Bookmark | Read Write Collect

Bookmarked Introducing PootleWriter: Your Friction-Free WordPress Writing Companion by

Jamie Marsland (pootlepress.com)

Say goodbye to cumbersome writing tools and hello to PootleWriter – the revolutionary writing app that puts simplicity and speed at your fingertips.

Unlike AI-powered alternatives, PootleWriter is a human-designed solution that prioritizes your writing experience.

Source: Introducing PootleWriter: Your Friction-Free WordPress Writing Companion – Pootlepress

I have tinkered with some Micropub clients in the past, including Indiepass (was Indigenous) and Monocle, however I always found that they did not match how I write on my site.

Bookmarked Orbit – Follow the music and find your vibe (bbc.co.uk)

Support undiscovered artists and find new tracks for your playlists, handpicked by local BBC Introducing teams. No algorithms, no genres and no personalisation – all you need to do is listen to music samples and tune into what sounds good.

Orbit provides another means of adding serendipity to your music feed.

Bookmarked Behind the Scenes of My Obsidian Vault: A Knowledge Management Tour by Home (wiobyrne.com)

Managing knowledge effectively is essential in today’s information-rich world. Over the years, I’ve experimented with various tools and systems, but Obsidian has emerged as my primary knowledge management platform. In this post, I’ll take you on a tour of my Obsidian vault, showcasing how I’ve structured it to optimize learning, creativity, and productivity. Remember that this is a work in progress—my vault evolves as my needs and ideas do.

Source: Behind the Scenes of My Obsidian Vault: A Knowledge Management Tour | Dr. Ian O’Byrne

Thank you Ian for sharing how you use Obsidian, especially your vault under the hood. Always food for thought. I feel that I am well and truly due for a review of my workflow. With regards to Markdown I recently ditched Trello and feel on the edge with Obsidian, still trying to workout how to make it all best fit.

Bookmarked The Exploding Whale (theexplodingwhale.com)

The original story of the exploding whale first appeared on KATU Channel 2 Portland, OR in November 1970. The story was reported by Paul Linnman with cameraman Doug Brazil who captured the event on 16mm film, the common format for TV news coverage in those days.

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary in 2020, the Oregon Historical Society had the original 16mm transfered to 4K. KATU subsequently released a remastered version of the original news report. Both the original (now) low-resolution internet video and the remastered version appear above.

Since then, the story has been retold countless times, and numerous versions of the original news story have appeared on the internet as a result. Several of them are viewable in the section below.

Source: The Exploding Whale

This never ceases to entertain me, a ‘whale of a problem’. A life long lesson, what not to do … explode a whale!

Bookmarked https://darkpatternsgame.productartistry.com/ (darkpatternsgame.productartistry.com)

I created this interactive experience to explore the intersection of design ethics and human psychology, helping us all make more informed choices while browsing the web.

Source: Dark Patterns Detective

A useful resource for walking through different dark patterns to add to my work as a part of the CSER MOOC.

Bookmarked Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 (calculatingempires.net)

Explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization.

Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today.

Source: Calculating Empires by

This is an interesting visualisation capturing changes in technology over time. Useful to consider alongside Justin Smith’s book The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is?

Bookmarked For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website – Aftermath (aftermath.site)

To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before. If you look at my work on Kotaku, there’s so many garbage ads on the screen you can barely see the words. Waypoint and Motherboard are both being run like a haunted ship, pumping out junk so that Vice’s new owners can put ads on it. I don’t have to worry about that anymore—I don’t have to worry about my work being taken down or modified or sold, or put in an AI training set against my will. I have my own website, and it is mine, and I get to own it completely. I hope someday soon I can visit your website.

Source: For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website – Aftermath by Gita Jackson

Although I agree with the sentiment about a domain of one’s own, I cannot help feel that my site is like one of those country bakery’s that used to thrive when the highway ran through town until a bypass around town changed that?

ᔥ “Doug Belshaw” in I hope someday soon I can visit your website | Thought Shrapnel (01/05/2025 04:00:38)

Bookmarked The Year in Writing (Audrey Watters)

So I’m leaning into the newsletter and its paywall. Email isn’t perfect (read Sarah Jeong’s wonderful The Internet of Garbage) but the inbox feels intimate and personal without being so exposed to the extraction machine. “Open” doesn’t just feel dangerous; it feels naive.

But here I am, blogging on my own domain. Silly me.

Source: The Year in Writing by @audreywatters

With Audrey Watters’ statement about open being naïve, I am left feeling that at the very least it isn’t about free beer? Reading back through Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peck’s essay ‘Fifty Shades of Open’, wondering if they might need a new section?

Bookmarked https://www.theredhandfiles.com/where-is-the-hope-what-is-hope/ (theredhandfiles.com)

I wrote in Faith, Hope and Carnage, ‘Hope is optimism with a broken heart’. This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralisation becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change.

Source: Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #308 – 2025 is coming. The world seems to be in such a catastrophic state. Where is the hope? What is hope? by Nick Cave

Nick Cave with a little bit of hope for the new year.

Bookmarked Micro-learning in 2025 by

David Truss (daily-ink.davidtruss.com)

Want to learn a complex concept? AI will do two things for you. First it will curate your learning for you. And secondly it will be adaptive to your learning needs. Want to learn a complex mathematical concept? AI will be your teacher. Got stuck on one particular concept? AI will realize what mistake you are making and change how it teaches you that concept to better meet your leaning needs, and pace.

It’s like having content area specialists at your finger tips.

Source: Micro-learning in 2025 by David Truss

Clearly artificial intelligence tools are and will have an impact in and out of the classroom. What that impact is, I am not sure. However, I have been left thinking about a comment from Simon Willison I picked up via Doug Belshaw:

The key skill in getting the most out of LLMs is learning to work with tech that is both inherently unreliable and incredibly powerful at the same time. This is a decidedly non-obvious skill to acquire!

There is so much space for helpful education content here, but we need to do do a lot better than outsourcing it all to AI grifters with bombastic Twitter threads.

Source: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 by Simon Willison

I also appreciated Stephen Downes’ response to the promise.

Truss argues that this will have an impact in classrooms. Maybe. But AI will be as welcome in classrooms as the plague. I mean, they're banning phones. Students will be the last to use AI as part of what they do, not the first.

Source: Micro-learning in 2025 by

As always, time will tell.

Bookmarked Pwned The Book, Is Now Available for Free by

Troy Hunt (Troy Hunt)

Speaking of reflecting, this week was Have I Been Pwned’s 11th birthday. Reaching this milestone, getting back to travel (I’m writing this poolside with a beer at a beautiful hotel in Dubai), life settling down (while sitting next to my amazing wife, and it now being 2 years since we launched the book, I decided we should just give it away for free. I mean really free, not “give me all your personal details, then here’s a download link” I mean, here are the _direct_ download links:

1. PDF
2. EPUB

“Pwned”, The Book, Is Now Available for Free by Troy Hunt

I really like the idea of a book collating key moments of a blog over time. I wonder if the benefit is in the actual writing and reflection?

Bookmarked Pluralistic: How to have cancer (05 Nov 2024) by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)

I’ve got cancer. No cancer is good. This cancer is better than most. I am almost certainly fine. Every medical professional I’ve dealt with, and all the administrative support staff at Kaiser, have been _excellent_. Even the doc who dropped the ball on my biopsy was really good to deal with – she was just clearly drowning in work. The problems I had are with the system, not the people. I’m profoundly grateful to all of them for the help they gave me, the interest and compassion they showed, and the clarity and respect they demonstrated in my dealings with them.

How to have cancer by Cory Doctorow

Bookmarked Between Goblincore and Taylor Swift, I’m baffled and embarrassed by my Spotify Wrapped by Virginia Trioli (ABC News)

I was intrigued to see what data Spotify had wrapped up for me. Would I again be grouped with those in Hobart, like I was last year? Well, no (as Spotify seemed to realise that grouping people by location was … weird.) Like Virginia Trioli, I was left wishing Spotify would some how see me through all the noise:

The pitfalls of refusing to buy a separate Spotify account for a 12-year-old…

Just once, I wish my Wrapped actually wrapped up me.

Between Goblincore and Taylor Swift, I’m baffled by my Spotify Wrapped by Virginia Trioli

My top songs were those I played for my children (Please, Please, Please by Sabrina Carpenter.) I was left thinking about the artists that I thought I had on high-rotation, but did not make the list, such as Ibibio Sound Machine or Fanning Dempsey National Park (although I think this one suffered as there were no standout tracks that were placed on high rotations?) In the end, I think what taints some of this is that there is some much that I listen to outside of Spotify (on vinyl) that does not make the count?

Trioli also highlighted the amount an artist receives per play:

The American UMAW has been needling Spotify with irrefutably uncomfortable data of their own, showing that Spotify pays a maximum of 0.003 cents per stream and has fired most of their curatorial staff, instead relying on AI for the $2.5 billion salary the union says Spotify founder, Daniel Ek, makes.

Between Goblincore and Taylor Swift, I’m baffled by my Spotify Wrapped by Virginia Trioli

I was left feeling guilty at only paying only $1 for Twinkle Digitz. However, I am now left thinking that clearly is not so bad, because at 0.003 per play I’d have to play Blackmail Boogie 33333 times, which on my rough estimates would involve playing the track for 2425 minutes. I like Twinkle Digitz a lot, but I am not sure I have played any track or artist for 2425 minutes, so maybe Trioli is onto something?

Bookmarked https://johnjohnston.info/blog/random/ by

john (johnjohnston.info)

I’d noticed that my ?random link here stopped working a while ago. A search found it had been removed from Jetpack and WordPress.com had brought it back. I asked ChatGPT for a snippet that would bring this back and it works.

Source: Random by @johnjohnston

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John Johnston shares another snippet to add to my Site-Specific WordPress Plugin.

Bookmarked “Embracing Duality: Finding Value in Contrasting Perspectives” (andreastringer.blogspot.com)

Base your selections on your enthusiasm, expertise, and independent research. Exercise caution against external negative influence, and believe in yourself. You don’t want to regret squandered opportunities.

Source: “Embracing Duality: Finding Value in Contrasting Perspectives” by Andrea Stringer

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Andrea Stringer provides a useful reflection on the different forms of study and the benefits of each.

Bookmarked 18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian (The Marginalian)

On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s — the most challenging and most transformative of my life.

Source: 18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian by Maria Popova

Maria Popova reflects on writing on her website for 18 years. There are so many interesting points, two that stood out to me were “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time” and “Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.”

Like so many of Popova’s pieces, this feels like one that you could come back to again and again to reflect upon.

Bookmarked Critical AI Literacy is Not Enough: Introducing Care Literacy, Equity Literacy & Teaching Philosophies. A Slide Deck by Maha Bali (blog.mahabali.me)

What is my teaching philosophy? What do I believe about how people learn, how do I want to be as a teacher, how do I want my classroom environment to be? And I don’t just mean revising our learning outcomes and our assessments in a kneejerk way to figure out how to circumvent student AI use.

Source: Critical AI Literacy is Not Enough: Introducing Care Literacy, Equity Literacy & Teaching Philosophies. A Slide Deck by @bali_maha

Maha Bali goes beyond critical literacy to argue for a wider discussion of AI in education, including where it sits in regards to a teaching philosophy. This is covered in a slide deck attached to the post.

This has me thinking again about the Modern Learning Canvas and the discussion of pedagogical beliefs and where this sat alongside other aspects, such as learner’s role, strategies, enablers, practice, culture, policies, educator’s role and learning outcomes.

Bookmarked https://100.datavizproject.com/ (100.datavizproject.com)

As an information design agency working with data visualization every day, we challenged ourselves to accomplish this using insightful and visually appealing visualizations.

We wanted to show the diversity and complexity of data visualization and how we can tell different stories using limited visual properties and assets.

Source: 1 dataset. 100 visualizations. by @ferdiocom

A collection of visualisations with an explanation for each.

ᔥ “Jeremy Keith” in Adactio: Links—1 dataset. 100 visualizations. (11/13/2024 22:39:49)

Bookmarked Deprogramming Kin Lane by Kin Lane (Kin Lane)

I have done a good job over the last decade at deprogramming from the previous four decades, with the essential ingredient being the injection of more diverse voices into my head, reading the stories of all of these amazing authors. I am very thankful for being able to decouple myself from the television and the Internet to make my way through these nourishing stories.

Source: Deprogramming Kin Lane by Kin Lane

Kin Lane provides a reading list for understanding how the United States works.