Replied to IndieWeb Camp San Diego Day 2 by Joe CrawfordJoe Crawford (artlung.com)

IndieWeb Camp San Diego [1] [2] has been a blast. Great bunch of people and great ideas in a terrific outdoor context.

A group of IndieWebCampers sitting around a low table at an outdoor coffee shop working on laptops.
Yes, that was me, the weirdo on the right at IndiWebCamp working on a nested platform of typewriter, laptop, and cell phone. It was totally worth it to see Tantek’s expression when he realized I had actually typed one of my earlier responses.
I’ve been seemingly “away” from my online presence for several months, but felt it’s time to come back to posting publicly a bit more frequently. Some of the hiatus has been set aside for crafting some new workflows for posting more content privately for a slightly different version of my commonplace book. 

While I’ve learned a lot in my experiment, I’ll have to ruminate on it a bit longer before writing any specific takeaways. One of my favorite portions has been some work to pull more data out of the books I’m reading in terms of highlights, notes, and marginalia for research purposes. 

In general, not much has changed here directly, but I will have to get used to the the posting interface and some of my old workflows again. I’ll also need to get around to some general updates and fixes that I’ve let slide for far too long. I’ll also have to catch up on some change logs for things that have improved since my hiatus began.

I will say that while I’ve been very productive during my hiatus, which has included stepping away significantly from other forms of social media consumption as well, I also very much miss interacting with a lot of my online friends and colleagues on a more regular basis. It’ll be good to ease back into my feed reader and see what everyone has been up to for the past several months.

👓 Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don’t stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review | The Guardian

Read Farm Girl Café, Chelsea: ‘We don't stay for dessert, because we have suffered enough’ – restaurant review by Jay Rayner (the Guardian)
The food was so bad, says Jay Rayner, a nearby Yorkshire terrier started to look more appetising
It’s got to be difficult to write a restaurant review that’s more scathing than this. Wow!

📺 Michelle Wolf complete remarks at 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner | C-SPAN (YouTube)

Watched Michelle Wolf complete remarks at 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner from C-SPAN (YouTube)
From C-SPAN coverage, Michelle Wolf remarks at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Watch the complete video here: https://cs.pn/2JxzkC2

After having finally seen this, I don’t see anything wrong or problematic about Michelle Wolf’s act. In fact, she gave a generally solid roast that dished it around to almost everyone. If we want to take someone to task, why not Trump for being a “poor” coward? Was he worried he wouldn’t be the richest person in the room? Was Jeff Bezos RSVP’d?

Some have said that Wolf took Sarah Huckabee Sander’s appearance to task; the sad fact is that they’re just apparently not up enough on popular culture to have gotten some of the jokes. If anything Wolf was complimenting Sanders’ makeup technique.

On the other hand, if we want to beat someone up over taking people’s appearances to task, perhaps we should go back and do some better reporting on the President who says these things on a regular basis and not as part of an obvious comedy and satire routine? A real ad hominem appearance attack would sound something more like “With crazy hair, orange complexion, and bizarre makeup, I often wonder if Trump isn’t attempting to prove that he got just enough talent and votes to hold the office of “First Clown.” Apparently he wasn’t rich enough to buy the popular vote, but just like the sham of Trump University, he was able to afford the Electoral College. Can the voters get a settlement too?

At the end of the day it’s really Wolf who should be the most upset. The worst part of the whole performance was a painfully bad and poorly placed microphone that continually gave me nightmare flashbacks of Howard Dean’s Yahhh!! moment. Her material would have definitely done better with a more solid audio set up.

Now if the WHCA really wants to get righteously upset, maybe they should invite Jeffrey Ross to come? Perhaps he could toss off something tame along the lines of “I wouldn’t f@*k Trump with Sarah Huckabee Sander’s dick!” Maybe it would at least buy his redemption in Bea Arthur’s eyes?

Replied to Building a Front Entrance for Your Domain with Site Publisher (Extend Activity Bank)

ornate stone gate standing freely in a countryside field with the words domain.me superimposed on the bottom

A Domain of your Own gives you more than one web site you can put there, think of it as a plot of land with many different structures.

It’s useful to have an entrance gate or a simple “calling card” for the main URL of you domain (e.g. like extendlabs.ca). Later we will show you how to install blogs and other applications at different locations within.

Your web hosting cpanel includes an easy to use tool that will let you create your first web site just by filling out a few items in a form. These are simple, and probably in no time you will find them limiting. But for now, in a few minutes you can create something with information you choose to replace the temporary screen a new Reclaim Hosting domain provides you. Consider it as a placeholder for a fancier front entrance.

These are an interesting little side experiment for getting something quick and dirty up. I think they’d be more valuable as simple templates if they’d let one define some additional links like “Blog” with an icon and a field to redirect to a subdirectory or subdomain. I was also surprised that there were so many religious-related templates instead of educational ones.

My favorite was the Pravatar tool hiding in the lesson. I can think of lots of fun uses for a tool like this. 

My placeholder “site” lives at https://sp.chrisaldrich.net/.

Free E-Book: Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielsen

Bookmarked Neural networks and deep learning (neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com)
Michael A. Nielsen, the author of one of our favorite books on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, is writing a new book entitled Neural Networks and Deep Learning. He’s been releasing portions of it for free on the internet in draft form every two or three months since 2013. He’s also maintaining an open code repository for the book on GitHub.

Michael A. Nielsen
Michael A. Nielsen

The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology

Francis Crick, OM, FRS (1916 – 2004), a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist
first articulated in 1958 and restated in August 1970
“Central dogma of molecular biology.” Nature 227 (5258): 561-3.
Bibcode 1970Natur.227..561C doi:10.1038/227561a0 PMID 4913914

👓 The Next App: Nextcloud | Tim Owens

Read The Next App: Nextcloud (Throw Out The Manual)
You may have noticed in my last blog post a bit of a tease in that I've become a bit more comfortable recently with building installers. Of course not every application is going to be compatible with a cPanel environment or work well in the context of automating the install,

👓 Twitter fixes their timeline | Colin Devroe

Read Twitter fixes their timeline by Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)
I saw this tweet last night and immediately turned this on. Now with this new setting I don’t need it. Please keep this Twitter. Please!
Now here’s some welcome news. Will need to play around with some of these new Twitter settings.

👓 Motels to House Pasadena Homeless? | ColoradoBoulevard.net

Read Motels to House Pasadena Homeless? by Garrett Rowlan (ColoradoBoulevard.net)
If the body politic were a real body, the body of Pasadena would be one plagued by itches and bruises that continue to irritate.

Acquired The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver

Acquired The Mathematical Theory of Communication (The University of Illinois Press)
Scientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace--but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published originally as a paper on communication theory in the Bell System Technical Journal more than fifty years ago. Republished in book form shortly thereafter, it has since gone through four hardcover and sixteen paperback printings. It is a revolutionary work, astounding in its foresight and contemporaneity. The University of Illinois Press is pleased and honored to issue this commemorative reprinting of a classic.