Dan J’s Website

Important article by Cory Doctorow about "adversarial interoperability" - the concept of building a system that interoperates with an existing system for the purposes of competing with it—what it is, why it matters, and what's happened to it.

In short: alt. took over from Usenet in a way that federated social networks are struggling to take over from facebook and twitter.

(via... I can't remember; EFF's newsletter, probably)

Short video about Dustin's writing process: he does a shit-ton of outlining on cards ahead of time, which I think is what Joe wanted me to see an example of.

(via Joe Nassise)

"What’s your advice for aspiring writers?"

Keep writing, and don't walk away when you're discouraged. Finish your projects.

I still feel like an aspiring writer. I'm self-published. No one shook my hand and told me I'd make a most excellent author, and that's a scary thing. I took a leap.

I spent years toying around with unfinished manuscripts. You know what got me out of that rut? I decided enough was enough, and I committed to a publish date. Even now that I've published my writing, I still use pre-orders not just as a marketing tool, but to force myself to finish my projects. Maybe it's the former journalist in me, but I need deadlines.

So, try giving yourself a deadline. But don't make it a soft deadline in your head. Commit to sending your work somewhere: to a beta reader, a friend, a book agent or online to Smashwords or Amazon Direct Publishing.

Try writing novellas instead of the great American novel to start out. Finish a shorter piece, and you'll figure out some of the formula for finishing a longer one. You'll also prove to yourself that you can finish it.

Then comes the hardest part. You have to set it free.

Good luck!

I came across this person when searching for my own author name. At least in terms of pronunciation, they're awfully similar. 😂 Anyway, I really like her advice, quoted above.

There's no good reason I should build my own site generator, instead of just using Jekyll (as I am at the time of writing this post.)

No good reason, other than I want to, other than I miss software development and, more specifically, have never really done a big software …

A favourite post from one of my favourite tech bloggers, Scott Hanselman. I keep this in mind when trying to decide how the URLs on this IndieWeb site should work.

Critical hub for learning about tools and services that respect / protect your online privacy.

SBI is a home for generating new knowledge and understandings of how Indigenous nations and communities are impacted by gender and sexual violence, and how they may continue to work towards healing and freedom from such violence.

I saw this site linked to somewhere, and wanted to bookmark it for future investigation. I feel woefully ignorant of indigenous issues (and intimidated by the thought of countenancing them, let's be honest). At least let me not ignore resources when they're dropped in my lap.

My man Antony Johnston's take on organizational techniques that work for him. I want to get more organized, seems a good time to read this old article again.

Perennial favourite from one of my heroes, Antony Johnston. One of many exhortations to "write more, more often" that I am trying to actually live.

This is basically my go-to site for learning F#. Full of good explanations of concepts, and worked examples.

IndieWeb supernerd Aaron shared this post on Micro.blog the other day, and, having just bought Hue bulbs, I definitely want to dig into this. He has a focus on doing home automation while staying off "the cloud", which is totally my jam.

(via @aaronpk on Micro.blog)

(...interesting how he does permalinks to status posts like that! 🤔)

I asked this question a while back—if I ever get back to playing with my Librem laptop, it's worth keeping an eye on this.

Dang, I was quite compelled by Walker's various podcast appearances. You just can't trust anyone these days. 😏

Well. The fact is, science is hard, uncertainty is the only thing that's certain... and you have to be willing to stay sceptical without checking out entirely.

Honestly, that last might be the hardest thing of all.

All it really means to me is, best to keep experimenting to figure out what sort of sleep schedule suits me.

(via Mark Manson's newsletter)

Awesome tool for finding special characters (and their related encodings/code points/etc.) or even taking an unfamiliar character and finding out what the heck it is.

Sweet (though non-SSL 😜) utility for easily creating tables in a variety of formats (Markdown being the one I'm interested in).

I used it to create the table [in this post][1], by copying the table off of the website, pasting it into a Numbers document, exporting that to CSV, and loading the CSV into this tool. Worked pretty well.

[1]: {% post_url 2019-11-20-cooking-oils-and-smoke-points %}

I can't remember if I'd come across the Markdown Guide before—useful reference for the less-common bits of Markdown, like tables.

In fact, I found the site when searching for evidence that Jekyll supports Markdown tables (it does). The list of tools and what features they support is handy. 👍🏼

I'd been looking for a quick reference for the smoke points of various cooking oils. I tend to use EVOO for everything, or Avocado Oil for higher-temp frying, or as an alternative to Coconut Oil (which is high in saturated fat).

In fact, in addition to containing the useful table below, this article points out that, as a rule of thumb, oils which are solid at room temperature (coconut oil, and, oh, I don't know, butter) tend to be higher in sat fat, and should therefore be used sparingly.

I mean, butter also has a super-low smoke point, but it's pretty much irreplaceable in the dishes that call for it (most baking, for example). At least in this amateur cook's opinion.

I used this article to properly position the little Micro.blog logo next to the Status Feed link in this site's navigation bar. Useful!

Looks like a big leap over the old OverDrive app I used years ago. Gotta check this out—it would be nice to patronize my local library with the same convenience that currently drains my bank account to fill up my Kindle. 😅

I'm glad I took the 12 minutes. Don't cheat yourself out of watching the video, but I'm collecting these bullets to remind myself:

1. Be okay with what you ultimately can't do... because there's so much you CAN do
2. Surround yourself with people you want to be around
3. Keep moving forward
4. Never miss a party if you can help it

Truer words, and all that. 😄

(via Tim Ferriss's "5-Bullet Friday")