Jeremy Cherfas

Fascinating conversation with Jess Phillips on @tppolitics_ especially the bit at about 29:15 when she said: “We are basically retweeting away our liberty.”

And yes, I am aware of the irony. Which is why I posted this on my own site first

During the virtual IWC tonight, we were discussing third-party clients for publishing to websites, essentially Micropub clients and MarsEdit. And it occurred to us more or less simultaneously, that I do not use Micropub for the site that supports it out of the box, whereas I do use a client for the site that does not support Micropub out of the box. And that is because the post-creation UI is nice and simple for Known, and a right mess for WordPress. So, just to be difficult, I’m using Quill for the first time in a long while to create a Post in Known.

#IndieWeb

Getting set for virtual Homebrew Website Club. Want to join us? indieweb.org/events/20…

A cup of coffee here, a cup of coffee there, pretty soon you’re talking about a bottle of wine. Nevertheless, I thought it worth dropping 2.5 coffees to check out fsnotes, which bills itself as a “lightweight notational velocity reinvention”.I depend totally on nvALT as my general place for keeping scraps, vital information, inchoate thoughts and more besides, and the one thing that has always bugged me has been the inability to have more than one folder. Mainly, I envisage using an additional folder as an archive; notes that I truly believe I have finished with but that I really do not want to throw away because there might be something in them I need later. NvALT’s blazing search speed would be fabulous for that kind of treasure hunt, but I honestly don’t want currently dead notes cluttering up my view of all that stuff.I asked about multiple folders 21 days ago and a couple of days ago the developer, Oleksandr Glushchenko, delivered just that. Definitely deserving of my support.First impressions are that fsnotes is every bit as fast as nvALT. I haven’t been able to give multiple folders a good workout yet, because I only have one big folder of notes. My minor niggle is that the display of links is different from nvALT’s. A well-formed Markdown link is clickable in the preview mode, but not in “native” mode. I suppose I could fix that easily enough in my existing notes, and it need not be a problem going forward, but it is an annoyance right now that might stop me switching completely over to fsnotes.Maybe I’ll raise an issue on github for that. 

Little Beans Bring Big Farm Losses as Global Glut Mashes Exports, via Bloomberg www.bloomberg.com/news/arti…

So was the International Year of Pulses a success or a failure?

This person thinks it is easy to cook good french-fried potatoes. I think they are wrong, because they omit an essential step: take them out of the oil and allow it to reheat. Of course, our idea of what constitutes a “good” fry might be different. Our understanding of how to cook certainly is.

So interesting to read things like this at the same time as enjoying The Circle by Dave Eggers.Plus, a really good reminder to get my head around why I am tracking things and what to do about that.

I moved everything to Fastmail too, a couple of years ago, but I didn’t actually delete my gmail or Mac mail. I just have everything, including some other domains, forwarded to fastmail. But I’ve never thought about unifying contacts between Mac and Fastmail. Is there a way to have a single canonical contacts list that will sync to all devices?

Colin Tudge explains the crucial difference between @OFRC and @oxfordfarming. The R stands for Real, and also for Radical. Start from what you want, then work out how do do it. www.campaignforrealfarming.org/2017/11/w…

@oxfordfarming I find this hard to swallow. Have you really “teamed up” with @ORFC or are you just burnishing your reputation by basking in their halo?

So interesting to see this, not only as a piece of history but also as a personal reminder.Back when the web was young and shiny, an otherwise extremely intelligent BBC television producer, a friend at the time, asked my help in understanding the promise of the new shinyness, especially in visual terms. I told him about the famous coffee pot web cam (and maybe, also, about the link to the Coke machine).“Isn’t that great,” I said, “that you can see whether there’s coffee in the pot without having to leave your computer.““But you could just get up and look.““Well yes, but the coffee pot could be anywhere in the world.““What’s the point of that? You can’t go and get a cup of coffee there.““True. But it doesn’t have to be a coffee pot. It could be, oh, anything.““I just don’t see the point.“Of couse he went on to produce a highly acclaimed series, and much else besides.

The simplest way to describe the attitude of software engineers and companies to linguistic interfacing with their customers would be to say that they do not give a monkey’s fart about such matters. Not only do they never have a linguist check the use of language in the programs they expect us to use (that’ll be the day), they don’t have anybody at all checking it.If they program interfaces this carelessly, just how likely is it that robots are going to respect the Three Laws of Robotics?Not just software engineers.

@denials I absolutely need to check that I am not talking through my hat when I say that I can post more than 140 characters here @withknown and see them show up via POSSE on Twitter. Which means I need to blab a little more than usual.

Seeing White from John Biewen and Scene on Radio was far and away the most interesting and valuable series this year. @nwquah