Today we saw the first picture of a black hole. I found a good video that explains how to understand the image.
I think the iPad Mini 5 is the closest we will get to a modern version of the Newton MessagePad. Nebo incorporates some of the handwriting gestures available in Newton but not all. What I wish I could find is a notepad app for the iPad that works like the one in Newton. WritePad also is familiar but I find it frustrating to use.
Why Big Pharma Is Winning the Drug Price Wars
Drug companies are able to pay PBMs — as well as hospitals and some doctors — to make sure cheaper drugs are left out. It’s as simple as that. Drug companies pay everyone along the way so that lower-price drugs lose.
You don’t have competition when the system is gamed, and those who argue against “single payer” health insurance always hinge their argument on competition. If you don’t want to change health insurance then do something about the costs with regulation that forces competition.
It’s that time of the year when the outdoor temperature is so warm the furnace doesn’t run and therefore the basement, where I work, gets cold and feels colder because I am not yet in summer mode.
What if Obama had refused to release his taxes?
Only at the top of the fourth inning and two hours in to Cubs/Brewers game. Why so slow? Bad pitching and fielding, which is why any rule change MLB may make to require relief pitchers to face at least 3 batters is idiotic. You don’t want rules that keeps bad pitching in games, they will go on and on.
Nothing, not mound visits, and not replacing pitchers makes games go longer than continual walks and hits.
Hypothes.is is an open annotation tool for the web, allowing anyone to highlight, annotate, or comment on any webpage via a Chrome plugin (web developers can also install it on their sites, like I have with my blog).
Source: Hypothes.is as a public research notebook
It strikes me that blogging has always been an annotation tool for the web.
It is always fun to find new people on the Web. Kris Schaffer has a Ph. D., from Yale, but most important, he knows how to drive a zamboni.
Read this piece about desktop computers in Computerworld. I’ve long sought a cloud-based Windows desktop on demand that I can access from my iPad thinking I may need one as I personally move away from Windows on the computers I own. I know how I can do that in a variety of methods but it is turning out that I really don’t need it. I do 95% of my personal computing in a web browser, which is what Chrome OS is optimized to provide.
I have an observation about the Pad & Quill Oxford case for my iPad Pro 10.5, which is that the leather has broken in very nicely and the case feels much less bulky than when it first arrived. I’ve been really happy with this case.
Journalism Yes, Media No
I have been reading Dave Winer’s writing for a long time, and a common theme of his writing is journalism. My translation of what he has been saying is that news has become a platform, and as such anyone can do it, and those who are employed as journalists need to shift from being gatekeepers to being participants. True platforms route around gatekeepers.
The reason why this message is not well received by journalists is obvious, it’s because what they hear is that you no longer have a job. Staying employed is important to these people and you cannot blame them because it is how they support their families.
When the constitution was written people like Benjamin Franklin viewed journalism as a vocation because frankly the idea of a “job” didn’t really exist. When vocations became professions, a shift in priorities took place, with maintaining employment moving to the top. When journalism transformed to media thanks to corporate consolidation, the move to journalism being about money became complete.
The honest question that has been avoided ever since is, is what we have, journalism as media to make profits, consistent with the “fourth estate” established by the First Amendment? If the prime objective of the Consitution, of which the First Amendment is a part, is to be the United in the United States of America, then today’s media is not that which the first amendment refers to because there is more profits generated from disunity than unity.
Citizens instinctively know that the profits that corporate ownership demands is corupting, and therefore they do not trust media because they know there is a bias towards making money over telling truth.
Of course Fox News is giving their viewers what they want to hear, that is how they make money! Of course MSNBC is giving their viewers what they want to hear, that is how they make money! Of course the New York Times is giving their readers what they want to red, that is how they make money!
On and on it goes. It is another example of how hyper capitalism is destroying republican democracy and thus destroying our country.
Ever since Google announced they were no longer supporting Inbox I have been looking for a replacement app. I found Spark to be the best app to provide the main features I like: bundling and one-click bundle archiving. Unfortunately, up until today it has only been available on iOS, but now I am able to install it on my Pixel 2.
If you are at all in to computers and/or you like making things, then I strongly recommend that you get a Raspberry Pi. I have a couple of them running on my home network, one powers a custom desk clock and the other is the hub for backing up several of my web sites.
Yesterday I figured out how to automatically backup this site and of course I have written down the steps I took in my wiki.
Testing Micro.blog Wordpress Export
In December micro.blog stopped exporting my site to Github, a consequence of their change from jekyll to hugo as the CMS. We do have manual ways to export a site, one is to download an export file as a Wordpress export and the other is to generate an archive in a “blog archive format” that doesn’t appear to be well documented. Manton wrote a post proposing the format in 2017, but I have not found anything else so it doesn’t appear that format is useful to anyone other than programmers.
An export is only as good as the ability to import, so I decided to create a local install of Wordpress on my Pixelbook using Docker and then try importing the Wordpress export. The good news is that the import was successful. The bad news is that the export file retains markdown that is not converted to HTML so none of the links in the posts appear correctly. We either need the micro.blog export process to convert to HTML or some way for the import process to convert markdown to HTML.
Update: I was directed to install the JP Markdown plug in to my site, which I did and then did a wipe and re-import and the good news is that with it installed all the markdown formating is appearing on the local Wordpress site.
Oddly, one of the challenging things about wiki is creating new pages. A new page is created by first creating a link to the page and then adding items to that page, therefore I have the Now page on which I create new links.
The problem is, those new links can accumulate over time and then I have to back and remove them. I have found code for an HTML form to create a new page so that I can enter a page title, click create, and a new ghost page appears.