Announcing Portland Protest News

In July 2020, I created a news river to track what was going on in the Portland, Oregon area regarding the daily protests (George Floyd/Black Lives Matter). That river has been very helpful to me, but I felt that there was not a good place to capture the highlights of that river. After discussions with Ken Smith, professor of English at Indiana University-South Bend, I decided to start a project to collect those highlights, document them, and to try to provide some insights into the ongoing struggle in Portland regarding police brutality.

That project has created Portland Protest News, a news site summarizing the events in Portland related to the ongoing protests. The site publishes a daily list of links to articles and videos about the Portland protests. Users can sign up for a daily email with links of the day, subscribe via RSS, or go directly to the site. If you have any interest in following this topic, Portland Protest News is a valuable resource.

Bookmarked Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet by Tanya Basu ([object Object])

A growing number of people are creating individualized, creative sites that eschew the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media

Bookmarked Raspberry Pi 3: A Cheap Desktop Computer for Children Learning to Program in BASIC (cheapskatesguide.org)

In the early 2000’s, parents began noticing that educators were no longer interested in teaching their children about computers in ways that would lead them to get excited about pursuing computer-related careers like computer science and computer engineering. The problem was explained in a famous 2006 essay by the well-known astrophysicist and science fiction writer David Brin, Why Johnny can’t code. As the essay mentions, Brin could not find a modern computer and modern software capable of teaching children the BASIC computer programming language at a level they can understand. So, he solved the problem by buying a used computer from the 1980’s that came with BASIC already installed.

Link to David Brin article

Bookmarked Why Johnny Can’t Code (salon.com)

BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched — but today there’s no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.

Bookmarked Effective Political Giving (idlewords.com)

With less than two months left before the election, this is an explainer for the politically panicked. You’re anxious, you feel the need to do something, and you have a little money to spare. Who should you give it to?

Bookmarked Solving The Coronavirus Test Mess – The Brian Lehrer Show (wnyc.org)

Interview with Atul Gawande (The New Yorker), includes link to Atul’s recent article on this topic.

Bookmarked “Using Pressbooks to Publish Openly Licensed Learning Material” by Steel Wagstaff (2020.heypresstoconf.org)

We’ll show you how you can publish interactive, openly licensed webbooks and quickly produce export formats for offline access (EPUB, PDF, MOBI, etc) using Pressbooks, an open source book publishing platform built on top of WordPress multisite.

Bookmarked ClassicPress: The Business-Focused CMS | Instantly Familiar ([object Object])

ClassicPress is a community-led open source content management system and a fork of WordPress that preserves the classic editor as the default option.

A fork of WordPress focused on the Classic Editor

Bookmarked Org-roam – A plain-text personal knowledge management system (orgroam.com)

Need to look at this sometime…

Bookmarked Org-Kasten (github.com)

This is a small set of elisp functions I use to implement my own version of a Zettelkasten, something that HN is currently infatuated with.