Reads, Listens

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Read UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right? by Zach Holman (zachholman.com)
Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds... everything is pretty terrible.
The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct... sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider.
It's time... to talk about time.

As programmers, we’re kind of inherently built to want the ABSOLUTE BEST HIGHEST FIDELITY FORMATS OF ALL TIME. Like dammit, I need the timestamp down to the micromillinanosecond for every cheeseburger that gets added to my bespoke Watch-The-BK-Throne app. If I do not have this exact knowledge to the millisecond of when I consumed this BBQ Bacon WHOPPER® Sandwich From Burger King® I may die. ❧

I totally want this as a Post Kind on my website now!
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 07:28PM

Read Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text with Zero-Width Characters by Tom Ross (Medium)
Zero-width characters are invisible, ‘non-printing’ characters that are not displayed by the majority of applications. F​or exam​ple, I’ve ins​erted 10 ze​ro-width spa​ces in​to thi​s sentence, c​an you tel​​l? (Hint: paste the sentence into Diff Checker to see the locations of the characters!). These characters can be used to ‘fingerprint’ text for certain users.

A cool little trick with text for embedded steganography, security, or other communication purposes. 

This could also be used for pseudo-private communication via Webmention even. Just hide your messages inside of public messages.

ᔥ Aaron Parecki bookmark Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text with Zero-Width Characters (medium.com) ()

Read Manifold Version 4.0 Overview | Building Manifold (blog.manifoldapp.org)
The Manifold team is delighted to announce the release of Manifold version 4.0. The hallmark features for this release are the addition of reading groups, which allow readers to annotate texts publicly, privately, or anonymously, and standalone mode, which allows creators to set up projects that appear without the library. We’ve also made notable strides in improving Manifold’s accessibility and are now publishing docker images to Docker Hub.
Read a post by gRegor MorrillgRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)
I was watching the beginning of Bang Bang Con (!!Con) and they talked about their code of conduct. I liked these three tips they gave to stay in line with their values: “Avoid feigning surprise.” When someone says something like “I’ve never heard that you can do x,” instead of replying “...
Some excellent examples and advice here. Good find.
Read Pocket Casts acquired by NPR, other public radio stations, and This American Life (The Verge)
One of the best podcast apps just got bought by some of the biggest podcast producers
Owning their own pieces of distribution is going to be key to their long term interests. This is a brilliant move.
Read Public media found its answer to Spotify in Pocket Casts (The Verge)
More investment in the podcasting open ecosystem

Pocket Casts is instead committed to podcasting’s open ecosystem of freely available RSS feeds, CEO Owen Grover says.❧

I wish their app allowed one to actually use the podcast’s native URL(s) when sharing instead of providing a pca.st shortened URL.

Annotated on March 02, 2020 at 12:21PM

Read The mis-application of learning technologies within the context of Design Studio-led education by Adam Procter (Manifold Scholarship)
Despite the widespread application of digital technologies in higher education there is scant evidence to suggest that these have had a significant impact on student learning. (Bainbridge, 2014, p1)
Some great material here. Revisit this again soon.
Read Pete Buttigieg is ending his presidential bid by Chelsea Janes (Washington Post)
Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who saw a meteoric rise from virtual unknown to top-tier contender and became the first openly gay candidate to make a high-profile presidential run, ended his campaign Sunday as he confronted the reality that his prospects of victory had all but collapsed.
Read Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds by Dan Q (danq.me)
I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.
I’m sort of hoping that feed readers will improve with respect to titleless posts and make hacks like this one unnecessary. Though it could be an interesting tidbit until then.
Read Removing IndieWeb WordPress Plugins by Khürt Williams (Island in the Net)
I am reevaluating my use of certain IndieWeb technologies. In 2018 I added a set of plugins to my website and started using a microformats 2 theme, SemPress to mark up my website so that content could be interpreted by other sites. SemPress is the only theme in the WordPress repository that is fully...
Having watched some of his issues, I totally get where Khürt is coming from here. Sometimes it can be a pain, especially a manual pain. In the end, it isn’t the plugins that make you independent, it’s having your own domain and your own site where you control your own content. He’s still got that and so much more.

I think of IndieWeb in terms similar to Churchill’s quote about Democracy:

Many forms of social media have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that the IndieWeb is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that IndieWeb is the worst form of social media except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…