Happy Bill of Rights Day! For what it's worth, the Third Amendment is still in pretty good shape—at least, the last soldier to crash on my sofa was a friend sleeping off a post-divorce binge. It's a mixed bag for the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights, though, with protections for some important freedoms facing serious incursions. What's most disturbing is that the threat comes not just from the usual suspects in government, but from the public at large.
Fourth Amendment-wise, this week brought us a much-anticipated Justice Department Inspector General's report on the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign's alleged contacts with Russia. While Inspector General Michael Horowitz found no evidence that political bias motivated the decision to open the investigation, the report "identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation." This is how the feds conducted themselves in a high-profile investigation. They play at least as fast and loose with privacy protections for us commoners, according to a 2018 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling that slapped at repeated FBI misuse of snooping tools.
Self-defense rights are more unpopular than ever with much of America's political class. Politicians may not be able to define "assault weapon," but many wannabe Democratic presidential candidates propose to ban the things—and even to confiscate them. While most Republicans reject such grabbiness, too many of them endorse the president's unilateral restriction on "bump stocks" that let people rapidly fire some semiautomatic rifles. They're also prone, along with their cross-aisle co-conspirators, to endorsing "red flag" laws that would let government officials temporarily (supposedly) suspend individual Americans' Second Amendment rights with minimal due process muss and fuss.
Free speech gets similar disrespect from lawmakers. Last week four socially conservative members of Congress tried to revive old-fashioned sex panic, demanding that Attorney General William Barr "declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority." On an even more dangerous note, Democrats continue their efforts to trim First Amendment protections for core political speech. Their proposed constitutional amendment would not only potentially choke off the speech rights of people banded together as incorporated entities, it would also empower government to regulate the raising and spending of money to influence elections—an outright gift to incumbent politicians with easy access to free media coverage.
Legislators from both major parties want to strip away protections for online speech. And President Trump insists that "free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad, to me that's very dangerous speech."
But these are government officials. We assume that they're nasty creatures who will always push against restraints on exercising the power that attracted them to their chosen careers. Against their worst efforts the public can supposedly count on the admittedly uncertain, but often helpful, protections of the Bill of Rights to protect their rights from government violation.
What happens, though, when the public itself becomes iffy about personal freedom?
That contempt for open discussion is reflected among the public at large. An October 2019 survey by the Campaign for Free Speech found that 51 percent of Americans think "the First Amendment goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America and should be updated to reflect the cultural norms of today." An even larger 57 percent think "the government should be able to take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false."
Unfortunately, that hint of grassroots authoritarianism jibes with the 56 percent of Americans who supported domestic surveillance in the name of counter-terrorism after Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was spying on private communications. At the time, a solid 59 percent of Democrats and Republicans alike wanted to prosecute the whistleblower for giving us a heads-up. Numbers shifted a bit in a more civil libertarian direction later, but most people's initial reaction was to give the snoops a free hand.
Public support for self-defense rights is also eroding after a long period in which they seemed relatively safe and gained a big Supreme Court win in Heller. The ranks of Americans willing to compromise Second Amendment protections in the name of stricter gun laws is growing and now stands at 60 percent, up from 57 percent last year and 52 percent in 2017. Sixty-nine percent of respondents want to ban "assault-style weapons" and 71 percent favor giving the same treatment to ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.
Why are Americans seemingly becoming more willing to let the government intrude into people's lives and penalize people for exercising their rights?
Interestingly, the Campaign for Free Speech sees political polarization at work. "While many who identify as conservative may dislike the reporting of CNN and would likely favor sanctions for 'fake news,' many progressives or liberals may feel the same way towards Fox News," the group says. That is, while Americans may favor punishing "biased" media outlets, they see bias in media operations on the other side of the political divide and want to put the screws to their opponents.
The weaponized nature of the assault on speech rights becomes clearer when left-wing academics complain that "free speech law entrenches a social view at war with key progressive objectives," and when social conservatives campaign against pornography, at least in part, as an exercise in "smashing the sacred cow of cultural libertarianism."
Similar factional concerns may be at play in views of Fourth Amendment issues, too. Americans generally favored domestic surveillance after Snowden's revelations, but after it became clear that the FBI—a major player in monitoring communications—was investigating Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Pew Research reported, "the share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents with a positive view of the bureau has fallen 16 percentage points," from 65 percent to 49 percent. Democrats' views of the FBI remained overwhelmingly positive, at 77 percent.
And attitudes toward Second Amendment rights have long divided along partisan lines. With firearm ownership established as a right-of-center preference (44 percent of Republicans report owning guns, compared to 20 percent of Democrats), 86 percent of "Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor stricter gun laws, compared with" 31 percent of their Republican and Republican-leaning counterparts, according to Pew.
There's a good chance that Americans are turning against their own liberty because they're deeply concerned that it might be enjoyed by people who disagree with them. They'd rather tighten the restraints on everybody then see their political enemies exercise universal rights.
That doesn't bode well for constitutional rights protections, since words on paper can't stand alone. The Bill of Rights can withstand a hostile political class if it's supported by a culture that genuinely wants to be shielded from the depredations of government officials. If, instead, people come to see the Bill of Rights as a barrier to their efforts to harm their opponents, its component amendments will be reinterpreted or overturned so that they don't get in the way of political warriors sticking it to each other.
So, happy Bill of Rights Day! Celebrate while it still means something.
10 years ago today, my friends at FictiveKin and I launched TeuxDeux, a simple, minimal to-do app. If you like paper lists, you’ll like TeuxDeux.
Happy our birthday to you!
I keep my TeuxDeux as the browser landing page, which means, every time I open a browser window I am being reminded what I should be focusing on. Whatever you don’t check off today, will automatically roll over to the next day. You see the week at a glance and it’s delightfully simple. And in the ‘someday section’ below I keep lists like shopping, movies I want to watch, gift ideas for the kids, etc
Try it for free for 30 days! And if you do, do me a favor and enable the flying cat in the settings. You’ll see!
Another quick one this week with AI designed logos at the top of the list. If you like dark patterns, then the canine high-five is the cutest way to manipulate your way to more likes.
For retro movie fans, I found a Robocop typeface that'll make your day. If you're more into horror then a true account of how Silicon Valley financing works will haunt your dreams for weeks.
Usually, you can tell the people who know JS deeply. They have the thousand-yard stare, the coffee jitters, but at peace with the world for they have seen things most mortals barely dream of.
This is an interesting read into how all of those big tech buyouts are structured and, particularly, how preference overhang works. It's the kind of accounting that would make mafia accountants uncomfortable.
Not having shot an IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) match since January 2018, and feeling a need to do so before shooting their big Sheepdog match next month, I shot the Monster Match conducted by Little River gun club in … Read more
Last year, Cape Town couple Barry and Julie Coltham went on an 8,000-mile road trip through six African countries. While the iridescent fish of Lake Malawi and the great elephant herds of Hwange were special, the unlikely highlight of their trip was little-known Kasanka National Park. This small park in Zambia plays host to a mesmerizing annual event where 10 million megabats with 30-inch wingspans show up for dinner.
The straw-colored fruit bats’ 1,500-mile round trip to and from the park is believed to be the largest migration of mammals on the planet. But the best way to appreciate the spectacle is to catch them once they’re already in Kasanka — specifically just after sunset, when all 10 million bats head out to feed in a 30-minute period. And again before sunrise, when they return, fat and chirpy, for a well-earned sleep.
Watching the sunset departure was “a spiritual experience that gave [me] goosebumps,” says Barry, explaining that the bats leave for the feeding grounds in complete silence save for the whoosh of their wings. The predawn return is a much noisier affair, with the bats squeaking like excited mice about the night’s exploits. “You can almost understand their conversations,” he adds.
Having 10 million bats fly above you is not claustrophobic, smelly or scary, adds Julie. Instead, watching the sky “fill with a moving flow of blackness against the pinks and purples of the setting sun” is an experience she calls “exhilarating,” “wondrous” and — perhaps most aptly — “impossible to describe.”
They can even rack up 40 miles on a single Kasanka fruit foraging mission — quite something for what is essentially a pub crawl.
Sunsets are best appreciated from one of the public viewing areas (ask the park staff for recommendations) where tourists gather with deck chairs and G&Ts to await the main event. Around 1,000 people make the pilgrimage every year, says Geraldine Taylor, Kasanka’s knowledge manager. As the sun slips behind the horizon, bats fill the sky and the jovial atmosphere instantly turns solemn. “We lay on our backs watching them,” says Julie, explaining that some of the bats fly so low you can see their feet tucked up under their chests.
Sunrises warrant an altogether different plan. Here it is worth forking out $35 per person for a guided game drive (you’ll head out at 3:30am!) to one of the “hides” (like raised viewing platforms) that offer a bat’s-eye view of the proceedings. It’s incredible how many bats can roost in a single tree, Barry says. Which is not to say it doesn’t go wrong sometimes — like when he witnessed a branch get too heavy, sending a few unlucky bats to the crocodiles eagerly waiting in the swamp below.
But where do the bats come from? And why do all 10 million of them descend on a patch of the Fibwe swamp forest the same size as three soccer pitches? Taylor says “there’s still a lot we don’t know” about the Kasanka bat migration — it was discovered only in 1980 — but a 2008 paper in the Journal of Zoology used satellite telemetry to establish that the bats fly from multiple smaller colonies across equatorial Africa. They arrive in mid-October to feast on the bounty of fruit brought about by Kasanka’s first rains (the region’s humans also go wild for the masuku, or wild loquats, says Taylor) only to head home by around New Year’s Day, when the food supply peters out.
The straw-colored fruit bats have 30-inch wingpans.
During the migration the bats can fly a whopping 230 miles per night. And they can even rack up 40 miles on a single Kasanka fruit foraging mission — quite something for what is essentially a pub crawl.
Between sunrise and sunset, bat activity quiets down. It’s a great opportunity for birdwatching, or a batnap.
You’ll need all the rest you can get to fully appreciate witnessing the “wonder of lazily and haphazardly flapping mammals in every direction,” says Taylor. Combined with dramatic skies, scattered thunderstorms and beautiful sunsets, the bat migration makes for “spectacular pictures that nevertheless don’t do the experience justice.”
Many photographers, she adds, end up putting their cameras down to simply savor the moment.
Where: The park is an eight-hour drive from Lusaka on good paved roads. There’s also a small airstrip in the park.
When: The bats arrive on about October 20th and leave around Christmas Day.
How much: Entry to the park is $10 per (foreign) adult plus between $15 and $30 per vehicle per day, depending on how big your vehicle is.
Stay: Wasa Lodge offers all-inclusive accommodation ($350 per person per night during bat season), while Luwombwa Lodge has self-catering options ($70). There are also three campsites in the park ($20). The Colthams recommend Site 2 at Pontoon Campsite — it’s a great place to spot sitatunga, a rare amphibious antelope with splayed hooves and a “rubbery” coat that make swamp living enjoyable.
Hot tip:African Bush Adventures runs trips to see the bats where you’ll drive your own vehicles but have all the nitty-gritty taken care of by the bionic husband-and-wife duo who lead all trips themselves.
From the days of Spanish colonial rule, the coast of Pinut-an on the central Philippine island of Leyte has drawn explorers searching for gold mixed in the region’s quartz deposits. But it was only in the 1970s that locals started diving into the sea — without any equipment — to search for the precious metal. Now, after half a century of the gold rush, quartz deposits are hard to find in shallow waters. That’s prompting local miners to turn to even more dangerous methods, with only marginally better equipment than their predecessors.
With underwater boulders of quartz hard to find close to the beach, miners are increasingly digging into the bedrock with tunnels that run along known underground deposits of gold. This is the land entrance to a 30-meter-long tunnel where L Seber, a 58-year-old veteran diver (above, in the blue shirt), worked for five years. He sports a tattoo of Jesus on his forehead and believes it will protect him underwater.
But even the tunnels are rapidly getting depleted. Seber’s tunnel — where he is unable to find high-grade gold anymore — connects to the ocean and is filled with dark yellow water. Miners effectively can’t even see what they’re looking for. They need to smash suspected silica-quartz deposits and listen to the sound pebbles make to determine if they’re close to the ore. “The Philippines is the only country where even the blind can mine,” jokes 69-year-old Ernie Gaylo, a retired mechanical engineer from Pinut-an, who was once a diver and is now a tunnel owner. Instead of his tunnel, Seber looks for gold in the sand on the seabed. Above, he’s preparing to dive for just that.
Back in the 1970s, divers didn’t have any oxygen supply and so could stay underwater for only very short periods. Now, divers like Seber work with young men like Danian — he’s wearing the cap with the dollar sign above — who operate and manage diesel-powered compressors that can simultaneously feed the lungs of five underwater gold miners. The compressor sends oxygen through a thin hose into the mouth of the miner.
The fine sand off the shores of Pinut-an also carries gold, deposited over centuries of natural grinding through erosion and pounding waves. Today, Seber hauls the sand he has collected in recent days. He pulls himself along a rope that extends to a depth of 15 meters. He places his sandbags into a big bowl that’s carried by buoyant drums. He’s close to the entrance of the tunnel where he once worked. Skillful submarine miners like Seber have even learned to find lunch underwater in the form of seafood such as fresh clams and sea urchins.
The sand is run through a sluice box, where finer particles are separated. Then, traditional panning techniques are used to extract gold.
Once they’re out of the water,
divers must attend to their oxygen supply. Here, two divers untangle their
pressured hoses in the late afternoon after eight hours in search of gold
underwater.
In the garden of Gaylo’s home, his 45-year-old son, Gamalliel (above left, in the blue shirt) grinds pebbles from the quartz deposits found by miners in their tunnel. After three hours of grinding, the pebbles turn into slurry. Like his father, Gamalliel too was an underwater miner but stopped because of back pain. His two children are about to graduate from high school, and he doesn’t want them to continue in the family profession. He wants them to be safe.
Tanillo (above, in the yellow shirt) mixes liquid mercury with the slurry, the next part of the gold-extraction process. While gold dissolves in the mercury, impurities don’t. But the process is dangerous: Mercury vapors, when inhaled, can form deposits in one’s lungs. In the nearby region of Mindanao, mining using mercury has been banned. And even in Pinut-an, authorities have tried cautioning local communities, but it’s hard to give up a decades-old practice that is the community’s biggest economic driver. And authorities know they would need to arrest entire villages of people, numbering in the hundreds, to forcibly stop the practice. So it continues.
Gaylo heats a small piece of amalgamated gold over the kitchen stove, shielding his nose and mouth with an old T-shirt to avoid inhaling mercury vapors. Many miners, he says, don’t even take that basic precaution. Gaylo, who earlier worked as a surveyor for multiple mining firms, says gold mining offers “monetary opportunities” and helps him support the community and even workers from other regions with jobs. Each gram of gold fetches 1,300 pesos — more than $25 — in the market.
Once the mercury vaporizes, what remains is a small lump of gold with 75 percent purity (18 karat). Impurities such as pyrite, iron, copper and silver make up the remaining 25 percent. This gold will be sold for refining in cities in Mindanao to undergo further purification. The gold is then sold to private clients in the form of jewelry or tiny gold bars.
In a country where the annual per capita GDP is just over $3,000, the earnings from gold mining are no small amount. Amang, 30, used to work as a machinist on a ferry, which stopped operating. Here, he poses in his diving suit. His new occupation is dangerous and carries long-term health hazards. But for now, it brings a smile to his face.
Whether you’re breaking a bad habit or trying to form a good one, a little nudge in the right direction can go a long way. These free printables and ebooks promise to help you track or change habits easily.
As the year draws to a close, we often succumb to the pressure of setting resolutions. But if you’re serious about changing habits, you need the right advice and tools to get you going. You can use habit apps to reach your goals or go old-school with a pen and paper. There is just something more satisfying about the tactile feel of crossing or ticking a box.
1. Habit Print: Create a Printable Seinfeld-Like Chain
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld famously shared his productivity habit. He wrote a joke every single day and crossed it out on the calendar. The visual chain of his successful habit kept him going every day. Several people now swear by this trick.
Habit Print is a free web app to create such a visual habit tracker and print it. Just write whatever task you want to accomplish (maximum 35 characters), and the app will create a printable page for it. The page includes the seven days of the week in a grid of circles, with 10 rows of these circles.
There’s a productivity principle that if you want to form a new habit, you need to do that task for 66 days. Habit Print will take you to a chain of 70 days, ensuring you meet your goal and are better off for it.
Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, has spent a long time researching the science behind habits. He has studied people’s behavior to figure out what makes them stick to a habit or change it.
Duhigg believes the key to changing habits is the “habit loop.” Habitual behavior activates based on a cue, like a time or when you’re at a certain place. Our brain then seeks a reward, which we indulge through some destructive behavior. In the end, this forms a routine.
But if you change the reward, you’ll break the habit loop. Find a reward that is healthy, without altering the cue, and you’ll end up making a new routine that is good for you. Over time, this will become your new habit.
Duhigg has converted his theory into two easy-to-follow flowcharts while you try to form a new habit loop:
Habit Print is a single page to focus on a single new routine. If you want a more comprehensive habit plan with several tasks and practices, try Clementine Creative’s habit tracker.
You get 31 columns for the dates of the month, along with a space to write the day. And there are 15 rows to list all the habits you want to form. Every time you complete a habit, check, fill, or draw a pattern in that column.
You can print it in Letter, A4, or A5 size. The writer recommends using different colors for different tasks to add a little oomph to the calendar and to also make it easy to distinguish how well you’re doing on different habits.
The website also has an editable version of the habit tracker, where you can first add the different tasks and print after that. But this needs a small payment.
Like the month-long habit tracker from Clementine Creative, there are several others. Teal Notes has compiled the best of them into well-designed free downloads that you can print.
There are weekly, 10-day, 15-day, and monthly habit tracking templates, available in both vertical and horizontal formats. The vertical monthly tracker even has a color version.
The 10-day and 15-day trackers stand out because of their columns for notes. The 15-day version even looks different, presented like a hand-fan. The first day is the smallest to fill, but as your streak continues, you get to fill larger boxes, making you reflect longer about your accomplishments.
The best habit app is not an app at all. In fact, it’s a little guide that sits in your pocket. Download the Hipster Habit App PDF and print it out. Then fold it as shown in the instructions and stick it in your wallet.
Follow the instructions of the Hipster Habit App page by page. This habit-changing guide follows all the basics that will set you up for actually making a lasting change. It encourages you to figure out the purpose, breaks the task into easy steps day-by-day, and gives you things to do through your journey.
The Hipster Habit App also includes habit streak calendars, and even a little bit of gamification to encourage you to achieve new titles. All you need is a pen to fill the blanks. It’s super cool and will be a talking point wherever you go.
Mark Manson, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, wanted to understand the science behind habits, and different studies conducted about it. After much research, he compiled all the data into an easy-to-understand article, also available as a 21-page ebook. The ebook is worth it for this longread.
Manson’s focus is on willpower since that seems to be what drives whether you can successfully change a habit or not. From the famous marshmallow test to real-life examples of people, the ebook traces different data about how we undertake habit-changing behavior.
If you are serious about forming a new habit, it’s important to understand how your mind and body will react to behavioral changes. The more you know, the easier it is to set plans to tackle pitfalls. Habit change isn’t overnight, as the ebook will tell you. But you can change your life in small steps.
Try Micro-Challenges for Habit Changes
With these downloads and printables, you’ll have an easier time in effecting meaningful change in your life. But we all know it won’t happen overnight. A neat trick is to try mini-challenge apps for life-altering habits. A lot of people are having some success this way.
Have you decided to stick with this native macOS app for browsing? Then it’s time to take your Safari experience a notch or two higher by adding a few choice shortcuts to your workflow. Take your pick from the shortcuts we’ve compiled in the cheat sheet below. (Using them all is even better!)
The cheat sheet contains several keyboard shortcuts as well as link-based shortcuts for handling tabs, bookmarks, webpage content, and more. These shortcuts can save you loads of time as you surf the web.
FREE DOWNLOAD: This cheat sheet is available as a downloadable PDF from our distribution partner, TradePub. You will have to complete a short form to access it for the first time only. Download The Safari Shortcuts Cheat Sheet for Mac.
The Safari Shortcuts Cheat Sheet for Mac
Shortcut
Action
Tab and Window Management
Cmd + N
Open new window
Shift + Cmd + N
Open new private window
Cmd + T
Open new tab
Option + Cmd + T
Open new tab at end of tab bar
¹Cmd + L
Select address bar content
¹Cmd + Return
Open address bar URL in new background tab
Shift + Cmd + Return
Open address bar URL in new foreground tab
²Cmd + click
Open link in new background tab
²Option + Cmd + click
Open link in new background window
²Shift + Cmd + click
Open link in new foreground tab
²Option + Shift + Cmd + click
Open link in new foreground window
³Cmd + M
Minimize current window
Cmd + W
Close current tab
Option + Cmd + W
Close all tabs except current tab
Shift + Cmd + W
Close current window
Option + Shift + Cmd + W
Close all windows
⁴Cmd + Shift + T
Reopen last closed tab/window
Control + Tab OR
Shift + Cmd + ]
Switch to next tab
Shift + Control + Tab OR
Shift + Cmd + [
Switch to previous tab
⁵Cmd + 1/2/…
Switch to first tab/second tab/…
Cmd + 9
Switch to last tab i.e. tab at end of tab bar
⁶Option + Cmd + 1,2..9
Open first/second/… bookmark listed under Favorites
Shift + Cmd + \
Toggle Tab Overview
Option + click Close button
Close all tabs except tab whose close button you clicked
Cmd + Q
Quit Safari
Webpage Content
Up Arrow
Scroll up
Down Arrow
Scroll down
Left Arrow
Scroll left
Right Arrow
Scroll right
Option + Arrow key
Scroll in larger increments
Spacebar OR
Page Down
Scroll down a screen
Shift + Spacebar OR
Page Up
Scroll up a screen
Cmd + Up Arrow OR
Fn + Left Arrow OR
Home
Scroll to top of webpage
Cmd + Down Arrow OR
Fn + Right Arrow OR
End
Scroll to bottom of webpage
Cmd + +
Zoom in on webpage content
Cmd + -
Zoom out of webpage content
Option + Cmd + +
Make webpage text bigger
Option + Cmd + -
Make webpage text smaller
Cmd + 0
Restore webpage content to default size
Cmd + R
Reload webpage
Option + Cmd + R
Reload webpage from origin i.e. without using browser cache
Cmd + .
Stop webpage from loading
Cmd + ] OR
Cmd + Right Arrow
Go to next page in history
Cmd + [ OR
Cmd + Left Arrow
Go to previous page in history
Hold Back/Forward toolbar button
View history of current tab in a list
Shift + Cmd + H
Go to homepage
Option + Cmd + S
Search results SnapBack
Cmd + F
Find text on page
Cmd + F
Cmd + E
Find selected text on page
Cmd + G OR
Return
Move forward through matching text results
Shift + Cmd + G OR
Shift + Return
Move backward through matching text results
Reading and Bookmarks - I
Shift + Cmd + R
Toggle Reader view for current webpage
Cmd + D
Save current webpage as bookmark
Shift + Cmd + D
Add current webpage to Reading List
⁷Option + Cmd + Down Arrow
Load next Reading List item
⁷Option + Cmd + Up Arrow
Load previous Reading List item
Click bookmark in sidebar or double-click in Bookmarks Editor
Open bookmark
Shift + click
Add linked page to Reading List
Cmd + click folder in Favorites bar
Open all bookmarks from folder
Drag bookmark to left/right in Favorites bar
Move bookmark
Drag bookmark off Favorites bar
Remove bookmark
⁸Reading and Bookmarks - II
⁹Cmd + click
Select/deselect bookmark/folder
¹⁰Shift + click
Select multiple bookmarks/folders
Cmd + double-click
Open bookmark in new background tab
Option + Cmd + double-click
Open bookmark in new background window
Shift + Cmd + double-click
Open bookmark in new foreground tab
Option + Shift + Cmd + double-click
Open bookmark in new foreground window
Spacebar
Open selected bookmark OR Toggle contents of selected bookmark folder
Right Arrow
Open selected folder
Left Arrow
Close selected folder
Return
Highlight name of selected bookmark/folder for editing OR
Finish editing name of bookmark/folder
Delete
Deleted selected bookmark/folder
Browser Layout and Views
³Cmd + ,
Open Preferences
Shift + Cmd + B
Toggle Favorites bar
Cmd + /
Toggle status bar
Shift + Cmd + L
Toggle sidebar
Control + Cmd + 1
Toggle Bookmarks sidebar
Control + Cmd + 2
Toggle Reading List sidebar
Shift + Cmd + \
Toggle Tab Overview
¹¹Option + Cmd + L
Toggle Downloads
Option + Cmd + B
Show Bookmarks Editor
Control + Cmd + F
Toggle Full Screen view
Cmd + Y
Show browser history
Esc
Quit Full Screen mode OR
Quit Reader View
Development
Option + Cmd + R
Toggle Responsive Design mode
Option + Cmd + I
Show Web Inspector
Option + Shift + Cmd + I
Connect Web Inspector
Option + Cmd + C
Show JavaScript Console
Option + Cmd + U
Show Page Source
Option + Cmd + A
Show Page Resources
Option +Shift + Cmd + T
Start/stop timeline recording
Shift + Cmd + C
Start/stop element selection
Option + Cmd + E
Empty browser caches
Other Shortcuts
Cmd + O
Open file
Option + click file link
Download linked file
Double-click file in Downloads list
Open downloaded file
Cmd + I
Email link to current page
¹Use Cmd + L and Cmd + Return in that order to duplicate current tab quickly.
²Shortcut works with bookmarks in Favorites bar also.
³Shortcut works in other macOS apps also.
⁴The Undo shortcut Cmd + Z also works as long as the Close Tab action was the most recent one. Neither shortcut can reopen private browsing tabs and windows.
⁵Shortcut works only for first eight tabs from left.
⁶Shortcut works only for first nine tabs from left. Folders and bookmarks within them don’t count.
⁷Shortcut works only when Reading List sidebar is open.
⁸Shortcuts work in Bookmarks Sidebar and Bookmarks Editor.
⁹Shortcut also lets you select multiple, non-contiguous bookmarks/folders.
¹⁰Shortcut works with contiguous bookmarks only.
¹¹Shortcut does not work when Downloads list is empty.
Personalize Safari for a Better Workflow
Despite being less versatile than popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, Safari remains the top choice for Mac users thanks to its seamless integration with macOS.
There are over 700,000 active podcasts today. If you want to discover awesome new podcasts that you’ll enjoy listening to, check out these recommendation engines and blogs.
There some excellent podcast apps for beginners or addicts, but apps aside, podcasts themselves aren’t advertised like movies or TV shows. Even books get more publicity. So it’s difficult for most people to find an enjoyable new series.
For now, to find podcast recommendations, you need to rely on word of mouth. Apart from social media, these are some worthwhile blogs, search engines, and social recommendation tools that talk about the best podcasts you should be listening to.
1. Podyssey (Android, iOS): Twitter-Like Recommendations for Podcasts
Podyssey is a social recommendation engine for podcasts. Sign up for an account, add what you are already listening to, and dive into a world of similar choices and recommendations. It’s mainly about finding people with similar tastes.
The setup is a crucial step, even if it seems tedious. You’ll need to export your current podcast player’s playlist and then import it into Podyssey. But do this and you’ll likely get much better recommendations for shows and people to follow.
The app shows you a customized news feed based on your shows. Users can “echo” what they listen to, which is the equivalent of a retweet. Once you start following people with similar interests, you’ll discover what they’re listening to. Users can also build playlists to recommend to others, which is a good way to discover a bunch of new shows when you’re starting out.
As with any social-based app, Podyssey is as useful as you make it. Be active and connect with fellow podcast lovers, and you’ll not need any other source.
2. Podcast Review (Web): Episode and Series Reviews by LA Review of Books
The Los Angeles Review of Books started an exclusive website for podcast reviews and interviews with hosts. Unlike social recommendation engines, these go much more in-depth and are presumably done after listening to full series or multiple episodes.
The reviews and interviews are in text, not in audio format. It sounds odd to review podcasts in text, but it works. In fact, you might just save time this way. It gives you the ability to skim through multiple reviews more quickly, and when you find something interesting, you can read all the details you want.
The website leaves a lot wanting in terms of design. There aren’t easy “most popular articles” or such collections to find podcast recommendations. Periodically, the site publishes a listicle or a roundup that’ll give you multiple choices. But otherwise, it’s all about reviewing one podcast at a time. But hey, at least you’ll know for sure if it’s to your taste or not.
3. Listen Notes (Web): Search Text in Podcasts, Discover New Shows
Listen Notes is one of the most useful tools for anyone who is interested in podcasts. First, it’s a mind-blowing search engine. That’s right, you can type keywords and Listen Notes will search through transcriptions of podcasts to find where it was said. It’s amazing how well the search function works, across an enormous range of free and paid podcasts.
When you find something you like, you can add it to your Listen Later playlist, which is a bit like a read-it-later list. You can import this playlist into any podcast player app. Because so many people are using Listen Notes, it has a “Listen Real-Time” feature to see which podcasts people are actually hearing right now.
Similarly, you will find a Best-Of section divided by country, with categories like true crime, history, news, comedy, TV & film, etc. The Hot section has trending podcasts, while the Curated section finds online articles and listicles from reputable sources. And finally, there’s Explorer, where you can key in any podcast for recommendations of similar podcasts.
4. Riptide (Web): Find Podcasts Based on Short Clips
Movies have trailers. Books have excerpts. Podcasts have Riptide. Listen to a short clip of a show to figure out if you’d like to hear more of it. It’s like watching the best jokes of a stand-up comedian before figuring out whether you want to see their whole set.
The feed of clips comes entirely from users and can be filtered by genre. You’ll find the podcast’s name, the episode’s name, and the length of the clip. If you like what you hear, you can listen to the full episode or add it to your playlist (as long as you’re logged in). It’s a super-cool way of discovering new podcasts, as well as sharing your favorites.
You’ll need to register to make your own clips. Then search for the podcast’s name or the episode’s name. Play it in the browser, and set the start and end times of the clip. Share it for the world.
5. Discover Pods (Web): All the Essential Lists for Podcasts
If all you want are lists and roundups of podcasts to listen to, look no further than Discover Pods. You’ll find everything you wanted, and even stuff you didn’t know you wanted.
The website is full of articles, interviews, and other information to discover new podcasts. But more than anything else, check out the Podcast Reviews section. That’s where you’ll find those essential top 10 and top 50 listicles, which tell you what you should be listening to.
You’ll get the best of the year, the best of genres like true crime, and even lists of the best episodes of popular podcasts like WTF With Marc Maron or This American Life. If you’re new to the world of podcasts, you can’t go wrong with these.
There are no Oscars or Grammys for podcasts yet, but The People’s Choice Podcast Awards perhaps come the closest. There are 20 categories with 10 nominations each. The 2019 winners have already been announced, with The Fantasy Footballers getting the coveted People’s Choice Award.
The list only mentions the name of the nominees and links to the podcast’s homepage. Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear description available for you to read beforehand, but the category makes it amply clear.
At the end of the page, you can check out a list of all past winners till 2005, so that’s a great range of new shows to discover.
What’s the Best Podcast App?
You’ve found great podcasts with this article. But you need a good podcast player to listen to them. We compared four of the best podcast apps to help you pick the perfect one for you.
With so many movies rumored, produced, and released every day, it can be hard to keep on top of them all. Fortunately, there are plenty of movie RSS feeds that deliver all the news to your favorite reader.
Here is our collection of RSS movie links, and where each one shines.
What Is an RSS Feed?
If you’re not sure what an RSS feed is, it’s a good idea to grab an RSS reader before you proceed to the entries. When you click on an RSS feed without a reader for it, you’ll see a mess of data.
If you refuse to see a movie until you hear what the critics have to say, why not subscribe to the Roger Ebert movie website?
Roger Ebert was a movie critic from 1967 until 2013 and won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. After his passing in 2013, his website was kept alive by critics who wanted to continue his legacy. As such, the site is home to a group of critics who review new releases.
This website is a good pick if you want reviews, and you’re not interested in news or gossip. You can also subscribe to their membership club for $20 a year, which gives you more insight into the movie world and access to movies you can stream.
To subscribe to this feed, open the Roger Ebert RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader.
2. MovieWeb
If you’re looking for a range of different movie topics, try MovieWeb. The website covers just about anything related to movies. If you want reviews, trailers, or talk about potential castings, MovieWeb has you covered.
The best part is, MovieWeb breaks up their RSS into different feeds. That way, you can pick and choose which sections you want to read, and which you want to leave out. As far as selection goes, the sky’s the limit; you can pick from TV news, movie news, CD and DVD news, and even interviews with celebrities.
If you want MovieWeb’s RSS links for English movie news and releases, you can find all their links on the MovieWeb RSS feed page.
3. Screen Rant
If you’d rather receive all kinds of movie information in a single feed, Screen Rant has you covered. The website covers every possible topic; news, reviews, and previews, for example. Screen Rant also features podcasts, which gives movie fans something to listen to on the daily transit to work.
Screen Rant covers a vast amount of content, such as movies, TV, comics, and gaming. The RSS feed doesn’t differentiate between these topics, so you’ll need an avid interest in those topics if you want to get the most out of their feed.
The website also writes listicles, such as Al Pacino’s 10 Best Movies (According to IMDb). While these kinds of articles are not to everybody’s tastes, they can be a fun read for those who appreciate the format. It’s worth checking out their listicle articles and see if they’re to your liking before you subscribe.
Point your RSS reader toward the Screen Rant RSS feed if you’d like to subscribe to them.
4. Coming Soon
Are you also interested in television and video games? Then you should give Coming Soon a shot. As the website name suggests, Coming Soon’s primary focus is on what’s on the horizon. It also covers the bleeding edge of movies and video game releases, so you can stay in-the-know on what’s available.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to split the RSS feed into different categories. As such, you should only subscribe if you want to get updates on all the topics they cover. If their categories match your interests, however, you’ll find Coming Soon a fantastic one-stop-shop for all your news.
If you like the idea of gaming and television news but you want control over your feeds, Cinema Blend is a good choice. You can pick and choose what appears on your feed, or sign up to the lot if they all fit your needs.
Cinema Blend is especially useful if you love your superhero movies. There’s an entire section dedicated to bringing you comic book and movie news about our favorite heroes. From news about upcoming films to actor news and other movie recommendations, there’s a lot to love.
Want to stay up to date on the newest film festivals? Then why not subscribe to an RSS feed that keeps you in the loop about them?
The Film Festivals website is all about keeping movie addicts informed about the festival scene. These articles are accessible via an RSS feed, which you can customize. If you prefer to hear about only animated films, or if you love documentaries, you can choose the RSS feeds for those specific niches.
The website does offer other RSS feeds related to the world of movies. For example, there’s a separate feed for news of the award winners and a feed for movie professionals looking to make their mark on the cinematic world.
If you want to know what movies are out now in cinemas, what better way to keep on track than with a ticket sales company?
Fandango sells seats for the latest blockbusters, so their RSS feeds focus on movie releases. Just pick the genres that you want to track and have the most recent announcements appear on your RSS reader.
If you want to see what’s on the horizon, Fandango has RSS feeds for movie trailers too. The website separates each feed by genre, so you can subscribe to the ones that interest you and keep tabs on any future releases that may look good.
Fandango also has a news section on its website, which also has an RSS feed. Unfortunately, the news isn’t as well-updated as some of the above examples, but it is there if you decide that Fandango is your movie home on the internet.
If you want an RSS link for movie releases near you, the Fandango RSS page shows every feed they have available.
Exploring the World of Movies
The internet is the perfect home for the movie addict. You can get news, trailers, and box office stats at the click of a mouse. There are plenty of RSS feeds to keep on top of this information, so pick the ones that suit your needs best.
Answer questions in a way that sparks a conversation
“Never, ever, give just a one-sentence response to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ Give the asker some fuel for his tank, some fodder for his trough.”
Imitate a parrot
“Never be left speechless again. Like a parrot, simply repeat the last few words your conversation partner says. That puts the ball right back in his or her court, and then all you need to do is listen.”
Save your smile for greater impact
“Don’t flash an immediate smile when you greet someone, as though anyone who walked into your line of sight would be the beneficiary. Instead, look at the other person’s face for a second. Pause. Soak in their persona. Then let a big, warm, responsive smile flood over your face and overflow into your eyes. It will engulf the recipient like a warm wave. The split-second delay convinces people your flooding smile is genuine and only for them.”
Learn to listen
“I always try to turn the spotlight on the other person. Truly confident people often do this. They know they grow more by listening than talking.”
You can stop the usual process of trading time for money when you learn how to earn passive income by working smarter. There are four proven ways to do it.
Do you love both photography and houseplants? If so, did you know that you can easily use your camera to measure the intensity of the light falling on your plants?
In the United States, optimal light intensity for houseplants is often discussed in foot-candles (and for those of you more familiar with lux, 1 foot-candle is about 10.76 lux).
If you don’t want to buy a dedicated light meter for your houseplants (and haven’t needed one for your photography), you can also gauge light intensity using just your camera (if it has a built-in light meter and manual controls) and a sheet of ordinary white paper.
First, set your camera’s mode to aperture priority (Av), sensitivity to ISO 100 and aperture to f/8.
Next, hold the sheet of white paper right in front of a plant’s leaves so that the light is hitting the sheet of paper instead of the plant. Hold the camera in front of the sheet of paper (not further than the width of the paper) while doing your best not to cast any shadows.
Now meter with your camera and see what it recommends as the shutter speed for correct exposure. Use the chart below to convert the result to foot-candles:
These numbers are based on a handy online calculator by the store First Rays. You can use the calculator if you’d like to figure out foot-candles for different combinations of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed.
There you have it: a quick way to measure foot-candles using the camera you already have. Happy houseplant growing (and photo shooting)!
“Electric Night” photographed by Ivan Pedretti was featured on Wednesday’s ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website with the caption:
It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian Island of Sardinia in early June. The foreground rocks and shrubs are near the famous Capo Spartivento Lighthouse, and the camera is pointed south toward Algeria in Africa.
In the distance, across the Mediterranean Sea, a thunderstorm is threatening, with several electric lightning strokes caught together during this 25-second wide-angle exposure.
Much farther in the distance, strewn about the sky, are hundreds of stars in the neighborhood of our Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy. Farthest away, and slanting down from the upper left, are billions of stars that together compose the central band of our Milky Way.
NASA selects a different photo of the cosmos each day. Here's the latest one!
Who says you can’t have fun while working? With the help of these viral shortcuts, what normally takes you several clicks and scrolls could be done in a matter of nanoseconds. Try out these Microsoft Excel hacks or bookmark this cheat sheet to save yourself valuable time and effort, whether at home or in the workplace.
Here just a few:
Shift+Space: Select an entire row
Ctrl+Space: Select an entire column
Alt+Semicolon: Select visible cells
Ctrl+Plus: Insert new row or column above or to the left of selected row or column
Ctrl+Minus: Delete selected row or column
Alt+Plus: Calculate the sum of selected cells
Ctrl+N: Open new workbook
Ctrl+S: Save current workbook
F4: Repeat last action
Ctrl+Up/Down Arrow: Move to the first or last cell in a column
No matter how much of an expert you are on a topic, if you’re making a video, a teleprompter will help you deliver your message much more effectively.
Teleprompters put the word-for-word message you want to get out right in front of your eyes. It’s like hand-delivering a precisely worded letter to your audience.
Is using a teleprompter a guarantee that you won’t mess up? No. But the likelihood of you delivering a well-worded and passionate message is greatly increased when using one.
You don’t have to have a giant teleprompter like what’s used on the evening news, either. In fact, there are many small, portable, and affordable options for vloggers and videographers today.
Let’s take a look at some of the best teleprompters on the market.
Best Teleprompters of 2019: mPrompter
Even though this teleprompter by mPrompter isn’t going to be available until early in 2020, it still makes this list of the best teleprompters of 2019. Why?
That’s easy…
I’ve had my hands on a prototype model the last couple of months and have found that it’s highly portable for shooting video on the go and it’s extremely durable, so it can stand up to use and abuse while on-location or in the studio.
This rig has a stainless steel body and frame with a textured black coating to minimize reflections and glare.
It has a 3mm glass mirror with a 70/30% reflective coating, and the mirror is permanently attached and free floated in a protective stainless steel bezel.
mPrompter is compact and ideally suited for use with a smartphone, but it is adjustable to any kind of camera, so you can use it with your small mirrorless camera or your big DSLR too.
This teleprompter was developed with bloggers in mind: it’s small, easy to set up (it takes less than a minute!), and comes with aluminum adapter rings to ensure it’ll work with your existing smartphone or camera.
On top of all that, mPrompter is affordable! It really is the best of all worlds - portable, easy to set up, durable, and easy on your pocketbook!
Ikan’s PT-Elite-Pro teleprompter is specifically designed for larger tablets like the Apple iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy tablets as well as any tablet from 6 x 9 inches to 9 x 12.
But even though it’s designed for larger tablets, it’s still an easy and quick setup to save you time.
It features an adjustable, foldable glass frame, a quick-release base plate, and a much lighter design that makes it more portable than its predecessors.
In fact, the solid CNC machined aluminum construction makes it super lightweight so you can take it from the studio to locations in the field with ease. The custom foam hard case for carrying the teleprompter enhances its portability.
This unit has a 15mm rod base for versatility and ease of use, and includes an elite remote as well.
The scientific-grade 70/30 teleprompter glass ensures high clarity and sharpness for an easy reading experience while the adjustability to various types of camera sizes makes it an excellent option whether you shoot with a DSLR, a mirrorless camera, or a video camera.
Another one of our favorite teleprompters of 2019 is the Little Prompter.
As its name indicates, it's a compact teleprompter that you can use to deliver polished talking points to the camera no matter where you’re recording.
It’s a versatile setup that’s also easy to use, so you can use it with a wide range of cameras without having a long setup time.
This unit can be used with your smartphone, and when paired with a teleprompter app, the Little Prompter can operate with your computer’s built-in camera and microphone.
Little prompter can also easily pair with a mirrorless camera or DSLR, a webcam, or even a handycam.
The lightweight body measures just 6 x 6 x 6 inches and is made of durable expanded PVC. It has an adjustable tripod attachment support bar, spacers, and screws to give you versatile setup options. All these components are manufactured using 6061 aluminum for durability.
The teleprompter glass is made of high-quality 70/30 BeamSplitter glass that gives you beautiful sharpness and excellent transparency as well.
This is just a smartly designed and well-made teleprompter that might just be the ideal fit for your teleprompter needs.
Next on our list of the best teleprompters of 2019 is the Padcaster Parrot, another multi-functional, affordable teleprompter.
This teleprompter fully sets up in just a few minutes’ time, which makes it a solid choice for videographers that need to run and gun.
Just attach any camera system to the unit, insert your phone, and read the text that shows on the teleprompter. The companion Parrot app makes it super easy to set up.
Like the other teleprompters on this list, the Parrot uses 70/30 BeamSplitter glass for the highest-quality view of your script.
This unit also comes with 13 mounting rings so you can easily attach it to almost any type of camera lens.
There is a Bluetooth remote to improve ease of use via the Parrot app and there's a glass cleaning kit included in the bundle as well.
Last but not least, the Datavideo TP-300B is a great teleprompter option for videographers that use an iPad or Android tablet for reading scripts.
The scripts or cue sheets that you create can be quickly and easily transferred into the DV prompter application software and scrolled at a set automatic rate. Additionally, it can be controlled via an optional remote if a set rate is not desired.
The prompter software gives you plenty of options for customizing the text size, colors, and fonts so you can make the script as easily readable as possible from a variety of distances.
The unit has a versatile mounting system that enables you quickly and easily mount many different-sized tablets to it.
The strong prompter frame affixes to any standard tripod and gives you the option of using it as a standalone, in front of the camera, or below the lens. Whatever the positioning, you’ll appreciate the 60/40 glass that allows you to see the script clearly.
Most visitors to Xochimilco, in the south of Mexico City, come to ride its canals, eat, drink and listen to floating mariachi bands. Few, however, realize that this reserve is the last example of an ancient way of farming on water called chinampas. It’s a method that is 1,300 years old and is disappearing due to cultural, economic and climatic threats.
When the Aztecs settled an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco (where Mexico City stands today), they built these floating gardens to feed their growing city of Tenochtitlan. The chinampas were an innovative solution given the lake-based location: They built artificial islands using wooden stakes and reeds in a grid pattern, accessed by canals, on the shallow lake bed. The method proved to be very efficient and fertile.
However, when the Spanish arrived and defeated the Aztecs, they drained the lakes and filled them in, destroying the chinampas. Only one lake remains from the original five and its canals mostly dried up in the 1950s, almost dooming the future of the chinamperos (the farmers who tend to these floating crops).
Of the remaining 2,200 hectares in Xochimilco, 60 percent are idle or abandoned and 17 percent have been illegally urbanized. Only about 80 families continue farming on chinampas. Yolcan, a project started in 2011 to revive and rejuvenate the chinampas, works with four families, focusing on organic agriculture and inventive techniques to deal with water pollution. They farm about eight hectares and what they cultivate supplies some of the city’s top restaurants. They also deliver more than 300 CSA baskets each week. The work has been slow and challenging, but Yolcan is proof that the chinampas can be revived—one study has shown that the whole of Mexico City could be fed if these floating farms were fully developed.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
Lucio Usobiaga (right), a Mexico City native, co-founded Yolcan with his old friend Antonio Murad after a business selling organic food didn’t work out. He studied philosophy, but he forewent a PhD to focus on Yolcan. He started by working with a family of chinamperos and went on to rent a chinampa to begin producing. He has had to educate himself in organic and permaculture farming techniques. Yolcan now also works with farmers in Hidalgo, Puebla and Texcoco to diversify what produce they can supply and provide more opportunities for farmers.
The canals of Xochimilco. Photo by Leila Ashtari
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
To germinate seeds, farmers dredge mud from the bottoms of canals—but only certain canals as the mud must have a specific texture. They pour it into a rectangular bed and let it dry for a day. Then they cut the mud into small squares and plant a seed in each one. The bed is covered for two to three weeks before the germinations are transplanted.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
The water in the canals of Xochimilco is very polluted with toxins and heavy metals. So farmers are experimenting with biofiltration. Small canals are sliced into the chinampas and various plants are cultivated in a procession. The water slowly moves from one section to the next as it is filtered, and after a few months, the clean water can be used to irrigate the crops.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
Javier Cruz (left) is originally from Puebla but now lives in Xochimilco. He started working with Yolcan six years ago, left for personal reasons, but recently rejoined the collective.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
Cruz offloads hoops to create a structure to cover the germination beds. Everything must be brought in by boat in the chinampas.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
With the ability to farm year round, Yolcan mostly focuses on growing leaves, roots and brassicas. Plants from the nightshade family are more difficult to grow here. Farmers also grow at least half a dozen different types of lettuce, kale, collards, broccoli and many other crops.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
Noé Coquis Salcedo comes from a family of chinamperos and he owns his own chinampa. Yolcan’s goal is for a square kilometer of chinampa to generate 20,000 ($1,025) pesos per month for farmers like him.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
One of the greatest challenges is fighting illegal construction of homes in the chinampas. Authorities haven’t shown any interest in stopping this invasion and more land is lost each year. A complicating factor is that many of the chinampas are abandoned and there is no record of who owns the land.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
Each day, Yolcan sends out a message to chefs with what produce is available. At that moment, chefs race to place their orders on a first-come, first-serve basis. And each day, the harvest is delivered to them. When Yolcan first started, Usobiaga had to cold-call on restaurants to find customers. He found early support from chefs such as Gabriela Cámara, of Contramar, and Jair Téllez, of Amaya.
Photo by Leila Ashtari.
As a way to connect people to the chinampas and teach them about where their food comes from, Yolcan hosts tours as well as monthly meals with guest chefs. In November, chef Joaquin Cardoso of Loup Bar served a menu that used carrots, lettuce, beets and talamayota squash from the chinampas.
From the outside, it resembles any one of the 17 million shipping containers that are currently in use around the world. But step inside and you’re entering a futuristic hydroponic, vertical farm where cutting-edge technology can grow anything from tomatoes to turnips. It’s called the “Greenery” and it’s the newest container farm from Freight Farms, the company that has pioneered this unique style of indoor growing starting in 2010.
I recently toured a Greenery located below an overpass on I-93 in Boston’s South End neighborhood, a few blocks from Freight Farm’s headquarters, with Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman, the company’s founders. The placement of the container farm wasn’t accidental. They can be sent anywhere in the world a regular shipping container can go and used in a myriad of settings, from an urban underpass in Boston to the jungles of Vietnam, or the Google campus in Mountainview, California.
The Greenery sits below an overpass in Boston. Photo by Andrew Amelinckx
The Greenery can pack the equivalent of 3.5 acres worth of produce (13,000 plants) into a 320-square-foot space and it uses less than five gallons of water a day. That’s 99.8 percent less water than a traditional soil-based farm, according to Friedman. Farmers can tailor fit the Greenery’s growing conditions via its unique operating system to influence the flavor, color, texture, and size of crops. The company has standardized “recipes” that can be uploaded to an operating system that controls exact combinations of nutrient and CO2 levels, as well as light and water schedules. The operating system controls everything from the components and sensors to the climate and temperature, and then it continuously relays the information to a smartphone application called the Farmhand App that the farmer can also use to remotely run the farm.
The Greenery is the second-generation container farm from the company and is replacing its original model called the Leafy Green Machine.
“Inevitably, as the network of farmers grew, farmers are farmers—they’re entrepreneurial—and we wanted to encourage experimentation,” McNamara says. “That’s where a lot of the development with the Greenery came in. Light spectrum, spacing, and the biology of the plant were the limiting factors and that’s what pushed the Greenery’s development.”
The company did a complete redesign of the Leafy Green Machine, from the body to every part of the interior. Where the old model used reconditioned shipping containers, the Greenery’s shell has been custom designed, but it can still be transported like a regular shipping container. The new design has 70 percent more growing space in the same footprint. Lightweight growing panels can be maneuvered using a rack-and-pinion system that allows the farmer to customize the growing space to accommodate larger plants, improve workflow, or for hyper-specific growing conditions. A new HVAC system specifically designed for the Greenery condenses and recycles water in the air. In some humid areas, such as in Miami where one of the Greenerys has been installed, it can capture enough moisture (around 1.5 gallons of water per hour) to make the operation water positive.
Freight Farms farmer Lexy Basquette tends to crops in the Greenery. Photo by Andrew Amelinckx
The new interior includes a workstation used for seeding, transplanting, and harvesting. It has its own dedicated watering system that can dose two independently controlled seedling troughs with water and nutrients on different cycles along with its own LED lighting system.
“You can program them to grow differently,” Friedman says.
When I was there, one of the company’s farmers, Lexy Basquette, was in the process of transplanting calendula seedlings, commonly known as marigolds, from the workstation where the seedlings grew to the plant panels that hang on a mobile rack system where the plants will grow to maturity before harvesting. Basquette was in the process of testing out four different types of calendula for a skincare company as part of a new subscription service Freight Farms offers called Grown.
“Customers either have the farm onsite or remotely and we run it so that they don’t have to have the full scope of involvement but they can still see the benefits,” Friedman says.
The Greenery sells for $104,000 (it’s going up to $115,000 after the first of the year). The first run of 20 is already sold out and have been shipped to customers in the US, Canada, Spain, and the UK. There’s a waitlist for the next 60 that will be ready for delivery before the first half of 2020, Friedman says.
“We wanted to build something where farmers on different sides of the world can communicate on the same framework, which really doesn’t happen,” Friedman says. “The sense of community we’ve gotten just from standardizing something farmers can share has been very fulfilling.”
In 1959, pianist and composer Dave Brubeck “made one of the coolest and best-selling jazz albums of all time,” writes Matt Schudel at The Washington Post. He did so at a time when dozens of other jazz musicians were releasing career-defining records that also changed jazz, almost overnight. Brubeck’s Time Out eventually became a “certified pop hit,” largely thanks to “the infectious quality of its classic instrumental hit, ‘Take Five.’”
It is indeed rare for a song to become both a jazz standard and an instrumental so popular that it’s covered by dozens of artists in dozens of popular genres over six decades, including some reverent ska and dub reggae tributes. “It has certainly shown up in some unjazzy settings over the years,” writes Ted Gioia in The Jazz Standard: A Guide to the Repertoire. The song has been “rapped over and sampled, played by marching bands and sung by choirs… I am sure I will hear it on a cell phone ringtone someday soon.”
The original tune, composed not by Brubeck but longtime saxophonist Paul Desmond, was adapted into more popular forms almost as soon as it came out. In 1961, Brubeck and his wife Iola penned lyrics for a version recorded by Carmen McRae. Al Jarreau adapted this version for a 1977 recording on his Grammy-winning album Look to the Rainbow, which “introduced a new generation of fans to this song. “
Over time “Take Five” may have “lost much of its capacity to surprise," but "it can still delight.” That is no more so the case when we hear as it was originally played by the Dave Brubeck quartet itself, formed in 1951 by Brubeck and Desmond, who first met in Northern California in 1944. After cycling through several rhythm players throughout the early fifties, they found drummer Joe Morello in 1956, then two years later, bassist Eugene Wright, who first joined them for a U.S. State Department tour of Europe and Asia.
While traveling to ostensibly promote U.S. good will, Brubeck and his bandmates also picked up the Eurasian folk music that inspired “Take Five,” with its 5/4 time (which in turn inspired the name). No matter how many times you’ve heard Desmond’s Eastern-inspired melodies over Brubeck’s two-chord blues vamp and Morello’s relentless fills, you can always hear it afresh when the classic quartet plays the song live. Above, see them in one of their absolute greatest performances, a rollicking, dynamic attack in Belgium in 1964 that serves as all the argument one needs for “Take Five”’s greatness.
It’s probably your first time to hear of McKee, a small rural town in Jackson County, Kentucky, and one of the poorest counties in the U.S. But it hopefully won’t be the last. This Appalachian town is home to small business owners with big ambitions, like Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative CEO Keith Gabbard, who have made leaps and bounds to bring fiber-optic broadband to their humble hometown. Now, PRTC subscribers enjoy internet speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second!
There’s a sit-down restaurant, Opal’s, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen, a pair of dollar stores, and some of the fastest Internet in the United States. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (P.R.T.C.), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the coöperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits.
But the process to get where they are at was definitely an uphill climb, and the rural town residents had to get creative.
In the most rugged terrain around McKee, the crews relied on a mule named Old Bub to haul the cable two or three miles a day. “We’ve got mountains and rocks and not the greatest roads, and there were places we couldn’t get a vehicle to,” Gabbard told me. “Farmers here have been using mules for centuries. It just made sense that, if a place was hard to get to, you went with the mules.” Old Bub, he said, was able to do the work of eight to ten men.
The effort took six years, at a cost of fifty thousand dollars per mile. “Someone has to build to the last mile,” he said. “The big telecom companies aren’t going to do it, because it’s not economical and they have shareholders to answer to. We’re a co-op. We’re owned by our members. We answer to each other.”
The introduction of high-speed internet to McKee has provided a ray of hope for those suffering from the harsh consequences of poverty and unemployment. For many, there are now opportunities to get easier access to online educational resources and to engage in work-from-home vocations.
On the other hand, Gabbard and McKee residents are conscious of the fact that broadband is not going to magically make their lives better nor poverty go away. But it can sure help with education, entertainment, the economy, and health care. And that’s more than enough.
Gabbard says,
And I even think that people’s mind-set—how they feel about themselves—can be improved just by not always saying ‘We don’t have nothing here.’ In this case, we have something to be proud of. We have something everyone else wants.”
For more than 25 years, the holiday season has brought to the radio not just Christmas carols but a diaristic monologue by a writer with, in every sense, a distinctive voice. When it first aired on Morning Edition, "Santaland Diaries" made David Sedaris' name, not that he holds the piece in esteem as high as some of his fans do. "People will say, 'Oh, I loved that Santaland thing,'" Sedaris said in a recent interview, but "that thing is so clunkily written. I mean, it’s just horribly written, and people can’t even see it." Most are "listening to the story, but they’re not paying attention to how it’s constructed, or they’re not paying attention to the words that you used. They’re not hearing the craft of it." Sedaris fans who do hear the craft of it may well be in the target audience for a new Masterclass taught by the man himself.
Here on Open Culture we've previously featured Masterclasses by writers as intellectually and stylistically various as Joyce Carol Oates, Malcolm Gladwell, Margaret Atwood, and Dan Brown. But we've never conducted investigations into any of their writing processes in the same way we have into Sedaris' writing process, his own view of which constitutes the core of his Masterclass' content. "If you write about people, you have to be interested in people," he says in the trailer above. For him that means asking unexpected questions, like "Do your children shower?" or "Who's the drunkest customer you've had today?" It also means keeping a diary in which to record the answers, and with which, even more importantly, to maintain a daily writing habit.
Even now, with a full schedule of readings to give around the world, Sedaris writes every day without fail. But he also did it for fifteen years before "The Santaland Diaries" brought him the attention that got his first book published. "I meet a lot of young writers and I say, 'Do you write every day?'" he mentions in one lesson. "They say, 'No, but just — you know, I write when it strikes me.' I don't know. I suppose that might work for some people." But it certainly wouldn't work for him, nor would doing fewer than his customary twelve to eighteen rewrites of each piece. In other lessons he covers such aspects of the craft as "observing the world," "connecting with the reader," "ending with weight," and "writing about loved ones."
For that last lesson Sedaris brings in a special guest: his sister Lisa, there to talk about what it feels like to be written about by her famously observant brother. That will come as a special treat for anyone who recognizes her from all her appearances in Sedaris' family stories, but each lesson seems to play to Sedaris' strengths as a writer as well as a performer: he gives readings of diary entries and published pieces, but also gives his students advice on how to handle readings of their own in the future. As with every Masterclass, you can take this one for a one-time fee of $90 USD or with an all-access pass to every course on the site for $180. Sedaris makes no promises that the course will bestow upon all who take it a worldview as distinctive as his, to say nothing of a fan base as lucrative as his, but it will surely make them better at "hearing the craft of it," a skill as worthy of cultivation as it is rare.
Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
Not having shot an IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) match since January 2018, and feeling a need to do so before shooting their big Sheepdog match next month, I shot the Monster Match conducted by Little River gun club in … Read more
