A Free Joe Russo's Almost Dead Show

Joe Russo's Almost Dead is one of the best Grateful Dead tribute bands out there. Actually, I probably shouldn't call them a tribute band, because while they play the Dead's music, they don't try to immitate it note for now. Rather, like a good jazz group, they extend it and riff on it. They have that wonderful loose improvisational vibe that the Dead had at their best without imitating the Dead's exact sound.

Nugs.net has made one of their recent shows, August 16, 2018 at Red Rocks, Morrison CO, free to listen to or download in MP3 format. I'm listening to Eyes of the World right now, and it blows away any version I've heard by the Dead and Company.

I don't know how long the show will be free, so get it now. Heck, even if it wasn't free, it'd be worth buying.

Interview with Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is a busy guy. Right now he's trying to finish post-production work on a new series, Good Omens, for which he
show runner, based on the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett. Another series, American Gods, based on his novel starts its second season in a couple of months. And he's even managed to publish a couple of books in the last year.

Vanity Fair has just published a short interview with him in which he discusses his current projects. I found his comments on Twitter particularly interesting:

I think it’s terrific. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer, and I didn’t know how. As far as I was concerned, writers were exalted, magical, godlike beings who probably walked six inches above the ground. I think I believed that one wrote a fairly decent poem, sent it out into the world, and never had to work again. Probably a limousine filled with groceries would show up once you’d written your poem, because, obviously, that was how it worked.

It became easier when I started meeting writers. When I was a young journalist, the idea of actually talking to the people whose work I admired so much—Gene Wolfe or Diana Wynne Jones—was huge for me. It also made it achievable. So the idea that, you know, J.K. Rowling is somebody who could like your tweet on Twitter is a great thing for kids out there. 

Parilament Has Moved

The Canadian Parliament has moved from the Centre Block building on Parliament Hill to the West Block. The Centre Block will be closed for major restoration and renovations for at least ten years.

This short video from the CBC shows the new parliamentary chamber and some of the rest of the building. What I found interesting was just how plain it is, even allowing for the fact that it's a temporary space, especially in comparison to the US Congress and Senate buildings.

Create Custom Shading Colours in Word

The text highlighting tool in Word 2013 limits you to fifteen colours, but most of those are useless because they make the text hard to read. However, you can easily create custom highlighting colours that are more pleasing to the eye and offer more choices.

Note: When you pick a highlight or shading colour for a document that is likely to be printed, you should print the document to ensure that the highlighted text will be legible in the hard copy. In my experience, theme colours (in the first screenshot below) reproduce reasonably accurately, but many of the Standard and Custom colours (in the second and third screenshots) print darker than they appear on screen.

To use a custom highlight colour:

1. Select the text you want to highlight.
2. In the ribbon's Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click the arrow beside the Shading icon. A colour palette appears.
3. Do either of the following:

• From the Theme Colours palette, select a colour.

• Click More Colors. From the Colours dialog box that appears, select a Standard colour or define a Custom colour, then click OK.

Your selected shading colour is applied to the text you selected.

If you have a shade you're particularly fond of (pale purple, for example), you can use this technique to assign the colour to a character style. Then to apply the highlight, just select the character style from the styles list.

Apollo 11 Documentary Coming

This year is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing and there will be a documentary about Apollo 11 featuring "new" footage. NASA hired an MGM film crew to film the preparations for the launch and the mission, but most of the 70 mm. footage has languished in storage until recently. A documentary using the footage was shown at the Sundance Festival and it sounds incredible.

Buzz Aldrin himself is one of a dozen credited cinematographers on the new documentary, and based on early reviews coming from Sundance last week, it appears that the level of intimacy the crew captured is the film’s biggest strength. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that “much of the footage in Apollo 11 is, by virtue of both access and proper preservation, utterly breathtaking,” and found that the filmmakers were freed up to make something experiential because the story of the mission is already so well known. Indiewire gushed that “the clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”

 If the trailer (linked above) is any indication, this is going to be a must see for anyone with the slightest interest in space exploration.

Some Redundant Words to Remove

Benjamin Dreyer is vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief, of Random House. He has a new book, released today, Dreyer’s English: An Utterley Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. Medium has published an excerpt from the book dealing with redundant words. Based on this excerpt, I think I'm going to buy the book. It reminds me of the great Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, possibly my favourite book on English usage, and sadly never issued in Kindle format.

Here's a sample. Words in italics can be deleted:

all-time record

As well, one doesn’t set a “new record.” One merely sets a record.

assless chaps

The garment, that is. Not fellows lacking in dorsal embonpoint. I’m not sure how often this will come up in your writing — or in your life — but chaps are, by definition, assless. Look at a cowboy. From behind.

ATM machine

ATM = automated teller machine, which, one might argue and win the argument, is redundant enough as it is.

As an aside, I keep a list of words and phrases to use with Paul Beverley's wonderful FRedit Word macro. I think I've found a few more to add to the list. 

Review – Once There Was a Way

I've liked alternate history stories since reading H. Beam Piper's Gunpowder God in Analog in the 1960s. Since then, they've become a sub-genre of their own, with their own awards (the Sidewise Award), and a few have attained best-seller status (Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Ben H. Winters' Underground Airlines, for example).

The latest one that I've read is Bryce Zabel's Once There Was a Way, which is a history of the Beatles career from 1968 onward. "What career?", you may ask. In this book, they didn't break up.

The framing device for the story is that it's a compilation of articles  and interviews about the Beatles from a British rock magazine, stitched together to form a continuous narrative. The demarcation point from our worldline seems to be when the Beatles were to be on the Johnny Carson show. In our world, Carson wasn't available that night and only Lennon and McCartney appeared. In this story, they insisted on Carson being available and it gave them a psychological boost that helped them stay together over the next few months. And it goes on from there in a most entertaining way.

I don't want to give more of the story away, because obviously the Beatles story quickly becomes very different from what actually happened. Zabel has worked out a logical series of events and both the story and the Beatles' characters are believable.

You don't have to be a Beatles fan to enjoy this book, although I'm sure it helps. It's a good read and deserved its Sidewise Award.

Dixie's Land Is Being Serialized

Many years ago I was an advance reader for Michael Skeet's allternate-history novel, Dixie's Land.

It is 1851. The United States have been at war with one another for nearly a year, with nine states* fighting to sustain their right to secede from the Union. Watching nervously from the sidelines and dominating the northern and western portions of the continent is the Kingdom of Canada. It is to Canada's winter capital, New Orleans, that the Confederate Captain Charles Stewart is sent by his government to assist in the negotiating of a treaty of recognition between Canada and the CSA. More than negotiation is going to happen, though...

For whatever reason, Michael was never able to get the novel published. I don't think that was due to any fault of the novel, which had an interesting and well-developed setting and was at least as readable as most of the alt-history novels being published.

Micheal has now decided to serialize it on his blog, Quipu, so you can now read it in installments and I encourage you to do so. If you like his writing, follow the blog as there will be more following Dixie's Land, or buy his historical fantasy novel, A Poisoned Prayer.

Remembering Grissom, White, and Chaffee

This year will be the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, but there are other anniversaries that should be remembered. Today is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

At 6:31 p.m. EST on Friday, 27 January 1967—52 years ago, tonight—as darkness fell over Cape Kennedy in Florida, one of the worst disasters ever to befall America’s space program unfolded with horrifying suddenness. Out at the Cape’s Pad 34 sat a two-stage Saturn IB booster, capped with the Command and Service Module (CSM) for Apollo 1. In less than a month’s time, it was hoped, Apollo 1 Command Pilot Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White—who had already earned fame as the United States’ first spacewalker—and Pilot Roger Chaffee would fly the new spacecraft for the first time in a crewed capacity in low-Earth orbit. As outlined in a recent AmericaSpace history article, those plans turned figuratively and literally to ashes in a tragedy forever known as “The Fire.”

They weren't the first to die in the quest for space, and they wouldn't be the last. As with all of the tragedies that befell the Apollo program and later, the Shuttle, their deaths were preventable. Let's hope that some of the lessons learned are still being remembered.

Featured Links - January 27, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• My weirdly wonderful weed-infused dinner party. Now that weed is legal in Canada, we'll be seeing more of this. 
• Why Science Fiction Authors Need to Be Writing About Climate Change Right Now, by Charlie Jane Anders, one of today's best SF authors.
• Microsoft's latest Windows 10 build brings better support for RAW images. It's about time!
• We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it
• Why Gen Z Loves Closed Captioning. It's good for some British shows, but otherwise, nope.
• 7 Reasons to Switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox. I use both, depending on what I'm doing.

Core Memory

In modern computing a "core" is usually considered to be a CPU or central processing unit. The term, however, had a different meaning in the early days of computing, where it meant "core memory".

This is an example of what it looked like. It's from the Apollo Guidance Computer.

Each point where the wires crossed was one bit.

Boing Boing has a long review of a new book, Core Memory, that has pictures starting from the early (really, really early) days of computing to the present. They're fascinating and gorgeous, and the early ones will be completely alien to anyone who was born before 1980 or so.

Mark Richards’s wonderful photographs capture the fascinating machines in the museum’s collection from a hyper- aesthetic viewpoint, while John Alderman’s text speaks to their unique historical context. The period covered in this book spans from the first giant machines—such as the room-filling ENIAC—to very recent personal computers.

I hope my library gets a copy. I would really like see it.

Toronto Street Art Map

The City of Toronto has created an interactive web map of street art projects in Toronto. From their website:

Toronto is home to some of the best mural, street and graffiti artists and art in the world. These artists and artworks have transformed Toronto's public streets, laneways and parks into a city-wide art gallery!

This map based app will help you explore the amazing street art located throughout the city. The current database provides a sampling of murals created as part of the StreetARToronto suite of programs from 2012 to 2018. In addition to identifying the artist and arts organization responsible for painting the mural the database describes the stories and themes behind each unique and beautiful artwork. Individually and collectively these murals are designed to celebrate the City of Toronto motto "Diversity Our Strength" and foster a greater sense of belonging among all.

Filters allow you to search by any combination of Year and/or Ward. Additional filters will be installed and the database is being updated regularly to add more artwork, so check back often!

This is very cool and works well both on my computer and phone. I expect to be using it quite a bit when we're exploring Toronto (once the temperature goes up to something closer to supporting human life). I did notice immediately the paucity of street art in the financial core and dowtown.

Thanks to Mobile Syrup for the tip and review.

2019 Edgar Award Nominations

Per File 770, the Mystery Writers of America have announced the nominations for the 2019 Edgar Awards (actually the Edgar Allen Poe Awards, but everybody calls them Edgars). "The award honors the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2018."

These are the nominees for best novel.

• The Liar’s Girl by Catherine Ryan Howard 
• House Witness by Mike Lawson 
• A Gambler’s Jury by Victor Methos
• Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
• Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne
• A Treacherous Curse by Deanna Raybourn 

I don't read many mysteries, but I have many friends (and a wife) who do, so I'm posting the list here. 

Ford Nation: How Populism Took Hold in Toronto

I live in Pickering, just east of the city of Toronto, and have spent most of the last 35 years working in Toronto, so I tend to think of myself as a Torontonian, even though I don't live there. I love the city; it's safe, multicultural, vibrant, and has more good restaurants than I could sample in a dozen lifetimes. But it's not perfect, and the major imperfections are its transit and its politics, which are tightly intertwined.

Toronto's politics has been tumultuous during the last decade and the main reason for that comes from one family, the Fords. The late Rob Ford won one term as mayor and probably would have won a second if he hadn't developed a fatal cancer. His brother, Doug Ford, won election as a city councillor and is now the premier of Ontario, a post that he has used to shaft Toronto at every opportunity.

I've made no secret of how much I detest the Fords, especially Doug, who is now in a position to do real damage to, not just Toronto, but the people of Ontario. I find it difficult to understand how a man who is so manifestly unqualified to hold public office has attained the premiership. In Ford Nation: How Populism Took Hold in Toronto, Rob Florida looks at the rise of the Ford dynasty and analyses the demographic and political factors behind it.

Before Trump, the late Rob Ford rose to power in Toronto, arguably North America’s most diverse city, filled with tall towers, dense walkable streets, and a vibrant knowledge economy, with a long history of progressivism on social issues. Rob Ford’s rise was not just a one-off event: It was part of a much broader populist movement dubbed “Ford Nation” that ended up propelling his brother Doug to the much more powerful post of premier of Ontario.

The rise of Ford’s brand of populism in Toronto is the subject of a new study by my University of Toronto colleagues Daniel Silver and Fernando Calderón-Figueroa, and Zack Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario. Their detailed research is a warning to all of us, especially to left-leaning urbanists, that populism can grow in superstar cities. So exactly how did Ford’s populism emerge in Toronto and Ontario, the largest city and largest province of a country whose national political scene is often noted as virtually immune to populism?

Florida's final words echo my thoughts exactly:

When Rob Ford’s originally rose to power in my adopted hometown of Toronto, I predicted that if he could take power in such a thriving diverse and progressive city, more would likely follow. After reading this study, I am more worried now than ever.

We're Toast 2

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change

• One Species Loves Our Climate-Wrecking Ways: Fire Ants!
• The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything
• The Insect Apocalypse is Here
• Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change
• Deadly Bird Battles May Be Another Weird Consequence of Climate Change
• Oceans Are Warming Faster Than Predicted
• Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN

Politics

• The President's Coal Warrior
• Why press coverage of the 2020 election will be a disaster (Twitter thread)
• 'Nothing on this page is real': How lies became truth in online America
• It's Not Quite Doomsday o'Clock – But It Should Be

Technology

• The Hard Math Behind Bitcoin's Global Warming Problem. It's an older article but still relevant. 
• Patent trolls celebrate as Trump's new rules breathes fresh life into parasitic grifter capitalism

GoNow App for GO Transit

I've been a regular user of GO Transit ever since I moved to Pickering almost 25 years ago. Service on the Lakeshore East line has improved markedly since then, from hourly to 15 minutes  during the day and 30 minutes on weekends. However, reliability is still an issue, especially during the winter and when they are doing track or switch maintenance (which seems to be every weekend).

GO used to have a mobile app, but dropped it a couple of years ago. Their website is reasonably mobile friendly, but not as convenient to use as a dedicated app would be. Now an outfit called Data Crunchrs has stepped in with a very useful app called GoNow.

The app provides four functions:

• View departures from Union Station.
• Search for and view schedules
• Track GO trains in real time
• View GO Transit service updates

The features are basic but useful. You can favourite a schedule so that it shows up on the Schedules tab; for example, Pickering to Union Station. The schedule selection could be easier to use, especially for the bus routes, but it does display the schedule for the current day or other dates that you select. The Tracker tab displays only GO trains on the map but does give you real-time information if you tap on a train's icon. I'd like to see the Union Station departures tab expanded so you could select departures for a specific location, such as Pickering GO.

Even with these limitations this is a very useful app and no GO train rider should be without it. I don't know if there is an IOS version for iPhones – if you're an iPhone user and can check if it's available (or suggest another equivalent app), please leave a comment.

Something Hit the Moon Sunday Night

Multiple observers have reported seeing or recording a bright flash on the moon during Sunday's total lunar eclipse. I certainly didn't see it, though I did go outside (in -27C weather) several times to look at the moon until the middle of the totality phase. It's almost certain that a large meteor hit the moon.

A number of different videos showed the same flash, at the same time and in the same place on the moon's surface. It was also cross-referenced with data from the  Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System, or MIDAS for short, which is a scientific project that watches for the faint flashes that indicate some thing has hit the moon.

All of that allowed scientists to confirm that the moon did appear to have hit something, right in the middle of the lunar eclipse.

I hope that further observations will provide more details, including an estimate of the size of the body that hit the moon, and possibly before and after images of the site of the impact, either from Earth-based telescopes or one of the orbiting satellites.

Using Sequence Fields for List Numbering in Word

List numbering in Word 2013 (and later versions) is reasonably stable, if you use a properly designed template that has been set up to use Word's Multilevel List styles. However, numbered lists in Microsoft Word can still break. The most common cause is pasting numbered paragraphs from another document. If you have a document with several numbered lists and something goes wrong with the automatic numbering, the problem can affect all of the lists in your document.

If this happens you can create a new style and then insert Sequence fields to create the numbers in the list. It may seem that this is a lot of work, but SEQ fields are stable and almost never fail.

Create the new style

To create the new style:

1. In the Home tab, click the drop-down arrow in the bottom right corner of the Styles pane. The Styles dialog box opens.
2. Click New Style. The Create New Style from Formatting dialog box opens.
3. In the Name field, type Step. 
4. Click Format, and then select Paragraph. The Paragraph dialog box opens.
5. Set a left margin of 0.5" and a hanging indent of 0.25". (These settings may change to reflect your template's style). 
6. Click Tabs.
7. On the Tabs dialog box, create a new tab at 0.75".
8. Click OK on both the Tabs and Paragraph dialog boxes.
9. On the Create New Style from Formatting dialog box, select Add to the Styles Gallery and Only in this document, then click OK.
10. Apply the new style to your numbered list.

Insert sequence fields

The numbering will be controlled by a pair of Sequence fields.

To insert the Sequence fields:

1. Put the cursor at the beginning of the first item in the list.
2. Click Insert > Quick Parts > Field.
3. On the Field dialog box, from the Field Name list, select Seq.
4. In the Field Codes entry field, type the following: SEQ Step \r 1 
5. Click OK. This creates the first number in your field
6. Add a period and a tab after the field.
7. For the remaining items in the list, do the same as above, except in step 4, enter the following in the Field Codes box: SEQ Step \n.

You can copy and paste the fields for new items or even a new list. You can also set up Word’s AutoCorrect feature to automatically insert the fields when you type something like 1] or n].

To update the fields, highlight the list and press F9. You must do this if you add or remove steps from the list.

Other sources of information

• Correct Automatic Numbering in Numbered Lists
• Autonumbering with RoboHelp and Microsoft Word
• SEQ Field Numbering

The Treasure Behind the Wall

I've been watching Art Detectives on Acorn TV and have been fascinated by how great original works of art can become lost or mislabelled over periods of years or centuries. You would think, however, that a 10 x 20 foot painting would be hard to lose. That turns out not to be the case, as this story from the New York Times shows.

When rennovating a boutique for a high-end fashion store, workers discovered a lost painting by Arnould de Vuez in 1674. It's a strikkng work and will be preserved as part of the store's rennovation and surely will bring people into the store just to see it.

Featured Links-January 20, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• 27 Free Alternatives to Adobe's Expensive App Subscriptions
• How and When You Can Access The Biggest Upcoming Google Assistant Features
• The best science images of the year: 2018 in pictures, from Nature. 
• Assistive tech can't handle the unusual fonts people use on Twitter to be cute. Don't use them!
• The 2019 Sci-Fi TV Guide. This one is from Popular Mechanics.
• Do Electric Buses Have Enough Juice? Apparently, not yet.
• When the gig economy becomes a public health issue. Not having a steady job is bad for your health. 

Rockets and People

If you're into the history of the space program, have I got a treat for you. Rockets and People is a 4-volume history of the Soviet space program, written by Russian spacecraft designer, Boris Chertok.
The link above is to volume 4, which covers the period 1968 to 1974, when the Soviet Union was in serious competition with the United States to be the first to land on the moon.

I'm particularly interested in the N-1 booster program. If the last flight had lasted another 20 seconds, the program might have continued, and the history of the space race would been very different.

You can download all four volumes for free from NASA in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF.

Getting More From Your Kindle

I've been using an Amazon Kindle now for more than six years and I'm now on my fourth one (which should have been three except my first Kindle died a month after I got it and was replaced under warranty). I rarely read paper books any more, mostly due to being so nearsighted that it's difficult. Along the way, I thought that I've figured out most of the features of my Kindle, but I still keep finding new things to explore.

This article from MakeUseOf.com has nine tips for Kindle users. Out of the nine, there were three that I didn't know about:

• View the most highlighted passages in an ebook.
• Extend your Kindle's battery life. 
• Quickly your Kindle's brightness

The article links to another article that describes twelve sites that every Kindle user should know about. Again, there were several that I haven't seen and should find useful. 

• /r/Kindle: Subreddit for Kindle users
• KBoards: Online forum for Kindle users
• Kindle4RSS: Send RSS feeds to your Kindle

Just so you know, my current Kindle is the Paperwhite 4, which Amazon introduced last fall. I was using a Paperwhite 3, but after several years the charging connector got loose, to the point where I couldn't charge it. I published a short review of it last month.

How to Identify and Report Hate Speech on Social Media

Hate speech is a growing problem on social media, but it can be hard to decide what is legitimate commentary or discussion and what is hate speech. And the various social media platforms don't make it easy for people to report hate speech.

Lifehacker has published a guide to identifying and reporting hate speech on social media, with detailed examples for the most popular sites, Twitter and Facebook. I liked the section on what to do if you get ignored and how you can escalate the process.

This article is a good one to bookmark for future reference. As we have elections coming up in Canada (this year) and the US (next year), as well as the continuing Brexit disaster in the UK, I'm sure we'll be seeing more problematic content being published.

Removing Gel Pen Stains from Your Hands

A quick household tip. Dawn dish detergent does an excellent job of removing gel pen stains from your hands. I had a leaky pen get ink on both my hands this morning. A bit of Dawn and warm water and it was gone. Normal hand soap doesn't work nearly as well.

I haven't tried any other dish detergents to see if they work as well, because Dawn is the only one we have, and the only one we've been using for several years. I'd be curious to know if any liquid dish detergent would do the same thing.

Comparing Two Documents in Word

Word makes it easy to compare two versions of a document, even if you have been working without tracking changes. You may want to compare two documents at the end of a writing cycle, rather than work with change tracking on, because change tracking can cause performance problems in large documents and may even cause Word to crash.

In these instructions, current document means the most recent revision, and original document means the version to which you are comparing the current version.

To compare two documents:

1. lose all open documents.
2. In the Ribbon, click Review > Compare. From the menu that appears, click Compare. The Compare Documents dialog box opens.
3. Select the original document and the document that you want to compare it to.
4. Select your comparison settings. Selecting only Moves and Tables, and deselecting all other options should be OK in most situations.
5. In the Show changes section, select Character level and New document.
6. Click Compare. If either of the documents contains tracked changes, you are prompted to accept them.
7. Word produces a new document, showing the changes between the current and the original document.

Word uses the Track Changes options that you have set in your copy of Word to display the changes. You set these options in the Review tab. Using an Insertions setting of Underline may be appropriate, but note that underlining generally makes blocks of text hard to read, which defeats the purpose of the review.

Better Worlds from The Verge

A lot of modern science fiction and fantasy has gotten dark and dystopian. That's why The Verge has created a new, original, online muultimedia science fiction anthology called Better Worlds.

The stories of Better Worlds are not intended to be conflict-free utopias or Pollyanna-ish paeans about how tech will solve everything; many are set in societies where people face challenges, sometimes life-threatening ones. But all of them imagine worlds where technology has made life better and not worse, and characters find a throughline of hope. We hope these stories will offer you the same: inspiration, optimism, or, at the very least, a brief reprieve that makes you feel a little bit better about what awaits us in the future — if we find the will to make it so.

There will be eleven stories, five animated adaptations, and five audio adaptations published over the next month. The first story, also published in an animated format, is "A Theory of Flight" by Justin Ireland. Among the other authors in the anthology are John Scalzi, Kelly Robson, and Rivers Solomon.

How to Play Music From Your Phone on a Google Home

We bought a Google Home speaker when they were on sale over Christmas, mainly because we wanted to be able to play music in the kitchen and dining room where having a voice-activated device made sense. However, I was disappointed to find out that it wouldn't play music that I had stored on my phone. I had naively assumed that it would work as a Bluetooth speaker, but that's not the case the Samsung Music app doesn't support casting.

It took me much longer than it should have to find the simple solution–use VLC. I must be getting slow in my old age.

Ten Google Docs Tips

MakeUseOf.com has published a list of ten Google Docs tips that they claim will make you more productive. I had to use Google  Docs at the TMX and I hated it. But if you have to use it, some of these tips should prove helpful. I'd especially recommend learning how to use the Advanced Search features and trying the integration with Google Keep.

In the future, I will probably publish some posts based on my experience with Google Docs. There are some add-ins that provide some of the features missing from the basic application.

Google Canvas: A Simple Drawing App

Google Canvas is a new, simple drawing app from Google. It's available for Android, IOS, or over the web.

I played around with the web version for a while. It looks fairly straightforward and I'm sure that someone with more drawing talent than I have (which means most people) could create something worthwhile using it. There is a wide selection of templates for it and they aren't limited to just logos or banners, so you can create documents like resumés. While the basic selection of tools is free, it's loaded with in-app links to either purchase more features or upgrade to the Canvas for Work version.

According to Mobile Syrup, who picked it as their App of the Week, "Overall, Canva is a great option for creating a variety of things, including posters, images for social media, logos and more. It’s not hard to use, and your results usually look pretty good."

Note: In the blog labels, I am going to start using FAAMG for posts about Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Nothing Is Real, At Least On the Internet

"Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about", The Beatles, Strawberry Fields.

In the last week or so, I've come across three articles that look at the unreality of content on the Internet from different perspectives, but all of them point to a world in which what you see online can't be trusted at first glance.

In How Much of the Internet Is Fake?, New York Magazine looks at the quantity of misinformation on the Internet. It's not encouraging. The article headings are: "The metrics are fake", "The people are fake", The businesses are fake", and "The content is fake", "Our politics are fake", and finally "We ourselves are fake". That's hardly encouraging, and the author doesn't offer a lot of hope:

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

'Nothing on this page is real': How lies became truth in online America looks at fake news from both the perspective of someone who creates it and someone whose political views have been shaped by it. The article starts with Christoper Blair, who runs the Facebook page, America's Last Line of Defence.

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

The article then moves on to Shirley Chapian, 76, whose main Internet activity seems to be surfing right-wing conspiracy sites.

Now another post arrived in her news feed, from a page called America’s Last Line of Defense, which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats — or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them — had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day, and this time she decided to click ‘like’ and leave a comment.

“Well, they never did have any class,” she wrote.

I'm not sure what bothers me more: Blair's casual trolling or Chapian's disregard of reality.

Finally, we have Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: ‘Everybody is a potential target’. I found this the most disturbing of the three articles, both because of the real harm being done to innocent victims that it describes, but also because of the potential long-term consequences of the technology that is now readily available.

Johansson has been superimposed into dozens of graphic sex scenes over the past year that have circulated across the Web: One video, falsely described as real “leaked” footage, has been watched on a major porn site more than 1.5 million times. She said she worries it may already be too late for women and children to protect themselves against the “virtually lawless (online) abyss."

“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. . . . The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

Leave it to a science fiction writer to focus on the second-order effects of this technology. This is from William Gibson on Twitter: "Pornographers, always in the lead with new platforms, will offer products starring literally any two or more celebrities, politicians, or your neighbors and co-workers on a custom basis, etc. Video blackmail will become extinct." It makes me wonder about the future of video as evidence in court cases.

How to Test Your PC for Failing Hardware

Modern PCs are generally reliable, certainly more reliable than they were in the dawn of the PC era (and yes, I was there, and this is a true statement).

But things can still go wrong. Often the failure is gradual or preceded by noticeable warning signs. About three years ago my PC's hard drive gave me a SMART warning. I immediately bought a new hard drive and had the contents of the old drive Ghosted on to it. I am still using the old drive for backing up files and it's still working fine, so go figure. But it could have died and I wasn't prepared to take the chance.

MakeUseOf.com has an article about how to test your PC for failing equipment. It's loaded with tips and information about useful tools. Bookmark this one. It might come in handy some day.

The parts that most commonly break are fans, hard disk drives, CPUs, and GPUs.

RAM also tends to fail too. It is continually being written and re-written to (flashed). Solid-state memory can only handle so many flashes before it begins to fail. The problem also applies to solid-state hard drives.

The best way to avoid being caught out is to perform regular hardware diagnostic tests on your computer. Here’s how to do hardware tests on Windows 10.

Featured Links-January 12, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Outback regeneration at Bon Bon station reserve – a picture essay
• Toronto street scenes from 1943. A short colour film from Toronto during WWII. Note how grimy everything looks.
• The North Face's New Breathable, Waterproof Fabric Might Be the Holy Grail of Outdoor Gear. I want a summer jacket using this fabric.
• Canadian plans to transport oil as solid briquettes move forward. If we have to transport this stuff, this looks like a good way of doing it.
• How The Lord of the Rings Changed Publishing Forever. At the very least, it created a new publishing genre.
• The Average Spotify Subscriber Pays $5.50 a Month – and Record Labels Hate It

Fake News: Samsung's Uninstallable Facebook App

I came across a couple of stories about this yesterday along with the predictable outrage, and thought I'd post about it before I see more upset posts. The stories claimed that Samsung is installing a version of Facebook on their phones that can't be uninstalled.

Per thurrott.com, it's not true. They are installing a stub app that's basically just an installer, but doesn't do anything else. The user can still uninstall Facebook (if they've first installed it) and can disable the stub app. It'll remain in the phone, but won't do anything.

Personally, I hate pre-installed apps that can't be deleted (Rogers puts several on their phones), but given the storage and memory capacity of modern phones, it's pretty much a non-issue.

Free Dead & Company

In preparation for their upcoming spring tour, Dead & Company, the current incarnation of the Grateful Dead, have made recordings of some of their recent live shows free to listen to.

Over the next two months, we'll be truckin' along with the Dead & Company Digital Concert Series featuring all 19 complete shows from the group’s Fall/Winter 2017-18 tour. The series begins today with the release of all three of the original “Playing In The Sand” shows that were recorded February 15, 17, and 18, 2018, in advance of the second annual “Playing In The Sand” all-inclusive concert vacation in Riviera Maya, Mexico next weekend. The band will release two more complete live shows digitally every week.

The shows will be available on all the major streaming services (I'm listening to 2/17/2018 on Spotify) and you can buy the lossless versions from Dead.net. As you'd expect, sound quality is first rate.

Are Vegan Burgers Getting as Good as the Real Thing?

If this article is to be believed, vegan meat substitutes may have reached the point where they taste as good as the real thing. The Impossible Burger 2.0, described in this article, will be available in supermarkets in the fall.

At the Impossible Burger event in Las Vegas, I watched a pink patty turn crispy brown and then find its way to a bun, a sauce, and a plate that appeared in front of me, and I can’t lie. I chomped it, and I felt joy. If I were a better former vegetarian, I’d express some point about how I thought this new burger stood the chance of saving rainforests or transforming how we eat protein, but that’s not what was going through my head when I was munching on this faux cow sandwich. The Impossible Burger 2.0 just tasted great. Alongside a cold Shake Shack burger, it tasted very great. I’d go so far as to say that it would still taste great if that Shake Shack burger had been hot and lovely. The fact that I’m fantasizing about the ultimate perfectly matched Shake Shack versus Impossible Burger battle royale says a lot.

I am prepared to believe that this claim might be true. I've eaten at the Cosmic Treats cafe in Kensington Market a couple of times, and their "italian sausage" sandwich, to my taste, would fool me into thinking it was real meat if I didn't know better. 

Near Toronto? Right!

According to the headline at BlogTO.com, the north shore of Lake Superior near Sault Ste. Marie is now "near Toronto". That's one of the best examples of Toronto centrism that I've seen in quite a while. Maybe Doug Ford will add the Sault to the list of destinations to which he's going to build a subway. Admittedly, the article does quality the term "near", but still.

Ice caves near Toronto ranked as one of the top places to visit in the world

The New York Times just dropped its ultra prestigious annual list of "52 Places to Go" in the world, and one of the spots to make the cut is right in your own backyard... relatively speaking.

Aside from Calgary, the scenic ice caves along Lake Superior's northern shore are the only destination in Canada to have made NYT's influential travel guide this year.

Changing Image Size in Word

Since it's Wednesday, it's time for a Word post.

In versions of Word before Word 2013, the fastest way to resize a picture (such as a screen capture) to an exact size was to right-click on it and select Format Picture from the context menu. That opened a dialog box with options to resize the picture, either by absolute value or by scaling by percentage, and would allow you maintain the aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height). In other words, you could change the width and the height would change to match so you didn’t distort the image.

In Word 2013, if you right-click on a picture and select Format Picture, it opens a sidebar with various options, one of which is Crop.

Changing size in that sidebar will not maintain the aspect ratio. Instead, you want to select Size and Position from the context menu. That opens the original Layout dialog box which lets you keep the aspect ratio intact as well as adjusting the position of the graphic on the page.

Just to make things even more confusing, when you select an image, a Picture Tools Format tab opens in the ribbon. 

 

That has fields for adjusting the image size, and they do maintain aspect ratio; however, in the ribbon there doesn't appear to be away to turn that option off.

Of course, you can always resize the image with the sizing handles, but it's harder to get an exact size.

SF&F TV Shows and Movies Coming in 2019

It's a good thing that I now have a real TV because it looks like 2019 is going to be a banner year for science fiction and fantasy TV series and movies. io9 has compiled two articles listing all (more or less) the genre TV shows and movies you can look forward to this year.

As well as the returning shows that we'll all want to watch (American Gods, Game of Thrones, and The Expanse probably being the three biggies), here are a few of the shows I'm looking forward to:

• A Discover of Witches
• Kingdom
• Good Omens
• His Dark Materials
• Lovecraft Country
• War of the Worlds
• Watchmen

As for movies, I would like to see these:

• Glass
• Captive State
• Ad Astra
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters
• Men in Black International

This Is How Canada's Housing Correction Begins

There is a good article in Maclean's about the housing market in Canada and how it's starting to implode. Contributing factors are the rise in interest rates imposed by the Bank of Canada and tightened mortgage lending and renewal rules put in place by the federal government. If you own a home in Canada or are hoping to buy one, you need to read this article.

Now rates are rising, and many heavily indebted households are feeling crunched. In 2018, the Bank of Canada increased its benchmark rate three times to 1.75 per cent. Another two or three hikes are expected in 2019. For the first time in a quarter century, households are having to renew their mortgages at rates that are higher than when they first signed.

At the same time, the federal government has steadily tightened mortgage standards. Federally regulated lenders must put potential borrowers through stress tests, whether they’re applying for an insured or uninsured mortgage, to determine their ability to repay. The new mortgage rules have reduced the amount Canadians can afford to borrow by around 20 per cent, sending home sales tumbling across much of the country.

It’s a one-two punch that has shaken the foundations of the housing market, put an immediate dent in consumer spending and left economists and market observers wondering how deep the hit to the economy will be. “Maybe it’s just a moment and the market will rebound again like it has in the past, but maybe this is finally the perfect storm,” says Steve Saretsky, a Vancouver real estate agent. “I think we’re seeing the catalyst for a correction that everyone’s been talking about for 10 years.”

One data point: one of the town houses in our row is up for sale. The asking price is $100,000 less than that of our next door neighbour who bought two years ago.

15 Tips and Tricks for Chrome on Android

I use Chrome as my default browser on Android. Given that Android is Google's operating system, it makes sense. But I've never found it a particularly intuitive browser.

Android Police have put together a collection of 15 tips and tricks for Chrome on Android and several of them cover problems that I've had. Here are a few of them:

• Copy the current URL faster
• Tap a word to search for it
• Add a Home button
• Zoom on any website

Some of them are of no use for me – I have no need to save pages as PDF, for example, but you'll probably find something useful here if you use Chrome.

Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2019

Every year SF author and futurist Bruce Sterling moderates a discussion on the state of the world. It's free wheeling, wide ranging, and always worthwhile reading. This year's edition is up on The Well (yes, it's still around). He's currently living in Ibizia.

Here's part of his take on Brexit:

Since I do hang out in Belgrade, I have a pretty good idea of what economic sanctions can do to people and their societies.   And yeah, the lack of trade agreements will probably deal with that immigration free-movement problem they think they have.   That annoying flow of job-stealing migrants, and the free-spending tourists, are both gonna vanish like the dew, because there's no genuine difference: they're both human meat on  the hoof.  

       Sanctions against world trade are very effective, if you really, really want to carve a place like Yugoslavia into quarrelling micronational bits.  That this fate would happen, by choice, to a nuclear power that's a permanent member of the UN Security Council, well, that's pretty interesting.   Not the bureaucratic process, what is boring, but what it does to people inside: getting balkanized.

      I sure wouldn't wanna be trapped inside that situation -- because in 2018, the British were the gloomiest and doomiest that I've ever seen 'em.  They all know they're about to pound nails through their naked feet with big hammers.  I reckon that Ibiza will be an interesting ringside seat for that.

Enabling Dark Mode in Windows 10

I have a 28" monitor and staring at a screen with a white background is a guaranteed way to end up with a headache from eye strain. So as much as possible, I use dark mode in my web browsers (the Dark Reader extension in Chrome and the Dark theme and the Owl extension in Firefox).

But until recently, Windows didn't have a dark mode setting for its own applications. That's been fixed (somewhat) in the October 2018 update which showed up on my PC a couple of weeks ago. You can enable dark mode in Settings > Personalization > Colors. It works for Microsoft's own apps, including File Explorer, Settings, and the Windows app store.

It should also work in Office applications, if you have a more recent version of Office than Office 2013. Unfortunately, I am still using Office 2013, so I'm stuck with the blinding white screen in Word. That might be enough of a reason to consider upgrading Office (or to convert my files to Google Docs).

For email, I mostly use Mozilla Thunderbird. The default Mozilla Dark theme changes only the menu bar, which isn't much use, so I use a third-party theme called TT Deep Dark. It changes everything except the message content, so it's not perfect but it's better than the default.

Featured Links–January 6, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• The Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Cambell, and the Origins of Scientology. You can't understand Scientology without knowing about Hubbard's history as a science fiction writer.
• The Marriage of Structure and Semantics. Some thoughts on the great divide in content management by content strategist, Joe Golliner.
• Manual introducing the BASIC computer language from Dartmouth College in 1964 (PDF link). If only all computer language documentation was this well written.
• The Mad Scramble to Retrieve the World's Most Coveted Meteorite. This was the best science-related article I've read in some time.
• How To Take Back Your Facebook News Feed. An essential article if you use Facebook. 
• Forbes Is Developing More AI Tools for Its Reporters: Technical writers, editors, and reporters–your jobs will be at risk soon too.

Pathmap needs more

If you visit downtown Toronto at lunch hour in February,  you may think that there's been a zombie apocalypse; almost no one is out on the street. It's not zombies; they're all 20 feet underground in Toronto's sprawling PATH network.

The PATH is a godsend in a winter city like Toronto (and it's good for hot, steamy summer days too), but it's huge and everything looks pretty much like everything else–a giant shopping mall built by a hundred different landlords. It's easy to get lost, especially if you don't come downtown often. I worked in downtown Toronto for more than thirty years and have gotten lost a few times, especially when trying to navigate to a new building.

A couple of years ago the PATH organization started updating their map (PDF link), which is posted all over the PATH. It's a big improvement over the previous version. But it's not interactive.

That need is served by a new third-party app, Pathmap, available for both IOS and Android. The app shows similar information to the offiical map, but it's searchable in that you can enter starting and ending points and see the route you have to take. You can either select the from and to points on the map or search for the name of a building or business.

The app has some rough edges–I found searching to be unreliable when trying to find a business. The basic navigation works well enough. What would be handy would be a link to a list of businesses and buildings, something like that in the PDF of the official PATH map.

I will be keeping this on my phone. It's a handy tool for getting around downtown Toronto.

12 Web Design Trends for 2019

During the last year I was at TMX, I spent quite a bit of time learning some new web design skills. I redesigned my internal documentation web site using the W3.CSS framework and rebuilt my online documentation and web-based help using the latest version of WebWorks ePublisher's Reverb skin, which is now based on SASS. It's a long way from the hand crafted HTML and CSS that I used to build my personal web site. And what I was doing was much less sophisticated than what a profession web designer would be doing, but it did give me an appreciation of how complex web design tools have gotten.

Shopify's Partners blog interviewed twelve web designers and content strategists to look at what trends they expected to see in 2019. It's an interesting and varied list, and I have to admit that I haven't heard of much of the items discussed; for example, ambient design and intrinsic design.

The term "Intrinsic Web Design" was coined by Mozilla designer advocate Jen Simmons last year, and it’s something we will hear a lot more about in 2019.

Self-taught designer and developer Chen Hui Jing thinks it’s a very apt term.

“The word ‘intrinsic’ is defined as ‘belonging to the essential nature or constitution of a thing,’” she explains. “When we talk about the web as a visual medium, the canvas is the browser. Browser capabilities have reached a point where we can do a lot of creative things, using the tools and properties the way they were meant to be used—instead of hacks and workarounds to overcome the limitations of the browsers.”

Most of the article is focused on design trends, but there are a couple of sections that should be of interest to technical writers and those focused more on content development. 

The Inter UI Font Family

InterUI is a free, open source font that has been designed for legibility at small sizes.

Inter UI is a typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens.

The family features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

The web site has full details the design philosophy behind it and how to download and use it. It looks like it would be a good font to use in tables, which are often formatted in a smaller font size than body text.

Backing Up Your Word Options

Microsoft Word stores options and personal customizations in several different places. It's a good idea to back these up periodically, in case you ever have to reinstall Word, or one of the files gets corrupted or deleted.

These instructions are for Word 2013 but should work for other recent versions of Word.

normal.dotm

Many of Word’s options and configuration settings are stored in the template file, normal.dotm. It is also the default container for any macros that you create.

The default location for normal.dotm is: [YourDrive]:\My Documents\Templates.

You should back up this file frequently. A corrupt normal.dotm file is one of the most common causes of problems with Word.
You can delete normal.dotm at any time and Word will create a new version when you restart it.

Key Assignments

Word allows you to customize the keystrokes used to invoke commands and apply paragraph and character formatting, but offers no way to back them up. The best you can do is to print out a list of your custom key assignments.

To print out a list of custom key assignments:

1. Choose File > Print. The Print page opens.
2. In the Settings section, click Print What Pages. From the menu that appears, select Key Assignments.
3. Click OK. The list is printed.

Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar customizations

You can back up customizations that you have made to the ribbon and the Quick Access toolbar (QAT), but you have to do both together. AFAIK, there is no way to backup just ribbon customizations or Quick Access toolbar customizations.

To back up your ribbon and QAT customizations:

1. In the File tab, click Options. The Word Options dialog box opens.
2. In the left pane, click either Customize Ribbon or Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
3. Below the right list of options click Import/Export.
4. From the menu that appears choose Export all customizations. A File Save as dialog box opens.
5. Save the file. By default, the file name is WordCustomizations.exportedUI, but you can choose any file name you want.

To restore your saved customizations, follow steps 1 to 3, then in step 4 choose Import customization file.

What I Read in 2018

In the previous version of this blog, I was writing monthly posts about the books I read. I am going to start doing that again, although they may not be monthly. Despite being retired, I don't have more time to read (or so it seems) and I am reading a lot more news online now than I used to.

So I'll start by listing the books I read in 2018 (as many as I can remember) with short comments on each.

• Autonomous by Annalee Newitz: A near-future SF novel set in Canada's north featuring gene hacking, climate change, and self-aware robots. One of the most auspicious debut novels in quite a while.
• The Gripping Hand by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: This is the sequel to their classic The Mote in God's Eye. It's not as good but I still enjoyed rereading it. 
• Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds: The latest in his Revelation Space series and a sequel to The Prefect. A complex and vivid novel. 
• Time Was by Ian McDonald: A wonderful time-travel love story and a paean to the power of books and reading, told in McDonald's pellucid prose. This was the best book I read last year. 
• The Great Quake by Henry Fountain: A gripping history of the great Alaskan earthquake of 1964 and the science of geology at a time when the idea of plate tectonics was just gaining prominence. 
• The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal. The story of the first expedition to Mars in an alternate history where the Earth has been struck by a giant meteor in 1952. These books got a lot of attention and deservedly so. 
• The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross: The latest in his long-running Laundry Files urban fantasy series. I didn't enjoy this as much as some of the earlier books in the series. 
• The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Third Annual Collection: These were the gold standard for "best of" SF anthologies and this one didn't disappoint. Sadly, Dozois died earlier in the year and I don't know if the series will continue. 
• Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1) by A. G. Riddle: A near future thriller that starts out with a deadly plague and then devolves into a weird conspiracy tale. I didn't finish it. 
• Testimony by Robbie Robertson: Robbie Robertson's autobiography, up to when he left The Band after the last waltz. 
• Night Drive by Garnet Rogers: Garnet's story of his early career spent touring with his late brother, Stan. 

It wasn't a big year for books; I spent too much time reading articles downloaded from the Internet via Pocket. Looking at my list of purchased and wanted books, I realize that I will have to spend more time reading books this year. 

Featured Links - January 2, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• The Grand Tor: How to Go Anonymous Online. I'm saving this one for future reference, just in case.
• How Chip Makers Are Circumventing Moore's Law to Build Super-Fast CPUs of Tomorrow. Smaller, faster, cheaper.
• A Not-So-Brief History of Racism from Andrew Scheer's Conservative Party. As if I needed more reasons to not vote Conservative.
• The Bristish Library's flickr page. Over a million illustrations from books in their collection.
• The Year of the Affected Generation. Hope for the future lies in the millennial generation.