Alan Jacobs

Here’s a little post on my struggles to find a seamless way to write in text files and post to WordPress.

I use RSS rather than Apple News because I prefer to determine what I read rather than rely on an algorithm to determine it for me. Yes, I can help train the Apple News algorithm but in the end it shows me what it wants to show me. I hate that.

Also, I don’t think I remembered to post a link to my most recent newsletter.

I posted a brief reflection on that Cal Newport essay on the indie web.

♫ I got friends in low places ♫

Malcolm is very happy after he has played in the garden hose.

Rule number 1 for defenders: Do not give Megan Rapinoe time on the ball. ⚽️

When the [Works with Nest] service shuts down in August, it sounds like all of those (probably expensive) third-party smart home products will stop working with any Nest-based automation workflows. This mandatory feature removal situation is pretty much a smart home owner’s worst nightmare.

— Ron Amadeo. This kind of thing is why I don’t and won’t have a smart home. My home will remain reliably stupid and stupidly reliable.

Me to Netflix: When I tap “play” in the Netflix iOS app, it auto-connects to the Netflix app on my Roku TV. If my TV is on, I can’t watch Netflix on my iPad. There are no settings in either Netflix app to disable this behavior.

Netflix to me: We suggest that you contect Apple.

These pictures are from the eastern side of the Skyline Drive this morning. The air was clear because the morning sun had burned off the mist. On the western side, just a few hunded yards away, the fog was so thick you couldn’t see anything.

Back to my old stomping grounds. Those Grounds haven’t become less beautiful.

Hey folks: in the fall I’ll be teaching a seminar for our first-year Honors students that can be on any topic I choose. For the last couple of years my topic has been Reading, Writing, and Thinking in a Digital Age, and while I still think that’s super-important, I have found that students get tired of being forced to reflect on their technological choices. Because many of our Honors students are science majors, I also have thought about The Two Cultures Revisited (based on the old C. P. Snow essay about the chasm between the sciences and the humanities) and this: FAKE! or, How We Can Know the Truth When the Whole World Is Trying to Deceive Us. What should I do?

“Maybe white racists and nationalists can sit comfortably in the pews of certain churches because whenever calls for social justice arise their leaders say that such issues are a ‘distraction’ from the gospel.” — Jemar Tisby

Are there good reasons not to use Patreon?

I hereby announce my Abdication from the role of Guy Who Takes Out the Garbage In This House. I wish my successor every good thing.

Here’s a new edition of the newsletter.