Papering the record for appeal.
¶Renee, Jake, and I are headed down to Orland for a quick visit to the Food and Wine festival at Epcot. This is the first time we’ve been in an airport since, well, over eighteen months ago when covid brought the world to a standstill. I have to say, it feels really good to be traveling.
¶Jake and Renee assured me they’re both smiling beneath their masks.
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¶Good morning! Up and at it!
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¶This has always been one of my favorite views of Jake — watching him take pictures of planes from a window seat. He’s still a kid in a candy store every time we fly, and I love that. It’s been too long since I’ve seen it.
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¶“But Nature’s survey suggests that even though researchers try to shrug off abuse, it might already have had a chilling effect on scientific communication. Those scientists who reported higher frequencies of trolling or personal attacks were also most likely to say that their experiences had greatly affected their willingness to speak to the media in the future....”
¶The pandemic, and our collective handling of it, has already had societal impacts that we fail to appreciate. A chilling effect on science, and its role in the distribution of knowledge, is disturbing. And that might not be the worst of it. Have we discouraged a generation of people from going into science as a career? Medicine? I don’t know, maybe it’s had the opposite effect in that regard. I have heard that applications to medical school are up. I didn’t expect that.
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¶We took Teddy to the pet store again tonight. He’s still a bit of a crazy puppy, but he’s getting better. He certainly loves walking through that place — so many smells!
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¶The 2021-2022 NHL season kicked off tonight with two games — Penguins v. Lightning and Golden Knights v. Kraken.
¶Yep, that’s right, the Kraken has been released! Seattle is back on the board with the league’s newest franchise. The expansion draft was quite friendly to them, too. Lots of talent there — should be fun to watch.
¶And watching hockey will be different this season, too! The NHL is no longer carrying streams inside its own app, farming that service out to ESPN+ this year. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m certainly not optimistic that we’ll be able to watch our local feed for all Red Wings games. And Hulu is no help, either, as apparently they have yet to re sign the regional sports networks.
¶Hockey is back, but so are my streaming frustrations.
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¶If ivermectin isn’t working as you expected, maybe give devil worship a go....
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¶Full cancellation mode has been activated for John Gruden.
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¶Don’t look now, but the NFL’s golden boy, Patrick Mahomes, has a losing record (2-3). And he really should be 1-4, since the opening week win over Cleveland was enabled by a horrible call. I’m hoping the comparisons to Tom Brady will be dialed back a bit now.
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(cnbc.com)
¶And now begins the delicate dance of launching an effective oral antiviral for COVID while still working to convince people to take a vaccine. The availability of molnopiravir will embolden some who refuse the shot, I suspect. Why take the shot when there’s a pill?
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¶This is why they play the games.
¶No one saw this coming. The Rays were the unbeatable force rolling into the playoffs, and the Red Sox were off the rails a bit. The teams flipped roles in this series though, and now the Rays are headed home and the Red Sox will play for the American League pennant.
¶Man I love baseball.
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¶This seems as good a photo as any to be the first posted through the Shortcuts app on iOS. I remember taking it at a gas station on a drive home from Florida. In southern Georgia, I think. The grammar police are everywhere…thankfully!
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¶I struggled a bit with photo uploads through the iOS Shortcuts all. The interface for creating scripts is a little janky…still. After struggling with the logic of the photos script, I realized that it was a problem with the interface that was borking things for me.
¶Basically, the script calls a Get Contents of URL action to send a POST request to the API. The photo is included as a file in the form data. When you add a field to the form data in Shortcuts, it defaults to a text field, but allows you to change it to “file” when tapping on it. This doesn’t actually change the field to a file, though. Rather, it allows you to pick text attributes of a file to send as text. I had changed it to File, and thought, for hours, that I was in fact sending a file.
¶I finally reconstructed the action from scratch, adding each field one by one. When initially adding fields, a separate text v. file option appears. Setting that to File actually sets the field as a file. In the list of fields, the file fields are right-aligned while the text fields are left aligned. I wish I would have known that a couple hours ago!
¶Anyways, the Shortcut is now working. First photo posted through the Drafts-Shortcuts-API conduit coming next!
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¶I learned something today. Scheisse yeah!
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¶Ken Jennings retains GOAT status.
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(cnbc.com)
¶‘Within the U.S., 19.9% of bitcoin’s hashrate – that is, the collective computing power of miners – is in New York, 18.7% in Kentucky, 17.3% is in Georgia, and 14% in Texas, according to Foundry USA, which is the biggest mining pool in North America and the fifth-largest globally.’
¶What a crappy headline. Texas is in fourth place according to the source cited in the article. Why is the fourth place state headline worthy, while the second (Kentucky) and third (Georgia) place states are not? Eyeballs and clicks, Texas apparently brings (or has the potential to bring) more of each.
¶And this is really sad when you consider that so many people “only read the headlines” these days. They don’t walk away with only part of the story, as you would expect of someone only reading the headline. They actually walk away with a completely different story.
¶That’s sad. And dangerous.
¶And it’s not journalism. It’s clickbaiting.
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¶Renee and I might have stumbled upon an unexpected use for AirTags — training a dog to stop barking. Teddy is a constant barker when he’s outside. He barks at everything — joggers, bikers, leaves, even the political sign out neighbor recently installed.
¶He escaped from the backyard a couple weeks ago. Luckily, he ran right to the front porch, but we thought it would make sense to put an AirTag in his collar so we could locate him if he ever got away from us.
¶Testing it out this morning, Renee hit the “Play Sound” feature, which makes the AirTag chime a bit to help you locate it when it’s nearby you. With his AirTag chirping, Teddy immediately took notice, stopped in his tracks, and did the tilted head thing. Hmmmm. Maybe a simple ping to his AirTag will stop a barking episode? We’ll see....
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¶I’m finally getting around to updating some of the scripts I have for Daystream in the iOS Shortcuts app. Shortcuts is still somewhat limited but has surprised me with what it can accomplish.
¶I’ve now got it working essentially as a conduit between Drafts and the Daystream API for posts. This allows me to publish to Daystream directly from my favorite iOS text editor, with tags and everything. My post earlier today about last night’s football games was the first to use this setup. It should enable faster, and more frequent, posting.
¶I plan to create similar Shortcuts for links and photos, too. For those, I’ll use drafts to write the main text elements for the content (the body and tags), and then use Shortcuts to get the other content (url for links and a photo for photos).
¶Then on to the watch.
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¶I didn’t get to watch much college football yesterday, but I think the sixty minutes I watched last night had to be the best hour of the day. When I tuned in at about 10:00, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Alabama were all losing, with time running out in their respective games (and I’d be happy with a loss for each of these teams). Michigan and Notre Dame ended up surviving their games (by the same final score, btw - 32-29), in dramatic fashion. Alabama lost to unranked Texas A&M on a last second field goal.
¶All of this in the span of about an hour!
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¶Well, I completed my annual feat of strength today. I’m happy to report that I can still manhandle the pool cover all by myself, without drowning, breaking my neck, or otherwise inflicting significant bodily harm on myself. The gash on my ankle from clubbing it with the anchor tool doesn’t count, I’ve decided.
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¶Photo posted via iOS Shortcuts app
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¶The American Women Quarters Program looks interesting. Sounds like the first quarters in the series will begin circulating next year.
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¶Dave Winer celebrated his 27th anniversary of blogging today…by launching Drummer, a new blogging platform.
¶That’s pretty cool.
¶I enjoy watching everything Dave does, and am a bit curious about Drummer. I’m not keen on having to log into Twitter on someone else’s server to post to a blog, though. This is particularly true with the outliner setup, which is most effective when always open and at the ready (meaning, to get the benefit of the outliner setup, I’d have to stay logged into my Twitter account on someone else’s server, all the time).
¶I’ve looked at it a bit. It reminds me of Dave’s old Fargo platform, which I tried and liked. I haven’t looked closely enough to be able to understand the differences between Fargo and Drummer (and, presumably, the advances and benefits offered by Drummer).
¶Worth watching.
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¶Just watched Jake takeoff from Fremont Airport for a little night flying.
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¶Working on adding a few more iOS Shortcuts to posting to Daystream via the API. This post was added by sharing a draft to a Shortcut that adds a post to the current day’s journal with shared text.
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