337 entries for 2024

The Signals: A Guided Primer

[Welcome:

1. Does everyone feel invited to participate?
2. Does the space guarantee users a safe experience?
3. Does the space encourage the humanization of others?
4. Can people express themselves without compromising their identity and data?

Connect:

5. Does the space cultivate a sense of belonging?
6. Does the space encourage fruitful connections between groups that aren’t naturally alike?
7. Does the space strengthen emotional, structural, and participative ties to geographically local communities?
8. Does the space make it possible for people to be heard by those in positions of power?

Understand:

9. Does the space allow for shared concerns to be raised for broad attention by society at large?
10. Is the information being elevated and shared reliable, factual, and true?
11. Does the space build civic competence and encourage democratic participation?
12. Does the space promote thoughtful conversation and room for respectful disagreements?

Act:

13. Does this space boost a community’s resilience in the face of significant stress or adversity?
14. Does this space facilitate our ability to participate in each others’ lives and shape society?]

Paul’s notes on how JSON-LD works

[The JSON-LD data model is a graph with documents as nodes and properties as edges to other nodes or ‘values’.]

[@vocab maps a default prefix to keys not mapped explicitly in @context].

[@context provides only definitions to map your keys, it’s not a type. @type is a type, and can be defined with a URL or a term from @context.

[@id’s value is a reference to another object or node.]

[Chop fresh herbs to bash with oil, or press into butter, or flavour plain yogurt into a sauce.]

In autumn, roast a whole butternut squash. Smash it in a bowl with good olive oil, a little freshly grated Parmesan, and a lot of freshly cracked black pepper. Spread the squash thickly on the toast, drizzle it with more olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice, and sprinkle it with roughly chopped toasted almonds.

[Stale bread can’t be bought. You must wait for it.]

bread soup that’s true to the spirit of bread, which is that if you have it, all you need to turn it into a meal is whatever else you have.

[Form leftover bread soup into cakes and fry with olive oil into pancakes; probably better than either the soup or the bread.]

Almost any fruit tastes good sliced, laid out on a plate, and sprinkled with salt and olive oil. Most taste good with herbs, or onions, or olives, or chiles, or nuts added, too.

[Share a list of ways you can help as a consultant, then offer a sliding scale of hourly rates.]

At this point I basically upgrade iOS when there are new Progressive Web App features.

How to save money and making a homemade cleaning spray out of lime peels!

[Chop finished lime peels and put into a spray bottle, add 1/2 cup cup white vinegar, 1 tsp salt, a bit of dish soap, and fill the rest with water. Shake and spray for a nice household cleaner.]

Apple System Preferences URL Schemes

Open a macOS preference pane via URL like file:///System/Library/PreferencePanes/Keyboard.prefPane or terminal with open "x-apple.systempreferences:<PaneID>"

How do I play a YouTube video in the background on my iOS?

[Start a YouTube video full-screen via Safari, then:

1. tap the home button or swipe up to show the home screen;

2. when playback stops, open the back ground audio controls in control center;

3. then press Play to resume playback in background.]

How to concatenate two MP4 files using FFmpeg?

(echo file '/alfa/bravo.mp4' & echo file '/charlie/delta.mp4' ) > echo.txt
ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i echo.txt -c copy foxtrot.mp4

If you have a website, what are your earliest meaningful links that still work? I have almost no broken links since 2012.

a “protocol” sync engine, with multiple storage backends, and hooks to tie into “storage providers”, would be an amazing public good

Let’s talk about Biden, banking, and overdrafts….

[USA banks make over eight billion dollars a year from overdraft fees (by charging people who don’t have money).]

The difference between a blog and journal is the title field.

Instead of queuing ideas onto an infinitely expanding todo list, blogging (or microblogging) about it can be a useful way to find synergy. If someone else had maximum information to pick up where you left off, maybe you’d be free to do other things?

Melted Onions!

[Halve onions into a muffin pan; sprinkle with salt and pepper; bake for 25 minutes at 425°F then baste with butter; bake 40 minutes more and baste again before finishing.]

More clean hacks because so many of you asked for it!

[Refresh towels in the washing machine on a full cycle with half cup of baking soda instead of detergent and half cup of vinegar instead of softener.]

Only by tasting can you learn to connect the decisions you make with their outcomes.

[Taste, listen, smell, touch, and watch as much as possible.]

I cook mostly with my hands: they’re calibrated, by now, to turn things at the right moments, to choose correct amounts of salt. They seem to know before I do when to stop squeezing a lemon, or how much parsley to grab.

Ingredients don’t take three or five or ten minutes to be done; it depends on the day and the stove.

While your oven is lit, use its heat thoroughly. When a pan of vegetables comes out, replace it with a toaster tray of walnuts or almonds. They will be perfectly toasted after ten minutes or so and can be stored in the refrigerator for months and used in vegetable salads, added to pesto, or snacked on. Or scatter stale bread in a little pan, drizzle it with olive oil, and make toasted breadcrumbs or croutons.

If you can’t find anything to fit into the spaces vacated by roasting vegetables, use the oven’s heat once everything is out. Let it warm your dinner plates, or the meal’s bread. Use its ambient heat for loosening vinaigrette that’s hardened in the refrigerator, softening a stick of butter, or mixing pasta with cheese.

When you don’t taste heat first but instead the sweetness of cauliflower or beet, the prickliness of vinegar, or tingle of good olive oil, it is flavor, not temperature, you experience.

All cooked vegetables, whether boiled or roasted, become wonderful salads. They need only a handful of toasted nuts, chopped fresh herbs, a few vinegar-soaked onions, and a sharp vinaigrette. It’s really all most food ever needs.

By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once. You will also have had a number of satisfying conversations. You will have eaten a raw bite of kale stem and wondered whether next time it should be pickled. You’ll have tasted a particularly soft, cold, vinegary beet, and realized you wanted to make beet soup again and serve it cold. You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse, feeling out unfamiliar conjugations, brushing up.

The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It’s no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it’s no more or less pea for being pea or pod.

Find a turnip that missed the week’s roasting, asparagus bottoms, cabbage cores. As long as a soup’s ingredients are born in the same season, they will meld together perfectly in a pot and can then be blended until creamy. If there is a final cup of cooked beans or lentils that needs somewhere to go, once you’ve blended it this sort of hodeepodgey soup is the place.

The amount of food you have left from a meal is always the perfect amount for something.

handling insults

[Handle insults by: 1) Adding silence or continuing as if it doesn’t affect you; 2) if a stranger, asking for their name, then asking to repeat what they said; 3) if someone you know, saying maybe they’re right and checking in if they’re feeling okay.]

respect for construction over destruction