Reads, Listens, Watches

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events

📺 “Modern Family” He Said, She Shed | ABC

Watched "Modern Family" He Said, She Shed from ABC
Directed by James Alan Hensz. With Ed O'Neill, Sofía Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell. Jay teaches Joe how to play golf but he and Gloria both push him into becoming too competitive. Mitch and Cam host a party for Lily and her friends. Claire thinks that the Homeowners Association turned her application to build a shed on her own property.
I’ve recently seen an insurance commercial with a reference to a she-shed. I suspect this episode is the origin of the term, but I’ll be on the look out for earlier instances.

👓 Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking | Future Releases | Mozilla

Read Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking by Nick Nguyen (Future Releases | Mozilla)
Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.

👓 Electracy | Wikipedia

Read Electracy (Wikipedia)
Electracy is a theory by Gregory Ulmer that describes the kind of skills and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media such as multimedia, hypermedia, social software, and virtual worlds. According to Ulmer, electracy "is to digital media what literacy is to print." It encompasses the broader cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition from a culture of print literacy to a culture saturated with electronic media. "Electracy" is the term he gives to what is resulting from this major transition that our society is undergoing. The term is a portmanteau word, combining "electrical" with "literacy", to allude to one of the fundamental terms used by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida to name the relational spacing that enables and delimits any signification in any medium.

👓 Notes on Imagined Communities and the Open Web | Open Parenthesis

Read Notes on Imagined Communities and the Open Web (Open Parenthesis)
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp for Publishers in Chicago. I tried to link together Benedict Anderson's take on nationalism from Imagined Communities to a number of concepts about what might make an "Open Web." 

👓 Distributor publicly released with Gutenberg support and Enterprise service offering | 10up

Read Distributor publicly released with Gutenberg support and Enterprise service offering by Jake GoldmanJake Goldman (10up)
We are proud to announce that Distributor has exited beta and is now openly available. Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across your websites—whether in a single multisite network or across the web with the REST API. With Distributor, content creators can "push" or "pull" content [...]

👓 University’s $999 online textbook creates confusion and outrage | Inside Higher Ed

Read University's $999 online textbook creates confusion and outrage (Inside Higher Ed)
An online textbook priced at almost $1,000 has infuriated students trying to navigate an already confusing textbook marketplace, but Louisiana-Lafayette officials insist they had "good intentions."
This reporting doesn’t drill in far enough. Surely there are a few dozen textbooks that cover all of the same material that are roughly equivalent. What are those textbook prices? What about OER textbooks and their relative prices? Why is the department or even the professors doing anything but recommending textbooks? Why aren’t the students given the freedom to choose their own textbooks?

👓 National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All. | New York Times

Read National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All. by Jim Rutenberg, Maggie Haberman (nytimes.com)
Donald Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, devised a plan to buy all the stories on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected, according to Mr. Trump’s associates.

👓 Rick Scott’s financial trail leads to tax haven in Caymans | Miami Herald

Read Rick and Ann Scott’s financial trail leads to Cayman Islands tax haven (miamiherald)
Gov. Rick Scott’s 125-page U.S. Senate financial disclosure statement reveals he and his wife, Ann Scott, hold investments in two dozen hedge funds registered in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven.

👓 Faculty champions of accessibility shed doubts about investing time, money | Inside Higher Ed

Read Faculty champions of accessibility shed doubts about investing time, money (Inside Higher Ed)
Faculty members often worry that making digital courses accessible to all students will be too time-consuming or expensive -- but some of their colleagues want to convince them otherwise.

👓 It’s time to reconsider low-dairy diets, new study suggests | NBC

Read It's time to reconsider low-dairy diets, new study suggests (NBC News)
Cheese and yogurt were found to protect against death from any cause, and also against death from cerebrovascular causes, like stroke.

🎧 This Week in Google 467 Techno Tragicomedy | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google 467 Techno Tragicomedy by Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, Jason Howell from TWiT.tv
Lenovo Smart Display, Pixel Rumors.
  • Jeff unboxes his new Lenovo Smart Display. Our live Duo demo goes about as well as you'd expect.
  • Facebook finds more political shenanigans.
  • Google's Censored Search in China.
  • Stacey has all the news from Google Cloud Next.
  • Amazon's facial recognition software outs 28 US lawmakers as crooks.
  • All the Pixel 3, Pixelbook, Pixel Watch, and Pixel Stand rumors we know.
  • You want a notch on your phone? Fine. Two notches? Sure, why not? Three notches? HOLD UP THERE, BUDDY!
Picks of the Week
  • Jeff's Number: 5 years of Chromecast
  • Stacey's Thing: OSRAM SMART+ Outdoor Flex RGBW
  • Jason's Tool: Fighting Spam Calls with Android

👓 Sunday, August 26, 2018 | Scripting News

Read Sunday, August 26, 2018 (Scripting News)
The OPML Editor is my fork of the Frontier code base, started in 2004. It runs on today's Macs. In the flurry of activity in April, I broke the Mac part of the download page. I have now fixed it.

📺 How the tech sector could move in One Direction | Sacha Judd

Watched How the tech sector could move in One Direction from Sacha Judd

This is a talk I gave at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin in November, 2016 and at Webstock in February, 2017. A text version with the slides appears below.