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

👓 Own your identity | Marco.org

Read Own your identity by Marco Arment (marco.org)

This paragraph in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Why I’ll Never Redirect my Personal Blog to Google Plus scared me a bit:

Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options. Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.

I hope he’s being clever here, because we had that. (And I think we still have it.)

It’s interesting that so much online publishing is moving into a small handful of massive, closed, proprietary networks after being so distributed and diverse during the big boom of blogs and RSS almost a decade ago.

👓 Medium and Being Your Own Platform | Marco.org

Read Medium and Being Your Own Platform by Marco Arment (marco.org)

Glenn Fleishman responded very well to my semi-controversial tweet about Medium from the other day:

I’ve written a few things on Medium (not paid) because I liked the experience of their writing tools, their statistics, and their reach. I think two of the three items I wrote became featured and had several thousand reads. It’s a wonderful way to write and a wonderful place to post.

But it’s not mine. It’s theirs.

Bingo.

You can use someone else’s software, but still have your own “platform”, if you’re hosting it from a domain name you control and are able to easily take your content and traffic with you to another tool or host at any time. You don’t need to go full-Stallman and build your own blogging engine from scratch on a Linux box in your closet — a Tumblr, Squarespace, or WordPress blog is perfectly fine if you use your own domain name and can export your data easily.

👓 Still Blogging in 2017 | Tim Bray

Read Still Blogging in 2017 by Tim Bray (tbray.org)
Not alone and not unread, but the ground underfoot ain’t steady. An instance of Homo economicus wouldn’t be doing this — no payday looming. So I guess I’m not one of those. But hey, whenever I can steal an hour I can send the world whatever words and pictures occupy my mind and laptop. Which, all these years later, still feels like immense privilege.

👓 The Beauty of Amazon’s 6-Pager | Brad Porter

Read The Beauty of Amazon's 6-Pager by Brad Porter (linkedin.com)
Imagine for a moment that you could go into a meeting and everyone in the meeting would have very deep context on the topic you're going to discuss.  They would be well-versed in the critical data for your business.

🎧 Episode 37: Chenjerai’s Challenge (Seeing White, Part 7) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 37: Chenjerai’s Challenge (Seeing White, Part 7) by John Biewen with special guest Chenjerai Kumanyika from Scene on Radio

“How attached are you to the idea of being white?” Chenjerai Kumanyika puts that question to host John Biewen, as they revisit an unfinished conversation from a previous episode. Part 7 of our series, Seeing White.

Photo: Composite image: Chenjerai Kumanyika, left; photo by Danusia Trevino. And John Biewen, photo by Ewa Pohl.

There are some great questions here that are well worth revisiting in light of the remainder of the series.

Some of this discussion reminds me of a lazy, 20-something comedian I heard recently. He hadn’t accomplished anything useful in his life and felt like (and probably was in the eyes of many) a “complete failure.” He said he felt like an even worse failure because in the game of life, playing the straight white male, he was also failing while using the game’s lowest difficulty setting. I wish I could give the original attribution, but I don’t remember the comedian and upon searching I see that the general concept of the joke goes back much further than the source–so it may seem he was an even bigger failure in that he was also lifting the material from somewhere else. What else should we expect in a society of such privilege?

👓 A Great App for Recording Podcasts | Allen Pike

Read A Great App for Recording Podcasts by Allen Pike (allenpike.com)

A year ago I wrote about the modern era of podcasts. In that article, I made a forward-looking statement:

With all this growth, what improvements are we seeing in the tools? As of this writing, a horde of developers are building podcast listening apps. Podcast recording apps, on the other hand?

Well, more about that soon.

In the intervening year, we’ve seen the launch of Castro, Overcast, and the acquisition of Stitcher. It’s been a big year for podcast listening software, but not so much for podcast recording software.

👓 Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites | WordFence

Read Chrome and Firefox Phishing Attack Uses Domains Identical to Known Safe Sites (Wordfence)
Update on April 19th at noon Pacific time: Chrome has just released version 58.0.3029.81. We have confirmed that this resolves the issue and that our ‘epic.com’ test domain no longer shows as ‘epic.com’ and displays the raw punycode instead, which is ‘www.xn--e1awd7f.com’, making it clear that the domain is not ‘epic.com’. We encourage all Chrome users to ...Read More

🎧 Episode 36: That’s Not Us, So We’re Clean (Seeing White, Part 6) | Scene on Radio

Listened to Episode 36: That’s Not Us, So We’re Clean (Seeing White, Part 6) by John Biewen with special guest Chenjerai Kumanyika from Scene On Radio

When it comes to America’s racial sins, past and present, a lot of us see people in one region of the country as guiltier than the rest. Host John Biewen spoke with some white Southern friends about that tendency. Part Six of our ongoing series, Seeing White. With recurring guest, Chenjerai Kumanyika.

Photo: A lynching on Clarkson Street, New York City, during the Draft Riots of 1863. Credit: Greenwich Village Society of Historical Preservation.

Having lived in many parts of the country growing up (Dahlonega, GA; Burlington, CT; Calhoun, GA; Baltimore, MD; Charlotte, NC; etc.), I can attest that the generalities described here do dovetail with many of my experiences. The cultures with respect to racism are very different depending on town, region, state, and histories.

How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon | The New Yorker

Read How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon by Connie Bruck (The New Yorker)
He says that, before he became a senior adviser to the President, he was a successful player in the film industry. But what did he actually do?

👓 Butterick’s Practical Typography

Read Typewriter habits by Matthew But­t­er­ick (Butterick’s Practical Typography)

I’ve claimed through­out this book that many bad ty­pog­ra­phy habits have been im­posed upon us by the type­writer. Here, I’ve col­lected them in one list.

  1. Straight quotes rather than curly quotes (see straight and curly quotes).
  2. Two spaces rather than one space be­tween sen­tences.
  3. Mul­ti­ple hy­phens in­stead of dashes (see hy­phens and dashes).
  4. Al­pha­betic ap­prox­i­ma­tions of trade­mark and copy­right sym­bols.
  5. el­lipses made with three pe­ri­ods rather than an el­lip­sis character.
  6. Non-curly apos­tro­phes.
  7. Pre­tend­ing that ac­cented char­ac­ters don’t exist.
  8. Us­ing mul­ti­ple word spaces in a row (for in­stance, to make a first-line in­dent.)
  9. Us­ing tabs and tab stops in­stead of ta­bles.
  10. Us­ing car­riage re­turns to in­sert ver­ti­cal space.
  11. Us­ing al­pha­bet char­ac­ters as sub­sti­tutes for real math sym­bols.
  12. Mak­ing rules and bor­ders out of re­peated characters.
  13. Ig­nor­ing lig­a­tures.
  14. un­der­lin­ing anything.
  15. Be­liev­ing that mono­spaced fonts are nice to read.
  16. Abus­ing all caps.
  17. Think­ing that the best point size for body text is 12.
  18. Ig­nor­ing kern­ing.
  19. Ig­nor­ing let­terspac­ing.
  20. Too much cen­tered text.
  21. Only us­ing sin­gle or dou­ble line spac­ing.
  22. Only us­ing the line length per­mit­ted by one-inch page mar­gins.

👓 Welcome Back! Let’s fight for an Open Web | Michael McCallister

Read Welcome Back! Let’s fight for an Open Web by Michael McCalllisterMichael McCalllister (Notes from the Metaverse)
A few weeks ago, I was preparing a talk on WordPress at a local university. I knew that posting here at Notes from the Metaverse was on the erratic side in recent months. Yet it was something of a shock to discover that more than a year had gone by!