Maryanne Wachter: How I Org – Examples of Emacs configuration and several examples of how the author uses Org/Emacs (via Sacha Chua)

Fedora Magazine: “This is an article about my journey to finding and configuring Emacs as a writer’s text editor and the results of my journey.” – A gentle introduction to how the author started using Emacs and an overview of features. (via Sacha Chua)

Github/James Gill: Writing with Emacs – “Emacs has a long history of being used for writing prose, blog posts, technical books, novels, and more. Here are some first-hand experiences you might find useful, whether you’re new to Emacs or just looking for ideas to customize your current Emacs configuration.” (via Sacha Chua)

Greg Wilson/The Third Bit: The First Six Questions – Greg Wilson continues to explore ways to teach the social sciences, interesting reading

Sacha Chua: Emacs tweaks: Choosing what to hack on – I liked this post a lot, showing Sacha’s process for working on her Emacs setup, and providing some insight on hacking in general.

Slate.com: Judge Aileen Cannon Is Quietly Sabotaging the Trump Classified Documents Case – I agree – she should be removed from this case (also see this from Joyce Vance).

New York Magazine: Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden? How the coalition that defeated Donald Trump crumbled. – I don’t agree with the title of this post. I think that coalitions can be rebuilt to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, but there has been some “splintering” since January 2021.

OpenRss.com: Bluesky has launched RSS feeds – hmm, seems like old news, I wrote about it on December 22, 2023, but there is some screen captures on discovering the feed URL, and notes on how links are not embedded in the full text of the feed.

John Johnston: iPod podcasting nostalgia – John found an old iPod with a recording device that he used to make podcasts some time ago – and he made a podcast with it just this week – neat!

The end of podcasting, chapter 62

Well, I haven’t written on this topic for at least a month, but an interesting story appeared on Semafor (via Ben Werdmuller) called “The Incredible Shrinking Podcast Industry”. It seems that Apple releases download counts for shows for Apple Podcasts app users, and that they made a change in their app recently to stop automatic downloads of podcasts if the user had not been listening to a podcast within the last two weeks. This resulted in a big drop for many podcasts that use this data to track listener volume. I guess my comments in chapter 60 (and associated podcast) about Apple controlling the master list of podcasts were incorrect, that they ALSO control the way podcasts track download counts (for their app, which I GUESS is the most used app for listening to podcasts). To echo chapter 60 – WHO CARES!

This Semafor article also referenced the Hot Pod Newsletter from The Verge, which seems to be attempting to cover the “podcasting industry”, in addition to shilling for its own conference. I guess I’ll have to subscribe….yawn…