onfocus

I'm not sure how to link to this because it's not a newsletter or a podcast. But if you're interested in Internet culture you should read everything Taylor Lorenz writes for The Atlantic. If you use a newsreader you can subscribe to her author page RSS feed (while they still offer it) or use IFTTT and the feed to email new articles to you—then it would be a newsletter. You could also make a friend read them out loud to you—then it would be a podcast. It's worth the extra effort to make sure these work their way into your media diet.

"Thousands of miles of railroads have been abandoned in the United States, much of it in the last 40 years."

This is a fun site to browse. You can look for abandoned tracks via maps and read about the history of failed business ventures. Then you might follow that up with Extreme Railbiking which triggered my fear of heights in 30 seconds.

Today I have a special hybrid Newsletter Wednesday where you'll be required to purchase a book as well as subscribe to a newsletter. We have collectively reached semantic satiation with the phrase fake news but there's a reason we talk about it so much. Understanding the history of hucksters and media manipulation is important context for the reality distortion field we’re living through. Last year, old guard blogger and Cold Fusion holdout Rex Sorgatz put together a fantastic collection of the ways we have been duped through the ages called The Encyclopedia of Misinformation. It is extremely entertaining, well-designed, and a nice reminder that truth exists somewhere. (Even if it takes the distance of time to find it.)

On to the newsletter! Rex recently started a newsletter called Recs (pun intended) that has recommended links around these themes. His latest had a pointer to the Our Fake History podcast that looks great. These newsletters have been packed with fun so far and I'm looking forward to more.

(ok, you aren't required to purchase the book but subscribing to the newsletter is mandatory, sorry.)

Intermittent Podcast Saturday™ continues with Criminal. Phoebe Judge produces stories that are related to some form of criminal activity. She has a fantastic classic NPR style and I say that as a sincere compliment! The contrast between her composed tone and the often chaotic stories is what makes this show amazing. Her latest episode about misplaced online vigilantes was absolutley chilling with its just the facts delivery. But keep in mind they aren't all meant to be chilling. Often the episodes are moving or highlight a particular time and place in history. She brings them to life with research and typically one in-depth interview. (Here's the episode list if you want to get a sense of the material.) I have always found it worth the time to listen.

The current state of accessibility in web design is not good even though awareness is up and related development tools are becoming more available. Eric Baily does a nice job here of summarizing a recent WebAIM analysis of the top million home pages and putting it in context. One thing I learned is that Firefox added a new accessibility pane for developers: Accessibility Inspector. It's very handy to be able to get color contrast info with a click and I hope the ease of use and ubiquity of tools like this will help developers make more accessible choices.

Simplenote is yet another cross platform note-taking app and I'm ready to say I like this one. For years I've used the Apple Notes app as my primary place for notes but I spend a good chunk of time on Windows these days. The browser-based iCloud version of Notes is fine but their login process is a complicated pain. The time from need-to-take-note to getting logged in at iCloud was too much. To fix that I've tried a bunch of note-taking options like Bear, Notion, Evernote, Google Keep, Microsoft's OneNote and who knows how many others. Simplenote works well with no cruft. It's made by Automattic—the company behind WordPress—so I'm hoping that means they'll be offering this for the forseeable future.

Security update: Nelson let me know that Simplenote does not store notes encrypted on their servers. It does encrypt the notes in transit between your devices and their servers, but that doesn't provide a spectacular level of security. He recommended I take a look at Standard Notes which does store them securely. And be sure to look at Nelson's summary of Standard Notes.

Hello, it's time to revive Newsletter Wednesday where I post about an email newsletter I subscribe to. On Wednesdays. (As the name implies.) I know next to nothing about "business" or "finance" and that's why I love Matt Levine's Money Stuff. Just about every day he describes some aspect of the day's financial news in a way I can understand. Of course you could read all of his articles in the Bloomberg Opinion section. But receiving them in a calm email with no other bits of the page vying for my attention is a superior experience. To get a feel for it, here's his latest: Who Can Say What California Means? Ha! He also recently described Slack's unorthodox IPO which I found helpful: Bankers Can't Feel Great Helping Slack Go Public.

I have to link to this excellent reporting by Casey Newton. This is an important article that shows the human cost of maintaining large centralized social networks. I think it also reveals a sick society where people are constantly uploading psychologically scarring material that other people then have to sift through. I felt like Facebook's response was weak—at some point the we're growing too fast to keep up and we're so new at this doesn't work. As Bloomberg points out, companies have always said artificial intelligence is just around the corner to save the day. I think that's why companies view human moderators as a failure of technology rather than a key piece of their success. Matt Haughey ran an indie corner of the open internet for years and knows Content moderation has no easy answers. Just because it's hard doesn't mean we shouldn't hold Facebook accountable. They made decisions that created this problem and it's a shameful aspect of the internet we need to fix.

This program is an audio equalizer for Windows. Well, it's a graphic interface for the text-only Equalizer APO which sounds complicated, but you need to install both programs to get a nice, familiar slider EQ:



Ok, so it looks a bit like a 90s Visual Basic version of a familiar slider EQ, but it works. If you spend any time on Windows it's a nice addition because Windows inexplicably doesn't have a native equalizer and neither does Spotify where I spend most of my listening time. Being able to boost the bass and treble and drop the mids is one of those things I could live without, but now that I have the ability everything sounds better.

I'm a big fan of goofing around with a Raspberry Pi. At times I've used mine as a game emulator, media center, and caller ID server. Recently it has been sitting in a box, but now it's a DNS server that blocks ads on my home network thanks to Pi-hole. Pi-hole is software you install on a raspberry pi that filters the addresses you or your devices request through shared lists of known advertisers. It's simple to set up and it just works. I'm seeing 98% fewer ads across the web—no browser ad-blocker required. Once installed it has a nice web admin interface and it gives you statistics about which domains have been blocked. (8.7% of all my DNS queries have been blocked as I write this.) It was also easy to add my favorite ad-supported sites to a whitelist so they'll still get paid. It does bother me that this kind of tool leads to a nerds vs. everyone else experience (great interview, btw) but tracking, malware, and general browsing performance has gotten so bad due to ads that we need these tools. If you already have a tiny computer, Pi-hole plus an hour to set it up on a weekend will improve your web experience.