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.
I started the second week of "Programming 101: An Introduction to #Python for Educators" on #FutureLearn and wrote a small quiz about Arabic verbs: https://github.com/kranatalie/Introduction-to-Python/blob/main/arabic-quiz-bot.py It was fun again and I'm actually a little proud! Would really like to recommend the course again. It's the perfect gentle introduction for me that doesn't overwhelm but still teaches enough to get an idea of what's possible. Looking forward to the final challenge this week: Building commands into your bot. Let's try this! https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/programming-101
Earnest but still solidifying #pkm take:
The ever-rising popularity of personal knowledge management tools indexes the need for liberal arts approaches. Particularly, but not exclusively, in STEM education.
When people widely reinvent the concept/practice of commonplace books without building on centuries of prior knowledge (currently institutionalized in fields like library & information studies, English, rhetoric & composition, or media & communication studies), that's not "innovation."
Instead, we're seeing some unfortunate combination of lost knowledge, missed opportunities, and capitalism selectively forgetting in order to manufacture a market.
A new year brings new calls for a return to personal blogging as an antidote to the toxic and extractive systems of social media.
@cplong@sramsay
IndieWeb, blogging, fountain pens?!? I almost hate to mention it for the rabbit hole it may become, but you’ll get a bit of all three here: https://micro.blog/discover/pens. Happy New Year!
The combination of Zotero (with the Better BibTeX plugin) and Obsidian with the Citation and Projects plugins are the perfect way for me as a PhD student to keep track of the literature to be read and already read.
This is excellent! I’d already had the majority of it set up and I was going to spend some time this week to write some custom code with Dataview to do this, but apparently there’s a reasonably flexible plugin that will get me 95% of what I’m sure to want without any work! Thanks Natalie.
Incidentally, I spent a chunk of yesterday looking at S.D. Goitein’s note taking process (zettelkasten) in his work on the Cairo Geniza, specifically with respect to:
Zinger, Oded. “Finding a Fragment in a Pile of Geniza: A Practical Guide to Collections, Editions, and Resources.” Jewish History 32, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-019-09314-6.
Slowly customizing my site layout enough to get it to validate h-entry info according to this nifty tool: https://indiewebify.me Wow, do I teach myself best by exploring other examples. #blogging#indieWeb
@ryanrandall@natalie I’m seeing more HCommons folx looking at #IndieWeb, so I’ll mention that I’ve got several IndieWeb friendly sites including on #WordPress as does @KFitz, who I think has also been experimenting with static sites lately. If you need support, there’s a great and helpful community you’ll find at https://chat.indieweb.org for all your questions. You might find some useful tidbits and examples at https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education as well.
The Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education, a great (1400+ pages!) resource on elearning has been released as an openly licensed book. Great essays in here on learning theories - I will write more as I get through this, but it looks some of the most interesting writers/researchers on elearning are well represented here. Pay a lot for the print copy or download it free as a pdf. https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-981-19-2080-6
I’ve wanted full RSS feeds for several Mastodon instances for ages.
They can be particularly useful for small instances (aka communities) with slow posting velocity—you know, that instance you wanted to join for the local camaraderie, but having/maintaining/maintaining yet another Mastodon account wasn’t worth it, the hashtag discovery wasn’t going to cut it, and trying to follow all the people in the local community individually is irksome. Well OpenRSS.org might be able to cover you.
As an example, I wanted to follow what’s happening at toolsforthought.rocks/public/local so I added that slightly trimmed local timeline URL onto https://openrss.org/ and put it into my feed reader. After they wire things together for you a bit (presuming it’s one they’ve not seen/done before), voilà your RSS feed just starts working! Now I’m following ToolsForThought at: https://openrss.org/toolsforthought.rocks/public/local.
Since my personal website works with Mastodon and the Fediverse, this last part of more easily following groups of people in my social reader helps me complete the circle of reading, following, and responding in a more IndieWeb way. (Of course I wish that Mastodon 4.0 had not gone full js;dr, which would have allowed following them using Microformats mark up with much better fidelity. le sigh)
What website(s) are you using if you blog about movies / TV shows and want to link to general info about them? Is it still IMDB, or is there something better?
@tchambers@indieweb.social @coachtony @jeffjarvis@mastodon.social @mathowie@xoxo.zone Thanks for these links! Definitely exciting to see how this is being approached from different angles. I’m excited for this next chapter.
@buster@medium.social @tchambers@indieweb.social @coachtony@medium.social @jeffjarvis@mastodon.social @mathowie@xoxo.zone
Another example of longer posts which are folded under a “read more” type link within the Fediverse itself can be seen in the Hometown fork of Mastodon (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown), which is running the hcommons.social platform. The admins have upped the character limit to 1000 instead of the usual 500. Ideally those reading in other parts of the network would see the beginning of a post and a “Read more” link to read the remainder of the piece.
I often post to my own WordPress website which has a plugin to make it appear as if it were ActivityPub compatible. If I follow it via a Hometown-based (Mastodon) server, like my hcommons.social account, I see all the full short notes/replies content which are usually 1000 characters or less. For posts over that limit, there’s a “Read More >” which opens up the entirety of the article within the hcommons.social interface where I can read it in its entirety. Naturally there’s a link to the original, so I can also go back to read that if I chose.
I’ve just gone over the 1000 character limit, so I’ll post this on my own site, syndicate a copy to my hcommons.social account, and with any luck it will serve as an example of how all this might work between WordPress, a forked version of Mastodon, and Mastodon itself, as well as for testing it for reading in other parts of the Fediverse if one wished.
Beyond this reading experience, one should also be aware of a separate user interface/interaction problem inherent in how Mastodon and potentially other parts of the Fediverse handle replies and who can see them. I’ll leave this link to explain that issue separately: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036. (Hopefully your instance will let you see a subsection of some of the replies to it…)
An additional benefit that one gets in bolting on ActivityPub the way it works for my WordPress site is that folks who subscribe to @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com can see linked text natively from within Mastodon despite the fact that Mastodon doesn’t allow one to wrap text with URLs to link out.
Martha Stewart’s Cooking School series is a rather nicely structured introduction to cooking. I enjoyed her presentation on creating stocks, but there’s an odd double entendre about taking stock tips from Martha Stewart.
3oz. over ice. Very smoky/peaty with a long finish.
social media (n): /ˌsoː.ʃəl ˈmiː.di.aː/
A DDoS, usually perpetrated by surveillance capitalists, on a person’s attention preventing them from traditional sensemaking, clear thinking, learning, and generally otherwise experiencing life.
It’s not lost on me that historically multiple votes to elect a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives like this happen when the United States is grappling with its white supremacist history and what Eddie Glaude, Jr. calls “the lie”.
Seems odd that Pope Benedict XVI has died, yet we’re all watching the U.S. House of Representatives for the proverbial “white smoke”? Perhaps we’ll see it tomorrow on January 6th?
Ryan Randall
Geoff Cain (@geoffcain@mastodon.social)
kimonostereo
Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social)
