vanderwal.net

Affinity 2 Finally on iPad

I’ve been waiting on the Affinity app (version 2 of the suite of Affinity creative and design apps) to come to iPad since the same came to Mac after Canva bought the Affinity creator Serif. Today is the day Affinity for iPad arrives. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m really looking forward to being able to edit photos and modify vectors on my iPad again.

Prior to the new version of Affinity on Mac I really enjoyed using the prior suite of apps and the ability to go back and forth between Mac and iPad for design tasks. I really enjoy editing photos on iPad and the ease of it. Working with a Pencil Pro to clean up designs and illustrations on iPad Pro is a breeze and something I’m looking forward to doing again.

NY Times Metropolitan Diary

‘On a Snowy Evening in February, I Went to a Wine Bar in Crown Heights’ - The New York Times - One of my favorite things in the New York Times has been “The Metropolitan Diary”. When I subscribed to the physical paper I knew the day and section it was in and looked forward to it. In the last 10 to 15 years I lost track of it and when I stumble upon it I realize how much I really enjoy it,

The Metropolitan Diary feels like a slice of cozy and comfort coming from one of the largest and most busy cities in the world. People and cozy are local, even in New York City.

The Fate of Logic Poem Now on This Site

I moved my June 1995 poem, The Fate of Logic from paper back to digital and placed in a spot in the Poetry / Creative section, The Fate of Logic.

The last couple of weeks my old poetry has come up a few times. Over the weekend I took my folder of pieces written in the 1995 to 1997 stretch that has around 100 pieces. All of them are printed out, and were written in text and most were posted in the CompuServe Poetry Cafe during that time. I also took many of the poems and created a designed layout version in Microsoft Publisher, and that software stopped working long before I moved to a Mac.

I had a lot of fonts and still do, but I’m finally taking photos of the poems and getting the text out. I have many pieces I like and am wanting to post out, so I may be doing a bit more of this posting of older pieces.

I still have not sorted out what I’m going to do with the Creative section.

Saturday Morning Comfort Dish

The change to cooler weather of windy gray days has one of my favorite Saturday morning dishes back in rotation. The sweet potato savory hash browns, which have garlic, fresh turmeric, onion, mushrooms (shitake and lion’s mane) prepped in a food processor and cooked down and caramelized in a little olive oil and sea salt before adding shredded sweet potatoes. This cooks down with a little cumin and ground coriander to soften and caramelize the sweet potatoes in a covered cast iron pan. Turning the hash browns every few minutes until they are softened, before pulling the hash browns to the middle of the cast iron pan and flattened a little, then putting a couple divots in the top with a large spoon back to hold eggs that are covered and steamed until the egg whites set.

When the egg whites are set and the yolk still runny, plate the hash browns and eggs intact. Then break the yolks so that the yolks ooze down into the sweet potatoes. Such a wonderful warming and comforting dish that is a little sweet but mostly savory. Enjoy with a good coffee as you ease into the world.

Refinding Lamb's What Sound

Early this week I was looking at last week’s new music and found something that reminded me of the band Lamb and I went looking to see if their 2001 album, What Sound, was finally available for streaming. What Sound was something I picked up thanks to a Tower Records listening station and really liked it and picked it up.

What Sound was an album that grew on me. I started liking it, but found I was listening to it a lot in the car and traveling about with my iPod. I wrote about What Sound in June 2003, Currently listening to Lamb and Massive Attack :: Off the Top, in a quick snippet. The album has Meshell Ndegeocello on bass and many occasions I have gone from casual listening to focussed listening to sort our rhythms and bass lines that punch and push against the beat.

Not having What Sound streamable has been a big disappointment. But, this week when I looked in Apple Music, it was listed and I started listening. I have my CD copy ripped, but adding music to shared playlists and easily jumping from one song or or album to another is much easier from the streaming side of Apple Music than my large collection on local storage.

When listening to What Sound again on my good setup, I was noticing much more in the details. I still really enjoy and am getting more out of various tacks: What Sound; One; Sweet; Heaven; Small; and Gabriel. The album has not only been traveling music with anchors for me to memories of Amsterdam and London, but also background sounds for coffee and brunch gatherings. I’ve also added a few songs from What Sound to my An Essence of Kensington playlist, which pushed the need to rework the bottom 2/3rds of the playlist (there have also been other additions to this playlist).

Zen Browser Privacy and Ease of Routing

I have discussed my browser use in the past and recent did a large run through which browsers I use and why (see My Browser Family :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net).

I use Zen for a variety of uses and deeply appreciate the Spaces and have a few of them . In recent weeks I heard a mention about LinkedIn and how bad it is with privacy reading other open tabs and your browser history. I mentioned this to a few others and got the, “we thought everybody knew this” response.

Zen is based on Firefox which is good with privacy and security. Zen Spaces create walled gardens for what is within the Space. The last few weeks I been running a LinkedIn Space in Zen, the downside is I run into LinkedIn links from many sources (email, backchannel messages, links in other browsers) and the friction has been opening links into Zen, but also the Space.

Space Routing Eases Opening Links Where I Want Them

Zen has something they call Space Routing where I link opened in Zen for, say LinkedIn opens in the LinkedIn Space directly. When I’m in another browser, most of them have the browser extension / plug-in to use Choosy, a macOS app that routes an open page or link to another browser and Choosy lets you select which browser. Now when I hit a link to LinkedIn and route it to Zen browser it goes to the LinkedIn Space.

I have set up a few Space Routings, not only for LinkedIn. I use O’Reilly Media a lot for workshops, reading books, and quick research needs. I love having an O’Reilly Space as it keeps all resources I’m using together and I don’t have to go digging through tabs and other browsers and their tabs. Before Space Routing I would have to click on the Zen browser and open the O’Reilly Space so I could click on an O’Reilly link elsewhere and open it where I wanted it.

Eight Rounds of Link Clean-up

I completed this round of links clean-up of my links page, which was the eighth pass. I went from 943 links on the page to 866 after removals. I have added a few new links from my usual laissez-faire finding methods.

The process honed into the Python link checker outputing a markdown file with sections for: Broken; Blocked or access denied; Timed out; SSL / certificate errors; Connection errors; Working, but redirected. I have the script put the related links that have been flagged into tables in these sections.

After the fifth or sixth pass I added an additional column to the tables in the markdown output note for “Action Decisions” where I put my annotation for: Keep; Delete; new URL (with the link); and update (for the redirected links section). After this eighth pass I added a small table at the top of the markdown output from the Python script link checker with each of these four decisions at the top. I had a couple of days between the sixth run of the check and the seventh and eighth (the last check was the post final clean-up check). Going through what remained on the seventh pass (mostly the 90 redirections) I swore I had more decision action types I had used, so having the list in the note I use for my manual assessment seemed really helpful.

This Task was a Sad Task

I’ve run a version of this links page for about 30 years. It has largely been an act of accretion. There have been many links that have gone dead and things no longer living on the web (or no longer living period). My link checker has done a decent job until about three or four years ago when my local version of Python didn’t mesh well with the older BeautifulSoup package. A couple of years ago when I got them in alignment there were quite a few false positives. But the task also had many links that had gone away.

This current update to approach (see Links Weren’t Linking :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net) drastically improved link checking, but also pointed to a fragile state of the web. Not only the cause of massively increased friction to run a link checker (a couple of orders of magnitude increase in crawler and bot traffic that is non-organic and non-productive). This traffic isn’t out of malice, but ignorance, poor thinking, and poor planning (a common aggregation that is a central consumable to build from is better than thousands of rogue entities).

I have many “archive” links that I grey out where the site is mostly functioning still, but not been updated in years. Many of these I found in this current run are now completely gone.

There are many personal sites and blogs gone. But, also many subject focussed sites in urban planning & cities focussed that are gone, along with many in the Food & Coffee & Travel section, Productivity / PKM / Systems, and the Enterprise / KM / Learning sections. So many good resources, mostly from individuals who are crafting, honing, and adding incredibly good and smart insights that are now gone.

Some of the redirects had gone from personal insights to machine-generated content with factual errors in abundance or ad driven content, which are pretty much indistinguishable from the former.

I’m Looking to Replace Lost Sources with Good Human Content

I started blogging in 2001 to put things out into the world to have conversation and share things from my personal world to my work world. I found blogging is an utterly insanely good way of finding people of like minds and interests. I found the fellow curious travelers who wanted to learn more and understand the small to the vast interconnections of systems, cultures, and diversities of understanding in this wonderful world of “other possibilities” that surrounds us. I write and share only what I personally create out of my mind to understand what I think and find cracks that inspire more curiosity. The nodes on the web that are blogs worked through good search, which is now mostly gone as Google seems to have lost interest and there isn’t really a viable replacement for that widening gap.

I’m deeply looking for replacements in the sections where I lost sites that provided good solid insights and sparked not only understanding but fact-based inspirations to understand more and incite more exploration.

Many of the people and voices that over the years drifted off from posting to their own sites I deeply miss. Some have drifted to silos that are (have become) horrible places for sharing information as they are really difficult to do anything positive with that information and what has been shared. Decent town square sites / services and plazas for people to digitally gather and share and interact have deteriorated and/or been manufactured by those running them to be problematic spaces by intent. Some I don’t go to at all, some I wander through, and some I wish their leadership cared (or had an inkling of understanding) to get back to something that was much better.

My Links Page is Largely in Decent Shape

My links pages has long been my loose tethering to others and other web spots that had information, people, and ideas of interest. It is for thin strands of interest as a weak attractor in a Model of Attraction sense. I can click a link and attract something to my screen of interest. People and their thoughts are drawn closer. These links are now mostly working after cleaning up more than 400 of them.

The People Holding up the Internet

The people holding up the internet (plain version) | Data Drop this is one of the better lists and explanations of solo or small team OpenSource projects. So many core tools and resources that most people take for granted or never considered who is behind the tech.

The list and write-up are so helpful and informative. I had forgotten about Paul Eggart running the timezone resource that everybody uses, as I learned about this years ago, but always figured it has been distributed in years since.

The snippet on SQLite was surprising as I don’t think I knew the team was that small. I’ve used SQLite a lot over the years (off and on) and in the past few years I’ve been using it a lot again for fast and reliable data analytics standalone web apps.

There are all of these small elements that hold up, not only the internet, but so many services that are essential for everybody. This fragility is not just with these core elements listed and the individuals and small groups that created and maintain them, but there are hundreds and thousands more.

Once in A Lifetime with Sleeping Beauties

A few months back I received an email that was not the usual sort.

The email asked for clarification on how to pronounce my name. Hmm… So, I read a little further. It was from the producer for an audio book recording of an unreleased book by David Byrne called Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. The email continued that the author was recording the audiobook and wanted to the pronunciation to be correct.

My first thought was, this couldn’t be David Byrne of the Talking Heads and the so many more wonderful contributions that entertained me and kicked off insightful considerations of the world and art that have been sprinkled through my life. I searched for the unreleased book and found it. It has an October 6th release date and it is from the only David Byrne I know of.

Say Your Name

My first thought was, “How do I share the pronunciation?” I looked up pronunciation guides and how to use them, which turned into a hot mess quickly. I reached out to a few friends to ask how to create a pronunciation guide of one’s own name. The responses pointed to the same and similar variety of non-aligned options. I turned to the best option I knew, just record myself saying my name. I did that quickly and made a quick edit of the file. I replied to the email request with a small audio file attached and asking if that would work, and it did perfectly.

This is a Road to Where?

Now the big question sat for months. Why was David Byrne using my name in his book? For months I’ve been deeply curious. I pre-ordered the hardback book, even though I’m really also interested in hearing David Byrne say my name, in whatever context it was used.

In the last week or so I looked at the Sleeping Beauties’ table of contents that were online and couldn’t sort out where my name would surface. Nor could I sort out the context for its use.

Sparking Innovative Understandings

Today I picked up my copy of the book and opened the box. I flipped to the book’s index (that is a habit I had for a good stretch of years, but now passed) to find my name. I found my name and it is listed on two contiguous pages. It was in the “Conclusion: Liberating the Imagination” section and is the focus of the subsection, “What You Call It Helps You Find It”, which was folksonomy (folksonomy marked posts) related. David Byrne’s write-up explained it incredibly well, and he called out my explanations. His wrap-up for the this sub-section had me insanely pleased as he really understands it:

Interestingly, although folksonomy tagging is nonhierarchical, a common shared set of terms and language has emerged despite the personal and subjective origin of the tags. Surprisingly, it’s not chaotic; there is an emergent self-organizing structure, though at the same time, as Vander Wal claims, it encourages exploration and serendipity – perfect for finding sleeping beauties!

Just prior to this conveyed understanding of not only the term folksonomy, but the deep river of understanding and possibilities it brings. David Byrne in the section goes through his own use of personal understandings and terms for what he calls things and calls when he shares with others. But, the breadth of his understanding is not only shown, but he has lived it, as he conveyed.

Now I’m deeply looking forward to reading the rest of the Sleeping Beauties book.

The Friday Consumables

There are a few regular Friday consumables I try to at least glance at each week: Installer Newsletter | The Verge (particularly when David Pierce | The Verge is writing it, and he is back from paternity leave!); The Waveform Podcast from Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, and David Imel, et al, WVFRM Podcast - YouTube; The Vergecast (particularly when David Pierce and Nilay Patel are on); and for a complete change of pace Hannah Ricketts - YouTube.

Friday is also “New Music Friday” and peeking through what new music is out that could be of interest. I really liked the Tidal service new music capture that was really well honed to my musical taste, but its interface changed and music recommendation that was my main focus was no longer core focus but got really buried. Apple Music has a decent run-down of things that are new music and it has some targeted recommendations. (Both services have hi-res lossless (where music is available for that) and are in the top tier of paying artist for streaming listening). But, I’m just on Apple Music these days. Apple’s new music hits some things I have interest in, but I often have to dig into global new releases for different countries and genres to get a full run-down.

What do I listen to? Pretty much anything but country. I have a lot of interest in West African music as well as other regions of Africa. I also have interest in music from around Europe (English and non-English) and the Asia sub-continent (India, Pakistan, et al).

These are end of the week wrap ups and new discoveries from more fun categories that put me in weekend mode. But, some weeks like this and I hit the core of the weekend and I’ve not skimmed through them.