Jeremy Cherfas

Jonathan LaCour has done some great work freeing himself from Facebook and Instagram, and his post is a good starting point for others who want to do the same. So far, I confess, I have not felt the need myself. There are no photographs in either of those silos that I don’t have a copy of (actually, the original, not a copy) on my desktop computer. And any text I may have place on FB is also either a copy of something here or else completely insubstantial. Heck, I’m still bringing in old blog posts to my new system by hand, very slowly, and I haven’t begun to bring in old posts from a previous incarnation of this stream. Maybe it is because I was an independent blogger long before either FB or IG saw the light of day, but I have never regarded those places as worthy of original material.

Eat your heart out @replyall. @NealGoldfarb does a yes-yes-no for the ages, and all on his own, more or less.

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

Kudos to @DICKS for doing the right thing. If I ever needed anything that they sell, that’s where I’m going to buy it.

I will never understand the special hell in which the people who do not understand Word styles must live.

The principle puzzle of podcasting lies in the fact that because it has an extremely low barrier to entry, it has an extremely high barrier to scale.

Two savvy treats on one day. Jeremy Keith takes a general look at the power of internet companies in his post on Ends and means. Tim Bray focuses specifically on the utility that is Google Maps in his post Reviewing Ethics. Jeremy: Going back to the opening examples of online blackouts, was it morally wrong for companies to use their power to influence politics? Or would it have been morally wrong for them not to have used their influence?Tim: Call me crazy, but I’d pass leg­is­la­tion to keep Google from do­ing what they’re do­ing. They should be able to sell space on the map­s, and they should be able to pro­vide qual­i­ty fil­ter­s, and col­lect feed­back on re­views and down­grade or up­grade them ac­cord­ing­ly. But no damn way should they own the map and the crowd­sourced value-adds on the map.No collusion, I’m sure, just two smart people addressing their concerns about good behaviour by those who make and use the web.

I’ve never done this myself, honest, but I can understand that it is tempting for a whole reason. And I like both ends of the spectrum of justification:The authors further proposed that retailers bore some blame for the problem. In their zeal to cut labor costs, the study said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility.”… and …“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is NO MORAL ISSUE with stealing from a store that forces you to use self checkout, period. THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE.”

The Hamlet fire was a devastating industrial “accident” that exposes the cost of cheap food. Why the scare quotes? Listen to Bryant Simon talk about his new book.

@toggl Overall, the font size and lack of contrast make the screen hard for me to read on my iPhone 6+ and more specifically, switching between manual and automatic is more difficult and selecting clients and projects more cumbersome.

I may need a new work timer, having inadvertently upgraded the old version of @Toggl. The new one is silly complex.

One of the good things about WordPress is how flexible it seems on the surface, able to perform all sorts of wizardry. One of the bad things about WordPress is how that very flexibility often makes it extremely difficult to achieve any sort of wizardry. That seems particularly true of anything to do with the #indieweb.So I was surprised to learn that Aaron Davis was having difficulty implementing a ZenPress child themeSurprised because I run fornacalia.com with a ZenPress child theme and cannot recall any difficulties in setting that up. I think there may have been some issues with capitalisation of various names, but beyond that, I’m at a loss. I’d love to help – but not sure how best to do that.Maybe I should just share my child theme.

Kinda like Indie Hosters, but more suitable for Gens 3-4? Add Known support and you might get even more customers.

The white man, Tocqueville wrote as he observed race relations in America, ‘is to the men of other races what man himself is to the animals’, in the sense that he ‘makes them serve his purposes, and when he cannot make them bend, he destroys them.’A social order built on systemic violence made the black man, Tocqueville recognised, an ever present menace in his white master’s imagination. Still I find it hard to internalise this understanding, no matter how much I may “know” it.

Jayson Lusk’s reminder that the Economic Research Service is a really important source of data is valuable. His suggestion to follow the ERS’s daily “chart of note” is even better.

“Years later I can hear the sizzle of my right retina as the burning ember connected with the delicate, light-sensitive tissue”Not to defend the special hell that is a cruise, but is there not one person in the editorial chain of that piece who actually understands the anatomy of the eyeball?

@dgold if you are in IndieWeb IRC, can you figure out what just happened? Every one left in a hurry. Something about *.net *.split

I want to make listening to or subscribing to a podcast as easy as sending an email. Or easier!A very worthy goal, I don’t doubt it. Sounds a bit like the universal Subscribe button that some people think is needed to get #IndieWeb writing going again. In any event, I wish them much luck and will be attempting to keep an eye on podTo.