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👓 A Twitter bot to find the most interesting bioRxiv preprints | Gigabase or gigabyte

Read A Twitter bot to find the most interesting bioRxiv preprints (Gigabase or gigabyte)
TLDR: I wrote a Twitter bot to tweet the most interesting bioRxiv preprints. Follow it to stay up to date about the most recent preprints which received a lot of attention. The past few months have…

🎧 “The Daily”: Nancy Pelosi’s Last Fight | New York Times

Listened to "The Daily": Nancy Pelosi’s Last Fight by Michael Barbaro from New York Times

The leader of the House Democrats faces challenges from multiple factions in her quest to regain the speakership.

The Netanyahu Investigations | The Atlantic

Read The Netanyahu Investigations (The Atlantic)
How the Israeli prime minister's scandal could spoil what should be his perfect political moment
Some of the criticisms here of Netanyahu seem eerily reminiscent of what one might suspect of Trump, who still refuses to put his assets into a true blind trust or to release his tax returns.

I strongly suspect that if Trump doesn’t stay in the good graces of the GOP, they’ll investigate his tax returns and dump him quickly.

Liked Reply to https://twitter.com/zkat__/status/1465743839830757377 by Jamie TannaJamie Tanna (jvt.me)
I'm replying to you from my #IndieWeb site on a domain I own that then publishes to Twitter so I can interact with you, but still owned by me. It's built on open standards (https://spec.indieweb.org) and is a great community around owning your data

Pen and paper publishing to your website? PaperWebsite is on to something.

Handwriting to Website #​​​FTW

While browsing today I ran across an awesome concept called PaperWebsite.com. It allows you to write on paper, take a photo, and then upload it to a website. Your handwritten words published to your website. A tactile writer’s dream.

My immediate thought—I need to have this now!

Articles written by hand in my journal to my website? Short notes that I write on index cards published as microblog updates.  How cool would that be? I was also talking to someone this morning about voice-to-text as a note taking concept. What about that too?

Of course, as you may know, I’ve already got a website. Do I need another one like this for $10/month? Probably not.

Value Proposition

But this has got me wondering “what the value proposition is for Paper Website as a company?” What are they really selling? Domain names? Hosting? Notebooks? They certainly seem to be selling all of the above, but the core product they’re really selling is an easy-to-use interface for transferring paper ideas to digital publishing. And this is exactly what I want!

The problem now is to buy this sub-service without all the other moving pieces like a domain name, hosting, etc., which I don’t need. Taking just the core service and abstracting it to the wider universe of websites could be a major technical hurdle (and nightmare).

IndieWeb and Micropub

Perhaps I could try find an OCR solution and wire it all together myself? I’d rather see the original developer run away with the idea though. So instead I’ll quietly suggest that they could take their current infrastructure and add a small piece.

Since PaperWebsite’s already got the front end up and running, why not add on Micropub support to the back end? Maybe Ben Stokes could take the OCR output and create a new Micropub client that could authenticate to any website with Micropub support? I have to imagine that he could probably program it in a couple of days (borrowing from any of the pre-existing open source clients or libraries out there) and suddenly it’s a product that could work with WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, Blot, and a variety of other platforms that support the W3C spec recommendation or have plugins for it.

The service could publish in “draft” form and allow editing after-the-fact. There’s also infrastructure for cross-syndicating to other social services with Micropub clents, so note cards to my website and automatically syndicated to Twitter, Mastodon, or micro.blog? Yes, please.

And maybe it could be done as a service for a dollar a month or a few dollars a year?

I made a short mention of the idea in the IndieWeb chat, and it’s already a-buzz with implementation ideas… If you’re around Ben, I’m sure folks there would lend a hand if you’re interested.

The website, commonplace book, note taking, stationery, and fountain pen nerd in me is really excited about where this could go from a user interface perspective.

How Moleskine, Leuchtturm, LiveScribe or the other stationery giants haven’t done this already is beyond me. I could also see serious writing apps like  iA Writer or Ulysses doing something like this too.

📺 "The West Wing" Take This Sabbath Day | Netflix

Watched "The West Wing" Take This Sabbath Day from Netflix
Directed by Thomas Schlamme. With Rob Lowe, Moira Kelly, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney. A drug dealer's appeal of the federal death penalty is rejected by the Supreme Court, which upholds the death sentence with execution scheduled for the following Monday. One of the defense lawyers on the case is Sam's old high school bully, and he appeals directly to Sam to involve the president. During a weekend in which he was supposed to be in a yacht race, Sam opts to stay at the W.H. and try...

The Web Cryptography API is a W3C Recommendation | W3C News

Bookmarked The Web Cryptography API is a W3C Recommendation (W3C News)
The Web Cryptography Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of the Web Cryptography API. This specification describes a JavaScript API for performing basic cryptographic operations in web applications, such as hashing, signature generation and verification, and encryption and decryption. Additionally, it describes an API for applications to generate and/or manage the keying material necessary to perform these operations. Uses for this API range from user or service authentication, document or code signing, and the confidentiality and integrity of communications.
h/t

📺 60 Minutes Season 51 Episode 30: The Price of Generics, The Most Unlikely Meeting, Mark Bradford | CBS

Watched 60 Minutes Season 51 Episode 30: The Price of Generics, The Most Unlikely Meeting, Mark Bradford from CBS
Sweeping lawsuit accuses top generic drug companies, executives of fixing prices; then, crime victims get chance to confront perpetrators through special program; and, Anderson Cooper profiles Mark Bradford, the artist who tackles complex social and political issues through abstract works
Watched October 20, 2020 - PBS NewsHour from PBS
Tuesday on the NewsHour, talks continue over a potential COVID-19 relief package, but time is running short to complete a deal before the election. Plus: The economic impact of pandemic aid, an antitrust lawsuit against Google, the U.S. and Russia near an agreement on nuclear arms control, court cases on voting rules, the high cost of foreign beef and Lynne Cheney’s book on Virginia presidents.

👓 Wrap-Up and Coverage for Düsseldorf 2019 | beyond tellerrand

Read Wrap-Up and Coverage for Düsseldorf 2019 by Marc Thiele (beyondtellerrand.com)
Where do I start? I mean, I run this event for nearly ten years now. Every time you think ”That’s it. It can’t get any better” and then you end the show and read, listen to and see all this wonderful and nice feedback. Wow, just incredible and fills me with a very warm and lovely feeling. Surely I am feeling exhausted. Empty. Tired. But the positive energy predominates. Energy that comes from people saying that they met many new friends, had exciting conversations and that my little event might have changed their life, or, at least, how they look at their day to day jobs and how they work. When I started beyond tellerrand, I never would have thought, that my event would have an impact for anyone. Honestly. I wanted to create a friendly and inspiring event, where people would feel welcome and spend two days with nice people. Two days, where they maybe could escape the daily routines and hectic. Two days, where phones and/or laptops mostly stay in their pockets and bags. Well, and now? I honestly feel like in a dream somehow. Thank you so, so much! With this wrap-up post, I want to give anyone who has been at the event a chance to look at everything that happened again as well as having a source for those who could not be there to watch all the videos, see blog posts by other people from the event and have a look at the many photos that had been taken. As usual I am going to update this blog post with new material as long as I find it or as long as people send stuff to me. If you have or find anything related to this event, that is not listed already, please let me know. Thanks. Kicking off the 2019 edition of beyond tellerrand. Photo: Juliane Schütz. Stats and Facts What I have recognised this year is, that many more people started using Instagram to document and talk about the event. Even though 2389 tweets had been made with the hashtag #btconf on Twitter, I had the feeling that more and more people use Instagram. Interesting also: we had less people using the wifi than ever before. Maybe also because people were following the talks more intensively. This year we had people from 24 countries in the house. Those countries, from A–Z, were: Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Gambia, Germany, Greece, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Singapore, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States. Wow. Thanks to the volunteer-team. Photo: Andreas Dantz. 14 wonderful volunteers were amongst those people. The core team is coming back for many, many years already and the names of those who helped running the event are: Alex, Andreas, Andy, Bartek, Daniela, Ewa, Jana, Jessica, Lisa, Patrick, Sven, Tom with Tanja (my lovely wife) and Guido leading the team. Absolutely fantastic to have such a stunning team. Thanks a lot! Side Events Before and After On Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th, we already and as usual for the last five years met for the IndieWebCamp in Düsseldorf. Tantek and I organised this IWC and it once more was hosted by our friends at sipgate. Indie Web Camp no. 5 in Düsseldorf at sipgate. Photo: Juliane Schütz. For the very first time our friends at Wacom hosted our Pre-Conference Warm-Up. All 200 tickets were taken and Wacom did an amazingly wonderful job of creating a friendly environment for us to meet and greet at the evening before beyond tellerrand. Wacom gave us a home and too care of us with drink, snacks and a DJ. Thank you so much! We furthermore had four sessions between the regular schedule: a Breakfast Session with Liam Griffin for Shopify, one Lunch-Time Session by Christoph Reinartz for trivago, another Lunch-Time Session with Chris Heilmann and the Working Draft Podcast for Microsoft, and an Evening-Break Session with Fabien Benetou for Mozilla. Thanks everybody for the session! Joschi Kuphal organised another Accessibility Club around beyond tellerrand. The first one in Düsseldorf and smaller than his conference in Berlin, but with around 70 attendees a well attended one with presentations and bar camp like sessions during the whole day. Photos This year Norman Posselt, Florian Ziegler, Juliane Schütz and Andreas Dantz officially took photos at the event, but other people shot some amazing photos as well. Anything I got or found so far is listed below. Florian Ziegler was part of the beyond tellerrand family again and captured the atmosphere in lovely black and white photos during the days. Juliane Schütz comes to Düsseldorf for a while now. Always known for amazing photos at the Indie Web Camp as well as beyond tellerrand, she caught this year’s edition in a mix of black and white as well as color shots. Andreas Dantz captured the show on stage and in the exhibition in this great set of photos. Long time friend and supporter with sipgate Axel Topeters created this set of lovely photos from two days in Düsseldorf. Juliane Schütz also created photo sets of day 1 and day 2 at the

The Typewriter You Probably Don’t Want to Buy

Caveat Emptor

One of the biggest of the very few companies still manufacturing typewriters in the new millennium is the Shanghai Weilv Mechanism Company.  Sadly, for the hobbyist space looking to get into typewriters, while these are easy to find online, they are notorious for dreadful quality control, lots of plastic, and poor type  alignment. As a result, they make a terrible investment compared to the far more robust vintage and antique typewriters which were manufactured from the late 1800s into the 1980s.

If you know nothing about typewriters, but are looking to purchase one (either for occasional/regular typing or even as a display piece), I couldn’t recommend them given the fact that there are so many far better machines in the secondary market which are more robust and will last for centuries compared to these poor, plastic machines.

Prior to purchase, you should be aware that many reputable typewriter repair shops will often refuse to work on or repair them, and most probably wouldn’t even accept them as donations to be parts machines. Most collectors and typewriter enthusiasts I’ve encountered will almost universally recommend against purchasing these.

Will Davis has determined that they’re based on the Olympia Carina design.

Shanghai Weilv Mechanism Company has licensed the names of some older manufacturers and are making typewriters variously rebadged and sold under the following names:  

Generally, the internals of all these machines are identical with the biggest differences being the external shell styling and the colors in which they’re offered. Typically they sell in the range of $200-300 and given the ubiquity of the number $259, I would guess this is the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.

Reviews

In case you don’t want to trust my individual opinion recommending against these, you might appreciate some specific reviews from others: 

Dr. Richard Polt, long time typewriter collector, former editor of ETCetera, the Journal of the Typewriter Collector’s Association, maintainer of The Classic Typewriter Page, and author of The Typewriter Revolution (Countryman Press, 2015): Typewriter review: Royal Epoch

Lucas Dul, a typewriter repairman from Typewriter Chicago, reviewed a 2023 Rover:

Sarah Everett, typewriter collector and creator of Just My Type on YouTube, reviewed a We R Memory Keepers Typecast typewriter:

I’ve also collected some links which talk about some of the models: 

If you really must…

Hopefully some of the data here has helped your decision for a well-informed purchase. You might notice that in online reviews, most of the people who purchase these machines and give them high marks seem to value them as decor and for their aesthetic. While this may be great, you could still get older vintage machines in a broader variety of looks for a fraction of the price.

Naturally, some will still want to buy one or more of these machines anyway. If you must do it, I would recommend that you can find gently used versions of these machines, often in their original boxes, at auction sites like ShopGoodwill.com for $5-15 several times a week. 

Checked into Cross Campus
An interesting take on the process of start ups and planning. I was surprised that I didn’t hear the phrase “technical debt” this morning as it was one of the major topics being discussed.

Afterward I ran into Chris Gore, an old hero of mine who started Film Threat back in the day! With any luck, it’s the inaugural club meeting (or maybe a recovery group?) of gray-haired Chrises who love cinema.