👓 Photos | Tom MacWright

Read Photos by Tom MacWright (macwright.org)
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.

👓 Following Twitter peeps in an indiereader with granary.io and Microsub | Neil Mather

Read Following Twitter peeps in an indiereader with granary.io and Microsub by Neil MatherNeil 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.
Read a post by Daniel Goldsmith (View from ASCRAEUS)

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…
Read a post by Daniel Goldsmith (View from ASCRAEUS)

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.

Replied to a post by Michael BishopMichael 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.
Replied to Sucking up the podcasts I've listened to: Days to save minutes by Jeremy Cherfas (www.jeremycherfas.net)
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…

👓 Monthly report: February 2019 | Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to Monthly report: February 2019 (jeremycherfas.net)

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.

👓 An error unexplained | Jeremy Cherfas

Read An error unexplained by Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)
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?

👓 The spam technology ecosystem expands | Language Log

Read The spam technology ecosystem expands by Mark Liberman (Language Log)
Wikipedia describes academia.edu as a for-profit "social networking site for academics", whose misleading .edu domain name "was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions". For my part, I'd describe academia.edu as "a source of large volumes of annoying unsolicited email".

👓 Alan B. Krueger, Economic Aide to Clinton and Obama, Is Dead at 58 | New York Times

Read Alan B. Krueger, Economic Aide to Clinton and Obama, Is Dead at 58 (nytimes.com)
A labor economist, Princeton scholar, Treasury official and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. The police said the cause was suicide.

👓 Alan Krueger, prominent Princeton economist, passes away | Princeton

Read Alan Krueger, prominent Princeton economist, passes away (Princeton University)
Princeton University is saddened to share that Alan Krueger, James Madison Professor of Political Economy, passed away over the weekend.  Alan was recognized as a true leader in his field, known and admired for both his research and teaching.