Some notes on how I am using crawlers as I’m collecting links.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Gopher? Gopher. | Peter Molnar
Peter Molnar (petermolnar.net)Since last weekend, I’ serving my site over gopher as well. Yes, that nearly forgotten 90s protocol. And it’s not even an april fools joke.
👓 8:27 pm EDT Fri Mar 15 2019 pulse rate | JR
8:27 pm EDT Fri Mar 15 2019 pulse rate 16 to 17 beats per 10 seconds. Or 99 beats per 60 seconds. I did not check my pulse around 4am nor later in the morning but it seemed much faster. I would estimate my pulse between 130 land 150 beats per min. I think the pulse rate has declined some which is go...
An example in the wild of someone with an indie website who is posting health data.
👓 Open Your Mouth Very Wide | Peter Rukavina
Peter Rukavina (ruk.ca)I read somewhere—perhaps it was “5 Tips to Instantly Up Your Instagram Game” or some such—that, when taking photos of people, you should ask them to open their mouths as wide as possible.
Interestingly, it works. It seems weird, both to them and to you, but the photos that result often have much more life in them than they would otherwise.
I received similar instructions many years ago from a CBC Radio producer: I was going into the studio to record a commentary, and she advised me to make my points so emphatically as to appear (to myself) to be raving. It was very hard to do this, and it made me very uncomfortable, but I had to agree that the result was better.
An interesting piece of photography advice… I like the caricature advice for audio as well. It was something that obviously worked for people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.
👓 Some important Known changes | Marcus Povey
Marcus Povey (marcus-povey.co.uk)Some important changes to Known were merged in over the weekend.
Most notably, (most) external dependencies are now managed and installed via Composer, and not included natively in the repository itself.
This makes updates easier to manage, but it does mean that if you are installing from (or more importantly, upgrading from) the git repository directly, you will need to perform an extra step.
cd /path/to/known; composer installThis is particularly important if you’re upgrading, and your site is a checkout of the git repo.
I’m reminded that I desperately need to upgrade everything on my install…
👓 Engineering bioinformatics in seconds, not hours | Ryan Barrett
Ryan Barrett (snarfed.org)It was winter 2014. Pharrell had just dropped Happy, the Rosetta probe landed on a comet, President Obama was opening diplomatic relations with Cuba…
…and here at Color, the bioinformatics team had a problem. Our pipeline — the data processing system that crunches raw DNA data from our lab into the variants we report to patients — was slow. 12 to 24 hours slow.
This wasn’t a problem in and of itself — bioinformatics pipelines routinely run for hours or even days — but it was a royal pain for development. We’d write new pipeline code, start it running, go home, and return the next morning to find it had crashed halfway through because we’d missed a semicolon. Argh. Or worse, since we hadn’t launched yet, our live pipeline would hit similar bugs in production R&D samples, which would delay them until we could debug, test, and deploy the fix. No good.
👓 Random passwords; Not easy to see | jeena.net
Jeena (jeena.net)Even if you look really close.
Malcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)Ok I totally stole the title from this article, which was really good and help me fix my problems so I wanted to link to it. I recently upgraded all my servers from Jessie to Stretch, which was long overdue. The catalyst being that certbot from Let's Encrypt started complaining about the security I...
👓 The worst design of 2016 was also the most effective | Duncan Stephen
The worst design of 2016 was also the most effective — Diana Budds, Fast Company
Why Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again hat, was a wildly successful design, despite being reviled by gatekeepers of good-taste design.
The “undesigned” hat represented this everyman sensibility, while Hillary [Clinton]’s high-design branding — which was disciplined, systematic, and well-executed — embodied the establishment narrative that Trump railed against and that Middle America felt had failed them. “The DIY nature of the hat embodies the wares of a ‘self-made man’ and intentionally distances itself from well-established and unassailable high-design brand systems of Hillary and Obama,” Young says. “Tasteful design becomes suspect… The trucker cap is as American as apple pie and baseball.”
This reminds me of the story that the most “tasteful” office spaces are less productive. When given a clean-looking office cubicle, people fill it with garden gnomes.
I don’t agree with the article’s premise that this challenges the idea of design thinking. Surely it means that Hillary Clinton’s designers simply didn’t do a good enough job at it (because nice typefaces ≠ design thinking).
But this does provide a challenge to the received wisdom of what good design is, and whether tasteful design is desirable.
Bookmarked The ultimate guide to DuckDuckGo - BrettTerpstra.com (BrettTerpstra.com)If you don’t already have the scoop, it’s the search engine that can serve as a complete replacement for Google (and Bing and whatever else you like), except it respects your privacy and security. And while Google does some cool tricks, DuckDuckGo does some even better ones.I switched over to DuckDuckGo for searches a few months ago. There’s a lot of stuff here I didn’t know about especially “bangs” which look really useful.
👓 Photos | Tom MacWright
My photos are on macwright.org now: /photos. I don’t like Instagram. I know that other people like it: they found a community there. They keep in touch with family. They share interests and life events. But I just don’t: I don’t like how browsing Instagram makes me feel. I don’t like how it shapes my photos, how it works as a product. I don’t like that it’s a Facebook company. How it doesn’t have critical APIs. You can’t cross-post to Instagram without using the app. By creating my own place to post photography, I can start to like taking photos again. I can feel like my process of taking film photos, scanning them, and putting them on the web is worthwhile. That learning how to tweak camera raw in Capture One is fun. I can post just a photo or two a month. I don’t want to engage, I want to create.
Tom has a great sketch for how he’s owning his own photos on his own website.
👓 Following Twitter peeps in an indiereader with granary.io and Microsub | Neil Mather
Neil Mather (doubleloop)My online social experience is mostly through the indieweb. For following people and blogs, I use Aperture, a Microsub server, to subscribe to various social feeds. And then I read and interact with those feeds in various clients – e.g. Indigenous on Android, and Monocle on the web. Although I don...
I haven’t migrated over to a microsub-based reader yet, but this is an excellent description of some tools for freeing yourself from reading friends and family in Twitter.
I’ve been happily noodling around the interstices of the web of late.
I’m still super happy with my nanoreader and using it everyday has reminded me of the beauty of plaintext. Text is content.
In that spirit, I’ve gone back to using gopher. I’ve finally got what I missed when I wrote about this three years ago - text doesn’t need to be the web! Text can just be itself, text should just be itself. My previous effort missed this fundamental principle, and looking back now, I can see that this was largely to blame for my walking away from that experiment.
Coming back to the idea of gopher, with that in mind, has been liberating.
Some of my content (not my microposts) is available on gopher, as this post will be. I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, feeling my way into an area I once knew well, and I’m satisfied with the results.
I’d love to hear from anyone else who’s using gopher, or who’s using older text-focused network systems in interesting ways. I still want to love the web. I still want to find communities working to deliver on the promise there once was in this technology.
I seem to be seeing a lot of resurgence around Gopher in the past couple of months…
I wanted a simple self-hosted read-it-later service, something akin to Instapaper and Pocket, but without the overheads involved in running something like Wallabag.
Failing to find one, I wrote my own, and have just released it to the wilds.
It is very very simple, and uses Andres Rey’s php port of Mozilla’s Readability.js to grab pages for reading. There’s no interface to speak of, just a lightweight api with POST and a DELETE calls exposed. All files are saved as flat html, with a json index. No databases.
While writing it I’ve been prototyping it on my own site, and have been loving the experience. Its like the web, but the way it should be. If anyone else finds it useful, that’s a bonus.
👓 An error unexplained | Jeremy Cherfas
Well, that was weird. Something had gone wrong with my little PHP script for adding items from my list at reading.am to my WithKnown-powered stream. It ran, reported no errors, and yet produced nothing at the other end. Gorgeous Saturday morning, blue skies and sunshine; what better way to spend it than indoors debugging?