Ordering the iPhone X. The Essential phone and its lack of press coverage. Who owns your face, malicious face recognition and the lack of face case law. The splintered internet explained. The iPhone calculator flaw. Burn-in problems reported for the Pixel 2. AI dominating companies and the Frightful 5 identified. Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft earnings beat expectations. The consequence of monopolies. The General Data Protection Regulation and its implication for your personal data. Amazon delivering inside your house now. Roger Stone has been banned from Twitter. Facebook might start charging publishers to promote their stories in the main news feed and of course the controversy surrounding the cheeseburger emoji.
At the end of NaNoWriMo day 1, I’ve added 2,859 words, most of them written in the early morning. A chunk is in the introduction, but the biggest part includes a relatively solid 1,800 words on the topic of microformats.
The power company decided to turn the power off at the home office today, so I had to migrate over to the local Starbucks for an impromptu write-in.
It’s probably going to take me a few weeks of heaving editing when the whole thing is said and done, but overall it felt like a terrifically productive first day. I am managing to get a bit of light editing done as I go through, particularly to try and make sure I don’t miss anything too significant. I’m going to need to spend a few days on screen captures when this is all said and done.
The best part is that even with a short section of code, the whole file compiled on the second run! And this was without putting any real effort into it as I was writing.
Hopefully in the coming week, based on output versus the scope of the outline I’ve set, I’ll have a better idea about how much of the book I’ll be able to finish within the month. I’m presently a tad concerned that it’ll take a few additional weeks to properly cover all the introductory topics I want to touch upon.
I keep having to remind myself of the likely technical level of the audience, but I feel like I’m keeping it simple enough to be clear while hopefully encouraging people to want to learn more about eventually learning to write some code themselves when they’re done reading and working through the book.
I’m happy that it feels like it’s almost writing itself, but the couple of dozen sites I’ve built in the past few years and a relatively solid outline are helping a lot.
Welcome to the second episode of NaNoWriMo Superheroes and Superheroines on Medium. Throughout the month of November we’ll interview people with different backgrounds, day jobs, and involvement with this annual writing event. All of our superheroes and superheroines have one thing in common — they accepted the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel first draft in the month of November.
Ben Werdmuller, gets the #NaNoWriMo quote of the month as he talks about the user interface in common text editors:
Every single one of those buttons is a distraction button.
Simpson's Paradox Part 2. This video is about how to tell whether or not university admissions are biased using statistics: aka, it's about Simpson's Paradox again!
I was just shy of that first “punch” when I quit reading the other day. It came and we’re now off to the races. This somehow feels a bit “fluffier” than the typical Langdon novel though. It feels like there’s a lot of discussion for those who don’t understand the religion, science, and technology, but at least he does it in a way that doesn’t feel too on-the-nose. I still feel a bit disconnected from the characters here compared to his prior efforts.
I spent a lot of time trying centralising my online activities, including adding bookmarks and imports from social networks. Lately my site looked bloated and unmaintainable. I started questioning what data is my data, what data should or could I own - it was time to rethink some ideas.
Peter has some solid thoughts here on some subtle uses of things including likes, favorites, and bookmarks. I particularly like the way he separates out and describes the “vote” intent of likes on various platforms.
Somewhat like him, I’m bookmarking things I’d like to read privately on the back end of my site, and then only selectively posting them as read posts when I’ve done that. Archiving them to the Internet Archive has been useful for cutting down on the data I’m keeping, but saving them does allow me to browse through my commonplace book frequently when I need to find something and couldn’t find it otherwise.
Some of this reminds me of the way I use the “star” functionality on Twitter (I still think of it as a star and not a heart). I don’t typically use it to mean anything in particular on Twitter itself. Instead I’m using that functionality in conjunction with an IFTTT recipe to bookmark things I’d like to read later. So in a larger sense, I’m using Twitter as a headline feed reader and marking all the things I’d like to come back and read at a later time.
Once in a blue moon, during a chat with others on Twitter, I may use the heart as an indicator to the other party that I’ve seen/read their post, particularly when I don’t intend to reply to the last in a chain of conversation. This type of ephemera or digital exhaust generally isn’t something I find useful for keeping in the long term, so like Peter I typically don’t keep/archive them on my site.
file compiled on the second run! And this was without putting any real effort into it as I was writing.
Peter Molnar