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"#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?
Nothing's wrong, GameRant.
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And it's your #tracking I'm blocking, not #advertising (well, ok, it's that too)
I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.
An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south
Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible "hand-me-down" white mayorship in the majority-Black town.
"We've never had an election out here. We don't have ballots and machines to do it." Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.
And now for something different from NovaColor: Understanding the Color Gray and Its Shades
I use NovaColor acrylics for my artwork, and love their occasional articles on the theory and history of pigments #art #painting #arthistory
Been wanting to re-focus on the ol' blog here, and a friend told me about https://shutupwrite.com/ -- there's a local event tomorrow night so going to go hang out and work on some longer posts with a bunch of other writers #writing #blogging #community
What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.
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Dear reader, it was Not Good.
Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.
Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some "where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway" I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven't had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.
Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I'm more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.
Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).
With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that's the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).
Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they've changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone "Toot" to "Publish". I'd have preferred "Post" myself, but 🤷♀️.