Over on The New Leaf Journal, I wrote about (with photos and a GIF) being treated to an unexpected fireworks show on September 14, 2024, while sitting on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with a friend. We left the Promenade about an hour after the fireworks show. I should say we almost left because just as we were almost in the clear, I realized that I was missing my BLUPOND Knight Vision Driving Glasses, which I reviewed on The New Leaf Journal all the way back in 2021. We retraced our steps and eventually found the glasses on the bench we had seen the fireworks from. All’s well that ends well.
Author Archives: Nicholas A. Ferrell
WordPress.com Reader as Social Media
Blogger Chris Lovie-Taylor wrote about using WordPress Reader as his social network. I am only mildly acquainted with WordPress Reader because it is a part of wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org and both this site and The New Leaf Journal are powered by the WordPress software on a VPS. However, I do have a WordPress.com account and a created a single-page personal feed aggregator site (which could use a touch-up), so I have an idea of how WordPress Reader works. As Mr. Lovie-Taylor explains, you can automatically discover and follow WordPress.com site and add any site with an RSS/ATOM feed to your list of follows. I very much like the concept and appreciate that it allows following non-WordPress.com sites (.org sites can appear with the help of the Jetpack plugin but I am not running Jetpack on either of my sites). What I do not like is that it is tethered to WordPress.com. I think there is an idea here, however, for a “social” media site based on following external sites and sharing posts, maybe even with some Hypothes.is functionality.
Houthis and the “Rules-Based International System”
Sometimes good articles have silly headlines. One such example is a September 25, 2024 piece on Long War Journal titled The Houthis have challenged the Rules-Based International System and must be defeated. I agree that the Houthis, an Islamist Iranian proxy currently in control of much of Yemen, must be defeated. But I do not think they must be defeated because they are challenging some abstract rules-based international system. My concerns are more prudential. They should be defeated because they are currently using Iranian missiles to do remarkable damage to international shipping, occasionally firing them at Israel, and have within the last few years hit Saudi Arabian oil facilities. As a general matter, defeating violent Islamist Iranian proxies is a good thing without appealing to end of history speak. Of course, the article itself largely agrees, notwithstanding the vague headline.
Some anime can’t be carried by animation
On August 1, 2024, an interesting Anime News Network headline crossed my RSS feed: Can an Anime be ‘Carried by its Animation’? Late that same day, a headline from the always-excellent Sakugablog hit my feed reader: Gimai Seikatsu: An Eclectic Mix of Avant-Garde and Ordinary to Rise Above Limitations. I am not sure there has ever been so clear a case of one article in my feed set indirectly answering a question raised by another. Better yet – I thought of Gimai Seikatsu, localized by Crunchyroll as Days with My Stepsister, as soon as I saw the Anime News Network headline.
Last month, I wrote an article granting that in some cases, what would otherwise be a totally middling anime can be “carried by its animation.” But there are counter-points where a middling anime cannot be carried by its animation, no matter how impressive said animation may be. I thought of this when I read about the release of a new Blu-Ray box set of Aldnoah.Zero.
(The director of Aldnoah.Zero did direct my 2023 anime of the year, however, so redemption achieved!)
Searching for a Precise Motive
‘Ukraine’s Unwinnable War’ is a window into the strange mind of Ryan Routh.
I came across an article in my feed reader from The Free Press titled I Read the Would-be Trump Assassin’s Book So You Don’t Have To. I could not read much of the article because it is paywalled (it was part of one of my Real Clear feeds). That is all well in good since I do not have to read the book it is about. But one quote from the article excerpt caught my attention:
Although Routh’s precise motive remains unclear, his self-published book—Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen—Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the End of Humanity (2023)—offers some insights into his worldview.
What was the precise motive of a man staking out a golf course to shoot former President Trump? I search and search for an answer, again today I search.
(PS: While I am sure his book must be riveting I submit that I would be more interested in what he was doing on his myriad foreign excursions.)
A Fix-It Spill
I had my corded vacuum in the back right corner of my room. I was pulling it out in order to plug it in so I could vacuum. In the process of pulling the vacuum out, the cord (mostly coiled) got caught on my zz plant and I tipped over the plant, spilling some dirt. The plant is fine now. The spill would have been annoying but for the fact that I could clean the spill with what I created the spill with. Almost as convenient as my recent good typo.
July 2024: Hezbollah’s Pager Communications Strategy
I came across an interesting Reuters report from July 9, 2024, titled: How Hezbollah used pagers and couriers to counter Israel’s high tech surveillance (headline has shifted over last few weeks). I quote from the article:
Cell phones, which can be used to track a user’s location, have been banned from the battlefield in favour of more old-fashioned communication means, including pagers and couriers who deliver verbal messages in person, two of the sources said.
Sounds like checkmate to me. But the article left out one important detail: Where did Iran-Hezbollah get the pagers? Well, no way such a minor detail could be too important.
My Writing Set-Up
At this week’s Homebrew Website Club, I asked everyone what tools they use for writing. Participants shared a range of tools, from BBEdit, a text editor for macOS, to “Written? Kitten!”, a web-based text editor that shows a photo of a cat after you have written a certain number of words. Delig...
Back in December I bookmarked a post on James Coffee Blog titled “My Writing Setup.” The post outlines one writing set-up and invites people to share their own via webmention. My writing set-up for full articles over at The New Leaf Journal is similar to when I wrote about my writing workflow in December 2021. I draft my articles in markdown using Ghostwriter and then export them into LibreOffice Writer (as .odt files) for final edits and transfer to WordPress. Since the 2021 article, I have added Yoga Image Optimizer to my workflow for compressing images and now use Shotwell instead of Nomacs for basic image edits. On this more humble site, I usually use the WordPress editor (note I use the classic editor) here instead of drafting the posts externally. There are some ancillary components of my workflow. For example, why am I responding to a post from 10 months ago? At some point, I saved it in a folder I created in my Zotero library for future article ideas.
Roku’s New Revenue Strategies
From a report at the Daily Upside:
The entertainment tech company filed a patent application for a “reinforcement learning model for optimizing long term revenue.” Roku’s system essentially aims to get as much revenue as it can without ruining the user experience.
Roku: Let’s see how far we can take this. How does this system work?
This system monitors the “user state” — the content users are currently watching, as well as profile information such as demographics, tenure, and activeness on the platform — to “personalize user actions based on different tolerance of the advertisement.” Along with tracking this information, Roku’s tech also determines the “revenue value” associated with the user.
Roku’s patent is dishonest on one point. Its so called “users” are its products. Its actual users are its advertising partners. While I know that my approach will not work for everyone, I recommend disconnecting your “smart” TV from the internet and powering it with a privacy-friendly Linux PC. I personally have had good luck with an N100 Beelink mini PC from Amazon, but even an old laptop or something of the like will work. If you have a 4K-or-up display, I recommend going with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment for this use-case (GNOME is also a fair choice but I had more luck getting an aesthetic KDE set-up).
Thoughts on Reeder App Re-Design
I read a new AlternativeTo blog post about the re-design of the Reeder app. Reeder, I read, is a feed reader for iOS and MacOS. I am not personally familiar with it because I do not use Apple hardware and even if I did, I would not opt for a proprietary feed reader. The design of the app looks interesting, however. As far as I can gather, Reeder was originally a traditional feed reader (that experience is apparently still available), but the re-design turns it into a feed reader with a more social media stream aesthetic. I would not opt for that design for reasons similar to those I offered for not wanting to use feed readers to follow social streams, but I nevertheless think the idea may be good for feed usage in general. Using feeds is good (regardless of the app), and offering people an interface they are more familiar with than that of a traditional feed reader may help increase uptake.
Russia, Mongolia, and the ICC
Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia is his first to a member of the International Criminal Court. That’s not a coincidence.
I have read several articles about Russian President Vladimir Putin using a visit to Russia’s small, once-mighty, land-locked neighbor, Mongolia, to poke the International Criminal Court (“ICC”). Mongolia is an ICC member, but being a country of 3,000,000 people which is sandwiched between and largely dependent on Russia and China, it is hardly in a position to do what the ICC cannot, even if it were so inclined. One headline from CEPA caught my attention: Putin Uses Mongolia to Mock the ICC. My take: Wholly gratuitous move by Russia. The ICC is more than capable of making a mockery of itself without any acts of diplomatic aggression from the always self-aware Russian government.
(Aside: Many foreign policy commentators who are into concern trolling about the “global south’s” views of supporting Israel are oddly unconcerned about how the “global south” may view big, wealthy, powerful countries trying to pressure Mongolia into picking a fight with one of the two nuclear powers it shares a border with.)
RSS Thank You Message
Found a cool message on Kev’s blog about appreciating RSS readers, so I decided to add something similar to mine. This WordPress snippet displays a random welcome messages to all RSS readers.
I came across a fun idea on WordPress developer Jeremy Herve’s blog (I previously wrote about using one of his plugins) to include a welcome message with RSS feed items thanking subscribers. I decided to add a small thank you note to my feed footers using Jeff Starr’s Simple Custom Content plugin, which I already used to ensure that all feed items conclude with a link to the original and a copyright notice. I decided to make my thank you message focus primarily on thanking people for subscribing, but added a note that feeds are the best way to subscribe.
Hum Link Shortener and BuddyPress Activities
I discovered a new use for the excellent Hum link shortener WordPress plugin (provides entirely local short-links). I have a BuddyPress activity stream on this site. While I do not know if this would be the case for every activity stream set-up, especially when used with themes designed with BuddyPress in mind, long URLs (or even regular-length URLs) do not look good in posts here. However, Hum-short URLs work well, so that makes it much easier to include links to new posts (or New Leaf Journal posts) in activities.
New Guestbook System
I had been planning to use the Gwolle Guestbook plugin here (I cannot use it on The New Leaf Journal because it relies on JQuery, which I disable over there). However, I decided that it was too heavy for what will probably be a light use-case. Over on The New Leaf Journal, I had briefly tried a comments-based Guestbook with an open source spam blocklist. However, we did not get any legitimate entries in that Guestbook before I shuttered it on account of the fact that a small number of spam comments were somehow showing up as published despite my requiring moderation in the WordPress settings. Wanting a Guestbook, I decided to give it a try on both sides while adding Antispam Bee, an entirely local anti-spam plugin, to my set-up. I also added a Block List Updater from the same developer to keep the open source-sourced blocklist up to date without my manual intervention. Finally, I use a plugin called Plugin Load Filter with allows me to explicitly limit Antispam Bee to specific pages. For example, this means that Antispam Bee only functions on the Guestbook page of The New Leaf Journal at the moment. We will see how it goes. But the way, while this site’s Guestbook looks solid (if I do so humbly submit myself), take a look at what I did on The New Leaf Journal side of things.
My 1,000 Articles at The New Leaf Journal
I published The New Leaf Journal’s 999th and 1,000th articles back in May. However, not all of those articles were mine. I published a few articles under the New Leaf Journal Editors byline and my friend and colleague Victor V. Gurbo has a good selection of posts on a number of mostly (but not entirely) music subjects. Today, I finally hit publish on my own 1,000th article: A stream of consciousness from someone who played EA Sports games back in the 90s about EA pontificating about shoving ads into its upcoming AAA offerings. I take readers from my memories of NBA Live 98 for Sega Genesis to a story from visiting my high school classmate’s man cave (it was a legit man cave, big TV, leather sofa, sports memorabilia, et cetera) where I witnessed the birth of a new phrase inspired by a game of Madden.