Shopping Safe On Amazon

Shopping on Amazon can be convenient, fast, and may save you money. But you can also end up with a late shipment of a substandard product that you paid too much for. Wired has some good tips for getting the most out of Amazon and avoiding hassles.

Some of the tips, like trying to buy products that are sold and shipped directly by Amazon, will likely be familiar to most people. But there are quite a few more things that you can do that I wasn't aware of, as well as some suggestions for browser extensions and sites you can use to check out sellers.

NASA Still Plans to Use SLS for First Lunar Mission

I posted a while back about NASA looking to alternatives to its troubled Space Launch System for the planned first Lunar mission of its Orion spacecraft. They've now completed a preliminary review and it looks like there aren't any alternatives available that would save them time.

However, they are considering options that they may be able to exploit later. The article on NASA Spaceflight.com goes into quite a bit of detail. I do hope that they will explore alternatives to the SLS, whic is basically a boondoggle created to keep as many former Shuttle-era programs in business.

Still, the Administration is not closing the door on looking at alternate launch options for Orion, especially in light of the subsequently announced goal to land Americans on the Moon within the next five years.

“There is a solution here that could potentially work for the future,” Administrator Bridenstine said in a NASA agency-wide town hall meeting on April 1. “It would require time, it would require cost, and there is risk involved but guess what? If we’re going to land boots on the Moon in 2024, we have time and we have the ability to accept some risk, make some modifications, all of that is on the table.”

“There is nothing sacred here that is off the table and that is a potential capability that could help us land boots on the Moon in 2024.”

Web Artichtecture 101

I wish that I had had this article when I started working on documentation for large, complex systems. It would have saved me a lot of time and effort tracking down information. Also, web architecture has gotten a lot more complex since then (mid-1990s) and some of the technologies mentioned in the article didn't exist then.

Cosmology May Be In For a Shakeup

We've known for many years that the universe is exapnding. The speed of the expansion is called the Hubble constant and there are two ways of measuring it: looking at the cosmic background radiation (the embers of the Big Bang) or measuring the distance to a type of stars called Cepheid variables. The two numbers should agree, but they don't.

This is causing some consternation among cosmologists, the astronomers who study the large scale universe. The discrepancy is now several percent, which is many times observational error. So it means that there's something basic that they're missing.

"The Hubble tension between the early and late Universe may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades," said astrophysicist Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University.

"This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This disparity could not plausibly occur by chance."

Which means that there's something out there that we've missed. As a study last year deriving the Hubble Constant using black holes proposed, the acceleration could be the result of an increase in the density of dark energy.

I'll be watching developments with some interest. 

Featured Links - April 28, 2019

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

• YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant. How YouTube turned into a cesspool. 
• In praise of the Yukon Gold potato. It's a Canadian success story. 
• A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy. The rise of Candida auris embodies a serious and growing public health threat: drug-resistant germs.
• NASA and FEMA Will Simulate an Impending Asteroid Strike Next Week. It's the ones they don't detect in advance that worry me.
• How the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster Looks to a Software Developer. Design shortcuts meant to make a new plane seem like an old, familiar one are to blame.
• Better, Safer Sex: On the Hunt for a Condom People Will Actually Like. As STD rates rise, researchers are looking to reinvent the most reliable disease-preventing contraception

Who's Really Running Ontario?

Here's a Twitter thread from someone who had a late-night conversation with Doug Ford. It raises the question of who's really running this province, because Ford obvious has no clue about what his government is doing to us.

100 Writers in Canada the World Should Read

The CBC has compiled a list they call 100 writers in Canada the World Should Read with links to a page for each writer.

I've had a look at the list and most of the names are unfamiliar. I'm not sure what the selection criteria were but I found some notable omissions. The SF genre is represented by Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a few others, but where's Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Watts, or Robert J. Sawyer? Or out of the genre, Linwood Barclary, Linden McIntyre, or Giles Blunt?

Still, it's good to see our writers being recognized. Thirty years ago, you'd never have seen a list like this being compiled.

Book Catalog Software

I have been looking for software to help me catalog our book collection, because we want to sell off as much as we can. The bulk of it is science fiction and fantasy, with quite a few signed first editions, both hardcover and paperback.

I wanted something that I could use on my phone to scan ISBNs and have the software enter the basic data. I spent too much time today fiddling with various apps, but I think I've settled on LibraryThing. It is primarily web-based but has an Android app that I can use to scan the ISBN directly into its database, which is stored online. That makes it easy for me to edit items on the PC, which is much easier than trying to fiddle with a small phone screen. It also lets me customize how it displays lists and add tags and categories.

LibraryThing has many social features, akin to Goodreads, but I have little or no interest in that part of the application. And it's free, which is a plus.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has used it, or has other tools to recommend.

Encrypting Your Life

You may already be doing some of the things mentioned in this article, but if you aren't you probably should be.

“Only the paranoid survive.” — Andy Grove

Andy Grove was a Hungarian refugee who escaped communism, studied engineering, and ultimately led the personal computer revolution as the CEO of Intel. He died earlier this year in Silicon Valley after a long fight with Parkinson’s disease.

When one of the most powerful people in the world encourages us to be paranoid, maybe we should listen.

And Grove isn’t the only powerful person urging caution. Even the director of the FBI — the same official who recently paid hackers a million dollars to unlock a shooter’s iPhone — is encouraging everyone to cover their webcams.

But you obey the law. What do you have to worry about? As the motto of the United Kingdom’s surveillance program reminds us, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Well, law-abiding citizens do have reason to fear. They do have reasons to secure their devices, their files, and their communications with loved ones.

At the very least, you should use 2-factor authentication on your online accounts where it's available, encrypt your hard drive and phone, and use the TOR network for any web browsing that you think might be at all sensitive.

We're Toast 6

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 and Environment

• Tall ice-cliffs may trigger big calving events -- and fast sea-level rise.
• The Climate Change Solution That Could Spark Global War. An all too plausible scenario.
• Polar Warning: Even Antarctica's Coldest Region Is Starting To Melt. Time to sell that Florida beachfront condo. 
• As the World Warms, Clouds Could Disappear—Catastrophically. I have read some differing opinions on the likelihood that this could happen.
• Canada warming at twice the global rate, leaked report finds.
• The Worst Disease Ever Recorded, especially if you're a frog.
• This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out. 

Politics

• The Chinafication of the internet continues as the UK proposes blocking any service that hosts "illegal" or "harmful" material.
• (How) American Collapse Resembles Soviet Collapse. 

Technology

• Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox On Us All. Probably a bigger threat than a rogue AI.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

I continue to be impressed by Douglas Preston's science writing. He's probably best known as a novelist, both on his own and in collaboration with Lee Child. But a couple of years ago, he published The Lost City of the Monkey God, about the discovery of Mayan ruins lost for centuries in the Honduran jungle and his struggle with leptospirosis, which he contracted while writing the book. It was one of the best non-fiction books I've read in years.

Now he's written The Day the Dinosaurs Died, a long article in the New Yorker, about what may be the most significant paleontological find of all time—fossils that were buried minutes after the impact that killed the dinosaurs. The article is also a profile of the young geologist, Robert DePalma, who discovered them.

The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-­section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another. Glass turns to clay over millions of years, and these tektites were now clay, but some still had glassy cores. The microtektites he had found earlier might have been carried there by water, but these had been trapped where they fell—on what, DePalma believed, must have been the very day of the disaster.

“When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t just any flood deposit,” DePalma said. “We weren’t just near the KT boundary—this whole site is the KT boundary!” From surveying and mapping the layers, DePalma hypothesized that a massive inland surge of water flooded a river valley and filled the low-lying area where we now stood, perhaps as a result of the KT-impact tsunami, which had roared across the proto-Gulf and up the Western Interior Seaway. As the water slowed and became slack, it deposited everything that had been caught up in its travels—the heaviest material first, up to whatever was floating on the surface. All of it was quickly entombed and preserved in the muck: dying and dead creatures, both marine and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks, roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs; tektites, shocked minerals, tiny diamonds, iridium-laden dust, ash, charcoal, and amber-smeared wood. As the sediments settled, blobs of glass rained into the mud, the largest first, then finer and finer bits, until grains sifted down like snow.

 If you have any interest at all in dinosaurs, paleontology, or geography, you will enjoy this article. It's a marvellous example of science journalism that reminds me of the great John McPhee at his best.

DePalma's research has recently been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Chicxulub impact played a crucial role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction. However the earliest postimpact effects, critical to fully decode the profound influence on Earth’s biota, are poorly understood due to a lack of high-temporal-resolution contemporaneous deposits. The Tanis site, which preserves a rapidly deposited, ejecta-bearing bed in the Hell Creek Formation, helps to resolve that long-standing deficit. Emplaced immediately (minutes to hours) after impact, Tanis provides a postimpact “snapshot,” including ejecta accretion and faunal mass death, advancing our understanding of the immediate effects of the Chicxulub impact. Moreover, we demonstrate that the depositional event, calculated to have coincided with the arrival of seismic waves from Chicxulub, likely resulted from a seismically coupled local seiche.

You'll probably want to read the paper as after you've read Preston's article. It's cleanly written and despite lots of technical details, should be comprehensible to lay readers.

Update: Here's a short video about the discovery from the PBS show, Nova.

Document360: A New Authoring and Publishing Tool

The ever intersting Tom Johnson has written a first look at a new (to me, at least) documentation tool, Document 360. From his article summary:

Document360 is a new authoring and publishing tool that spans the needs of both support teams creating KB content and technical writers creating documentation. Document360 provides a good balance of features that will satisfy both audiences. Launched in July 2017, Document360 is already growing rapidly with a robust customer base. In this post, I'll show screenshots related to many of these features and talk about the need to bridge the gap betAtween KB and tech doc content.

After reading Tom's article, and looking through the Document360 documentation (which is written in Document360), I agree with his assessment that it looks like a good tool for creating help content, especially if that content is being shared with or provided by a support group. To me, it looks like something like a cross between a good wiki (Confluence, perhaps) and a database-driven tool like ServiceNow. However, there are limitations that would have made it unsuitable for quite a bit of my documentation when I was working, like having to write in Markdown (I can't imagine having to do complex tables that way).

Why Software Projects Take Longer Than You Thnk

If you've worked in IT, you've seen it happen. A software project that seems straightforward ends up taking longer than originally estimated, sometimes a lot longer. Of course, the same is true for writing projects—sometimes the delay is because the overarching project runs into problems, other times the estimates for the writing project are just way off.

It's possible to apply statistical modelling to project planning and there may be a mathematical basis to some project delays. My university stats are pretty rusty, but the math in this article isn't that complex and seems reasonable.

Again, one single misbehaving task basically ends up dominating the calculation, at least for the 99% case. Even for mean though, the one freak project ends up taking over roughly half the time spend on these tasks, despite all of these tasks having a similar median time to completion. To make it simple, I assumed that all tasks have the same estimated size, but different uncertainties. The same math applies if we vary the size as well.

Funny thing is I’ve had this gut feeling for a while. Adding up estimates rarely work when you end up with more than a few tasks. Instead, figure out which tasks have the highest uncertainty – those tasks are basically going to dominate the mean time to completion.

What Really Happened to Vladimir Komarov

Fifty-two years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during an operational space mission when his capsule's parachutes failed to open after re-entry. Over the years, starting almost immediately after his death, there have been numerous and varying reports about what happened. For an example, see this Twitter thread, which among other things claims that Soviet Premier Kosygin spoke to Komarov as his capsule was falling to Earth.

But he didn't.

A couple of years ago, The Space Review published a two-part article (Part One, Part Two) citing Russian records and resources, including transcripts of the communication between ground crews and the capsule, to explain what really happened on that mission. It's clear from reading the article that Komarov was in trouble, almost as soon as he attained orbit, and his death was due to a design flaw in the parachute mechanism.

This current article is an attempt to use the transcripts, along with other Russian language sources, to offer a new and comprehensive account of this deeply misunderstood mission. The available evidence clearly shows that not only was Komarov not in hysterics, but that he communicated calmly and cogently throughout the mission, and only with people who he was supposed to be in touch with: cosmonaut communicators, flight directors, and chief designers. These transcripts also provide crucial detail on what exactly happened in orbit and how mission control and Komarov tried to bring a very faulty ship under control. The proximate cause of Komarov’s death was clearly a faulty parachute deployment system. But, more broadly, when Komarov boarded his spacecraft for liftoff, the Soyuz spacecraft was incontrovertibly not ready for crewed flight. And some of the blame for the tragedy must fall on three broader factors: political pressure to accomplish a mission in time for several anniversaries in 1967, the need to reassert Soviet dominance in space after a lull, and a management culture that discouraged dissenting voices.

It's a solid piece of research into a mission that should never have happened.

Stand on Zanzibar Is On Sale

Great book on sale alert. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar is on sale for $2.99 on most online ebook stores. It's one of the best books of the 1960s and probably Brunner's best work. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favour and grab it now.

Featured Links - April 21, 2019

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

• 7 Windows Files and Folders You Can Delete to Free Up Space. Some good tips here for Windows users.
• Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures. I know several SF writers who have successful second careers as futurists. 
• Dragonblood: Analysing WPA3's Dragonfly Handshake. The new Wi-Fi security protocol has already been hacked. 
• Designing the First Full-Time Human Habitat on the Moon. Shades of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
• Huawei P30 Pro Camera Review: Breaking the rules. I think this might be my next phone. 
• China Finds Phone-Wielding Tourists and Telescopes Don't Mesh

Off for the Weekend

It's Easter weekend and I don't think many people will be waiting with bated breath for my next blog post, so I'm taking the weekend off. Enjoy the spring, and I'll see you Monday or Tuesday.

Five Simple Project Management Tools

There are times when you may want to use a project management tool for a project, but a top-of-the-line tool like Microsoft Project isn't available or is overkill. This article describes five free tools that might be suitable for small or personal projects (home renovation comes to mind).

Out of the five tools, I'm inclined to recommend the one that's a Google Sheets workbook. Just make a copy in your Google Drive and away you go.

Building a Text Editor for the New York Times

I'm sure I'm not the only technical writer who has fantasized about building my own text editor or word processor. A lucky team at the New York Times got the chance to do exactly that and built an editor for use by the Times' newsroom staff. As you might expect, the Times had some requirements specific to the newspaper business, but what they built would probably keep most technical writers quite happy.

As the newsroom evolves, we envisioned a new story editor that would visually bring the different components of stories inline, so that reporters and editors alike could see exactly what a story would look like before it publishes. Additionally, the new approach would ideally be more intuitive and flexible in its code implementation, avoiding many of the problems caused by the older editor.

With these two goals in mind, my team set out to build this new text editor, which we named Oak. After much research and months of prototyping, we opted to build it on the foundation of ProseMirror, a robust open-source JavaScript toolkit for building rich-text editors. ProseMirror takes a completely different approach than our old text editor did, representing the document using its own non-HTML tree-shaped data structure that describes the structure of the text in terms of paragraphs, headings, lists, links and more.

Unlike the output of our old editor, the output of a text editor built on ProseMirror can ultimately be rendered as a DOM tree, Markdown text or any other number of other formats that can express the concepts it encodes, making it very versatile and solving many of the problems we run into with our legacy text editor.

The article goes into a fair bit of technical detail. If you're a tools geek like I am, you'll find it quite fascinating. It's notable that the editor is based on ProseMirror, an open source JavaScript toolkit, and doesn't use DITA.

G Suite Gets Office Editing

The Office Watch Newsletter reports that Google's G Suite customers will soon get the ability to directly edit Microsoft Office documents from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. This is big news for companies that have users on both platforms.

According to Google document participants will be able to use Microsoft Office or G Suite:

” … where some members of your organization use Office while others use G Suite, this ensures seamless collaboration and eliminates the need to consider or convert file types.”

They imply that real time collaboration is possible.

“Office editing brings everyone the benefits of G Suite’s real time collaboration tools and intelligence features to Office files.”

Anyone who has tried it knows that Microsoft continues to have problems with document collaboration and real-time interaction.  Getting it to work across platforms will be ‘interesting’.

If I were still working, I'd have reservations about letting anyone mess with some of my carefully crafted Word documents, so I'll be quite interested in hearing how this works in practice. Unfortunately, I won't be able to test it myself, since it's currently only rolling out to G Suite customers. 

Nemesis Games: A Review

Nemesis Games is the fifth book in the successful Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. The series is now up to eight books (with a final ninth book planned) and is the basis of a successful and very good TV series. 

While the first four books largely dealt with the fight against the alien protomolecule, this one starts with the crew of the Rocinante off on separate journeys while the ship is in dry dock. Then the Earth is hit by a giant meteor and the action picks up, but it's all contained to the solar system; there's nothing beyond the newly found gates to the rest of the universe.  

This installment feels very much like a transitional book, or a lead-in to the next one. We find out much more about the background of the main characters, especially Naomi, who plays a key role in the story, and most of the action revolves around the politics of the new (and now unstable) solar system. It felt claustrophobic.

It took me a long time to get into Nemesis Games. It starts out slow and doesn't pick up until about a third way through. The character development seemed awkward, and I found myself skimming a lot. 

Overall, I think this is the weakest of the Expanse series so far. I have started reading the next book, Babylon's Ashes, because it continues on directly from the end of Nemesis Games. I hope it will expand the scope of the story back to the fuller setting unveiled in the first four books. 

Louisiana Is An Omen of the Future of Our Coasts

The coast os Lousiana is disappearing. It's not just because of sea-level rise, although that's a contributing factor. Decades of attempts to control the course of the Mississippi river have disrupted the natural cycle of flooding and sediment deposits that built the original river delta. Without that sediment the land eventually disappears.

This long article in the New Yorker describes what it's like to live in a part of the world that's fighting a losing battle against the ocean.

Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on Earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teen-agers. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place-names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.

And what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. Since the days of Huey Long, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U.S. would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.

It's a compelling article (it reminded me of John McPhee at his peak), fascinating for both the technical details and the human predicament. But in the end, what's most sobering, although not explicitly stated, is the thought that the effort going into saving this one small part of the coastline will have to be multiplied by a thousand as sea levels continue to rise. 

Laser Scans May Help To Restore Notre Dame

Modern technology may help to restore Notre Dame after yesterday's terrible fire. National Geographic published an article in 2015 describing how art historians used lasers to create a detailed 3D map of the inside and outside of the cathedral.

Tallon figured out how to knit the laser scans together to make them manageable and beautiful. Each time he makes a scan, he also takes a spherical panoramic photograph from the same spot that captures the same three-dimensional space. He maps that photograph onto the laser-generated dots of the scan; each dot becomes the color of the pixel in that location in the photograph.

As a result, the stunningly realistic panoramic photographs are amazingly accurate. At Notre Dame, he took scans from more than 50 locations in and around the cathedral—collecting more than one billion points of data.

Update: Here's an article that desribes how the architecture of the cathedral could have saved much of the interior.

How To Run Diagnostic Tests on Your Smartphone

Modern smartphones are complicated little beasts. If you're having a problem, it can be hard to figure out whether it's caused by hardware or software. As this article points out, you may be able to access a couple of built-in diagnostic menus by dialing a short code.

The article gives two codes for Android smartphones. The first one worked on both mine and my wife's phones but the second didn't do anything. This is the diagnostic menu that the first code opens.

The article also information about iPhones and short-reviews of some third-party apps that you can use. 

A Little Bit of Apollo 13 History

Being a space buff, I'm familiar with the story of Apollo 13. Getting the astronauts back alive remains one of NASA's greatest achievements. But I didn't know about this.

If five men in Houston had realized what they were seeing through a telescope on the evening of April 13, 1970, they could have radioed those words to the crew of Apollo 13, who was still trying to grasp what had just happened: an oxygen tank on their spacecraft had exploded en route to the moon.

George Wyckliffe Hoffler was at the time a young NASA flight surgeon assigned to study cardiovascular data gathered from the Apollo astronauts during their spaceflights. On the second night of the mission, Hoffler was taking a break from studying for his medical boards, and had joined four other NASA employees on the roof of building 16A at the Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center. There they watched a television monitor hooked up to a 16-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a television camera mounted in place of the eyepiece. The monitor showed two dots flying in formation on their way to the moon: the brighter of the two was the spent third stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle; the dimmer one was the Apollo 13 spacecraft, which had separated from the third stage two days earlier.

It probably wouldn't have made any difference if they'd realized what they were seeing and called mission control immediately. 

New Release of Madcap Flare

Madcap Software has announced the April 2019 release of Flare, their premiere authoring tool. The new feature that Madcap seems to be pushing the most is micro-content, which makes it easier to create content that can be used by AI systems like chatbots. Tom Johsson has a blog post about how you might be able to use micro-content in Flare.

They've also added support for CSS variables (similar to what Quadralay did in last year's release of WebWorks ePublisher), which makes it much easier to change the look and feel of large projects.

Featured Links - April 14, 2019

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

• 2019 World Press Photography Contest nominees.
• Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old. These were the first computers I encountered.
• Ultra-fast air-breathing rocket engine moves a step closer. We may yet get a viable single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane.
• SpaceX likely to win NASA’s crew competition by months, for billions less. No surprise at all. 
• Avoid These Major Mistakes When Building a New PC. This is why I don't build PCs any more.
• 'Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time. The summaries in this catalogue will be very interesting.
• How to Get the Linux BASH Shell on Windows 10.

A Falscon Heavy Video with Good Sound

Here's another video of the Falcon Heavy launch and booster landing, but this one has good sound (from a separate mike away from the crowd). As the OP says, listen on headphones for the best effect. The booster landing starts at about 7:00 into the video.

Interview with King Crimson's Robert Fripp

This year marks the 50th anniversary of King Crimson, England's seminal progressive rock band. I was lucky enough to see them in Detroit in 1969, where they almost blew the Jefferson Airplane off the stage (not an easy task!), and in Hamilton in 1973, where they won over an audience that had mostly come to see The Strawbs do Part of the Union.

As a prelude to their 50th anniversary tour, founder Robert Fripp gave a press conference in London, reported on by Rolling Stone. Fripp isn't normally one to open up to the press, but he did here and it's fascinating.

Nothing seemed out of bounds. Fripp was generally patient, genial and up for anything, whether an interrogator wanted to know what he had in mind when he recruited three drummers for the current King Crimson incarnation (“But I’m a guitarist,” he chided, when he heard the writer in question was representing Drumhead magazine); what music he’s been digging lately (he cited Korean composer Unsuk Chin, saying her music “upsets my thinking” in a stimulating way); whether, via one of the few female writers in the room, he felt King Crimson was “too male” (“I agree,” said Fripp) and if he would consider including a woman in the lineup (Fripp said he’s absolutely open to the idea — a statement backed by his non-Crimson discography, which features collaborations with Sara Lee, bassist in his 1980 “instrumental dance band” League of Gentlemen, as well as Blondie and the Roches — but that he never considers gender when he recruits, only what’s needed for his vision of the band at that time); or whether King Crimson might make another studio album (no definitive answer there, though Fripp says there’s already plenty of new material to draw on). There were even several surreal photo ops throughout the day, where Fripp pointed his own lens at the the audience as dozens of camera phones clicked away.

I suspect that many readers of this blog have never heard King Crimson, or have only heard their "hits", particularly 21st Century Schizoid Man.  They'll be releasing all of their studio albums on Spotify in June, but Fripp has always considered their live performances to be the true essence of the band (much like the Grateful Dead).

In Fripp’s terms, studio albums have long been “love letters,” while a live show is a “hot date.” On Saturday, he made very clear which one he prefers. “Performance, for me, is where the juice resides. This is where it is,” he said. “King Crimson has always been a hot date; it’s always been a live event. And however good some of the albums have been, none of them ever quite compared to the power of the band in live performance.”

And the current version of the band is a powerhouse. If you don't believe me, check out their Meltdown album, recorded live in Mexico in 2017. Spotify currently has quite a bit of their music streaming including several other live performances.

Is That a Bug In Your Lens?

High-end camera lenses are usually sealed against dust and moisture. So how did a fully grown fly get inside a $2,000 Canon F2.8 70-200 mm. telephoto zoom? That's what the folks at Lensrentals would like to know. 

It took a technician several hours to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the lens. What I found most remarkable about the story is that the fly wasn't even noticeable until the lens was stopped down to F13, when it started to appear as a dark smudge. 

Happy Yuri's Day and Congratulations to SpaceX

Happy Yuri's Day, everyone. Today is the 58th anniversary of the first manned spaceflight, one orbit by the Soviet Union's Yuri Gagarin.

We've come a long way since Gagarin rode a Vostok booster into space. Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched an Arabsat communications satellite into orbit on a Falcon Heavy booster, and landed all three first stage cores.

While the launch is spectacular, my favourite part of the mission is watching the two side cores land back at the Cape. This is one of my favourite videos of the landing yesterday; it's short, but captures the sonic booms right after they touch down.

A Deep Dive Into Slang

One of the best aspects of the Oxford English Dictionary is its completeness; unlike some dictionaries, it doesn't turn up its nose at slang. The OED has published a two-part interview with slang expert, Jonathan Green, author of the Contemporary Dictionary of Slang. 

Let’s just wind back a bit and ask what I suppose is really the fundamental question here: what is slang?

There are – I won’t say an infinity – but there are many definitions. There are academic definitions, there are lexicographical definitions, there are definitions that depend on a term ticking certain linguistic boxes, there are amateur definitions, there are concerned litterateur definitions…

My feeling is that I don’t subscribe to a specific definition, rather the sense that slang has a pervasive state of mind. I would suggest that there is an underlying strain that goes through the entire slang lexis, which is sedition. It’s taking the mickey, it’s overturning. I have christened slang – and I am sure, quite consciously, that this is to do with that world of the ‘60s, which was known as the ‘counter-culture’ – for me, I call it ‘the counter-language’. I don’t think I even originated this, but for me it was a first.

So that’s how I see it. It’s always taking the mickey; it’s always in some way wanting to overthrow, to blow up – however you want to see it. That’s its essence. You may say, ‘Well, what about all these obscenities? Surely they’re not seditious, they’re not revolutionary?’ but within their context, the context being the standard English language, I would suggest that they are.

Helvetica Updated

The popular and influential Helvetica typeface has been updated.

Every single glyph of Helvetica has been redrawn and redesigned for this expansive new edition – which preserves the typeface's Swiss mantra of clarity, simplicity and neutrality, while updating it for the demands of contemporary design and branding.

Helvetica Now comprises 48 fonts, consisting of three distinct optical sizes: Micro, Text and Display. Each one has been carefully tailored to the demands of its size. The larger Display versions are drawn to show off the subtlety of Helvetica and spaced with headlines in mind, while the Text sizes focus on legibility, using robust strokes and comfortably loose spaces.

The Micro sizes address an issue Helvetica has long faced – that of being 'micro type challenged'. In the past, the typeface struggled to be legible at tiny sizes because of its compactness and closed apertures. Helvetica Now's Micro designs are simplified and exaggerated to maintain the impression of Helvetica in tiny type, and their spacing is loose, providing remarkable legibility at microscopic sizes and in low-res environments.

Type nerds (I know there are a few of you out there) can find out more in this Creative Boom article.

Adapting Good Omens

Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was long thought be impossible to adapt as a film or TV series. But things changed when Terry Pratchett, just before he died, asked Neil Gaiman to adapt it. That, and advances in CGI technology, have made it possible, and it'll be premiering on Amazon Prime Video on May 31. 

But it wasn't a simple task, as this article points out. 

The creative team is upfront about the fact that, although the show is indisputably loyal to Gaiman and Pratchett’s source material, liberties have been taken to elevate the narrative.

“We’ve taken departures because [the TV show is] a different thing,” explains Mackinnon, highlighting Jon Hamm’s archangel Gabriel character.

“That character isn’t in the book but we needed him to be around for storytelling reasons. Very often an adaptation suffers because a book is written with the voice of the reader in mind, whereas we have to expand that onto the screen.”

Elsewhere, while Shakespeare is mentioned once in the novel, the English writer gets an entire sequence shot out of London’s Globe Theatre in the show.

In addition, Gaiman has written a half-hour explanation of Crowley’s backstory at the beginning of the third episode that is completely original. “But the fans of the book will see that as a treat rather than a bad diversion,” assures Mackinnon.

I haven't read the book (I've never been a big Pratchett fan), but I probably will but after I see the show. 

Eintstein Was Right, Again

Astronomers have revealed the first ever image of a black hole, taken with a radio telescope array spanning the Earth.

The image and analysis of the data indicate that the black hole is in close agreement with Einstein's theory of relativity.

Details are published in a series of papers in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Update: Here's a good explanation of the truly weird behaviour of light around a black hole.

Imagining China in 2069

If the United States continues on its current course, the 21st century will be China's century. I don't think there's much doubt about that. What would a world dominated by a Chinese superpower be like? The article China 2069: Triumph or Travesty attempts to find out. 

One of the more remarkable things about China in the current moment is that a country with so much past is now the crucible of the future. But it shouldn’t really be a surprise. For most of the past 2,000 years, China has been on the cutting edge of both cultural and technological progress and for long stretches boasted the most prosperous pace-setting economy on the planet. In the long run, the so-called century of humiliation, dating from the Opium Wars to the triumph of the Chinese Communist revolution, may turn out to be nothing more than a speed bump, an interregnum between soaring dynasties. After 40 years of phenomenally fast economic growth, China already boasts the second-largest economy in the world; in 2069, another 50 years from now, it could well reign supreme again.

 But what exactly would it mean for China to once again set the world’s agenda? Is China 2069 a future in which technology works for or against humanity? China already is giving the world an avalanche of mixed signals. For every high-speed bullet train and spacecraft landing on the moon, there’s a facial recognition surveillance system backing up concentration camps in Xinjiang and a censored internet site. Chinese industry is simultaneously pushing renewable energy forward while generating astounding amounts of pollution. Are we headed for the engineered social stratification of “Folding Beijing,” or could we hope instead for a society where robots do all the work while humans amuse themselves composing poetry and practicing calligraphy?

The author examines six different topics: the environment, AI, space, war, the economy, and culture. All could have important and widely varying impacts on the next 50 years. 

I found it especially interesting that the author also looks at the future through the lens of Chinese science ficiton.

China watchers looking in from the outside have been waiting a long time for a new generation to loosen the reins of cultural control. They have been consistently disappointed. But as I corresponded with writers like Chen and Baoshu and Xia Jia, all of whom are living and writing in China today, it started to seem feasible that their own work was a demonstration of Chen’s argument. In other words, the best place to seek a potent source of Chinese cultural influence on the world is in the science fiction that is being concocted by a new generation forged in the crucible of the future.\

It's a fascinating and important article. 

White Supremacist Attacks Are Growing and Are Connected

As the US cuts back on its surveillance of white supremacist groups, attacks by these groups are growing and show more connections between the groups. The New York Times has published a multi-media article that examines how connections between the groups ripple through time and international borders. 

An analysis by The New York Times of recent terrorism attacks found that at least a third of white extremist killers since 2011 were inspired by others who perpetrated similar attacks, professed a reverence for them or showed an interest in their tactics.

The connections between the killers span continents and highlight how the internet and social media have facilitated the spread of white extremist ideology and violence.

In one instance, a school shooter in New Mexico corresponded with a gunman who attacked a mall in Munich. Altogether, they killed 11 people.

As well as being unsettling, the article is a good example of how to present a lot of information in a multi-media format, something which the New York Times is doing more of, and doing it well. 

 

Swastikas on the Strand

From what I've been reading, it looks like there's a good chance that Britain will end up as a neo-fascist state post-Brexit. That's not good, but it's not as bad as what could have happened, either if Britain lost World War II, or reached an accommodation with the Nazis before or during the war. 

It's a subject that's been hotly debated by historians and the subject of many novels and a few films. The article, Swastikas on the Strand, by Catherine Gallagher looks at several in detail in the context of counterfactual historical analysis.

The Germans called their cross-Channel invasion plans Operation Sea Lion. They made little attempt to conceal the operation. The whole world watched in part because Germany seemed at that point to be unstoppable; its blitzkrieg across western Europe had taken it to the coast of the English Channel. There it paused, confronting a nation that refused to make peace despite the defeat and retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from the Continent. All the action of the war had narrowed to the confrontation across the Channel. The tides and the weather would do much to determine when and if the invasion began. Would Hitler’s war machine be defeated in the attempt or deliver another deadly blow? Ultimately, Nazi Germany did not launch an invasion. But suppose the Luftwaffe had managed to defeat the RAF? Might the Germans then have started across the Channel? And if so, what might have happened then?

The question requires counterfactual historical analysis. Counterfactual history uses hypothetical thought-experiments to imagine the probable results of changes in the historical record. The hypotheses are two-part conditional statements, consisting of an ‘if’ and a ‘then’ clause: if the Luftwaffe had won the air battle, then the Germans might have successfully invaded Britain. Military historians have used counterfactual analysis for centuries. Among professional historians, they are still the most consistent practitioners. As soon as the German records for that summer had been fully declassified in the mid-1950s, military historians did not hesitate to pass judgment on the feasibility of an invasion. Their verdict: even if the Germans had won the air war, their invasion might never have launched and would have failed if it had. A Luftwaffe victory would have been a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for a sea landing.

She looks at three books in detail: Comer Clarke’s England Under Hitler (1960), David Lampe’s The Last Ditch (1968) and Norman Longmate’s If Britain Had Fallen (1972). Given the number of alternate histories I've read, I was surprised that I haven't read any of them; something I will try to remedy.

I should add to this a mention of some other related books that cover similar ground. First is Jo Walton's "Spare Change" trilogy: Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown. Also worth reading is C. J. Samsom's Dominion.

On the Origins of Modern Biology and the Fantastic

Tor.com is publishing a very interesting series of articles by Kelly Lagor called On the Origins of Modern Biology and the Fantasitic.

Science and science fiction are indelibly intertwined, each inspiring the other since their modern birth in the Victorian Era. Both employ similar feats of the imagination—to hold an idea of a world in your mind, and test the boundaries of that world through experimentation. In the case of science, you formulate a theory and conduct a series of tests against that theory to see if it can be disproved by the results. In the case of science fiction, you formulate a reality, and conduct characters through the logical implications of that reality. Good science fiction, like a sound scientific theory, involves thorough worldbuilding, avoids logical inconsistencies, and progressively deeper interrogations reveal further harmonies. This series will explore the connection between the evolution of biology and science fiction into the modern era.

So far there are 10 articles, discussing authors including Jules Verne, Aldous Huxley, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and more.

Report From the 2019 ACES Conference

The New Yorker has published a report from the 2019 American Copy Editors Society Conference. I think I would have enjoyed being there.

The conference offers dozens of sessions, on everything from gender consciousness to “Bad English,” in which James Harbeck, a freelance editor based in Toronto, showed how “Fifty Shades of Grey” had been put through one of the sites competing for your grammar dollars, and demonstrated that eliminating redundancy does not improve pornography. But the centerpiece of the weekend is the session at which the A.P. announces changes to its annual style guide. It was standing room only in Narragansett A as Paula Froke, the lead editor of the A.P. Stylebook, ran through her slides. There were guidelines on race—whether a subject is black or white need not be reported unless it’s pertinent to the story—and updates on recreational marijuana (pot or cannabis on second reference; employees at dispensaries are budtenders). A cheer went up when Froke announced that “split forms” are acceptable—most copy editors have long since stopped worrying about the split infinitive, but now we are good “to boldly go” where the English language has been going for centuries. Another cheer went up at the news that “data” takes a singular verb and pronoun (except in academic and scientific papers). A slide that said “Percent, Percentage” was greeted with a roar. From now on, the A.P. will use the percent sign after a numeral instead of writing out “percent” or “percentage.” Although 99.5% of those present approved, no publication is obligated to follow A.P. style. The New Yorker still spells out “per cent” and even makes it two words.

Exciting stuff. Go forth and update your style guides.

The Expanse Wiki

I've been a fan of James S. A. Corey's The Expanse series ever since the first book, Leviathan Wakes, came out and have watched all of the three seasons of the TV series. I'm currently reading and almost finished the fifth book, Nemesis Games.

So I was delighted to find that there is an Expanse wiki. If you're a fan of the show, you are probably going to waste spend a lot of time here in the (currently) 1899 page site. And if you're not a fan of the show, you should be. It's by far and away the best science fiction series ever shown on television and the books are even better. You can watch seasons 1-3 on Amazon Prime Video and the 4th season should be out later this year.

Just in case you're wondering, I'd rate the best SF TV shows as: The Expanse, Babylon 5, Battle Star Galactice (remake, seasons 1 and 2), and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Featured Links - April 7, 2019

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

• How Google Tracks Your Personal Information. First in a series of articles that explains how Google tracks you and what you can do about it.
• Master the New Mobile Gmail with these 10 tips. 
• 28 British Slang Terms You Should Know. Considering how many British TV shows I've watched, I should know more of these.
• Animated Knots by Greg. Knots have always been a mystery to me; this site shows you how to tie them.
• What Are FRBs? The Discovery of Mysterious Signals From the Cosmos. And no, they're (probably) not aliens.
• Soviet Space Program Patches. You can buy patches from Soviet space mission. So cool. 

Joe Hall, R.I.P. - Update

Sad news reported this morning by Douglas McArthur. Joe Hall has left us. He was a brilliant, quirky songwriter and performer who never got the recognition he deserved. I saw him perform solo a few times, but unfortunately never with his band, The Continental Drift.

Here's what I think is one of his best songs, a true Canadian classic, Vampire Beavers. from the album Rancho Banano.

You can find more of his music and buy his albums on his Bandcamp site.

Update: Here's an obituary originally published in the Globe and Mail. There will be a celebration of his life at the Tranzac Club on May 17th. I may go.

Trey Anastasio Debuts New Band, Bob Weir at the Blue Note

To help you chill out on this spring Saturday, here are links to a couple of very fine concerts.

First, Phish guitarist, Trey Anasatio, is nothing if not prolific. As well as leading Phish, he has his own horn-driven band and a trio. Yet now he's debuting a new band, Ghosts of the Forest, and releasing an eponymous album next week.

The group played their first show last night in Portland Maine. Jambands.com has a review of the show and have thoughtfully included links to a good quality audience recording of the show. I haven't listened to all of it yet, but what I've heard, I like.

Back in March, the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir played a gig at New York's legendary jazz club with his trio, Wolf Brothers. This group has Don Was (Was Not Was and more producer credits than I can count) on bass and Jay Lane from RatDog on drums. It was webcast by nugs.tv and is also up on YouTube.

Crank up the subwoofer for this one. It's good.

Impressionism in the Age of Industry

I viewed the Impressionism in the Age of Industry Exhibit yesterday at the Art Gallery of Ontario and very much enjoyed it.  I was impressed by the way the historical material, especially the photography, was integrated with the art work (including the use of film and one very impressive augmented reality installation).

The other thing I want to mention was using white text on a dark background throughout much of the exhibit and providing enough lighting to read the text. This was one of the few exhibits I've seen where I could easily read most of the text in the exhibit.

You can find out more about the exhibit by viewing the curator's talk from this page. It's at the AGO until May 5th and I highly recommend it.

Google Is Damaging Its Brand

Earlier this week Google killed off several of its products, including Google+, Inbox for Gmail, and the goo.gl URL shortener. Google's propensity to kill off products has been bothering people for quite a while (I still haven't forgiven them for killing Google Reader) and it's beginning to make people question whether they should be using new Google products.

Ars Technica has a long article about Google's product shutdowns, what it's doing to the company's brand (it's not good), and what they might be able to do to repair the harm.

We are 91 days into the year, and so far, Google is racking up an unprecedented body count. If we just take the official shutdown dates that have already occurred in 2019, a Google-branded product, feature, or service has died, on average, about every nine days.

Some of these product shutdowns have transition plans, and some of them (like Google+) represent Google completely abandoning a user base. The specifics aren't crucial, though. What matters is that every single one of these actions has a negative consequence for Google's brand, and the near-constant stream of shutdown announcements makes Google seem more unstable and untrustworthy than it has ever been. Yes, there was the one time Google killed Google Wave nine years ago or when it took Google Reader away six years ago, but things were never this bad.

For a while there has been a subset of people concerned about Google's privacy and antitrust issues, but now Google is eroding trust that its existing customers have in the company. That's a huge problem. Google has significantly harmed its brand over the last few months, and I'm not even sure the company realizes it.

If you're a podcast fan,  episode 502 of the All About Android podcast devotes a lot of time to this subject. Their main concern seems to be what Google has done to the trust that people, especially power users of their products, have in the company.

Alternatives to Google's Inbox

Google is notorious for killing off products and this week was no exception, with the demise of Google+ (at least for non-GSuite users) and Inbox.

A lot of people are upset about losing Inbox, because it had many features for managing email that Gmail lacks. I haven't used it myself, so I can't comment on it in detail, but I think I've seen more complaints about losing Inbox than any other Google product since Google Reader.

For those of you missing Inbox, Wired has collected some alternatives. Out of what they've recommended, the most comprehensive and closest to Inbox seems to be Spark, which is available for both IOS and Android.

Spark has over a million Apple users, and it launched on Android on Tuesday, just in time to pass Inbox on its way out the door. At this point, admittedly, the feature sets are going to start sounding a little bit redundant. Spark has the same email scheduling, prioritizing, snoozing, and customizing you’ll find from other premium offerings. But it has the twin advantages of also being free and offering a unique focus on collaborative use cases.

If you want to see what it looks like, check out episode 414 of the All About Android, starting at one hour and 26 mintues into the podcasts

Guide to Video Streaming Services in Canada

MobileSyrup has published a handy guide to video streaming services in Canada. If you're not Canadian you can probably skip this post, unless you have a masochistic streak. That's because many streaming services aren't available in Canada (Hulu) or have less content than their US versions (Netflix).

It's a good list, but not complete (they do say it's for the "major services". They list, with details for each service:

• Amazon Prime Video Canada
• Apple TV+
• CBC Gem
• Crave
• DAZN
• Hayu
• Netflix Canada
• Shudder
• SportsNet Now
• YouTube Premium

Other services (which they probably didn't consider major) are:

• Acorn TV
• Britbox
• CTV Go
• CuriousityStream
• Knowledge Network
• Tubi TV

There are probably more. Out of all the services listed in this post, the one we use the most is Acorn TV, which is mostly British and Australian TV shows and movies.

How To Run Chrome OS From a USB Drive

I have an old PC that we use only to stream web content like Amazon Prime to our downstairs TV. But it has a problem; it's running Windows 7, which will be reaching end-of-service in January 2020. I don't really need to put Windows 10 on it, or need to. Luckily, I may have found a solution.

It's possible to install Google's Chrome OS from a USB drive. Most modern PCs will boot from a USB device (although you can run Chrome OS from a hard drive, the idea is to remove the need for Windows 7).

This video gives step-by-step instructions. It looks fairly straightforward, although I haven't tried it yet. If it doesn't work, I'll update this post after I try it. Note that the Chrome OS used for this won't run Android apps, unlike new Google Chrome OS hardware.

2019 Hugo Award Finalists Announced

The finalists for the 2019 Hugo Awards, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Retro Hugos have been announced by Dublin 2019, this year's World Science Ficiton Convention.

File 770 has the complete list of finalists (with links). As in previous years, most of the short fiction is posted online, either in full or as excerpts of the lnger works.

Also, as has been the trend in previous years, most of the fiction finalists are female. I don't think this is because voters are trying to be politically correct or whatever; I think it marks a clear shift in the field and in the publishing industry.

Here are the finalists for Best Novel:

• The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager)
• Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
• Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga)
• Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey / Macmillan)
• Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

I have only read one of these, The Calculating Stars, and I would be quite happy to see it win, and I expect it will. I was hoping to see Ian McDonald's wonderful Time Was in the novella finalists, but that didn't happen.

Trimming Chrome's Memory Usage

Google Chrome may be the most popular Internet browser, but it's not perfect. If you use it a lot and keep a lot of tabs open, you'll probably notice that it's using a lot of your memory.

In fairness to Chrome, it's not necessarily any worse than other browers. As I type this, I have six tabs open in Chrome: Facebook, Feedly, Twitter, two Blogger tabs, and the article that I'm writing about. According to Task Manager, that totals to 1,231 MB, or about 15 percent of my installed RAM. I opened the same tabs in Firefox (just updated today), and it used 1287 MB, about 16 percent. That's not a huge difference.

Still, if you're one of those people who keeps a lot of tabs open, you may want to trim Chrome's memory usage. The article, How to Control Chrome's Memory Usage and Free Up RAM, offers some useful tips. I didn't know that Chrome has it's own Task Manager, which shows you memory usage by tab, process, and extension. Using it, I found that one extension, Password Checkup, was using almost 400 MB of RAM.

If you must keep a lot of tabs open, the article describes several extensions that you can use to manage them. You can also use some text and reading extensions that will cut down on the elements loaded into a tab (graphics, ads, embedded videos), with the side benefit of making the content easier to read.

For Chrome users, this is a must read.

Android Pie First Impressions

Samsung and Rogers finally got around to updating my Galaxy S8 to Android Pie today.

So far, my first impression is positive. I prefer using a dark mode theme on the phone, both to cut down on glare and to reduce battery usage (on an AMOLED screen, black pixels don't draw power). The dark mode is carried forward into more places, especially the Settings menus. The overall look is more consistent, with more standardization of the icons.

I haven't gone into all of the menus so far to see what's new. I noticed that I can now turn on the display just by picking it up, which is handy. Samsung has reorganized some of the menu items and the groupings seeem more logical. The Camera app now has text labels for some of the options, making it easier to use. The home screen layout can be locked so you don't accidentally move or delete icons.

On the negative side, performance seems a bit slower. It's most notable when swiping between screens. In one of the Advanced option screens, I was asked to swipe my unlock pattern, but the 9 dots weren't visible. It was still possible to swipe the pattern, because my fingers do it without me having to think about it. I eventually fixed the problem by setting my theme back to default and enabling night mode, which also changed a lot of my icons, but I'll get used to that eventually.

This article has a list of the new features in Samsung's One UI Android Pie skin.

Say Yes to RSS

Based on talking to friends and reading articles on the web, I am fairly sure that most people don't know about RSS. And that's a shame.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an information-sharing protocol that's been around for about 20 years. It let lets you use a program called a feed reader to get a feed of articles from a website. I've been using one almost since it was first developed. I still haven't forgiven Google for killing off Google Reader. Now I use Feedly, which has become my primary interface to the Internet.

You might say that it sounds like Twitter or Facebook's news feed, so why use it? Unlike those other feeds, you are control of your RSS feed – you control what sites you want to receive articles from and how to organize them. There's no algorithm making choices for you, as Patrick Howell O'Neill points out in this article from Gizmodo.

Here’s what’s important: RSS is very much still here. Better yet, RSS can be a healthy alternative when Twitter is making you feel like shit. In 2019, that’s, like, most of the time.

On the surface, Twitter’s main value proposition is that it delivers up-to-the-second news. Let’s just be honest with ourselves: 99 percent of the time, we don’t need up-to-the-second news. Most of us would do much better waiting until someone has had time to process the news and write more than 280 characters to explain in full what’s going on. Ideally, that happens on news websites themselves, which more often than not still offer RSS feeds. Gizmodo, for instance, is putting RSS out into the world at this very moment.

RSS has the advantage of feeling slow without being slow. You can get an article in your RSS reader as soon as it’s been published—and how much faster are you really looking to go? What you don’t get is the flash flood of half-thoughts and hot takes.

For me, the main advantage of Feedly over Twitter is how it lets me organize the flow of information coming at me. I subscribe to about 250 feeds or sites. I group them by categories (Favourites, Writing, Science Fiction, etc.). I can scan through a bunch of sites to see what's new and view individual articles that look interesting. I can also tag articles and save them for future reference.

This is a screen shot of my Feedly in action.

It's an incredibly powerful tool and I couldn't manage without it.

If you want to find out more about feed readers, here's an article with reviews of some of the current tools.