I started my week out with filling in for a principal. That was a fun experience. It led to it’s very own blog post earlier this week.
I picked up a new (to me) camera lens, so naturally, I had to give it go. Since I purchased a used lens, I had to make sure there were no issues with the lens. I’m happy to report that I like the lens quite a bit. The pictures have come out sharp. The lens is a used 24-105mm f/4. I debated quite a bit about the 28-70 f/2.8, but that was out of my budget. I’m hoping that this lens will do well for traveling.
Article Sharing
I was also stuck this week by an article sharing amongst staff. Someone found an article that was behind a paywall and included it (via a PDF) to everyone else. I don’t know why this one kind of struck me. I’ve shared articles that were behind paywalls before. Maybe it was the wording in the email.
There is something about how things are the Internet are “free”. This has long been established. We’re moving to rarely owning anything digital. Rather, we are just purchasing a license or subscribing to things. (Purchasing a license really confuses some people. Buying something on a streaming service is really just purchasing a license.)
Anyway, there are people who need to make a living, need to be compensated for the work that they do. Simply saving a PDF and sending to everyone in your group to read obviates others purchasing that article.
Again, I don’t know why this particular instance hit me the way that it did.
Link-o-rama
I’m currently working on an improved workflow for the “Link-o-rama”. Link-o-rama is a listing of the links that I found interesting of late. I’m a big user of Hypothesis for bookmarking and annotation, but I wanted a more efficient way to create a published list. What I’m trying is a process through Joplin. I webclip something, which creates a new note in a specific folder. Once I’ve webclipped a bunch of sites, I can use the Combine Notes plugin to push all of the webclips into one note. I little “Search and Replace” and I have a listing.
Tech
- Blogs are Back! (where did they go?) RSS Makes the Web Bearable (read in my dead reader!) – From Alan Levine an internet stalwart. Includes a bit about RSS. (if you aren’t using RSS, you are definitely missing out.)
- DOUG.md – Dr. Doug Belshaw’s write up about teaching AI to work with “you”. He notes that it might even be useful for other humans who work with you.
- Dynamic Skillset Ltd | Consultancy from Dr Doug Belshaw – Another link from Dr. Doug Belshaw. Maybe you want to work with Dr. Belshaw.
- Mr. Chatterbox – a Hugging Face Space by tventurella – “Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. He is not a modern AI putting on an accent — his vocabulary, ideas, and worldview are all drawn from nineteenth-century literature.”“
- Blog posts in the Stream, that is what we are – A project by Dr. Doug Belshaw that reconfigures how RSS is used. Instead of a badged, list of read and unread items, this just creates a stream. Not for me, but some people might like this.
- AddyOsmani.com – Cover Flow with Modern CSS: Scroll-Driven Animations in Action – How to use CSS to create a Cover Flow experience. I haven’t tried this yet, but it is on my list. I think that this could be very cool with some photography.
- Human. json Protocol: A lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their website content and vouch for the humanity of others. – Codeberg.org – “human.json is a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.”” I’ve implemented this on my site. The example was extremely helpful. I’ve only vouched for a couple of sites so far. Also, I got a warning from one of my protection plugins that a change had happened (due to the change I made for this).
- Vocalcat – “The decentralized link-in-bio that connects to the Fediverse. Share links, collect badges, and own your online presence — no corporation in the middle.”. I’ve created mine, but I’m not complete sure of how this is used or why.
- Badge Studio – site to help you create your own badges. There are lots of sites where you can create badges, but this prevents the overwhelming choice problem.
Photography
- Rinko Kawauchi | Works – Photographer
- Home – SZIPÁL PÉTER – (NSFW) Photographer
- BLAIR HANSEN – Photographer
- Critics’ Choice 2026 – LensCulture – Global Photography Competition. One free entry.
- RapidRAW – The RAW Editor You’ve Been Waiting For. – Free, open-source RAW editor. This one uses AI and is described as “A beautiful, non-destructive, and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor built with performance in mind. Just 20 MB – lighter than a RAW image.” Sometimes it cool to play around with options.
Education
- What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People | Psychology Today – Generally about autism misunderstandings. Set up with some claims and then evidence.
- Free Fact-Checking Sites for Students and Teachers | Tech & Learning – with AI, fact finding may be very limited. Still it is very important for students to learn critical thinking skills. The sites noted here can be very useful.
- Theme your H5P contents on WordPress … end elsewhere possibly – OTACKE’S LAB – Ah yes, theming capabilities have been added to H5P. This brings that theming to WordPress.
Interest
- CKLW Jingles – Classic radio jingles from CKLW. As a kid growing up in the Detroit area, I heard these regularly.
- The DOJ thinks news is contraband – Ben Werdmuller on the importance of investigative journalism.
- California scholar keeps showing immigration doesn’t increase crime – (Subscription required – but the title kind of says it all)
- My Gramps genealogy workflow – GRAMPS is an open-source geneology program to create your family trees and such. Kevin explains how he uses GRAMPS and the custom website generator that he built.
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