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

🎧 This Week in Google 445 The Mortician’s Wife | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google 445 The Mortician's Wife by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Kevin Tofel, Joan Donovan from TWiT.tv
Conspiracy theories arise online and off about the Florida school shooting. A Twitter bot purge significantly reduces the follower counts of conservative users, but Twitter claims it's not political. Google removes the 'view image' button from search results to appease photographers, and a federal judge says that embedding a tweet can be a copyright infringement. Has Google become too big? Plenty of examples featured in a New York Times article suggest that Google has been trying to suppress competition, prompting some critics to say the government should step in. Edible Arrangements also goes after Google because its competitors show up in search results. Google AI can now predict heart attacks through an eye scan. Jeff's number: 1,226,247, the number of people who signed the Change.org petition to revert to the old Snapchat. Kevin's pick: Secure Shell for coding on Chromebooks Joan's pick: Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

https://youtu.be/tPQRvduMrAM

👓 Kushner loses access to top-secret intelligence | Politico

Read Kushner loses access to top-secret intelligence (POLITICO)
A memo sent Friday downgraded the presidential son-in-law and adviser and other White House aides who had been working on interim clearances, barring them from top-secret information.

📖 Read Arthur’s Loose Tooth by Lillian Hoban

Read Arthur's Loose Tooth by Lillian Hoban (HarperCollins)
Arthur, afraid of pulling his loose tooth, and his little sister, Violet, learn something about being brave in the seventh adventure about two favorite chimps.
Not as solid as the Francis series, though this did have one or two nice moments. The illustrations were a bit too simplistic and much less realistic than they could have been.

How does a kid with only one tooth manage to loose it before he has more?!

I’m not sure which book I liked less, this or The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist. Though that one did have an entertaining set of pages which included an instrument that was colloquially called the “Yankers!”

Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Favorite quote:
“What!” said Arthur. “I am not scared to go upstairs in the dark!”
“I know,” said the baby-sitter. “But sometimes I think you are scared of a little soap and water.”

📖 Read Arthur’s Birthday Party by Lillian Hoban

Read Arthur's Birthday Party by Lillian Hoban (HarperCollins)
Arthur is having a gymnastics party for his birthday, with prizes for balancing, tumbling, and rope climbing. Arthur is sure that he will win the prize for best all--around gymnast. But his little sister, Violet, and her friend Wilma have been practicing-and they may have a surprise in store....
Simple to read and a vaguely interesting plot. Not as good as the Francis series though. Nothing funny here.
Rating: 2 of 5 stars

👓 Meet Vero: Why a billionaire’s Instagram alternative is suddenly so popular | Mashable

Read Meet Vero: Why a billionaire's Instagram alternative is suddenly so popular by Karissa Bell (Mashable)
What you need to know about Vero.
It looks like a very slick app that could replace way more than just Instagram. It’s got bookmarks/links, music, watches for movie/tv, read related posts for books, location, and photos as post kinds in addition to a variety of audiences. If it had broad based status updates and articles…

Of course it’s still early days for it, and all platforms change drastically as they grow without the customer’s real control of them. #justanothersilo

👓 Posting my phone’s battery status to my site | Dries Buytaert

Read Posting my phone's battery status to my site by Dries Buytaert (dri.es)
Working towards being able to publish notes and photos from my phone
This functionality seemed eerily familiar to me as I began to read, but the really interesting part is the reason he did it.

👓 Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Because He Couldn’t Figure Out How to Convert PDFs to Word Files | Slate

Read Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Because He Couldn’t Figure Out How to Convert PDFs to Word Files by Jacob Brogan (Slate Magazine)
Pro tip: If you’re going to falsify documents, it’s probably a good idea to learn how computers work.

👓 The forgotten art of squatting is a revelation for bodies ruined by sitting | Quartzy

Read The forgotten art of squatting is a revelation for bodies ruined by sitting by Rosie Spinks (Quartzy)
Westerners have forgotten how to squat, and it's causing health problems.
I’m curious how long it takes for someone to invent the “squatting” desk as the next evolution of the standing desk?

There’s also a cultural mention of both Yoga and “grounding”, though not quite specific, and this is the third reference to the idea of “grounding” that I’ve heard in the past two weeks. I suspect that is becoming a “thing” now too.

I’d love to read some of the evolutionary and physiological studies about this phenomenon. This particular quote was about as close to a scientific reference as there was:

Every joint in our body has synovial fluid in it. This is the oil in our body that provides nutrition to the cartilage,” Jam says. “Two things are required to produce that fluid: movement and compression. So if a joint doesn’t go through its full range—if the hips and knees never go past 90 degrees—the body says ‘I’m not being used’ and starts to degenerate and stops the production of synovial fluid.

👓 A brutal redesign | Duncan Stephen

Read A brutal redesign (Duncan Stephen)
When I started to experiment with different ways of blogging, I realised what I was doing was a bit off. So I decided to redesign the blog.
I appreciate that others are grappling with these design ideas as well. I need to get back to some of my own work and experimenting in this area. It’s also a bit reminiscent of Dries Buytaert’s recent post Reclaiming my blog as my thought space in which he contemplates some of these types of issues and questions, though from a slightly different perspective.

👓 Webmention.io integration for Drupal 8 | realize.be

Read Webmention.io integration for Drupal 8 by Kristof De Jaeger (realize.be)
I've had my site for quite some time now, the internet archive goes way back to 2002 even! To be fair, most of the content until 2007 wasn't that interesting (not sure what makes me think it is nowadays though, but okay ... ), but it was mostly the primary source of well .. me :). Apart from that, I also use Twitter, but I want to turn this around and let my site be the primary source. The IndieWeb movement is something I only recently discovered, but somehow, the philosophy was in my mind for the last few weeks, and I am not the only one that is talking about it. So, as a first small step, to figure out who links to my content, I created a simple Drupal 8 module that can receive and store webmentions and pingbacks from Webmention.io. The source is available at https://github.com/swentel/webmention_io. I'll move this drupal.org at some point once it gets into a more polished state, but it also depends on further iterations of getting more interaction feedback to my site. Next up is looking at https://brid.gy/ as the service has integration with social networks to post and retrieve replies from there.
This isn’t as direct a solution as I would have expected, but I suspect that it probably works pretty well. While reading it, I feel obliged more than usual to make a read post and send a webmention to it…

It’s interesting to see some of the great strides forward Drupal has been making in the IndieWeb arena since November .

👓 You Say Tomato | Peter Hertzmann

Watched You Say Tomato by Peter Hertzmann from hertzmann.com
During my years of teaching, the tomato was the one ingredient I never wanted to appear in the mandated class recipes. Management refused to acknowledge that good tomatoes were seasonal, that fresh tomatoes were different than canned tomatoes, and that not all canned tomatoes were the same. This video is a partial response to those bosses that I should have forgotten about long ago.
I suspect he’s just scratching the surface of the topic of tomatoes. This is the first time I’ve seen or heard a reference about the origin of the fact that a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.

📺 The Three Aspects of Knife Skills | Peter Hertzmann

Watched The Three Aspects of Knife Skills by Peter Hertzmann from hertzmann.com
Having written more than 80,000 words about knife skills as well as having taught numerous classes on the subject, I have come to the belief that good knife skills can be defined by just three simple aspects: grip, holding hand, and knife motion. In other words, the essence of good knife skills can be summarized by how you hold your knife, how you hold your food, and how you move your knife.
A solid little video on something every cook should know something about.

👓 Education in the (Dis)Information Age | Read Write Collect

Read Education in the (Dis)Information Age by Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
Kris Shaffer reflects on the abundance of information on the web. He suggests that the hyperlink maybe ‘our most potent weapon’ against disinformation: The oldest and simplest of internet technologies, the hyperlink and the “new” kind of text it affords — hypertext — is the foundation...

👓 I’m Glad I Got Booed at CPAC | New York Times

Read Opinion | I’m Glad I Got Booed at CPAC by Mona Charen (New York Times)
I spoke the truth for the sake of every conservative disgusted by what has happened to our movement.
I saw this article pop up over the weekend, but didn’t have a chance to read it. I circled back around to it after listening to The Daily episode from this morning which covered it. Ultimately I think the podcast version was more interesting and valuable.

I appreciate more and more of these dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who are sticking to their guns on the message that the emperor has no clothes. It gives me more hope for the future.

👓 SPLOT You’re a Rich Text Field | CogDogBlog

Read SPLOT You’re a Rich Text Field by Alan LevineAlan Levine (CogDogBlog)
I’m SPLOT tinkering and feel a wave of totally un-necessary but irresistible song plays… How does it feel to be One of the beautiful splots How often have you added video Often enough to know What did you format when you were there Everything that WordPress can Captions you’re a rich ...
Trying to figure out what a SPLOT is and what it means…