Rolandt

This is our 15th year on the web! Wow.

Hype Machine is a lot like the three of us when we were 15—completely obsessed with music, and always online. We listen to different stuff now, but that drive to keep searching for new music, through different genres, across decades, recommended by people we’ve never met who share our tastes, that hasn’t changed. If this is where you find your music, chances are, you feel the same.

Hype Machine is here today thanks to the support of our listeners, who kept the service going when we were sure we’d have to shut it down. The community came together and said, there’s still more music to discover. And if that’s important to you too, become a supporter and help us celebrate our next birthday.

Thanks for listening,
Dave, Zoya, and Anthony

alicia cougar mellencamden @aliciacamden
Keeping in shape with my favorite workout video, the critically-acclaimed 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Maki… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus

Fascinating interview with Bill Gates - the most interesting and informative article I've read about Covid-19 in quite a while.

This time I went around False Creek. Starting at Pacific & Burrard and working my way south / east through Granville Island to Cambie Bridge.

Once again, I recommend listening with headphones.

The Guardian has been playing with data that TomTom navigation software collects on congestion, the traffic index. The article has a range of graphs for cities worldwide, showing how city traffic is reduced due to various measures trying to stem the pandemic.

At the bottom of the article is a small search box where you can get the graphs for cities not mentioned in the article.
TomTom’s index contains it seems quite a few Dutch cities, perhaps because it’s a Dutch company. So I went ahead and grabbed a few screenshots for Dutch cities, amongst which my hometown.

TomTom sells services on the data they collect, so there doesn’t seem to be anything available to download for yourself. They do have a similar search tool on their site which gives slightly different perspectives on the data they have. Below for Amersfoort the traffic density for the past week. It basically shows us what we feel outside: every day is like Sunday traffic.

Did you know that e-bikes can make it possible for couples to cycle together – sometimes for the first time ever? There are many couples who would love to go for a bike ride together, but their cycling abilities are so different that it just doesn’t work. This post contains a video that shows how an e-bike solved this problem for our friends, Amanda and Wayne Smith. It also contains three case studies that show how e-bikes can help couples to ride bikes together.

The post How E-Bikes Can Help Couples to Cycle Together appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

Your members might share really bad advice.

One study of a community of surgeons discovered:

“While 58(43.3%) of threads contained unsafe advice, the majority (33, 56.9%) were corrected. [..] Of the 855 responses, 107 (12.5%) were considered unsafe/dangerous.”

The sample size is small, but the % of unsafe and dangerous responses is clearly a concern.

Naturally, it’s not a huge deal if bad advice ruins a member’s favourite shirt, but it is if it harms their health, wealth, or relationships.

Ideally, the natural process of a community should filter out bad advice. Bad advice is corrected by good advice. The advice shared by members with the best track record is given greater prominence than a newcomer. The recipient of advice can also share what did or didn’t work.

But this is a process that both takes time and doesn’t always happen. The feedback loop doesn’t always work. Top members aren’t always the wisest members. And it doesn’t help you if the bad advice you received today might be filtered out over time.

Some steps to consider here:

1) Measure what kind of advice is incorrect and dangerous. For sectors where bad advice can be life-changing, follow the same methodology as the study to determine what percentage of advice is bad. Put together an expert of 3 to 5 trusted experts (often in customer support/success) to go through a few hundred randomly pulled answers and classify each. This is your baseline.

2) what topics merit careful attention. Identify which topics (if any) could cause critical harm and ensure smart members / internal experts review these for any red flags. Small errors are fine, but nothing which can cause serious harm should remain.

3) Focus on improving the process. Send an automated reminder to members who ask questions to highlight if it worked or not (or do this manually with your top members). Use badging to verify top experts in different fields (as opposed to just the most active members).

You can’t prevent misinformation, but you can take reasonable steps to reduce it.

We cannot know the true number of coronavirus-related deaths. Maybe it’s because of a lack of tests. Maybe cause of death is ambiguous because of pre-existing conditions. So, for a different point of view, you might compare the usual number of deaths against total deaths. The Washington Post and researchers from the Yale School of Public Health looked at the differences.

See also a similar comparison for other countries by The New York Times.

Tags: coronavirus, Washington Post

The New York Times went through the words used during press briefings, pulling out five main categories and highlighting one in particular:

Viewed simply as a pattern of Mr. Trump’s speech, the self-aggrandizement is singular for an American leader. But his approach is even more extraordinary because he is taking credit and demanding affirmation while he asks people to look beyond themselves and bear considerable hardship to help slow the spread of the virus.

Hm.

Tags: coronavirus, New York Times, press, text

The latest version of Ulysses, the excellent Markdown editor, is available now. Ulysses 19 offers enhancements in several different areas, from fully optimizing for the new iPadOS cursor, to supporting external folders for the first time, introducing a new ‘material’ designation for sheets, and adding keyword improvements, exportable backups, and even a new font. It’s a strong update, and one that continues to prove Ulysses the best app for my writing needs.

iPad Cursor Support

Ulysses has done a great job implementing the new iPadOS cursor, offering the full range of behaviors you would expect. Hover over buttons and the cursor snaps to them; right-click on a sheet or group to open a context menu containing all sorts of actions; swiping left and right on a trackpad with two fingers provides a fast, easy way to open and close the app’s various panes.¹ I can’t think of anything I would change.

External Folders

For years I’ve used Ulysses to write all my published work, but there’s been one use case that’s required supplementing with a second Markdown editor: making changes to existing documents in third-party locations. The app has long offered the ability to open external files, but whenever I’ve tried that, it would always mess up the Markdown syntax for links in the files I opened, making it impossible to use. I was afraid the same problem would plague the new external folders feature, but I’m delighted to report that’s not the case.

Setup of external folders is done from the settings menu under Library. Here, Ulysses uses an iPadOS technology called file bookmarks, which Federico wrote about previously, to enable selecting any folder from the Files app to be stored in your Ulysses Library. This can be an iCloud Drive folder, or even one from a third-party file provider you’ve configured in the Files app, such as Working Copy. All of the external folders you set up will be automatically updated with the latest contents of their source, enabling persistent access and editing privileges for external Markdown files with minimal effort.

My use case is editing colleagues’ draft articles, which are stored in Working Copy via shared Git repositories. Now, I can access those files and make my edits directly from Ulysses. Solving my prior issue with third-party files is a toggle in the setup process for the external folder: the Create Reference Links option is what caused link syntax to be changed in external files. Switching that option off for all the external folders I set up solved the matter, and enabled me to use Ulysses not only for my own writing, but also for making edits to the drafts of my teammates stored in Working Copy.

External folders also make possible an interesting niche use case: storing all your documents in Files via iCloud Drive rather than in Ulysses’ native CloudKit storage. If you’d like, you can create a Ulysses folder inside iCloud Drive, configure it as an external folder inside Ulysses, and manage all your sheets from inside Files rather than Ulysses itself.

There are two options with this: you could make that iCloud Drive folder Markdown-compatible, so it stores MD files that can be read by the Files app, or you can have it keep documents in Ulysses’ native file format. There are trade-offs with both approaches. If you go the Markdown route, you’ll lose certain Ulysses features that don’t work with standard MD files. But you’ll gain the benefit of Quick Look previews for those documents inside Files. If you stick with Ulysses’ native format, you’ll retain all of the app’s features, but Files won’t be able to read your documents’ contents, so you’ll be limited to tapping them in Files to have them open inside Ulysses. This could still be an intriguing option, though, if you prefer to manage all of your documents from the Files app and benefit from features like tagging and favorited folders. Again, this isn’t a mainstream option, but it’s a fun new possibility enabled by external folders.

Material Sheets

One of Ulysses’ unique features is the attachments panel where you can store notes, images, and PDFs for research purposes, among other things. Sometimes, however, storing all of the research material you need for a project in that side panel can be too limiting, and you just want to keep research in its own separate sheet; this is an especially appealing option when working in multiple windows at once on the iPad or Mac. Now, those research-designated sheets can be marked ‘material.’

There are two special characteristics of material sheets: they’re excluded from statistics you’ve set up to track your writing progress for a given group, and they’re also excluded from exports of a group. This is particularly valuable for long-form writing, where you want an accurate count of your progress toward configured writing goals, and you also likely have numerous sheets that need to be compiled for publishing. Marking research as ‘material’ will ensure it can live alongside your writing without messing up your stats or publishing compilation.

You can set a sheet as material right when you create it, or change an existing sheet to material by long-pressing or right-clicking it and selecting Use as Material Sheet from the context menu. All material sheets are visually marked within groups by a slim pink line running along their right edge, making them perceptible at a glance.

All the Rest

Exporting backups. Ulysses has an automatic backup feature which backs up your entire Library at regular intervals. Previously, however, there was no way to export those backups to a third-party location. Now, when you’re browsing your backups (via Edit ⇾ Backup in the Library pane) you can swipe left on an individual backup to find a new share option. Your backup will be stored in a format native to Ulysses, so this feature isn’t intended for exporting your Library to a separate app, only for keeping an extra copy of it elsewhere in case you need to later re-import into Ulysses.

Keywords in Markdown files. The Keywords feature in Ulysses has until now been incompatible with similar tagging features in other apps, so if you’re working in external files or documents imported from elsewhere, the keyword functionality wouldn’t translate. In version 19, however, keywords in Markdown files are written out at the end of your sheet with a hashtag, following the designation pattern found in apps like iA Writer and Bear. So if you’re importing Markdown files from those sources, or directly accessing external files while leaving them in their home app, you can benefit from keywords in both apps without doing any extra work.

SF Mono font. Ulysses has a fairly limited selection of curated font options, so I consider it a big deal when a new one is added. Ulysses 19 introduces SF Mono, the monospaced version of Apple’s San Francisco font and only the fourth monospaced font in the app. Next I’d love to see another first-party font added, New York, if indeed Apple makes it available to developers.

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Ulysses 19 is the kind of grab bag update I love to see with mature apps, offering key enhancements that don’t change the app radically, but rather they just improve and expand upon what’s already there. If Ulysses wasn’t for you before, there’s likely nothing in this update that will change that. But if you already used the app, there are now more reasons than ever to continue enjoying it.

Alongside this release, the Ulysses team is opening signups for a forthcoming public beta of Ulysses 20. The beta won’t begin until later in May, but you can express interest in joining today on their website. To mark the occasion of a big version number, the next update promises to feature the following:

• New Attachments
• New Navigator
• Advanced Text Check
• New Dashboard
• Revised Interface

I can’t wait to get more details on all of these features, and give them a test run next month.

Ulysses is available on the App Store.

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For the first time in 38 years of driving, I suffered a cracked windshield. So the Kia Soul is at Good Guys this morning having a new one installed.

Postscript: Excellent service, quick turnaround. Good Guys is in a funny business: if I’m typical, I need windshield work maybe once a decade, so their challenge is to stay top-of-mind with longevity. In their case, it’s a long history of television commercials that does it.

The post Which Video Call Apps Can You Trust? appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

More and more people now rely on video call apps to stay connected during the coronavirus pandemic. We reviewed the privacy and security of some of the most popular apps to help you make smart decisions on what to use to work remotely, chat with friends and family, and connect with your doctor.

More >

mapsontheweb:

Etymology of Portuguese Cities

Milan announces ambitious scheme to reduce car use after lockdown: citymaus: “Milan is a small,...

Murals on a shuttered Granville Street.

April 26, 2 pm

I collaborated on this paper at PPIG19. They haven’t published the proceedings yet, so I’ve put the paper up here. Abstract:

Research on programming systems design needs to consider a wide range of aspects in their full complexity. This includes user interaction, implementation, interoperability but also the sustainability of its ecosystem and wider societal impact. Established methods of evaluation, such as formal proofs or user studies, impose a reductionist view that makes it difficult to see programming systems in their full complexity and, consequently, force researchers to adopt simplistic perspectives.

This paper asks whether we can create more amenable methods of evaluation derived from existing informal practices such as multimedia essays, demos, and interactive tutorials. These popular forms incorporate recorded or scaffolded interaction, often embedded in a text that guides the reader. Can we augment such forms with structure and guidelines to obtain methods of evaluation suitable for peer review? We do not answer this question, but merely seek to identify some of the problems and instigate a community discussion. In that spirit we propose to hold a panel session at the conference.

Subtext 10 is well underway, but version 9 deserves some mention. I didn’t record a demo video as in the past, because I have concluded that medium fails to communicate in sufficient detail. In the future I am going to try the forms discussed in my last post. Unfortunately Subtext 9 has fallen between the cracks, and all it gets is this lousy blog post.

Here is the abstract for a presentation I gave last fall, back in the halcyon days of jetting off to international conferences.

Between spreadsheets and programming

The simplicity and utility of spreadsheets puts programming to shame. We believe the power of spreadsheets is that they offer a computational substrate: an autonomous artifact combining code and persistent data that is presented through a simple spatial metaphor. Can we invent other computational substrates with more general programming capabilities than spreadsheets, while retaining some of their magical simplicity? Subtext is an experimental computational substrate structured as a tree. Its key difference from conventional programming systems is that code is not a syntax tree but a semantics tree — a tree representing an execution trace. Execution is not, as we usually imagine it, the effects of a machine running in a sealed box, but rather is woven into the fabric of the substrate itself. Program execution is in plain sight of the developer, even while they edit it: What You See Is What You Execute. Perhaps surprisingly, programs can also benefit from observing their own execution, as when, for example, a parsing function’s execution is itself the parse tree. But there is a difficult research problem at the heart of this enterprise: finding a language whose execution semantics can be materialized as data structures within that language, done so simply and naturally that it supplants the need for syntax. After much trial and error, Subtext has converged on a design in which the execution of a block of straight-line code is a record datatype, conditionals form a discriminated union, a loop is an array, and calls are nested executions. This research is still in an early stage, and is presented in the spirit of provoking discussion and the hope of receiving advice.

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In the demo I built a parser for a simple language of arithmetic expressions. It was coded as a recursive descent parser, which was simple because of the SNOBOL-like semantics of failure. The highlight of the demo was how the parser generated an AST. Normally the AST would be a recursive discriminated union (AKA sum), constructed as a return value of the parser. It is very boilerplate code, constructing back together the ASTs of the bits that have just been parsed apart. And plumbing the AST back through the parser is a pain. An advantage of parsing DSLs is that they can do all of this automatically for you

The highlight of the demo was showing how Subtext gives you “ASTs for free”. The trick is that because of the unification of code and data structures, the execution trace of the parser IS the AST. The recursive execution of the parser is physically a tree, and the conditional clauses trying to parse each kind of term are physically a sum. As a result, the execution trace of the parser is itself the AST, and this is made available to the code is a form of reflection.

Subtext 9 was progress for me: I finally figured out how to unify conditionals and sums after many failed prior attempts. I find this a deeply satisfying insight. On the downside, it turned out that thinking about executions as a data type was more abstract than I liked, and visualizing them in the programming environment was tricky. Subtext 10 will have a simpler way to expose these semantics. And advance in some other important directions, but that is another story.

My favorite quote is by Orson Welles; “If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story”. No doubt he was giving this advice to other filmmakers and storytellers, but I remind myself daily that it has tremendous influence on how I want to I live my life and that has helped form my personal story or my legacy. It can be easy to understand the philosophy behind that quote, but much Happy more difficult to apply. But, it has enabled me (to paraphrase my good friend Sky’s film title) to live a life well lived.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these days because I’ve been holed up for a month like the rest of us. That can be a good thing and a bad thing, but in my case it has been beneficial. It’s made me hit a big “pause button” and I think that was the universe giving me a message that was probably there all the time, but I wasn’t listening. As John Lennon wrote, “life is what’s happening while you’re busy making other plans”.

At the time that most of my “neighbors” in NYC and NJ and beyond went into quarantine, I had already been in self-isolation for two months editing my latest feature documentary Like A Woman – a film about women who are working in male-dominated professions – because it was a topic I knew quite well. For the majority of my career, I have been the only woman at the table. So, I wanted to use my storytelling skills to create awareness and make the change that I wanted to happen. As spring was right around the corner in NJ and I was ready to release my film – the world changed, not just for me for everyone and it is forever changed. It sucks, but it wasn’t the first time in my life that I had to switch gears and it has never been easy for me in my profession, because I a woman I had to try harder.

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not the easiest person to know but I’d like to think I’m worth it. I’m a glass half full (at least) kind of person. I have to believe in possibilities to be able to survive. I have to have hope and something to look forward to. With that said, after procrastinating for two weeks and really doing absolutely nothing, I made a list this morning of things I CAN do. Here are a few things I wrote down:

Like A Woman – I hope to hire a musical composer to create a score for the film. It will make it more powerful and have more impact. More importantly, I have decided not to proceed with entering the film into film festivals. It’s just bad timing and maybe that’s a blessing in disguise. Thanks to Travis Keyes and Katrin Eisman for their encouragement and that was desperately needed. I always thrive on encouragement but I can honestly say, I really need it now. They reminded me that “content” was golden these days and it’s being consumed like never before. So, I will let go of the film festivals because I sense that’s not the approach I need to take. Instead, I will pursue offering screenings (for a fee) for conferences centered on women and young girls. No doubt these conferences will be virtual for a while and I am able to stream the film and even set up a virtual Q&A via platforms like Zoom. And the film will actually have the ability to reach more people. I suppose one could say that I put my ego aside, that is customarily stroked with the film festivals and have put my emphasis on getting the film “out there” to inspire women and girls who need a lot of inspiration these days. And the stories of the amazing women who are in my film will surely inspire, which is the ultimately goal of this film.

And the film will have the ability to reach more people. As far as marketing this new film to the conference planners, I am extremely fortunate to have some prestigious  credentials with my last film Opening Our Eyes.If, you’d like to see the full film, you can see it here.

 

 

There is one film festival that I will still pursue to get in

to and that is the Santa Barbara Film Festival that hopefully will take place in January 2021. I will always have a close connection to Santa Barbara because that’s where it all started for me, at least as far as my career. After a yearlong backpacking odyssey around the world, I drove to Santa Barbara from New Jersey and attended Brooks Institute. As one of six women in a school of 600 at the time, it was my first experience in a male-dominated environment. It’s where I met my husband, Tom Kelly. And it’s where some of my best memories were made and I’ve have been blessed with decades of unbelievable memories and experiences since then. My years in Santa Barbara were my foundation.

Conteur Productions – I started this side business a long time ago. It was my first venture into the retail world. We shoot family story movies. We capture one’s family stories through interviews with their loved ones, while they are still here to tell those stories. We then scan their priceless family photos

School children – 1930’s

and digital their old family movies and/or videos, along with newspaper clippings and other documented mementos and make a “Ken Burns” type film to preserve those memories for future generations. It all began when my mother passed away and I realized that I would never hear those family stories that she told around the dinner table and her infectious giggle as she told them. It also led to me discovering a part of the family I never knew about – but that’s a story for another time.

This pandemic has also made me realize that when things get back to a new semblance of normal, there will be a real desire for this service. But, it will also be different. I will probably do more remote interviews via Skype or Zoom, rather than get on a plane and have face-to-face interviews with people wearing masks. I know that I can get a more professional product with a well lit and professionally shot interview with good audio. But, I also know that we have all gotten used to a new aesthetic with Zoom conferences and news reporters broadcasting from their home studios.

I know this blog is long but I want to thank everyone who has always believed in me, the ones who give me a call when I seem to need it most and my real friends and FB friends who have helped to fill this current void in my life and to Tony Bennett for his beautiful song Smile which has helped me through some dark days. I want to leave you with some wise words from my 93 year old Aunt and I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me.

• Q: You lost a child when she was 27 years old to cancer. What advice do you have for parents who have lost a child? (I will include all the people who have lost their loved ones during this Pandemic)

Let the tears flow, let it all out. Feel all the pain. I cried for four years straight. I cried for her son who wouldn’t have his mother. Before that, I never felt old in my life. But I felt old when Patty died. I was 52 when that happened.

• Q: You raised seven children and they all get along, how did you accomplish that?

            We traveled from base to base and they got along because they needed each other. I also kept family traditions. We ate every breakfast and every dinner together. We accepted each other for who we were that day. And whatever you earned, that was yours. I let them fight. That’s where you’re supposed to fight – with your family. That’s where you learn to adjust to the real world. I never killed their curiosity. Kids want to come to you – not the other way around. No one is short on love.

• Q: Last words?

        What women can’t do physically, we can figure out mentally. Most difficulties aren’t catastrophes.

Here’s a snippet of my family and where I come from and I’m so very lucky.

Hang in there everybody and stay on the side of the glass half full.

I 

There’s lots of discussion on what impacts  Covid-19 will have on the way we will live in the coming months and years.

I have already written about  Dr. Snow who was a Victorian era London physician. In 1854 he traced  cholera, which was infecting and killing people in the Broad Street area of  Soho London to  a public water pump on the street.

By removing the handle of the pump, and asking patients to wash hands and practice good hygiene the infected water was not consumed and the cholera cases diminished.Dr. John Snow solidified the concept that health and planning were integrated, and this approach contributed to more sanitary housing conditions and safe water sources

 The 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic infected 27 percent of the world’s population, but had a lesser death toll in New York City. What made the difference there was a “robust” and organized public health infrastructure, distancing of the healthy from the infected, a public health campaign and  disease surveillance.

Today we are dealing with Covid-19, a virus which can be deadly and indiscriminately impacts the young, elderly and vulnerable. As we emerge from isolation there will be a new normal, and it will be markedly different. It is expected that some of the more vulnerable population will continue to self-isolate and  physically distance by staying  two meters apart. That population will use shops and services that offer the required distancing space, and spend more time at their home abode.

The pandemic has also shown that sidewalks for walkers and rollers are not built wide enough to offer the required two meter physical distancing space. In Canada, Winnipeg and Calgary have responded by closing off streets to allow people to exercise and get to shops and services by walking or rolling on city streets. Vancouver’s Park Board took the initiative to close the road in Stanley Park for walkers and cyclists. Besides a section of Beach Avenue, Vancouver has not dedicated  a connected series of streets for walking, rolling or biking  off the downtown peninsula.

New York City has just announced  that 40 miles (64 km)  of connected street would be available for walking, rolling and cycling, and wider sidewalks and wider bike lanes built on other streets. Mayor de Blasio intends to open 100 miles (160 km) of city streets during the epidemic. This is a huge change in the Mayor’s thinking but as he stated “social distancing on the city’s narrow sidewalks and in its parks will only become more difficult as New Yorkers flee their cramped apartments during the warmer months seeking fresh air and sunshine.”

Lloyd Alter in Tree Hugger sums up the fact that we need a rethink of how we do domicile density and what amount of the public realm we give to walkers, rollers and cyclists. He challenges the concept of “density done well” from a physical design perspective, suggesting a more holistic approach in “Density Done Right”.

As Lloyd remarks, it has “become clear is that being in lockdown in high-density towers is a pretty awful experience, whether it is the lack of space or the shared elevators or the crowded sidewalks.”

“Density done right” or “distributed density” is a term used in the  Ryerson City Building Institute’s study  which found that high rise development put demands on “transit, water, wastewater, parks, childcare and schools”.

Density does not appear to make housing cheaper, forcing  citizens to choose between crammed condos or commutes from outside the city. In high rises, elevator virus protocols need to be transparent about how many occupants can ride at the same time, and halls need to be designed to allow for physical distancing. Exterior corridors could mitigate some of these issues.

Lloyd Alter is a proponent of “gentle density” walk-ups and townhouses which can provide front or rear yards, and ground level entry. He calls this “Goldilocks” density in that it is not too tall  or not too sprawl, and focuses on being walkable. But in a time of self-quarantine and self-reliance, the access to greenery, private space, light and air takes on a premium, and a rethink of how we define livable space during a pandemic and  through more “normal” times.

Central to this discussion is also the need for transit, and the location of jobs. This YouTube video below from Ryerson’s City Building Institute explores these topics more fully in this discussion recorded earlier this month with Toronto’s Ken Greenberg, Murtaza Haider and Cherise Burda.

 

Images: CBC.ca & City of Vancouver

 

Streaming performances are missing something crucial: the crowd. We’re going to need that. So today, I’m releasing a spec for the product we need: Virtual Stadium. If you build it, we will use it. Any good performer — musician, athlete, or public speaker — knows the crowd is an essential part of the performance. Did … Continued

The post Virtual Stadium — the Zoom live event product we need now appeared first on without bullshit.

It was in the Sun‘s lead article today, but it might get missed:

There were just 11 new cases reported between noon Sunday and noon Monday — despite an increase in the amount of testing being done — and no evidence of any transmission on public transit, Henry said.

Two qualifications: (1) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  (2) Over what time did that statement hold true?

Further, has there been any example of community transfer on transit, in Vancouver or elsewhere, and under what circumstances?

It seems obvious on one hand that crowded public transit should facilitate transmission.  But on the other, why aren’t there many more proven examples of it – hotspots in particular – given that some of the places where the virus has been most effectively contained – Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore – have some of the busiest transit systems on which their cities are dependent?   It’s a question that goes hand-in-hand with the density debate, as Sandy discusses in the post below.

If TransLink is to get back to anything like normal service in the next few months, it will depend on the public’s confidence (and willingness to follow protocols) in the safety (or minimal risk) of the transit system.

“No evidence of any transmission” is a very good place to start.

 

I woke up still really fucked off about what happened yesterday. I don't want this diary to be about work particularly, though it might sneak out from time to time. I was fucking angry because we were culled from a grant application process on an immaterial technicality. So, poof! That hope has been dashed. A guillotine move because they were completed overwhelmed by the number of applications.

Reading and exploring the Web is losing a little bit of its luster. In a single day, I encounter nearly a dozen paywalls and app/sign-in walls. Paywalls want you to pay a cover-fee for content. App/sign-in walls are just paywalls where you pay with your privacy.

Here’s all the paywalls I’ve encountered in the last 24-hours or so.

• New York Times
• NYTCooking
• Washington Post
• Wall Street Journal
• Financial Times
• Tumblr
• Facebook Pages
• Medium
• Reddit
• Apple News¹

I can and should pay for some of these outlets; a good citizen values a free and open press (that you pay for, naturally). Just this month I bit the bullet and got a New York Times account. I appreciate the Times’ reporting, but it’s quite verbose and I rarely am able to read an entire article. My subscription is primarily for the Cooking and the Crosswords and, silly me, I thought after paying I would get an ad free experience… but I guess not.

My bank account is starting to feel the drip, drip, drip of monthly subscriptions: NYT, Spotify, Apple Arcade, Maximum Fun, 8 Patreons, 5 OpenCollectives, and 5 different video streaming platforms. Paying $5~$10/month for every content creator you enjoy doesn’t seem like a sustainable future. My main objection is how the relative value shifts greatly over the course of a month. Over a month, my interests ebb and flow and I’d like my contributions to be more fluid as well, without getting multiple autopayment processors involved.

I’m still bullish on technologies like Coil which is based on the Interledger Specification. The hype machine around Coil has iced off in recent months, but I was pleased to see the recent announcement that Firefox Reality is using Coil for Web Monetization as well as the launch of Cinnamon, a new Coil-based video platform. These both divert funds directly to the content creator. There are some (financial and ecological) concerns with these crypto-backed ledgers I don’t want to ignore, but we’re long overdue for some form of passive or active micropayments for the Web. There are tradeoffs, but if we can move the needle to attention-based monetization as opposed to a service-based or a privacy-sacrificing ad-based model, I think the Web will be better off.

Unfortunately, it’s going to take a critical mass of paying users for the majority of content creators, apps, and publications to accept this new future. It’s a chicken-egg thing. A lot of us work on the Web, make money off the Web, laugh at memes on the Web, and yet use ad blockers. I think it’s worth investing $5/month to see if we can truly disrupt content creation and unbind ourselves from one of the Web’s biggest performance, privacy, and security pain points.

I’m happy to have skin in the game² but the plan doesn’t work unless we hit that critical mass and we all chip in. It doesn’t become a standard unless we can convince more browsers (beyond Brave and Firefox) to support this effort. Without an alternative, we’ll never be able to smash the paywall.

1. Eagle-eyed readers will note Apple News+ is technically not a website and is a native app. But let’s be honest, it’s just a fancy RSS reader with slippery swipe navigation and a subpar video experience compared to a web app 🌶. God bless proprietary markup schemas. ↩

2. At time of writing, I have contributed $40 to Coil and garnered ~119 XRP which is currently valued at ~$22 and the value of XRP is half of where it was when I started. ↩

This is crazy. Looks like Republicans don’t believe in germs.

Jo Vito Ramírez makes an end table:

Sick of watching videos from experts insisting that their wildly complicated craft is “simple”? Why not learn along with another beginner? Join Jo Vito Ramírez as he attempts to build an end table. For the first time.

mkalus shared this story from iandunt on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story from Comments on: Shelf space opened for small businesses to sell products at London Drugs.

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I wanted to get one more post out about another project I have been playing with these days. While attending the MyData conference in 2018 I saw a presentation from folks at Google about the Data Transfer Project (DTP). The project is an effort to create data standards across major social media companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, etc. that would allow you to migrate your content on one platform to another.

Video of Google’s Data Transfer Project demo at #mydata pic.twitter.com/YklIl3vsxI

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) August 29, 2018

So, such a tool could be used to migrate all my posts in Instagram over to Flickr, which would allow me to keep the image, descriptions, likes, etc. It is a tool that could be really useful for archiving, and I immediately started likening it to the Reclaim Your Domain discussions we had with Audrey Watters and Kin Lane back in 2013. The idea was not only about moving from one service to another via API, as this project does, but also taking that same approach and using it to pull your content into an open source, self-hosted application such as WordPress. I would love to one day have a version of this kind of thing in someone’s Reclaim Hosting dashboard that provides them the ability to archive and/or migrate from a service like Flickr or Instagram into a an open source content management system or straight-up HTML. This kind of portability should be part and parcel of the move towards data protection, the ability to port your data seamlessly to avoid platform lock-in.

Anyway, while I have thought about the implications of this project, I had not played with it since the workshop the DTP folks put on in 2018 at MyData (which was quite good). So, having some time last week I decided to try and fire it back up. It was a good reason to fire up Docker Desktop client for Mac, and I followed the directions on the DTP Github page to get the demo running locally on my computer. Initially I ran into an issue that Nginx was not loading, and after asking Tim for a second opinion he confirmed as much so I submitted query to their Google Groups forum. I got a quick response, and they resolved the issue and commited the fix, so when I did a pull request from Github the fix was working. Disco!

So, above is what the demo interface looks like, and you can choose what data you want to be moved from where, the key here is that you need the Environment secrets for the accounts you want to access (so a secrets to access your data fromInstagram, Flickr, Google, etc). Once you have those environment secrets you can run the DTP demo and play with it. I was not able to get access to my Instagram or Google data (so I may need to check my secrets), but I was able to transfer images from Twitter to Flickr. Which I thought was awesome.

So this tweet…

Day 45 of lockdown = new glasses and first trip out of my quadrant in almost 2 months #livingitup pic.twitter.com/dwqkFzCZOe

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) April 24, 2020

Was pulled into my Flickr account:

The titled comes in as “Copy of – Twitter Photo 1253618782981029888” because Tweets don’t have titles, but the text did come in as the image description, which is nice. One thing I did notice is that in the conversation GIFs and videos were simply converted to JPGs, so that could be an issue. The other thing was that only 17 images came over from Flickr, and I probably have thousands, so I am wondering if one can lift those limits, I’ll need to dig in on that.

The other question for me is can I get Instagram working. The whole reason I finally decided to do this is that after 1000 posts on Instagram I feel like I am done. I did my time, and I enjoyed it. But my job as a Instagram influencer didn’t pan out What’s more, I really want to avoid pushing too much content into a service I can’t get my stuff out of cleanly. I’ll explore other ways to migrate and/or backup Instagram (anyone playing with this?), but until then I am limiting my posting on Instagram until I have a viable escape plan. I already did that with my Tumblr, and I am glad I did—as much as I miss Tumblr.

So, this is another work in process, but one I really would like to see flower because one of the crucial elements of the effectiveness and usefulness of legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation is that it encourages companies to make our data more portable with incentives to create data models that adhere to standards.