Category: Uncategorized

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NYC Manhole Covers: History and How They’re Made by Michelle Young (Untapped Cities)

Before we close out, have you figured out yet why are manhole covers round? My contact at the DEP says, “The principal reason that manhole covers are round is so they won’t fall into the manhole.” If a manhole is square, rectangular or even oval, it can fall into the manhole if you insert it at an angle or vertically. Yikes!

I never thought about why manhole covers were round before reading this detailed history of manhole covers in New York City. That they are round “so they won’t fall into the manhole … if you insert [them] at an angle or vertically” makes sense. Maybe I never thought about it because I have never been tasked with installing a manhole cover.

Email newsletters via RSS by Dan Q (Dan Q)
No, I won't subscribe to your newsletter... except by using my RSS reader (and a clever feature of OpenTrashMail)!

I primarily use feeds to stay on top of interesting authors and websites. I seldom need to deal with newsletters because almost everything I follow (including a few Substack and Buttondown newsletters and the newsletter for Tablet Magazine) also have RSS feeds. But there are a few exceptions, notably some of the Real Clear network of sites. I started using Omnivore to cover this use case since it supports subscribing to newsletters from inside its app with its own email addresses. Blogger Dan Q here wrote about using an Open Trash Mail instance to handle newsletter to RSS conversions. Apparently one can subscribe to these disposable addresses via RSS. I’ll keep this in mind for future reference.

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Sports Illusrated, fresh off an AI article controversy, selected Colorado Buffaloes college football coach Deion Sanders as its Sportsperson of the Year. Mr. Sanders took over as head coach at Colorado after the football team went 1-11 in 2022. Sports Illustrated noted that the team improved greatly in Coach Sanders’ first season:

As for the actual football? It’s been an adventure. Colorado is massively improved over 2022, when it was by far the worst Power 5 program. The Buffaloes were outscored by 29.1 points per game last year, compared to 6.7 this year

The team lost its final six games to finish 4-8. While that is better than the 1-11 record Colorado posted in 2022, it is still sub-par.

Sportsperson of the Year is a nebulous award, But a college football coach coming off a 4-8 season, regardless of the circumstances leading up to the season, does not seem like a likely candidate. If they want to honor Mr. Sanders, why not wait 2-3 seasons to see how Colorado football looks after Mr. Sanders has more time to build the program in his image and bring in his recruits? What award be left to give Coach Sanders if Colorado is 11-1 at this point in 2025?

On the other hand, if the Sportsperson of the Year award is to honor sports figures who give human and AI journalists things to write about, the eminently quotable Coach Sanders had one of the best cases in 2023.

(I would have submitted now former Texas A&M football coach Jimbo Fisher for earning $76.8 million to not coach Texas A&M.)

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I received an email from the Bing Webmaster Team:

We hope this message finds you well! We've noticed it's been a while since you last visited Bing Webmaster Tools, and we've genuinely missed having you around!
Webmaster Tools has undergone some exciting updates and improvements recently, and we think you'll be pleased with the enhancements we've made. Your feedback has always been valuable to us, and we're eager to hear your thoughts on the latest features.

My main project, The New Leaf Journal, was blacklisted by Bing in January 2023 and not reinstated until July (I received formal confirmation near the end of August). The process was annoying enough to prompt me to create a GitHub repository (my choice of Microsoft-owned GitHub was intentional) collecting Bing-ban stories. I still do not know why Bing took adverse action against my site (they will never say), but I can report that our standing with Bing and Bing-dependent DuckDuckGo has finally returned to what it was on the eve of the troubles in January. Of course, this Bing email is a misunderstanding for a reason unrelated to my complicated Bing history. I usually use a Google account I set up for Search Console purposes to log into Bing Webmaster. This email was sent to my Bing-only account that has never been used. Bing can rest assured that I am alive and have seen its new Webmaster features.

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The Classic Editor in WordPress by Jack Baty (Baty.net)
I thought for sure I would finally settle in with WordPress for a while, but Gutenberg always annoys. Some of it is handy, but mostly I just feel frustrated when writing anything more than a paragraph or two. Several people, noticing my frustration, recommended that I try the Classic Editor plugin, so that’s what I’m doing now.

I am using the Classic Editor here at The Emu Café Social, in large part because some of the IndieWeb plugins I am using require it instead of Gutenberg. I agree with this take by Mr. Baty in a vacuum that  the classic editor is better for writing than Gutenberg. However, I use Gutenberg over at my main WordPress-powered project, The New Leaf Journal. The reasons are two-fold:

  1. Drafting articles in markdown (I like Ghostwriter) and converting them using Pandoc for use on WordPress provides a superior workflow to both Gutenberg and the Classic Editor.
  2. Because I draft my long articles outside of WordPress (with a few exceptions), I am more concerned with formatting. Gutenberg works better for me for that purpose than the TinyMCE editor.

(I will note, however, that Gutenberg footnotes almost cost me a great deal of work on a recent project.)

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The Gothamist published an article on the push to ban street vendors from the magisterial Brooklyn Bridge. I am 100% in support of banning street vendors from the Bridge, but I will focus on another point in the report. See the following quote:

But vendors said there are not many legal spots where they can move to. Street vending has become more common as asylum seekers try to make ends meet without work permits.

Setting aside the reporter’s insistence on using asylum seeker as a blanket term for aliens who may or may not have actually applied for asylum, much less have a colorable asylum case, I submit for the record that hawking wares on the street is not a legal solution to not having employment authorization. An alien who is not authorized to engage in employment is not authorized to engage in self-employment (many aliens who are explicitly here on work visas are not eligible to engage in self-employment, see e.g., H-1B specialty occupation workers and O-1 aliens of extraordinary ability). The article quotes a street vendor advocate in the very next paragraph as describing street vendors as small businesses. An alien who lacks employment authorization cannot legally work as a street vendor regardless of his or her desire to make ends meet.

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Importance of Bing Indexing For Alt Search (2022) by SpaceGhost (Blue Dwarf)
https://thenewleafjournal.com/importance-of-bing-indexing-for-alt-search/ I only stumbled accross this article a couple of days ago, despite the fact that it prominently mentions the cheapskatesguide article about being de-indexed by Bing.

Back in 2022, I wrote an article on the importance of being in good standing with Microsoft Bing for reaching searchers who prefer privacy-friendly search solutions. While Bing itself is far from privacy-friendly, many alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Ecosia, and Swisscows use Bing’s search index. That particular article was inspired by a post on Cheapskate’s Guide about being de-indexed by Bing and, as a result, being unavailable to DuckDuckGo searchers. I learned today from my New Leaf Journal Koko Analytics referrer logs that I had received referrals from Blue Dwarf, which is a small independent social network run by the admin of Cheapskate’s Guide. Sure enough, the referrals came from the author of the excellent Cheapskate’s Guide post discovering my article. Very neat. My original article came before The New Leaf Journal itself suffered a Bing blacklisting, but we were restored after just more than half a year and are now doing well with Bing and all of its derivatives. See my GitHub repository on Bing bans.

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I just published my article on Grenada’s annual October 25 Thanksgiving. As I explain in that piece, Grenada’s Thanksgiving commemorates the date of the commencement of the 1983 U.S.-led intervention to restore order on the island after a palace coup. It occurred to me right after publishing the article (somehow only after) to check whether then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan noted the intervention in his Thanksgiving Proclamation.  I found that he hardly could have in his 1983 Thanksgiving Proclamation since he issued it on September 15. I checked 1984 out of due diligence, but the 1984 Thanksgiving Proclamation was similar in brevity and substance to the 1983 edition. To be sure, short, lite Thanksgiving Proclamations have been more common than small Thanksgiving dinners. I conducted some research last year to see whether I could turn former President Calvin Coolidge’s Thanksgiving Proclamations into an article. I succeeded with his first Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1923, but in so doing I discovered that Coolidge’s Proclamations became more and more simple through the final one he issued in 1928.

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Running The New Leaf Journal takes me interesting places. For example, it has taken me to Grenada over the last few days. Not literally, mind you. I am not much of a traveling guy (nor am I a big fan of planes or other vehicles). I am researching Thanksgiving in Grenada for what promises to be an exciting follow-up to my excessively long study of Thanksgiving proclamations in the Philippines. If you ever wondered about Grenada’s version of Thanksgiving, your questions will be answered in short order.

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This buttery, garlicky sausage and rice recipe is simple, cheap, and pretty much to die for by Dale Roll (SoraNews24)
Plus, the stores sometimes even put out recipes, making it even easier to use them! For example, the official Twitter of 7-Eleven’s 7-Premium brand of prepared foods posted the perfect recipe for your busy weekday meal featuring their plump and juicy “Golden Wieners.”

SoraNews24 published an entire article about making a recipe released by 7-Eleven in Japan. I think the recipe looks good (“to die for” is probably excessive, however). But regardless of whether you think 7-Eleven’s sausage-butter-rice dish looks appetizing, I am sure you can join me in praising the convenience store chain for fully embracing open source.

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I use a low-end Beelink mini-PC as a TV box (this will be a New Leaf Journal article eventually). I run Fedora on the mini PC and switch between GNOME and Kodi sessions depending on what I am doing. Yesterday, I upgraded from Fedora 39 to Fedora 40. The upgrade went smoothly. Everything appeared to be good until I tried to start a Kodi session only to have Kodi crash after its logo appeared. What happened? I think it was a segfault (I love segfaults). How did I fix it? I could have read through the logs and tried to diagnose the issue, but I instead chose the path of less resistance. I uninstalled the Fedora Kodi package and installed the official Kodi Flatpak from Flathub (note not the Kodi Flatpak from Fedora’s Flatpak repo). I then reinstalled my small number of plugins (including MrKarabat’s unofficial Crunchyroll plugin) and was off to the races.

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From Mr. Heinrik Karlsson’s “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”

Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.

I feel under attack. I will have people know that some articles in my series on interpreting hair color in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels have actually done alright. The better example of people not caring about my idiosyncratic interests is actually my al|together visual novel review project, but I think that endeavor is genuinely worthwhile.

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Israel Has No Right to Self-Defense as ‘Occupier,’ Russia Says by The Moscow Times (The Moscow Times)
Israel has no right to self-defense against Hamas militants in Gaza as an occupying power in Palestine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said Wednesday.

The Russian government is appropriating Soviet humor. (I dare say that this is a better example of Russia’s questionable Iran-coddling commentary than the one I used for an October 14 article at The New Leaf Journal.)