to try.
🎧 Gillmor Gang: Monetize This
Recorded live Friday, September 2, 2016. Waiting for latency can be a lonely thing, but the media march toward live streaming reaches new urgency.
🎧 This Week in Google 382: Last Media
Google goes 100% renewable in 2017. Google and Minecraft's Hour of Code plans. Amazon Go is a vision for the automated grocery store. New Qualcomm 10nm server chips. YouTube Rewind 2016. Pardon Edward Snowden! Mathew Ingram's pick: Design Solutions for Fake News Google Doc is a collaborative effort to combat fake news. Stacey's things: GE Z-Wave Wireless Lighting Control and iDevices Outdoor Switch - control your holiday lights from your phone! Leo's Picks: Dark Patterns catalogs user interfaces designed to trick people, and QEMU Advent Calendar 2016 is the geekiest advent calendar ever.
Mention of Dark Patterns which sounds like an interesting UX/UI resource for “fighting user deception worldwide.”
Owning my old Delicious Bookmarks… Sadly not today.
I thought I’d take a few minutes to go back and “own” the bookmarks I had put into Delicious since I joined on July 5, 2009, so I could have them on my own website. Sadly I ran into the following message:
We’re sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible.
Hopefully they get things working properly so I can export them one of these days without resorting to more arcane methods to get the data back.
👓 Chris Aldrich is reading “Why Wix’s response to WordPress re GPL license is weak | WP Garage”
After being accused of ripping off GPL material by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami responded...inadequately. Here's why.
👓 Chris Aldrich is reading “The Wix Mobile App, a WordPress Joint | Matt Mullenweg”
Anyone who knows me knows that I like to try new things — phones, gadgets, apps. Last week I downloaded the new Wix (closed, proprietary, non-open-sourced, non-GPL) mobile app. I’m always int…
A New Microblog on Mastodon.social
Manually POSSEing my first post from my own site to Mastodon.social, a GNU social alternative. I have a feeling I’ll enjoy the increased character count of 500 before being truncated on a microblog. #firstToot
The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López
The New York Times bestselling winner of the 2016 James Beard Award for General Cooking and the IACP Cookbook of the Year Award. A grand tour of the science of cooking explored through popular American dishes, illustrated in full color. Ever wondered how to pan-fry a steak with a charred crust and an interior that's perfectly medium-rare from edge to edge when you cut into it? How to make homemade mac 'n' cheese that is as satisfyingly gooey and velvety-smooth as the blue box stuff, but far tastier? How to roast a succulent, moist turkey (forget about brining!)―and use a foolproof method that works every time? As Serious Eats's culinary nerd-in-residence, J. Kenji López-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. In The Food Lab, Kenji focuses on the science behind beloved American dishes, delving into the interactions between heat, energy, and molecules that create great food. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don’t work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new―but simple―techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes with over 1,000 full-color images, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.
🔖 A First Step Toward Quantifying the Climate’s Information Production over the Last 68,000 Years
Paleoclimate records are extremely rich sources of information about the past history of the Earth system. We take an information-theoretic approach to analyzing data from the WAIS Divide ice core, the longest continuous and highest-resolution water isotope record yet recovered from Antarctica. We use weighted permutation entropy to calculate the Shannon entropy rate from these isotope measurements, which are proxies for a number of different climate variables, including the temperature at the time of deposition of the corresponding layer of the core. We find that the rate of information production in these measurements reveals issues with analysis instruments, even when those issues leave no visible traces in the raw data. These entropy calculations also allow us to identify a number of intervals in the data that may be of direct relevance to paleoclimate interpretation, and to form new conjectures about what is happening in those intervals—including periods of abrupt climate change.
Saw reference in Predicting unpredictability: Information theory offers new way to read ice cores [1]
References
[1]
“Predicting unpredictability: Information theory offers new way to read ice cores,” Phys.org. [Online]. Available: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-unpredictability-theory-ice-cores.html. [Accessed: 12-Dec-2016]