Replied to a post by Michael BishopMichael Bishop (Miklb Mindless Ramblings)
Want to trip yourself out, sync your phon to a Bluetooth speaker @ forget about it until your trying to figure out what that noise is (keyboard clicks from phone)
I’ve done this several times before. Never fails to freak me out before I realize what’s going on.
Replied to Sucking up the podcasts I've listened to: Days to save minutes by Jeremy Cherfas (www.jeremycherfas.net)
Finally, I have succeeded in importing all the podcasts I have listened to with the Overcast app, at least as far back as May 2018.
Congratulations! I have to say I’m a bit jealous, but sadly Overcast is Apple only…

👓 Monthly report: February 2019 | Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to Monthly report: February 2019 (jeremycherfas.net)

February was a pretty good month. Or maybe it's just that I have a lot more reminders of how good it was.

Our Daily Bread

Fear of rejection utterly justified; the agent says publishers want something less bitty, "a biography of a commodity, like Kurlansky's Cod". In sales terms, I'll bet that's what they want. But it is not at all what I want to write. So, back to making self-publishing a reality, ASAP.

Jeremy, if this is the response an agent and publishers have given you and you’re even remotely considering the self-publishing route, please do let me volunteer to help you in the endeavor. I have a tremendous amount of experience in the publishing area and also have a lot of overhead (including a massive block of ISBNs) in place to help you out along the way.

It’s the least I could do since I feel like I may be at least partially responsible for starting you down the primrose path of Our Daily Bread… I also suspect that what you’d like to write is going to be far more interesting and nourishing a project.

👓 Peace and love | Ben Werdmüller

Replied to Peace and love by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)
I don't know how to even begin to address this, or if I should, but here goes. This update comes with a trigger warning for self-harm, serious illness, and hate. But also maybe some hope. My mother is sick. Really sick. She's waiting for another lung operation (she had a double lung transplant six y...
Thanks for the hope Ben. I too am really going to miss Kim. We’re all far worse off in the world without her.
Replied to Innovate Pasadena Friday Coffee Meetup: 5G in Pasadena (Meetup.com)

Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 8:15 AM

5G is a transformational change from 4G. 5G has the potential to provide 20X faster data speeds and carry a massive amount of data for a large number of simultaneous users.

Like the innovations that changed the world before, 5G is making a whole new era possible. 5G will enable giant advances in VR, AR, AI, robotics and totally new technologies. 5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology. But users will know it as one of the fastest, most robust technologies the world has ever seen. That means quicker downloads, outstanding network reliability and a spectacular impact on how we live, work and play. The connectivity benefits of 5G will make businesses more efficient and give consumers access to more information faster than ever before. Super-connected autonomous cars, smart communities, industrial IoT, immersive education—they all will rely on 5G.

A recent episode of the New York Times’ The Daily podcast provides some more sober analysis and thought about 5G and what it means for the world economy compared to the presentation which had a far too rosy picture: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/podcasts/the-daily/5g-technology-huawei-china-us.html

And for those interested in delving in further, here’s a very recent and more technically accurate (and reasonably accessible) discussion of 5G and its current state following the recent Mobile World Conference: 

It features Stacey Higginbotham a journalist who has covered telecom, the FCC, and technology for the past decade+.


See the related checkin.

Replied to a tweet by Justin JohanssonJustin Johansson (Twitter)
Thanks! I’d bookmarked it a week ago, but haven’t had time to plow through it yet. I’ll bump it up the list.
Replied to Context challenges between #indieweb and social media silos by David MeadDavid Mead (David John Mead)

My utopian dream of owning all my content would be to post it on my blog first. Syndicating to whatever social media silo's I choose afterwards.

This isn't a reality as some of these silos (Instagram) don't allow posting apart through their apps.

This forces me to accept their context for my content if I consume it into my site, from them.

This context piece David Mead is talking about is a far bigger issue than most people might give it credit for. Most don’t even notice it because their lives are split up so tragically online that they simply have never had any other experiences. Seeing things from a different perspective, I can guarantee that they’re missing out.

I’m reminded of chef Alton Brown who regularly gives the cooking advice that one should never buy unitasker kitchen tools, but instead get multi-taskers that can do a variety of jobs. This typically cuts down on a lot of the mess and fuss in one’s kitchen and generally makes it a nicer place to prepare food. Nine times out of ten the unitasker is a much more expensive and infrequently used tool and ultimately gets lost in a junk drawer. More often than not, there are one or multi-taskers that can do a better job for far less. 

In some sense social silos like Twitter (with functionality for notes and bookmarks), Instagram (photos), Facebook (notes, photos, links, etc.), Swarm (locations and photos), etc. are just like those unitaskers in the kitchen. They only do one (or sometimes a very few) thing(s) well and generally just make for a messier and more confused social media life. They throw off the mise en place of my life by scattering everything around, making my own content harder to find and use beneficially. On my own website, I have all of the functionalities of these four examples–and lots more–and its such a much better experience for me.

As time goes by and I’m able to post more content types (and cross link them via replies) on my own website and even to others’, I do notice that the increased context on my website actually makes it more interesting and useful. In particular, I can especially see it when using my “On This Day” functionality or various archive views where I can look back at past days/months/years to see what I had previously been up to. This often allows me to look at read posts, bookmark posts, photos, locations to put myself back in the context of those prior days. Since all of the data is there and viewable in a variety of linear and non-linear manners, I can more easily see the flow of the ideas, where they came from and where they  may be going. I can also more easily search for and find ideas by a variety of meta data on my site that would probably have never been discoverable on disparate and unrelated social sites. That article I read in July and posted to Twitter could never be grouped again with the related photo on Instagram or the two other bookmarked journal articles I put on Diigo or the annotations I made with Hypothes.is. But put all that on my own website, and what a wonderful exploding world of ideas I can immediately recall and continue exploring at a later date. In fact, it is this additional level of aggregation and search that makes my website that much more of a valuable digital commonplace book.

I’ll note, as a clever bit of of search and serendipity to underscore the discussion of context, it’s nearly trivial for me to notice that exactly two years ago today I was also analogizing social media and food culture. Who knows where those two topics or even related ones from my site will take me next?

Replied to Bookmark: Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Frank MeeuwsenFrank Meeuwsen (Digging the Digital)
Ik onderzoek weer hoe ik deze pagina’s beter kan gebruiken als een commonplace book, een plaats waar ik allerlei gedachten, ideeën en losse flodders kan plaatsen met minimale barrieres. Het is een rode draad in mijn blog-ontwikkeling en ik denk dat het een belangrijk element wordt op de IndieWebC...
[Rough English translation for convenience]
I am researching how I can better use these pages as a commonplace book , a place where I can place all kinds of thoughts, ideas and loose pieces with minimal barriers. It is a common thread in my blog development and I think it will be an important element at the IndieWebCamp barcamp for me.
Frank, in case you haven’t come across it yet, there is a stub page on the IndieWeb wiki about using our websites as digital commonplace books. Hopefully it will have some useful information, articles, and examples for you to use as you continue hacking. Feel free to add your own thoughts to it as you experiment.

While I do like the way that WordPress makes it easy for one to create link previews by simply putting a URL into the editor (as in your example), I’ve generally shied away from it as it relies on oEmbed and doesn’t necessarily put the actual text into your site. (Not all websites will provide this oEmbed functionality either.) I mention this because a lot of the benefit of having a commonplace is the ability to easily search it. If your post only has a title and a URL, without careful tagging it may be much harder to come back and discover what you were searching for later.

I’ve started an article on how I’m using my website as one, but still have a way to go before I finish it. A big portion of my workflow relies on the Post Kinds Plugin and its available bookmarklet functionality. There are also a lot of nice Micropub clients like Omnibear that making bookmarking things quick and easy too.

In the erstwhile, I ‘ll note that on my own site, I tag things relating to my own commonplace (thinking about and building it) as “commonplace book” and for examples of other peoples’ commonplaces, I usually use the plural tag “commonplace books“. These may also give you some ideas.

With respect to the Medium article which you linked, I’ve seen a recurring theme among bloggers (and writers in general) who indicate that they use their websites as “thought spaces”. Others may use similar or related phraseology (like “thinking out loud”) but this seems to be the most common in my experience. Toward that end, I’ve been bookmarking those articles that I’ve read with the tag “thought spaces“. Some of those notes and websites may also give you some ideas related to having and maintaining an online commonplace book.

Replied to a tweet by Khürt WilliamsKhürt Williams (Twitter)
“@ChrisAldrich figuring out how to attend an IndieWebCamp online session is about as frustrating as using the tools themselves. Can you help me out? Where can I find a video feed?”
They’ve all been listed at https://indieweb.org/2019/Online/Schedule with appropriate links. The chat channels are the best place for immediate help. Most of the sessions have been recorded, so you can catch them after the fact.

Hopefully you got things sorted before seeing this. There was a small bump in getting things started because the video server they had planned on using had some last minute problems that prevented recording, so they switched to Google Hangouts at the last minute. Other than that, most of it has gone fairly smoothly. Sorry to hear you had issues.

I’m curious if you could document the exact problems you ran into so that we can fix them in the future. Were there things you couldn’t find on the wiki? Was it bandwidth problems? Others?

Reply to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic | Nautilus

Replied to The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic by Amanda GefterAmanda Gefter (Nautilus)
McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence.
Quick note of a factual and temporal error: the article indicates:

After all, it had been Wiener who discovered a precise mathematical definition of information: The higher the probability, the higher the entropy and the lower the information content.

In fact, it was Claude E. Shannon, one of Wiener’s colleagues, who wrote the influential A Mathematical Theory of Communication published in Bell System Technical Journal in 1948, almost 5 years after the 1943 part of the timeline the article is indicating. Not only did Wiener not write the paper, but it wouldn’t have existed yet to have been a factor in Pitts deciding to choose a school or adviser at the time. While Wiener may have been a tremendous polymath, I suspect that his mathematical area of expertise during those years would have been closer to analysis and not probability theory.

To put Pitts & McCulloch’s work into additional context, Claude Shannon’s stunning MIT master’s thesis A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits in 1940 applied Boolean algebra to electronic circuits for the first time and as a result largely allowed the digital age to blossom. It would be nice to know if Pitts & McCulloch were aware of it when they published their work three years later.

👓 Indie Web Dose / Rainy Day | myravery

Replied to Indie Web Dose / Rainy Day by Miriam AveryMiriam Avery (myravery)
I’ve flipped, tweaked and punched more toggles and valves under the hood. This little blog just took a great many time-release IndieWeb vitamins. Watch out, my dosage may soon reach therapeut…
Congratulations on all the tweaks!

It took me a while to puzzle it out when I first ran across it, but the text just underneath your title: <SPAN CLASS='P-AUTHOR H-CARD'>MIRIAM AVERY</SPAN> is occurring because you’re using the microformats 2 plugin which tries to inject the p-author h-card portion into your page, but it’s having a conflict with your theme which is escaping the output for that author section. (More details on this known issue here.)

Chances are pretty good that you could deactivate the microformats plugin to fix the cosmetic issue without causing other major issues. Depending on your theme’s native microformats markup, you may likely find that you don’t see or experience any other major issues with any of the other technology. The one issue I’ve seen people come across here is if they’re using Brid.gy to syndicate their content via webmention to Twitter, in which case having stronger markup becomes much more important. Hopefully this will at least help you track down and either fix the issue or figure out the best way around it for your particular needs.

The best long term solution would be to add the proper microformats markup directly into the theme itself.

Replied to a tweet by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (Twitter)
“@jgmac1106 Thanks - been trying to get my head around webmentions for a while and still haven't figured it out....”
Tom, for the basics of what Webmention is you might try this intro article Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.

To get started quickly, just to have the notifications, you might try creating an account with Webmentions.io and put the endpoint into the <head> of your site so you can receive them in the erstwhile on a separate service and worry about direct integration at a later date. As I recall Aaron Gustafson has a Webmention.io Jekyll Plugin for display and some of the outline is covered in this recent article by Max Böck.

If necessary, you can get help in the #Dev channel of the IndieWeb chat.

📑 Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens | Tom Critchlow

Replied to Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)

How do you manage information flows? If anyone is using a personal wiki-style long term information tool I’d love to hear from you!  

I’ve got a handful of interesting things bookmarked here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/wikis/ which includes a rabbit hole of a request similar to your own.
Replied to a tweet by David ChartierDavid Chartier (Twitter)
David Shanske, have you gotten this far with your work on the Post Kinds plugin? I know you wanted to import your Pinboard account, but I’m not sure if you’ve got infrastructure for the import piece.
Any other ideas (aka #ActiveWeb)?