Read: The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin 📚★★★☆☆
Mcllvanney left half a manuscript, finished by Ian Rankin. Good page turner. Especially enjoyable for the 1972 Glasgow setting, chain smoking, pints & whisky in pretty rough pubs. The hero travels on the bus!
Daniel Jalkut (redsweater.com)• The FastScripts menu can now be presented by keyboard shortcut even if the menu bar icon is not visible
This is nice, I can keyboard the menu then see the shortcuts I’ve forgotten.
Read: The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety
When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century. Bucher told me that the idea of the algorithm is “a proxy for technology, and people’s relationships to the machine.” It has become a metaphor for the ultimate digital Other, a representation of all of our uneasiness with online life.
The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety via John Naughton
Our idea of algorithm is mixed up with other types of manipulation.
Got out yesterday and walked round the Glen Douglas trio of hills again. Map, photos and notes: walkmap
Large Red Damsel Fly Black legs are the clue to identify this one.
Read: Facebook has started to encrypt links to counter privacy-improving URL Stripping – gHacks Tech News
The main issue here is that there it is no longer possible to remove the tracking part of the URL, as Facebook merged it with part of the required web address. Removing the entire construct after the ? would open the main Facebook page of Ghacks Technology News, but it won’t open the linked post.
I don’t read FB but I typically strip any parameters from the urls of tweets. I guess this is the next stage.
It has been a few years since I walked to The Whangie, it got to busy for me as lockdown eased. Glad daughter took me today. Lots of flora, a few birds & a nice lizard on the carpark wall. More on Flickr.
joe jenett (pointers.dailywebthing.com)podviaznikov.com (new) wyvy.net (new) ThoughtAsylum
Hi Joe,
Another trio of fascinating links. podviaznikov.com took me to montaigne.io which the site is made with. Montaigne is a simple tool that allows you to publish any type of website from Apple Notes , the docs are not yet complete but I certainly want to keep an eye on.
Thanks!
Read: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka 📚
A huge complicated baggy book. Perhaps reflecting the chaos of reality too much to read smoothly. Sometimes exciting, sometimes amusing & quite often baffling to me. I suspect some knowledge of recent Nigerian politics would help.
Liked: Scratch is a big deal
Liked: Scratch is a big deal | Bryan Braun – Frontend Developer
Interesting take on Scratch by a Developer & parent.
This recent growth has caused Scratch to break into the Tiobe index’s top 20 most popular programming languages. At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages. The Tiobe index is imperfect but there’s clearly something happening here.
Bryan points to some
It’s pretty impressive how ambitious the projects get. Scratchers often build copycats of “real” games like Cut the Rope, Super Mario Bros, and Terraria. Features like cloud variables allow them to make online multiplayer games, like Taco Burp (popular in my house)
This is quite a different degree of scratching than I’ve seen in my and other classroom recently.
The REST APIs enable third-party tooling like Turbowarp—a parallel site that can run Scratch projects 20x faster.
A bit clicking leads to Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D) on Scratch!
A lot of food for thought, I never spend much time with scratch beyond preparing and experimenting with the most basic of things. I am not sure it is a rabbit hope I want to peer down for long. I think the simple types of things we do in class are enough for most of the pupils (along with micro:bits, lego and other coding). The advanced projects might be useful to point some of the more confident pupils at.
fBlog, a fake blog made from flickr
I like Flickr’s style:
we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?
I’ve just made a wee ‘blog’ from my flickr photos with the tag fblog: fBlog. It is only one webpage, not really a blog, but it didn’t take long. Sitting on my Raspberry Pi.
I do wonder if someone could make a clever flickr app that would mimic the best parts of instagram…