Weekly Thing #149 / RSS, Blogs, Giphy, Flour
I’m Jamie Thingelstad, and this is my Weekly Thing. Did you know that you can also get this via your favorite feed reader using the RSS feed? Hooray for the web standards!
I've come to an important conclusion as I've been working from home over the last few weeks. My preferred lunch at home is a Turkey & Swiss sandwich on whole wheat with mayo. But I would find that sometimes it was just too much turkey, and other times not enough. So, out came the gram scale and I can now say that 3.2 ounces of deli sliced no-salt added turkey is the perfect amount of turkey for my sandwich. Your mileage may vary… 🥪
Must Read
Inside King Arthur Flour, the Company Supplying America's Sudden Baking Obsession | Marker
We buy King Arthur flour and were caught off guard when there was a run on it in grocery stores. Flour was the only product through the pandemic that we actually had to make a focused effort to get for a couple of weeks. This story from the inside on what they were doing is interesting. It is notable to me that their commercial production that ships 50 lb bags could not be adapted for consumer packaging. I think that is a common limitation of many manufacturers, and a very hard, if not impossible, problem to solve.
Doc Searls Weblog · Will our digital lives leave a fossil record?
I've thought about this topic a decent amount, and I think there are some good strategies to make sure that our digital memories are preserved. When I think about this I’m thinking about my website and the content in it, and the digital photos. Things that my descendants may care about, if I can be so presumptive.
I think the answer to this problem lies in two things.
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Make the content as simple as possible. No databases, no fancy formats, just simple HTML files and related images. Stuff that you can easily put in a directory and requires no applications to serve or run. This is why I love static site generators and why I use mico.blog.
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Now that the content is super simple, make as many copies of it and give it to everyone. Put it on a thousand servers around the world. Distribute it everywhere. Make sure that your content license allows this, which is one of the reasons I use Creative Commons.
I trust that more than I trust printing everything. However, I have considered printing each year or two of my blog into books and having a few copies as well. Why not?
Photograph
The Hidden Falls, just a half-mile hike in at Nerstrand Big Woods State Park.
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Recommended Links
No Mask, No Dice
Gruber pulling from Talking Points Memo. I'll be wearing a mask when indoors for sure. Not wearing a mask seems at best statistically silly, or some form of political or culture statement.
Drafts 20 Introduces Advanced Wiki-Style Linking - MacStories
Drafts continues to get a ton of powerful features, the newest is wiki linking. I dig how this works. I don't know how much I will use this as I tend to think of Drafts as a place for text to start but then go other places. But this would open up the ability to have a Workspace that you could treat as a wiki store.
The Keys to Deeper and More Trusting Relationships - Matt Norman
Interesting article about "Proactive Listening", a technique to engage more deeply with others.
Through proactive listening, we can take what we currently hear and turn it into dialog bursting with information. We can consider how words may be dressed in body language and intonation revealing more. Active and engaged listening reveals deeper meaning than the words our ears are simply hearing. There are 5 levels of listening. In our professional role, we must reside in the top two levels of listening to have meaningful relationships with our co-workers, clients, and partners. Being attentive simply opens up the pathways allowing us to expand our connection to include the lower two quadrants of the Interest Areas diagram.
This is an interesting framework, and seems worth investing time to understand better.
25. Passive income for the soul - 100%
The title of this grabbed my attention. What even is this?
Soul-based passive income is when something you do requires little to no effort but delivers a lot of satisfaction. And that requires two things:
- repetition
- an absence of goals
There is an interesting thought here. I find it a little odd that the author doesn't refer to these as hobbies, since that is what it seems to be describing. I think of my blog and newsletter a bit like this, although I constantly struggle with wanting to introduce goals, because I’m me.
What is your passive income for the soul? That is a question I think we should answer.
Ukraine Nabs Suspect in 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ — Krebs on Security
Cool to see Ukraine in the news for catching a cybercriminal.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on Tuesday announced the detention of a hacker known as Sanix (a.k.a. "Sanixer") from the Ivano-Frankivsk region of the country. The SBU said they found on Sanix’s computer records showing he sold databases with "logins and passwords to e-mail boxes, PIN codes for bank cards, e-wallets of cryptocurrencies, PayPal accounts, and information about computers hacked for further use in botnets and for organizing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks."
👮♂️
@george__mack: Tobi Lutke (@tobi) is the CEO of Shopify, he's one of my favorite CLEAR thinkers
I greatly dislike Twitter threads. This is what a blog was made for. When you have something more meaningful to share, don't tweet it out in some linked list of blurps to connect together. Anyway, sometimes one is good enough that I'll detangle it with a thread reader and share.
Some very good items to think about in these six things.
- Operate on Crocker's Law
- Always be a Student to First Principles
- Think About the Long Term
- Embrace Transfer Learning
- Decision Making
- Talent Stack Led by Curiosity
All of this is worth incorporating.
It's Time to Get Back Into RSS | Daniel Miessler
This is a good introduction to RSS and I would also encourage everyone to use a feed reader. I use Feedbin and like it a lot. It’s the easiest subscription for me to renew. I also recently published the list of my RSS Subscriptions on my site.
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs - TTTThis
I completely agree with the sentiment of this. Of course, I've been a blogger for over 20 years and I still thoroughly enjoy my blog. I’m very happy with micro.blog and feel it offers the right set of ease-of-use and simplicity with the aspects of a reasonable business model and survivable content.
Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) – Ramez Naam
I haven't looked seriously at solar electric prices in 15 years, and it sounds like the price is dropping much faster than anyone predicted.
In fact, solar has reached prices today that are:
– 7 to 10 years ahead of what I forecast in 2015. – 10 to 15 years ahead of what I forecast in 2011. – 30 to 40 years ahead of what the IEA forecast in its 2014 Solar Technology Roadmap. – 50 to 100 years ahead of what the IEA forecast in its 2010 World Energy Outlook. (Depending on how one extrapolates IEA’s forecasts from 2010. Indeed, it’s also possible to interpret the IEA’s 2010 forecasts as to say that solar electricity is now cheaper than the IEA thought it would ever be, back in 2010.)
That is impressive progress!
Facebook to buy Giphy for $400 million - Axios
Looks like I have to add another domain to my 1Blocker blacklist. Facebook will make this a big revenue generator, and make it all gross and Facebook-y I’m sure.
The bottom line: Giphy is a massive video library, with hundreds of millions of daily users that share billions of GIFs, that generates revenue via branded content. Adding Facebook's ad sales and marketing firepower could be what transforms it from a popular service into a highly profitable one.
The bigger thing here is that Giphy images are embedded all over the web. I’m sure that Facebook has identified that they will not get to surveil humans in more places and understanding advertising intent even better. I would imagine Facebook can do machine analysis of the images themselves to also infer certain preferences back to the user that shared them. It’s all just, yuck… 😠
A Short on How Zoom Works - High Scalability
Collection of various bits about how Zoom has scaled. I find it interesting that they have a different video codec and all the design tradeoffs.
SVC is a single stream with multiple layers. That allows sending a 1.2 mbs stream that has every resolution and bitrate you may need to scale down to given network conditions. In the past you could only do SVC with an ASIC. Now, thanks to Moore’s law, SVC can be done in software.
It would be cool to hear more about how they have scaled this up.
Uncertainty, as mantra | Curious Public
Thoughtful article highlighting how off nearly all the world was in their thinking as we came into 2020.
Our error boils down to this: we conflate risk and uncertainty. We see risk and uncertainty basically the same thing. But Radical Uncertainty traces the stories of economic "heretics" over the past century — thinkers who argue that risk and uncertainty are categorically distinct. Risk and uncertainty, they say, are different species altogether. Kay and King beg us to re-engage this long and often ignored distinction.
This is worth reading deeply and contemplating with your coffee. ☕️
Scaling an Engineering Team from Zero to Infinity - Arush - Medium
A bunch of interesting thoughts on how you scale an engineering organization from 1 person to a larger team and how that evolves. I like the pragmatism about tools in here, and the approach.
I’m going to double emphasize a highlight in the middle.
This part is really important. Do not skip.
For a while we were executing on epics and successively increasing revenue but our support team were extremely unhappy with their tools and our engineers were ignoring much needed chores. It took us a while to figure out that this was a huge problem. We were only optimizing for dollars. We found that epic impact can be measured in at least 1 of 3 ways: 1. Profit. Some epics will literally turn up on the P&L as increased profit. This is why Ben Horowitz says a good Product Manager owns his/her P&L. 2. Customer happiness. This is self explanatory. 3. Employee happiness. As your startup grows you will find that your employee tooling will degrade and cause incredible frustration with engineers, ops, customer service, all of the above. Some epics should be dedicated to keeping your people happy.
That means a piece of your business funnel can be red even if it is making customers super happy because it might be crippling for employees. This is really important.
Read that part above over and over, and over, until it really sinks in because it is extremely important. 👍
Stream
2020 Minnesota Aspirations in Computing Award Ceremony
It was great to attend the Minnesota Aspirations in Computing Award Ceremony tonight held online. The accomplishments of these young women are incredibly impressive. It is an honor that SPS Commerce is one of the sponsors of the program, and we are hosting multiple interns this summer from the program, as we have for multiple years before. A big shout out to Amy Patton of #TeamSPS who has put so much into this program, as well as many others! "Photos" of Erin Mitchell (Keynote), John Bartucz (Educator Honoree), Afiya Ward (State Winner), Amy Patton (Intern Program), Stuti Arora (Intern Speaker), and Russell Fraenkel (Committee Member).
Also, 2019 Award Ceremony and 2016 Award Ceremony.
Solid climbing intervals in this morning’s 30-minute spin workout. I like how the charts look. 📈 #FitByFifty
Super excited to be watching live Bundesliga play with Union Berlin v Bayern! While there are no fans in the stadium, it turns out I can yell at the TV just as loud as ever when VAR calls back a Bayern goal! It was awesome to see Bayern take the win 2-0. We enjoyed some takeout cheeseburgers from Tap Society too! ⚽️
Had to go out and raise the Sea Legs up a foot and adjust the pontoon cover poles in the middle of gale force winds and heavy rain. How did you start your Sunday morning? 😬
We enjoyed a nice short hike to the Hidden Falls at Nerstrand Big Woods State Park today. It was our first time to this state park but we will be back to explore some more!
This graph of DNS requests by client at our cabin is a good example of how metadata and privacy interact. When did we get there? How many people were there? All reasonable things that you could derive from this metadata.
Time to smoke another pork shoulder! Big Green Egg charcoal with chunks of Hickory. 🔥
Tammy has coined the name “European Picnic” for what has become one of our favorite family lunches. Baguette, block of cheese, chocolate to finish. Turkey is an optional addition. Perfect for the four of us.
Happy 23rd Birthday BigCharts!
On this day, 23 years ago, we launched BigCharts.com. The time before and after that was fun, stressful, and filled with unknowns. It was a great ride. One of the defining experiences of my life. I love that the site is still around, serving charts for all that want! I’m sure code I wrote is still running on it. 😬
I bet that it is one of the very few sites that can show a graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to 1970. I know because I was the one that backloaded that data into the database!
I love that the size of chart bigger than Large is still called Big! I remember the laughter when we came up with that obvious label.
It still is one of the few sites that will give you a historical quote, with the price info for a given day in the past, backing out splits.
I remember the up2.aspx page that we used for the load balancers to make sure servers were healthy.
Here is a team photo from June 9, 1999. It was a tech team dinner at Buca. What a great team!
I hope the site enjoys its 20s and is around for decades to come!
I also shared this on LinkedIn and hopefully we’ll get some old school BigCharts folks commenting.
Micro.blog added a Custom 404 Page feature. I had sent Manton a note asking for this feature just a week ago. Love it! 💛
Such a pleasant evening on Cannon Lake tonight.
FYI
new.css
I dig this kind of minimal styling. Text forward, simple, etc. If I were building a blog I'd probably start with this.
Windows Terminal 1.0 | Windows Command Line
Good to see Windows finally getting a decent terminal.
How to use a DSLR as a webcam on a Mac – A Whole Lotta Nothing
The difference in video between the built-in camera and a powerful DSLR is awesome. I’m tempted to set this up and not tell anyone to just see if folks notice.
Apple Releases iOS 13.5 with COVID-19 Exposure Notifications, Face ID Bypass for Masks, FaceTime Setting, and Apple Music Stories Sharing - MacStories
Almost all of the features in this iOS release are focused around COVID-19 items. Face ID getting face mask features, and the contact tracing framework.
Thank you for reading! 🤓
Please share this with a friend. Cool, thanks!
Fortune
You've made it all the way to the end! 👏 Here is your fortune for this week.
You are taking yourself far too seriously.
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About
The Weekly Thing highlights helpful, engaging, or insightful articles from the week. I am a voracious reader of technology, culture, leadership, privacy, and many other topics as my interests roam. Each item I share is framed with personal commentary combining my decades of experiences. My goal is to positively impact your journey with knowledge and insight.
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