Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Pronounce
- like "Quinn"
Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
In light of a deeply-disturbing ruling from the U.S. 5th Circuit court today, a reminder that even before the United States Supreme Court decided D.C. v. Heller in 2008, inventing an individual "right" to own guns separate from any considerations of militias, and long before they decided the Bruen case last year apparently made it impossible to apply any considerations that have surfaced since 1788, the second amendment itself is rooted in this country's original sin of enslavement.
The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
https://truthout.org/articles/the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery/
Today we sacrifice our children's lives at the altar of the NRA, and it's all a bitter fruit of sacrificing the lives of those whom we consider "Black" during enslavement.
#BlackLivesMatter #BlackHistoryMonth #blog #politics #guns #DomesticViolence
My life online during the month of February is mostly shutting up about the things I normally natter on about, and promoting and highlighting others on the subject of Black history in honor of Black History Month. Such as:
Unsung Black Heroes, from Quentin R. Jiles
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuX_udIp4IoHR1MtRLpumkvED8wqHPxtO
Quentin is the host of The Queue with Que. Two years ago he ran a series on "Unsung Black Heroes," talking about people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Marilyn Nance and Dorothy Height. As a white person, I found myself nodding enthusiastically when I saw Coates or James Baldwin, and wondering "who?" at some of the other figures he covered. I hope you're better-educated about Black history than I am, but if not, or if you want a reminder, this series is for you.
There are 22 episodes, which are generally under ten minutes, although Fannie Lou Hamer just can't be contained in only ten minutes. 😀
Also, @mekkaokereke has been on fire talking about generational wealth today. I know I included him as someone to follow yesterday, but if a list of ten was too much for you, at least follow Mekka.
Then go back and follow the other nine, too. I'll have more suggestions tomorrow.
We can thank Carter G. Woodson, often described as the "father of Black history," for Black History Month. He started a week-long event in February 1926 which later turned into the month-long event we have today.
This video about Carter G. Woodson by One Mic History is less than 19 minutes, and worth watching: https://youtu.be/yDsgf3u3rEo
In fact, this entire 81-video playlist is good.
Black History, by One Mic History
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFAhUaY7D-Ea0hIjboE90EWZIFb-vtgiD
I'll be watching these myself this month, and I've got many more video playlists queued up!
I don't mean it go off on a rant here, but, my fellow Americans, we live in a country in which a six-year-old boy deliberately shot his first grade teacher with his mother's gun twenty-five days ago, and the national reckoning, the deep soul-searching and re-evaluation of every law and every cultural norm that has followed is... nonexistent. God bless America.
The school system's superintendent was removed, and the principal was reassigned, while the assistant principal resigned. The kids at this elementary school now have to walk through metal detectors and use clear plastic backpacks under the watchful eye of two cops. Which did no good at all less than a year ago in Uvalde, Texas. God bless America.
And that's it! Nobody has even bothered making a serious plea to change anything at all, because we know nothing will change. Virginia won't change anything any more than Texas did after the Uvalde shooting. We just know that this is now a part of life: sometimes people go to school to get shot. Sometimes it's children being shot. Sometimes it's children doing the shooting. Sometimes it's both. God bless America.
You might say it's been overshadowed in the news by the cops who murdered yet another Black man, a situation in which the Black cops were fired and charged with murder, while the white cops were put on administrative leave. But that murder didn't even happen until the next day, and didn't become public knowledge until three weeks after Virginia shooting. God bless America.
You might say it's been overshadowed in the news by January 6 being the anniversary of an attempted insurrection, for which the prime suspect remains at large. God bless America.
But if that's true, what does it say about this country that a six-year-old shooting his teacher takes third place at most to still more murderous cops and a scofflaw ex-president getting away with inciting rebellion?
God bless America.
Oh, consequences of my own inaction, why are you inevitably here at my doorstep, costing my $9.2 million each day?
I mean, not *my* inaction, but *someone's* inaction. And since it's not *my* inaction, it's fun to watch.
Recent movies I've seen, in reverse order:
_RRR_ is over the top in the best possible way. There were certainly things going on in terms of Indian culture and politics that I didn't understand, but that didn't affect my enjoyment at all. It's a fantastic movie about brotherhood and friendship and how incredibly evil British colonialists were. I loved it!
_Men_ is... strange. Moody, creepy, and then confusing, I'm not sure anyone quite knows exactly what the Cronenbergesque ending is supposed to mean, including writer and director Alex Garland. Still, it's clear in broad strokes, and I don't consider my time wasted.
_Glass Onion_ is great, a worthy successor to _Knives Out_, which remains great. I loved the cameos, spotted the editing trick, and still was surprised by the full reveal. Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig need to keep making these!
_Avatar: The Way of Water_ doesn't need me to say anything, and I think James Cameron literally reads about his story problems as a fetish. Still, I really, really disliked the first Avatar movie, and this one... wasn't bad! It could have been a shorter movie, but I'll admit the visuals balanced out the pacing issues. And sure, our characters end the movie in the same situation they were in about five minutes in, so you might wonder what the three hours were for, but: water! I'm guessing the next movie is when the fire nation attacks.
"But mercy has never arisen from an ideal situation – it grows as a garden at the end of this long maze of non-ideals."
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/strange-mercies
I have finally found a sauce I prefer to the traditional Huy Fong "Cock Sauce" Sriracha. Diamondback Texafied Sriracha is better. It's just better.
Huy Fong is still excellent for when I'm out and about at restaurants, and I've still got a big bottle in my fridge, plus those packets, but more and more I'm reaching for the Diamondback.
That's one good thing about H-E-B opening stores in the Dallas area. I would never have learned about Diamondback otherwise.
https://www.heb.com/product-detail/diamondback-sriracha-hot-chile-sauce/1978313
When the CEO of IAB describes his worst fear, and it sounds wonderful to you, I guess that makes you an "extremist."
Join me, fellow "extremists," as we insist on basic privacy and "cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it" in the process!
Reading the full script, I note that he calls out Apple as an "enemy from within," so welcome to the party, Apple. Let's take them down!
So the CEO of online ads giant IAB made a pretty… remarkable speech, saying: "These extremists (referring to privacy advocates) are political oppor...
I was not aware before this week that Apple, like Spotify, makes on-demand audio shows available to subscribers without making them available as podcasts, and yet audaciously calls them “Apple Podcast Subscriptions.” This is bad behavior, antithetical to the spirit of podcasting, and Apple should know better.
I learned about it via Hacker News from Matt Basta: https://basta.substack.com/p/the-absolute-audacity-of-apple-podcasts
I don’t use the Apple Podcasts app, because @overcastfm is really great, and most of the Apple’s podcast-related web pages seem to be focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as they have been since 2005 or so. Little did I know that things changed in 2021! That is apparently when they launched this:
https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions
Horrible!
I get the appeal of the pitch for podcasters. If you have an existing podcast and are tired of paying $5/month or more to host the audio files, you might hear about “Apple Podcasts Subscriptions” and see that they charge only $20/year, and you aren’t required to charge for a subscription. It certainly isn’t clear on the publicly-available pages I’ve seen that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere! Instead, even if your show is free, it will be encrypted with DRM and there will be no feed for clients not owned by Apple. They have many lawyers, so it’s probable that this disclosure is buried somewhere in the fine print as you sign up, but it’s still bad behavior.
A podcast is on-demand audio available in any podcast client via a syndication feed. Usually this means MP3 files via RSS, but M4A files via Atom would still fit the description. It’s possible to offer subscriptions to podcasts, and even charge for them. Even on Apple’s own list of “Podcast hosting providers” they list four providers that do so, but the normal way to handle that involves either HTTP Basic Authentication or tokens in the Feed URL, *not* DRM and proprietary clients.
https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search
Once you take away the feed and lock down consumption to only your apps, you’re not producing a podcast anymore. You’re producing a proprietary on-demand audio show. That Spotify and Apple use the word “Podcast” in their product descriptions is deceptive, but co-opting popular labels is somewhat common, and reasonably-aware people should be able to see through that.
I understand the appeal of this for Spotify and Apple, too. They can both say, “using our app, you can listen to any podcast ever made anywhere, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!” But of course, Spotify’s exclusives can’t be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and “Apple Podcasts Subscriptions” can’t be listened to in Spotify, because they’re not actually podcasts at that point. It’s a short-sighted approach with lasting damage.
Shame on Apple for playing this losing game.
This is real talk, with McSweeney’s saying what the folks responsible for laying off tens of thousands of people won’t.
So far, Apple has chosen to cut Tim Cook’s pay rather than engage in mass layoffs. So far, the company I work for has avoided mass layoffs, too. In fact, they acquired yet another small company, but that’s another argument for another day.
Since I don't want to actually publicly engage with Matt Yglesias or his fellow subscribers, and I keep talking myself out of my one-to-five rating system, it turns out what I do instead is discuss some of his articles at length with one of my brothers, where one of us takes the pro and the other takes the con on a given issue until we find common ground.
That way you don't have to read the whole conversations that end with one of us saying things like "I would *love* to live in a world where housing permits were like gun permits: shall-issue rather than may-issue."
Every now and again I think that it would be fun to post a semi-regular roundup of ideas proposed by Matt Yglesias, along with my level of agreemen...
The more I dig into GoodReads exports, the more I realize how utterly broken they are, almost to the point of uselessness.
Assuming I manually edit the CSV file to eliminate the corrupt data from the GoodReads database, I'm still left with a file which contains "date completed" but not "date started," and nearly every "date completed" is wrong. Usually off by one, sometimes by more.
I'm not sure which is worse, the missing data or the wrong data, but both require me to manually look up each book. Which I wish I had done *before* the very-recent rollout of the new book page, because I seem to recall both dates being visible directly on the book page, while now they require scrolling, clicking, and clicking again. It's possible the new book page is more usable for people who want to keep using GoodReads, but it's abysmal for people trying to leave and realizing the GoodReads export function is no good.
On the positive side, it's easy to add missing books to Bookwyrm, and some have turned out to not be missing, just missed while importing.
Bookrastinating update: I imported my completed books from 2021 onward, 269 books. Of those, 35 items failed to import, and a few more are missing cover images. 12 of the 35 which failed have ISBNs, so those failures were somewhat surprising, although most of them are either very old (first published in the 1920s), or clearly Amazon-only (the entire Hollywood Alphabet series by M.Z. Kelly makes up 20 of the 35).
For all of the faults of GoodReads, I'm not sure I've ever tried to add a book to my library that it didn't already know about, other than the book I wrote myself.
It is in the nature of open platforms not owned by corporate behemoth's to require a bit of effort, so I'll add cover images for the books missing them. I'll also poke around this weekend to figure out how to add the 35 books it apparently doesn't know about, which I note includes a book by Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series of books. It's not a Perry Mason book, though, it's another series of his.
Every now and again I think that it would be fun to post a semi-regular roundup of ideas proposed by Matt Yglesias, along with my level of agreement or disagreement. Not in terms of arguing the details, just a simple expression of agreement or disagreement. Maybe on a one to five scale.
But then I slap myself in the face and tell myself to do something more useful with my time, like count the bristles on my toothbrush, or polish the fire hydrant in front of my house, or learn how buggy whips were made.
Apropos of nothing, I do tend to think that "American transit agencies should prioritize ridership over other goals."
Wikipedia has launched a new page design, and like all new designs, it is being poorly received by a number of people who can't understand why they even bothered, why they made everything worse, or why anybody would want this rather than the old design.
The old "vector" design was made the default in 2010, so "every 13 years" doesn't seem like too often for a design refresh. That said, I'm sympathetic to the idea that a new design should be objectively better in some way, rather than just change for change's sake. So let's compare:
Old skin, minimum width: https://ibb.co/Pcvn7VP
New skin, same width: https://ibb.co/PgxF8hf
Old skin, maximum size: https://ibb.co/WsptkCY
New skin, same size: https://ibb.co/x8NmgZq
In both cases, more article content is visible and line lengths are more readable. I'm sure there are some edge cases in which things have objectively gotten worse, but it's also easy to keep using the old skin, or any of a few alternatives: add `?useskin=vector` to the end of any Wikipedia URL for the old skin, or log in to set a default for yourself. There's also a bookmarklet available on the Wikipedia page for skins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin
Old or new, Wikipedia remains a good resource that I use frequently. Kudos to the design team on the new look.
It would be nice if there were a lightweight ActivityPub server that is easily deployable as a docker image without being built first.
It's also possible I'm just not good enough with docker.
I could deploy mastodon using docker, but that seems like overkill for what would be a single-user server. I did find a doc on installing WriteFreely, which involves only two docker images rather than mastodon's three. Oh! And then I found a related guide that involves a single container!
https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-writefreely-sqlite-on-your-synology-nas
I might try this out.
I fiddled with Epicyon briefly a couple of weeks ago and didn't find satisfaction. Perhaps I gave up too quickly, though. That repo does include a Dockerfile.
Between WriteFreely and Epicyon, I'm going to try to get something up and running this weekend.
Statista's Chart of the Day is often fascinating to me. Today's is about the oldest people in the world.
https://www.statista.com/chart/8978/the-oldest-people-on-earth/
As the linked article says, all are women, and most are born in Japan or the United States.
Although born in the United States, María Branyas has lived most of her life in Spain. I'm still a bit surprised at how many of the women on the list are from the United States, though.
I'm not surprised to read this today, although I think those of us who limit ourselves to a single cup of coffee each day are in the minority.
Single-use coffee pods have surprising environmental benefits over other brewing methods
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/the-surprising-environmental-benefits-of-single-use-coffee-pods/ar-AA16tnBr
K-cups strike the right balance for me, but might not for everybody. Instant coffee would apparently be even less impactful on the environment, but other than trips to Asia and New Zealand, I try to avoid that stuff. It just doesn't taste like I want it to.
- Pronouns
- he/him
- Pronounce
- like "Quinn"
Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
