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Marked 2 as teleprompter
Marked 2 as teleprompter, revisited - BrettTerpstra.com:
Once you have the theme, you can start prompting just by hitting the ‘s’ key in a Marked preview. That will start autoscroll at the slowest speed. Use left and right arrows to speed up/slow down the scroll speed. (You can also click and drag on the meter that appears in the lower left of the screen.) That’s all there is to it.
So this is amazing. Love it.
🔗 Link Post: “Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown | Free to read | Financial Times”
Edward Luce writing for The Financial Times:
“Other scientists have taken note of Bright’s fate. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, when Obama’s administration sent 3,000 US military personnel to Africa to fight the epidemic, the CDC held a daily briefing about the state of progress. It has not held one since early March. Scientists across Washington are terrified of saying anything that contradicts Trump.
“The way to keep your job is to out-loyal everyone else, which means you have to tolerate quackery,” says Anthony Scaramucci, an estranged former Trump adviser, who was briefly his White House head of communications. “You have to flatter him in public and flatter him in private. Above all, you must never make him feel ignorant.””
This brilliant long read article details how the US has essentially become a failed state, led by a megalomaniacal madman.
🔗 Link Post: “Daring Fireball: Financial Times Reports the Obvious: Trump Resisted Testing ‘Too Many People’ Lest the Results Spook the Stock Market”
John Gruber writing for Daring Fireball:
“The problem isn’t testing, the problem is sick people, and testing is a way to get a handle on the problem. Trump’s stance is like telling your girlfriend not to take a pregnancy test because you don’t want a baby.”
What a great line.
My wife and our kids were featured in a newspaper article over the weekend as part of Mother’s Day.
🔗 Link Post: “Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families”
“Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. "
I used Cloudflare DNS in the past, but more recently have been using OpenDNS to block non-kid-safe content but its relatively slow. Now I’m moving back to Cloudflare.
🔗 Link Post: “Donald Trump Is a Menace to Public Health”
The entire article is certainly worth reading. It was hard to pick out excerpts because it’s all so well written.
Adam Serwer writing for The Atlantic:
Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee.
Democracy can be thought of as a garden; if you don’t tend to it, it doesn’t take long to be overtaken by the weeds of alternative, less-preferred civic models.
“Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president.”
Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
I’m old fashioned in that I like my news to give me the news, not an opinion. Right-wing media is out of control - pretending to be news but actually delivering propaganda.
The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
This pretty much nails it. Everything is for personal gain; not for the collective good. In Trump’s world, everything is a zero-sum game.
🔗 Link Post: “Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve” - Washington Post”
Harry Stevens writing for Washington Post:
If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days, there would be about a hundred million cases in the United States by May.
That is math, not prophecy.
The simulation diagrams in this story provide the best example of how social distancing can be beneficial.
🔗 Link Post: "Boeing 737 Max: debris found in fuel tanks of grounded planes"
“Boeing has ordered inspections of its entire fleet of grounded 737 Max planes after it found debris in the fuel tanks of some of the aircraft, in the latest setback for the US plane-maker”
Boeing seems to have forgotten the key tenets of lean manufacturing, especially the part about fixing problems at the source and not passing faults up the chain.
It used to be said that, “if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going”. Nowadays, I feel more comfortable with Airbus.
🔗 Link Post: "Donald Trump, the view across the pond"
“Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.”
Paul offers some thoughts and insights regarding Trump, from a British perspective. I think the Australian view is similar, but members of our society are more likely to say, “well, what else would you expect from a Seppo1?” Disparaging critique is a key element of our culture.
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Seppo, short for septic tank, which rhymes with Yank, which is slang for an American citizen. ↩︎
🔗 Link Post: “Clayton Christensen dies at 67 after lifetime of business, spiritual influence - Deseret News”
Tad Walsh writing for Deseret News:
“A true disruptive innovation, he taught, first appealed only to a niche market and appeared less attractive than the powerful incumbent it eventually usurped. In fact, the incumbent typically looked down on it as inconsequential until it ate up huge swaths of its market share.”
This article rightly focuses on Christensen’s impactful theory of disruption.
In my work I often crib Christensen’s case study about the utility of a milkshake as part of the ‘jobs to be done’ theory.
Rest In Peace, Mr Christensen.
🔗 Link Post: “Middle Age Is Actually Good - The Atlantic”
James Parker writing for The Atlantic:
“You’re not an apprentice adult anymore. You’re through the disorientation period”
— via Things to Click
🔗 Link Post: “Playdate December Update”
Panic writing for Playdate newsletter:
“We’re a smedium-sized crew — 25 people, 5 on Playdate.”
The Playdate gaming device is coming along nicely. Amazing what a small team has achieved, with this device and across other projects.
I like that Panic aren’t taking money in advance and that they are cash flowing the production. It’s real business.
🔗 Link Post: “Girls on Tour in Beirut — Long Distance Call”
Eliza Harvey & Geraldine Doogue: Long Distance Call Podcast E88:
“Geraldine and one of her oldest friends (and Eliza’s godmother) Mary Ciccarelli are in Beirut for new years celebrations.”
My Mother-in-Law Mary in what I’m sure must be her first podcast appearance.
In this older article, Dan outlines the benefits of blogging, but also the challenge of getting people to see beyond big social media.
It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site.
People still love the likes.
TV manufacturers unite to tackle the scourge of motion smoothing - The Verge:
Vizio’s Director of Product Marketing said that 85 percent of customers don’t bother adjusting their TVs from their out of the box settings.
This statement. How can people live like that?
WeWork's IPO: The Triumph Of Hype Over Fundamentals
WeWork’s IPO: The Triumph Of Hype Over Fundamentals:
“We Dedicate This To The Energy Of We – Greater Than Any One Of Us But Inside Each Of Us,” says the banner page of WeWork’s IPO document. I mentally added another “e” to We, and hastily moved on before I cracked up.
Sometimes it is perfectly appropriate to use toilet humour.
The Economist: America’s social-media addiction is getting worse:
FACEBOOK users in America spend about 42 minutes a day on the social-media platform.
I’m so happy not to be an active user of the Facebook platform anymore. Ditching it and Twitter has salvaged much time.
Into the Personal-Website-Verse · Matthias Ott:
Whenever you stumble upon an interesting thought on another site, write about it and link to it.
I stumbled across this article, and I liked it. It outlines why the IndieWeb should really just be the web.
As a result of finding this article on this website, I’ve subscribed to its RSS feed, so I’ll automatically get future content delivered to me. This is what makes the open web so great.
Drafts for Link Posts
I’ve been noodling around trying to figure out the most effective way to write and publish onto this Blot-powered page, especially from iOS, but also recognising that I do also use macOS.
The answer is always Drafts, isn’t it? That app that I keep trying to incorporate into my workflow, and then keep forgetting about.
Thanks to @vasta and galexa I should be able to develop a better/faster/more efficient process.
In fact, this post has been written in Drafts, utilising its share sheet extension as suggested.
Seven West Media Buys Remaining Stake in Community Newspaper Group in Wa ➜
Print and television giant Seven West Media has taken control of Community Newspaper Group in a deal that gives the company increased control over the West Australian media landscape, but has brought fears more jobs could be lost.
The deal brings several of Perth’s major suburban newspapers under the same company that owns The West Australian and Sunday Times newspapers, and top-rating TV news destination Seven News.
Well, this is depressing. As if our local media scene was not already enough of a monoculture.
Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction
Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction:
Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where it does not assume depth, it creates it.”
This article provides an interesting insight into the value that reading can offer the mind; how it can engage in a way that the shallows of the internet’s social platforms cannot (and will not, because they’re optimised for engagement, not consideration).