Fox
It’s a little NY and a little PA. Meet the only N.J. town squeezed between 2 other states.
My hometown of Montague, New Jersey: “It’s a little NY and a little PA.”
The only municipality in our state that borders both New York and Pennsylvania is finally starting to feel a little bit more like New Jersey.
Residents of rural Montague Township, population 3,753, no longer have a New York mailing address. High school students are no longer being bused across the border to [New York].
Now, that’s not to say that Montague is the typical New Jersey town. It covers more than 45 square miles, but there is not a single traffic light to be found. It’s home to High Point, the tallest elevation in New Jersey at 1,803 feet, but prohibits buildings from rising above 35 feet.
What’s in my inbox
I’m a sucker for newsletters and subscribe to a bunch, but don’t read them all consistently. Here are a few (more) that have been must-reads for me lately:
Amazon Chronicles
Tim Carmody’s brand new email 100% focused on tracking and contextualizing the movements of one of the most influential companies on the planet.
Squirrel Notes
Deane Barker’s Squirrel Notes is a must-read for CMS wonks, reporting on the latest content management trends, tools, events, etc. Usually a good bit of nostalgia too.
Heath Row’s Media Diet
My pal Heath‘s venerable blog, reborn in newsletter form. A roundup of interesting news and commentary across the landscape of culture, media, technology, politics, science, health, and more.
Manipulating text with BBEdit
But the other thing I use BBEdit for is a bit more esoteric and hard to describe—something I call “text munging”, for lack of a better word.
Text munging takes many forms, but generally it happens when you’ve got a bunch of text in one format and you need to get it into a different format. I’ve used BBEdit to transform the source pages of websites, to format a mailing list properly, and more. Today I used it to generate a podcast feed out of a chunk of HTML.
BBEdit has been my go-to text editor, notepad, and “text munger” since I started using a Mac as my primary computer, I think around 2001-2002.
I depend on it many times daily, and similar to Snell, just last week used BBEdit to migrate blog posts from a broken Movable Type installation by transforming its static HTML files into XML for importing to WordPress.
Related reading: learning regex via BBEdit.
New music: Pedro the Lion’s Phoenix
David Bazan’s first album as Pedro the Lion since 2004. It’s very Bazan-y and very good.
In the Shadow of the CMS
How content-management systems will shape the future of media businesses big and small.
3000 words on content management systems? 😍
Sweet Darkness
A colleague recently sent me this poem, by David Whyte, as a way of encouraging a new perspective. It helped.
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
“Sweet Darkness” by David Whyte by On Being Studios is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
You Should Meditate Every Day
The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind.
I started meditating for 5-10 minutes per day around October of last year (inspired by a talk from Dan Harris), and while I’ve faltered a little along the way, I do feel better when it’s part of my daily routine. I had been put off by the apparent spirituality of meditation, but Dan’s talk helped me understand that I can enjoy the benefits of practicing mindfulness without the spiritual…baggage.
If you’re looking for mindfulness app recommendations, check out Oak—it’s simple to use and free; a good place to start.
MongoDB switches to Server Side Public License (SSPL) to prevent cloud providers from exploiting its open source code
I missed this news from October. Noteworthy today in light of the DocumentDB announcement from Amazon Web Services.
2PM
2PM is a weekly email newsletter (and WordPress site)—addressed “to polymaths” (abbreviated to 2PM) interested in digital commerce—by Web Smith. It’s one of the few newsletters that I subscribe to and actually read every week.
Check out the most recent edition as a preview. Recommended!
Wildlife Camera
Some highlights of critters in the backyard, from our first year+ at the “new” house:
“Call with iPhone” for macOS
Six years ago I made a little utility to right-click a phone number on my computer and dial it using Skype. I’ve used this daily for years, but it broke recently with Skype’s redesign.
I don’t otherwise have a reason to use Skype regularly these days, and ever since Apple introduced the ability to make phone calls from macOS via FaceTime (and your iPhone), I’ve been meaning to explore using that instead anyway.
FaceTime supports the tel protocol, so adapting my AppleScript to use that was easy.
You can download it here. Double-clicking the file should open Automator and prompt you to install it (or install manually by putting the file in ~/Library/Services/).
Now you should be able to right-click any phone number (including international formats) in most applications and “Call with iPhone” using FaceTime (it does make a “real” phone call, not FaceTime or FaceTime Audio). If an application other than FaceTime launches, you probably need to go to FaceTime > Preferences and set FaceTime as the “Default for calls”.
Tiny Ninja Militia
My colleagues launched a really slick integration with Google Photos today, so this is me test driving it with a joke I stole from myself:
I’m preparing for the Trump presidency/decline of civilization by training a tiny ninja militia in my basement.
Baby snapping turtle at the skate park
Time Maps
Neat concept from Mapbox: maps designed specifically for travel-time-based decision-making.
[O]ur decision-making around places — where to go for lunch, if a certain day trip is feasible, and yes, whether a commute is practical — have shifted toward how long it takes to get there. But we still rely on traditional maps to do that: eyeballing straight-line distances, and running that through some alchemy of guesswork and firsthand experience to how long that trip would take.
What would a more directly useful visualization — indeed, a map of time — look like?
Check out the demo.
The Open Source Business Model is Under Siege
The Open Source Business Model is Under Siege
Good essay from Paul Dix at InfluxData about the challenges open source businesses face. Though I’d quibble with the “under siege” framing, as if these are new problems—they’re not.
Your Human-Size Life
One of the biggest mistakes rich people make is to try to live larger than a single human being can. A mathematical impossibility. You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time. You can own twenty fantastic cars, airplanes and yachts, but you can only be in one at a time. You can own an NBA team and a MLB team, and you get to sit in the nicest seat in the house at games, but you still can only sit in one seat. In other words, your humanity doesn’t increase just because your wealth did. You don’t get bigger.
via Phil and just about everyone else.
How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained
How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained:
If you were to go to southern Italy, you wouldn’t find people saying “gabagool.” But some of the old quirks of the old languages survived into the accents of Standard Italian used there. In Sicily or Calabria, you might indeed find someone ordering “mutzadell.” In their own weird way, Jersey (and New York and Rhode Island and Philadelphia) Italians are keeping the flame of their languages alive even better than Italian-Italians. There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese.
The Walk of Life Project
Even if you don’t know the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life” by name you’ll recognize it immediately when you hear it. Fun fact: It’s the perfect song to end any movie.
At least that’s the contention of the Walk of Life Project, the brainchild of Peter Salomone, a freelance video editor and writer. And I’m inclined to agree with him. Slap “Walk of Life” to the end of any movie and it immediately becomes 400 percent better. That’s just science.