Reads, Listens

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled

👓 Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker

Read Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? by Cal Newport (The New Yorker)
Alongside these official responses, a loose collective of developers and techno-utopians that calls itself the IndieWeb has been creating another alternative. The movement’s affiliates are developing their own social-media platforms, which they say will preserve what’s good about social media while jettisoning what’s bad. They hope to rebuild social media according to principles that are less corporate and more humane.
Excited to see that the IndieWeb “hobby” I’ve been spending a lot of my time on for the past few years has made it into The New Yorker!

👓 Are you ready to share your OPML? | Dave Winer

Read Are you ready to share your OPML? by Dave Winer (Scripting News)
Imagine if there were a database of feeds we all subscribed to, and we could get recommendations of new feeds to follow, based on what we already follow.That's the idea behind Share Your OPML, a service I started in 2006. The story of SYO is one of success followed by scaling issues. Now we have better technology so it should scale better.Help us get it started by:1. Export your subscription list in whatever RSS reader or podcast client you use.2. Upload it to the new SYO site. (It's simple, just sign in with Twitter and drag-drop your OPML on the gray box. Takes less than a minute.)If you have questions, post a comment here. Dave
Read No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript [Updated] by Jennifer OulletteJennifer Oullette (Ars Technica)

Medieval scholar: "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing."

The Voynich manuscript is a famous medieval text written in a mysterious language that so far has proven to be undecipherable. Now, Gerard Cheshire, a University of Bristol academic, has announced his own solution to the conundrum in a new paper in the journal Romance Studies. Cheshire identifies the mysterious writing as a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language, and he thinks the manuscript was put together by a Dominican nun as a reference source on behalf of Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon. Apparently it took him all of two weeks to accomplish a feat that has eluded our most brilliant scholars for at least a century.

🎧 Podcast: Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg

Listened to Podcast: Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg from Distributed.blog

The cofounder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic embarks on a journey to understand the future of work. Having built his own 900-person company with no offices and employees scattered across 68 countries, Mullenweg examines the benefits and challenges of distributed work and recruiting talented people around the globe.

This sounds like an interesting premise for a podcast, though I suspect it’s a limited run. I can’t imagine what episode 50 would look like.
Read Google uses Gmail to track a history of things you buy — and it's hard to delete by Todd Haselton,Megan GrahamTodd Haselton,Megan Graham (CNBC)
Google collects the purchases you've made, including from other stores and sites such as Amazon, and saves them on a page called Purchases.
Apparently https://myaccount.google.com/purchases is a reasonable place one could start for creating acquisition posts on their website. The downside is the realization that Google is tracking all of this without making it more obvious.

👓 Back from the dead | bastianallgeier.com

Read Back from the dead (bastianallgeier.com)
I killed my personal site in May 2018. It was the GDPR month of horror. Dozens of old clients approached me to help them get their privacy policies online. I was knee-deep into getting our own privacy policy for Kirby ready with our lawyer and everything just felt like shit. Instead of caring for my...
Hooray for resurrecting your blogs!

👓 Following other blogs on Micro.blog | Manton Reece

Read Following other blogs on Micro.blog by Manton Reece (manton.org)
After launching support for Mastodon on Micro.blog, I blogged about how Micro.blog is evolving to support 3 types of usernames: normal Micro.blog users, Mastodon users, and IndieWeb-friendly domain names. This last type of username is where I think we can bring more social network-like interactions ...

👓 ‘BH90210’ Showrunner, Multiple Writers Quit Fox Series Revival (EXCLUSIVE) | Variety

Read ‘BH90210’ Showrunner, Multiple Writers Quit Fox Series Revival (EXCLUSIVE) by Joe Otterson and Matt Donnelly
There is drama behind the scenes of Fox’s upcoming “Beverly Hills 90210” revival that is worthy of — well, “Beverly Hills 90210.” Showrunner Patrick Sean Smith and multiple senior-level writers have quit the six-episode series, which is titled “BH90210.” The exact reason for the exodus is unclear. One source said the dispute was over interference from two of the show’s lead actresses, while another noted that the writers were unhappy with one of the executives overseeing the project. Paul Sciarrotta has been named the new showrunner along with series’ creators Chris Alberghini and Mike Chessler. Sciarrotta, a member of the show’s writing staff, is currently under an overall deal with CBS Television Studios, which is producing the series.

👓 Seona Dancing | SeonaDancing.com

Read Biography Seona Dancing (web.archive.org)
Seona Dancing was a 1980s British pop group best known for providing Ricky Gervais with his first taste of fame. The band was formed in 1982 by aspiring pop stars Bill Macrae and Ricky Gervais. Their single "More to Lose", released in 1983, only made it to number 70 on the Billboard charts, and the band quickly disbanded in 1984. A year later, in 1985, a DJ from 99.5 DWRT-FM in Manila in the Philippines started playing a song called "Fade" by Medium (also billed as "Medium" by Fade). It became a runaway hit, and the angsty theme song for many Filipino teenagers in the mid 1980s. Eventually, the identity of the song was revealed as "More to Lose" by Seona Dancing. Bill Macrae faded into obscurity, but years later Ricky Gervais found new fame as the co-writer and star of the hit BBC comedy The Office.
He definitely had a different look when he was young!