A prayer for Minneapolis

Another week, another murder in Minneapolis by ICE agents after the murder of Renee Good. Today at Mass, one of our songs had a verse that was especially appropriate for the situation in Minneapolis and our country:

In the midst of persecution, Lord, stand by me

When my enemies surround me, Lord, stand by me

When the tyrant wields his terror and the armies wage their might

When the darkness overwhelms me, Lord, stand by me

Title: Stand By Me, words and music Copyright 2001 Tom Kendzia, published by Oregon Catholic Press (lyrics) (performance)

MyStatusTool development update

Late last year, I did some experiments with MyStatusTool to test use of async function calls to eliminate some startup errors I was seeing. Next, I did some tests of my ability to follow WordPress.com feeds. Eventually, I saw that I was not properly parsing the RSS server domain and path from the feeds. My prior setup had been for feeds using a separate rssCloud server for notification. The WordPress.com feeds use each WordPress site as the cloud server, so there is variation in the server URL. Now that has been worked out, my next step is update my startup logic to read the feeds, then parse the RSS server domain and path information. I may need to do more experiments with async programming again to get these steps to execute in a synchronous manner. See example installs here and here!

The clash of analog and digital

Earlier this week on NBC News, a story aired on the nightly news show about how young people are “putting down their phones and picking up knitting needles, board games, and even binoculars”. The slant of the piece was people picking up “analog hobbies”, but almost all of the story was TikTok videos of people engaged in these “analog” activities. So how did people find out that other people were involved in analog hobbies? Through the use of digital media! These analog aficionados were using their phones to capture and share their analog efforts. I thought about using the word “dichotomy” to describe this problem, but I am not sure if that is the word I want. I just think NBC should have tried harder to find analog instances of people sharing, rather than rely on digital media. Do some legwork – or is that “too analog” a phrase?

A Golden Globes award for podcasts – seriously?

I know I am late to comment on this, but I saw the Golden Globes last weekend, and was surprised to see that an award was given for Best Podcast (the winner was Amy Poehler for “Good Hand with Amy Poehler” (Apple Podcast link)). Seriously? Why are they doing this? From the history page on their website, the awards started out for film, and then grew to television. Who was asking for them to try to recognize a “best podcast”? After all, there are already 32 top awards for podcasts – who needed another one? Save us, please!

Wired: How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance – Law enforcement has more tools than ever to track your movements and access your communications. Here’s how to protect your privacy if you plan to protest.

Creating new types of feeds

I saw a post by Tantek Celik today describing how he created an h-feed microformat from a list of HTML elements. He then showed how this microformat could be read and parsed by the Monocle feed reader. He then pointed to a post by James Gallagher about how he publishes h-feed and uses the Granary tool to convert to RSS and other feed formats.

This is an interesting topic. I have looked at microformats before, to me it seems to be a way of adding to HTML to make it machine-readable without the construction of a separate feed. I have nothing against innovation in feeds, but I am not sure how popular the use of microformats is within the feed reader ecosystem.