Jeremy Cherfas

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

Relaxing with a peppermint tea and some Lester Young, having put tomorrow’s Eat This Newsletter to bed, or whatever one does in this digital age.

2021-12-09

On Wikipedia

1 min read

John Naughton's online diary contains a good piece on Wikipedia.

Me: “So you’ve found a glaring error on a subject you know about?”
Critic: “Yes. Elementary mistake”.
Me: “So why haven’t you corrected it?”
Critic: Flustered (sometimes), irritated (often), defensive (much too busy)

But there's another aspect to this, which is the wiki-zealots, who are all-too-ready to block the Critic who does have expertise on a topic precisely because they are not members of the Wikitribe.

Eventually, those people give up and keep their expertise to themselves, doing Wikipedia and the world a disservice.. Well, Wikipedia is doing itself a disservice, but let's not quibble.

TFW you forget to Start a Workout when you start a workout -- and you feel somehow you‘ve cheated yourself even tough, of course, you haven‘t.

We saw The French Dispatch this afternoon and it was a total delight, if you are into that kind of thing. Want to watch it again immediately as there were so many visual treats that went flying by. Probably not for everyone, but for me a solid 5/5.

Jeremy Cherfaspublished this 20 November 2021

0 stars 2 comments

@jeremycherfas Where/how did you see it? Theater?

JMaxB, Nov 20 2021 on micro.blog

@JMaxB Yup. Local cinema. Suitably masked and socially distant.

jeremycherfas, Nov 20 2021 on micro.blog

Why butter chicken, why not tomato chicken? @KanjiSuch explains:

If I had to guess, it would be that butter makes it sound fancier and nicer than just saying tomato chicken, because tomatoes are in many other chicken dishes, too.

From the transcript, now available.

Replied to a post on www.explodingcomma.com :

There is, in my mind at least, some confusion between discoverability and promotion. That is, I want people to be able to find my podcast, which means I both need to promote it where the ears are and, if possible, make sure the ears can find it.

Jeremy Cherfaspublished this 15 November 2021

0 stars 1 comment

@jeremycherfas Yeah, I wish there were some happy medium between the feeling of shouting into the void and the feeling that, at any moment, a million screaming randos might show up on my doorstep. I think you are right that it the slow, hard work of building community with webring-like tools is probably the best approach.

petebrown, Nov 15 2021 on micro.blog

Replied to a post on www.zylstra.org :

I've lost track, Ton. What are you using now as your feed reader?

Jeremy Cherfaspublished this 14 November 2021

0 stars 1 comment

I am using FreshRSS currently. I've dabbled a bit with Aperture/Monocle, with Yarns on Wordpress and with using a TinyTinyRSS instance. My TinyTInyRSS instance kept bumping into some 'bad bot' filters my hoster has in place (the same is true for FreshRSS btw). The upside to me for both Tiny and Fresh is that I find their php and mysql tech accessible, and have no trouble running it locally. Or at least more accessible than any of the IndieWeb stuff. I'd like to get to a working locally run Aperture/Monocle combo but can't and haven't figured out why. With Yarns, which has as a pre above Aperture it lives in the WP ecosystem I am at least more familiar with, I have issue with it storing all feeds in the WP content tables, even though everything in a feed reader is/should be ephemeral imo, just providing enough time to do something with whatever gets fetched (respond, bookmark, download to notes etc). Ideally I'd run yarns in a separate WP install to prevent it polluting my blogs database, but then you're back to how to ensure my 'reader' Wordpress instance can post to my 'blogging' WP instance.

Ton Zijlstra, Nov 14 2021 on stream.jeremycherfas.net

Can anyone tell me which template I need to edit to add an extra link to <head> in @withknown CMS?

Jeremy Cherfaspublished this 13 November 2021

0 stars 13 comments

@jeremycherfas are you ahead of me, and fully up to date with GitHub?

cn, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

That html tag has got lost… #POSSEhiccough

Chris 2️⃣💉 Neale, Nov 13 2021 on twitter.com

Yeah. WithKnown is wonderful, but it does have issues with, IMHO, over-aggressive tag stripping.

Jeremy Cherfas, Nov 13 2021 on stream.jeremycherfas.net

@cn I'm on Version: 1.2.2+2020061101
Github is at 1.3.1 202120201
But, y’know, inertia. Is the latest any less agressive about stripping tags?

jeremycherfas, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@jeremycherfas I don’t know, I sent a reply from my blog which may not have reached you regarding use of FooterJS in lieu of template hacking; although I can certainly look into that for us…

cn, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@cn No sign of it yet … And no rush either. I might just bite the bullet and upgrade. But not today.

jeremycherfas, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@jeremycherfas my install may warrant diagnosis (being PostgreSQL, and older than current…)

cn, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@jeremycherfas having “PubSubHubbub hub” field empty possibly not helping?

cn, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@cn Mine? Yours? I think all this recent crypticity is affecting your communication. 😀

jeremycherfas, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@jeremycherfas the field in my settings was blank; your blog gets twitter replies (via brid.gy?) which has stopped working for me (Stars happen).
The “crypticity” is a distraction from the week plus common(ish) cold 🤧

cn, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

@cn Get well soon. In the meantime, I am somewhat distracted myself.

jeremycherfas, Nov 13 2021 on micro.blog

For the sake of completion, the solution is to edit Themes/Solo/templates/default/solo/shell/head.tpl.php or the equivalent file in whatever theme you are using.

Jeremy Cherfas, Nov 15 2021 on stream.jeremycherfas.net

And remembering to edit it again when you upgrade…

Chris Neale, Nov 15 2021 on stream.jeremycherfas.net

Also on: @EatPodcast

Created an account at alltogethernow.io. It's a start.

Intrigued by a new role-playing board game called Rulal Commerce, based on China's demand for tea and what it is doing to Laos. Can't find any explanation of the significance of the name, though. Does it, I wonder, mean anything?

https://pim.cgiar.org/2021/10/25/rulal-commerce-boardgame/