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Jeremy Cherfas"/>

A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.

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Jeremy Cherfas

IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024

Very interesting write-up, echoing many of my own feelings from IndieWeb camps. Sorry to have missed discussion of the evolutionary history of camels.

Jeremy Cherfas

A new Eat This Newsletter: the other shoe drops on lead in cinnamon; rye in Scandinavia and the recent oldest bread, which requires a small qualifier; doubts about agricultural subsidies that “that when reached will make them redundant”; and a history of British pies https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/etn-233-leavened/

Jeremy Cherfas

Interesting to read Devastatia's IndieWeb Carnival entry, which opens with an account of The Breakfast Club, the day after we saw The Holdovers. We were talking about great high school movies of the past, and of course TBC was among them (also If, The History Boys etc). As a Boomer, I wonder how those and The Holdovers (set in 1971) come across to recent generations.

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on werd.io :

Very interesting personal history from @benwerd ... and here I remain, ready and willing to move from one-off donations to paying a real price for WithKnown.

Jeremy Cherfas

Just a moment...

History is not destiny, and yet a little understand of history can help to make sense of things. I am grateful to Alan Jacobs for surfacing this enlightening account of the history of an area called Palestine. And if I remember correctly, in 1948 Jordan could have accepted Arabs from Western Palestine who wanted to resettle, but feared that their presence would upset the Hashemite  kingdom.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Currently reading: US History in 15 Foods by Anna Zeide, ISBN: 9781350211971



-fiction


Jeremy Cherfas

Finished reading: English Food: A People's History by Diane Purkiss, ISBN: 9780007255566



-fiction


Jeremy Cherfas

Currently reading: English Food: A People's History by Diane Purkiss, ISBN: 9780007255566



-fiction


Jeremy Cherfas

@MairBosworth Terrific listen that adds so much history, humanity and thoughtfulness to the value of human breastmilk.

Jeremy Cherfas

Primed for Power: A Short Cultural History of Protein downloaded and ready to be read. Thanks @jessfanzo for the link to https://www.tabledebates.org/publication/primed-power-short-cultural-history-protein

Jeremy Cherfas

@ChrisAldrich Hardly surprising. The topic may have a long history, but it is very of the moment too.

Jeremy Cherfas

Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.

https://www.eatthispodcast.com/large-planet/

Jeremy Cherfas

2021-09-09

1 min read

Correctly attired for editing next weeks episode with @dianaegarvin on some fascinating aspects of coffee history. 
Wearing a T-shirt from tazza d’oro

Jeremy Cherfas

Grano arso is effectively smoked flour, although I don’t know whether they smoke the flour or scorch the grain, as history suggests

Grano arso is effectively smoked flour, although I don’t know whether they smoke the flour or scorch the grain, as history suggests

Grano arso is effectively smoked flour, although I don’t know whether they smoke the flour or scorch the grain, as history suggests. Either way it makes a beautifully dark loaf with a smoky aroma and sweetish crumb.

Jeremy Cherfas

An ad-hoc meeting of the WithKnown Open Collective

5 min read

The past 24 hours saw perhaps more activity in the IRC channel (yesterday and today) and than I have ever seen before. Near the end of it all, jgmac1106, having previously voluntold me to be the first rotating organiser, voluntold me to “call all of today a meeting of the Open Collective”. Obviously you can’t have a meeting without minutes,[1] so here they are.

It all started with jgmac1106’s heartfelt plea that he just wanted to publish his site, “not learn backend engineering” and contemplating starting afresh. LewisCowles raised the question of how to reward Open Source software developers and maintainers, and that started a discussion of what it would take to put Known on a commercial footing.

Jgmac1106 was of the opinion that easier install with auto-update was needed. Lewiscowles and jeremycherfas thought that better direction of the project was needed, with a model that offered installation, domain management and updates, for a fee.

“Make it Known would be such a great tagline if we could get Sir Patrick Stewart on board.” Lewiscowles

There followed further discussion of operational models, including micro.blog; pay for hosting, including updates, and some backfeed, with a free offering open to IndieWeb if you have a capable site elsewhere.

On funding, jeremycherfas related his early experience hosting through IndieHosters and jgmac1106 talked about applying for grants to fund specific pieces of Known development. We played around with numbers, concluding that nobody knew enough to build even an outline business plan. There did seem to be agreement that venture capital should be rejected from the outset, while collectives and cooperatives could provide a more desirable structure, and that any kind of structure needs direction.

After a gap, some other people joined the channel and mapkyca explained that right now, a bigger block than money was time as he is working flat out. He also said that the maths does not work out for SaaS.

Benatwork then rejoined the meeting and explained in some depth the history of Known, including funding decisions and his original vision.

The original intention was to build a community platform that could be hosted securely, with discussion not monitored by the likes of a Facebook. … [I]t was never built to be an indieweb platform or an individual blogging engine from the start. The core idea was: flexible, social feeds that one or more people could contribute to, with per-item access control and integrations both in and out. I still believe that it has most value as a multi-user platform.

Major problem: we gave our entire platform away as open source, and it turns out there was a strong correlation between people who wanted to use it and people who didn’t want to pay. Although they were happy to pay for an account on a shared host, which of course didn’t go to us. So it didn’t really work as a scalable business.

Benatwork then filled us in on recent developments and why his direct involvement has dwindled, all of which is very understandable, closing with his belief that SaaS is not the way forward.

Jgmac1106 then voluntold jeremycherfas to take the lead on setting up monthly meetings for the next three months, as the first rotating organiser.[2] He also shared his idea of having something like Known to offer local media as something they can sell to subscribers as a built in social platform.

In response to a question from Aaron_Klemm, Benatwork shared the Known roadmap on github. He also explained some of the past technical decisions and that maybe some of those should be revisited to improve the product as a whole.

People shared their different ideas of what Known could become for them, with the question of the current admin tax prominent. Cleverdevil said he would be happy to pay mapkyca to update his site, raising again the potential demand for SaaS.

Benatwork’s vision is Known not as a blog CMS exclusively, but rather:

What Known can do is create a stream of many different kinds of content, and present it differently based on context. Filtering is a similarly powerful idea. “Show me all posts that are sensor readings and photos tagged with bats, from January 1st.”

There was some discussion of other aspects of Known that need attention, including the templating engine, which mapkyca said he hopes to separate completely from the back end.

Chrisaldrich raised the possibility of working with Reclaim Hosting to devise a package similar to what Reclaim offers universities, i.e. Reclaim does the heavy lifting for turnkey Known installs while allowing a small group of others to support people who signed up. Aaron_Klemm supported this idea strongly.

There was a lot more discussion of various ways in which Known could contribute to community internet literacy and how it might be used alongside other web publishing tools.

This summary is an entirely personal capture of the discussion; corrections and comments welcome. (You know how to do that, right?) I’ll suggest some times for an online meeting through the channel.


  1. Though apparently you can have one without an agenda.  ↩

  2. Which I will do, bearing in mind that, with exceptions, I am really only available Monday to Friday from 08:00 to 19:00 CEST.  ↩

Jeremy Cherfas

A brief history of the “walking simulator,” gaming's most detested genre

As a non-gamer, I had no idea that this was even a thing. And some of these games are almost tempting. Found via Craig Mod's Ridgeline newsletter.

Jeremy Cherfas

Thinking about the Land: A Personal Perspective on the Origin of Organic Farming – Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan is promising a personal look into some of the history of the organic farming movement in England. Looking forward to the rest of her series.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

@rachellaudan Tone of voice failure. I was aping the view that seems to be prevalent among natural history filmmakers that to show humanity would be to despoil the natural.

Jeremy Cherfas

Thanks Aaron for your mention of my wheat and bread podcasts. You raise an interesting question about aboriginal bread in Australia. I've listened to a podcast with Bruce Pascoe and read a general piece that was awfully muddled, but I have not read his book. I have no reason not to take his claims at face value, although I also think that the freight he is adding to those claims owes as much to the general status and recent past history of aboriginal people in Australia as it does to archaeology. I will certainly be including something in the book I am working on.





Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Episode 01 of my contribution to Dog Days of Podcasting is up. [The Abundance of Nature](https://www.eatthispodcast.com/our-daily-bread-01/)

I'm going to be exploring the history of wheat and bread every day in August.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-06-11

1 min read

It's all about power. Where the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium leads, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking and the Agricultural History Society follow.

Jeremy Cherfas

That study of how people from rice- and wheat-growing areas of China differ in social situations is interesting, and part of a long history of trying to make use of the collectivism needed to grow rice well to explain other things. I'm not totally convinced.

Jeremy Cherfas

"Who We Are: #8 India"

The Aryan-Invasion-Theory sure looks to be basically correct. As for the archaeologists saying that there’s not enough evidence of devastation, Reich points out that they can’t really detect the fall of the western Roman Empire, which hardly means it didn’t happen. War and migration are well-known important factors in written history – why not in prehistory? Because many contemporary archaeologist and historians think that wishing can make it so. They should be paid accordingly.

PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4XXy/https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/who-we-are-8-india/.

Jeremy Cherfas

Atlantic City

Atlantic City came up in iTunes shuffle today, reminding of this absolute masterpiece (best enjoyed while listening along; also, if the images seem like ancient history, note they’re from just 3 months ago) 🎵

 

So very fine; I had never seen this before. I hope it never vanishes.

Jeremy Cherfas

Lifetime achievement award for the man who invented the webcam

So interesting to see this, not only as a piece of history but also as a personal reminder.

Back when the web was young and shiny, an otherwise extremely intelligent BBC television producer, a friend at the time, asked my help in understanding the promise of the new shinyness, especially in visual terms. I told him about the famous coffee pot web cam (and maybe, also, about the link to the Coke machine).

"Isn't that great," I said, "that you can see whether there's coffee in the pot without having to leave your computer."

"But you could just get up and look."

"Well yes, but the coffee pot could be anywhere in the world."

"What's the point of that? You can't go and get a cup of coffee there."

"True. But it doesn't have to be a coffee pot. It could be, oh, anything."

"I just don't see the point."

Of couse he went on to produce a highly acclaimed series, and much else besides.

Jeremy Cherfas

Virgin Cola: Richard Branson's Greatest Failure

As proven by his stunts, Richard Branson knew how to drive a tank. Unfortunately for Virgin Cola, Coke knew how to control an army.

Jeremy Cherfas

@pazzobooks Thanks Tom. Not all history. Today, the future of wheat @meanlouise @/besslovejoy

Jeremy Cherfas

NOFOMO I

1 min read

Finally reached a key milestone in the deliverables of a big work-for-money, so was able to treat myself to an excellent video from the [IndieWebSummit 2017](https://2017.indieweb.org).

First up, for me, [Lillian Karabaic](http://anomalily.net) offering [A brief history of my website](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VGX8iBWrTE&index=4&list=PLk3TtIJ31hqrLIPqz55TczawWu-30cnXM). I noted a few things.

First, the video, audio and editing were top notch. Huge kudos to everyone who made this happen. They say content trumps technical quality, and it does, but when you're not fighting quality, the value of the content is so much more obvious.

Second, and much more important, Lillian's trajectory mirrors my own and, not surprisingly, I can relate strongly to everything she said -- good and bad -- about the . The help available is stellar, the documentation isn't great (I hope to work on that) and it is hard to evangelise.

So much left to do ...

Jeremy Cherfas

A podcast about the Indieweb

2 min read

Further to my note about a new about things, I listened to Marty McGuire's rendering of This Week in the Indieweb. I really enjoyed it, even though I had read the text version. Production and audio were top notch, and it was very clear. My only quibbles concern the pace and the audience.


Even as a native English speaker, and despite Marty's very clear diction, it seemed a bit speedy to me. I wonder whether less fluent listeners manage to get it all.


A second, similar point, about the audience. In my estimate, as a newcomer to indieweb and a less than expert person, some of the stuff whizzed right by me. But if I were familiar with it all, I'd probably be keeping up with the IRC channels and the indieweb.org pages and so I'm not too sure why I'd need an audio version. But that's just a matter of choice.


The slightly bigger question is, would there be an audience for a more discursive podcast about the indieweb? Marty would be in favour. So would Chris Aldrich, who started this ball rolling for me. There's a fair bit of audio tagged indieweb at huff duffer, but nothing, apparently, dedicated to the topic.


We certainly have the technology to produce something that captures the history, what's happening now and how things might develop. There's no way I could do that on my own -- not least because I don't know enough to ask intelligent questions -- but with a co-host or two it would be a really interesting project.