Listening today: The first 5 tracks off the pre-order album The World by Seeming.
Another album that Daneel put me onto. They introduced me to Seeming a while back and the band never dissapoints. Raw, synthy and shouty, music filled with joy and ennui.
I only recently learned about this site (and can't find the Mastodon post that mentioend it):
We’re publishing reports by Congress’s think tank, the Congressional Research Service, which provides valuable insight and non-partisan analysis of issues of public debate. These reports are already available to the well-connected — we’re making them available to everyone for free.
A cartoon in 2 frames:
Frame 1
Nurse: Are you OK love?
Minister: Yes I’m just hearing legitimate concerns from real voters
Frame 2
Nurse: That’s a robot, a Nazi and a poorly-disguised Russian
[Show that the people he is talking to are precisely these characters]
Drove over to the local #nokings protest yesterday and waved our own signs. It was great seeing so many folks out and being very (and inflatably!) visible!
Syntax highlighting is a tool. It can help you read code faster. Find things quicker. Orient yourself in a large file.
Like any tool, it can be used correctly or incorrectly. Let’s see how to use syntax highlighting to help you work.
Niki Tonsky makes some good points.
On RADIOWWORLD, Kim Andrew Elliott guest writes about an old technology that could come back to help us route around the coming billionaire-and-fascist-censored internet:
Radio is the ultimate internet circumvention tool because it is not the internet. And it can’t be tracked.
This brings us to “Shortwave 2.0.”
Shortwave 2.0 won’t reach the audience of millions as in the heyday of shortwave decades ago. It will reach those who seek comprehensive, reliable, credible information. This audience will be technically inclined: radio amateurs, hobbyist shortwave listeners, scholars, technology enthusiasts and government and military personnel with access to receivers. They will pass on the information they have received to the larger audience.
Then comes this kicker:
An important feature of Shortwave 2.0 is that it is not limited to audio.
Starting about 2010 I was introduced to the digital modes of amateur radio. I was amazed that such a weak signal, in noisy conditions, could produce text. At that same time, VOA, RFE/RL and RFA were starting to feel the effects of internet blocking, especially in China and Iran. These two developments, combined, pointed to radio as a possible solution.
Starting in 2013, I was able to test the concept in “VOA Radiogram,” an experimental weekly program on the Voice of America. Instead of voice and music, we transmitted, on a conventional amplitude-modulated double sideband transmitter at Greenville, N.C., the warbles of the amateur radio digital modes.
The big advantage of text via shortwave is that it can be received successfully in poor reception conditions, in which voice broadcasts are difficult to comprehend. Text can be read and re-read, and passed on to others through personal media.
Daneel tuned me onto a new band recently, and I've become enamored.
Public Service Broadcasting is a rock group from the UK that creates instrumental music that trends a bit electronic and includes samples of... public broadcast radio from the UK. It's great music that warms my NPR and New Deal-loving heart.
Public Service Broadcasting (band) - Wikipedia
You can find them on Bandcamp, and in Apple Music (the two places I can access them).
The "The War Room" EP is not available on Apple Music, so go give them money (I gave them £10, the asking price is £4 I think) for a great EP.
Behold an abundance of fowl. Tap to embiggen. Share with anyone who needs a chickie break.
I loved these so much I used one for my mastodon profile pic.
The site is still a bit of a mess but I've managed to get it up and working. I'm back on Django now, and the home-brew blogging system is multi-tenant through Django's simple but terribly useful Sites framework. I'll be using that to host several of my sites in one place now.
I'm currently using Cloudflare to front the site but as they don't mind hosting Nazis I'll be moving to Fastly as fast as I can (it's more technical and I haven't had time).
I'll post another update soon and hopefully the posts will be flowing again.
Poynter.org – a globally-known organization promoting Democracy though Journalism, has a section on their site for the International Fact-Checking Network:
The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world. The network advocates for information integrity in the global fight against misinformation and supports fact-checkers through networking, capacity building and collaboration.
(Source: @nelepoldvere@fediscience.org)
4 years ago, as #Covid19 was just beginning to crest across the world, I started a new postiion as Senior Python Engineer at YouGov. I enjoyed my work immensely and got to help build some truly interesting things (more on that later 😁).
Sadly, Aug 01, 2024 was my last day at YouGov. I worked with the great people in the Research Platforms department for 4 years, helping to build and improve the systems that connect our amazing Panel to the research surveys that guide many organizations' product and political decision-making.
I worked with a great crew and especially want to say thank you to Allan Crooks and Clayton Butler, and the teams they led, for their leadership, and their inspiration adn guidance.
There are too many other folks to list, but I hope they know how much I enjoyed working together to do good things.
So now I'm looking for a new position focusing on #python #webservices #backendsystems, and/or #dataengineering. In addition to getting deep into technical solutions, I really enjoy working across teams to fully understand use cases, stakeholders' pain points, and help define solutions that have the best ROI possible.
Check out my resumé at https://monkinetic.blog/resume.
Was pointed to this standard test of executive function (or at least one's experience of it) called the ESQ-R, the "Executive Skills Questionnaire, Revised". Always one to see what these self-reporting tools say about by neurodivergence, I took the test here.
No idea as to the test's ultimate validity but this tracks:
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Went to the theater last night with my girlfriend(😁 👋), like a real adult.
Except it was a shockingly hilarious parody puppet show version of The princess Bride (By S. Morgenstern) by the All Puppet Players, complete with alcohol, musical numbers, 4th wall breaking, flubs, ad-libs and improv.
And I will never hear the lines "I'm going to do him left handed... if I use my right it's over too quickly!" the same again (Vizzini the puppet: "We didn't change those lines -- at all!!)
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Guess it's time to revisit the blog engine here. I wrote Goldfrog a few years ago and it's been chugging along on this Digital Ocean instance fairly well, but at the time I had in mind a two-way sync between gitlab, where I maintain a separate repository of my archived content, and the filesystem/db in Goldfrog.
It worked, sort of, for a while, but the deployment on DO is NOT simple to remember, uses Ansible and code from 2 different git repos to set up or update the server, and was just 3 times more clever than it should have been.
I also implemented a flexible/configurable POSSE feature that is supposed to send updates to my mastodon account but ... isn't right now? And the logging setup on the site is abysmal.
I still like parts of my system. If I did it again, I'd still want:
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And my version in Goldfrog:
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UPDATE: As long as I'm dreaming, I wish it was easier to run a small web app like this off a container. I probably could with Digital Ocean's app platform, I haven't looked into it lately, and I'd still have to solve the "index in a sqlite db file" problem.
Posting in your own site means #Facebook #instagram or #YouTube can’t decide if your writing is worth monetizing or not.
[Love love love these "ancient future"](https://www.karlaknight.org/33-spaceships-for-another-planet-2017-19-/1 #paintings by Karla Night, and I am so there for Jason Kottke's description:
Hilma af Klint as the production designer for Wes Anderson's Stargate
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via kottke
Fedi/Mastodon programmers... with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a "local" ID that is suitable for passing as the "inReplyToID" in a toot payload?
Wondering if I need to:
Would that be the "local" ID #MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb
Nothing's wrong, GameRant.
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And it's your #tracking I'm blocking, not #advertising (well, ok, it's that too)