Weeknotes: Week 24, 2023

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Here are the highlights of the week of June 12 to June 18.

A lot of people are in a huff about Reddit’s API pricing decision this week. Mike Masnick over at TechDirt accused Steve Huffman of being “entitled,” but he (and a lot of the people whose noses are out of joint) sounds awfully entitled too. Look, the API pricing plan seems ill-conceived at best, but the hubbub around Apollo sounds a lot like people just don’t like the Reddit app. (I’m not an Apollo user, obviously.) The CEO sure wasn’t doing himself or his company any favors this week and the “blackouts” seem like so much pissing in the wind. I still get value from Reddit and my subscription is paid until next May, so I’m going to sit back for now and continue to watch the situation unfold—or unravel.
After a bit of tinkering, my semi-automatic NOW page generator is also generating progress bars for books I’m reading, complete with tooltips showing the percentage complete and date last modified. The generator code is an updated version of the Lambda Function I wrote about a while back. I also had to tweak the DynamoDB table and YAML file.

My wife and I attended Columbus Stonewall Pride March on Saturday, joining a record crowd of 700,000 people. We donned green “Welcome” tee-shirts and marched with Huntington National Bank (my employer). We helped to pass out bracelets, beads, and of course those famous pens.
A former colleague introduced me to Ground.news this week. They merge articles covering the same event into a single story, allowing users to “compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias and break free from algorithms.” Using third-party media bias data, they provide bias, factuality, and ownership ratings for the media outlets covering the story. I’ve only begun to look at this so I don’t know yet if I’ll subscribe, but it does seem promising.
I started listening to Jeff Kinzbach’s Rocking the RV Life podcast this week. Kinzbach was half of the morning duo “Jeff and Flash” on WMMS, home of the Buzzard, in Cleveland, before retiring and hitting the road full time. My wife and I have discussed doing this some day too, so it’s fun to listen to their stories. There’s a lot to be learned.

Now Summary

These items were new or updated on my NOW page this week: