Sunken City is a section of parkway just east of Point Fermin Park in San Pedro that nature has reclaimed for its own. In the early 1920s Sunken City was a collection of high-end beach bungalows, a section of Paseo Del Mar Street and a charming walking trail very similar to the Cliff Drive section…
The Hay Tree is a 120 year old camphor tree where local dairymen from Hynes and Clearwater would bid on hay back in the first part of the 20th century. I don’t think there’s any more significance to the tree beyond a couple guys saying, “hey, let’s meet under that big tree over there.” I…
Alistair Humphreys, author and adventurer, tells a story about the moment he realized that his galavanting around the world was taking a toll on his family life. If he wanted to be present in the life of his two sons and his wife, he would have to give up his epic adventure to the South…
Our church has a tradition on Epiphany Sunday, or this year on the Sunday after Christmas, where they provide a bowl full of cards, each one printed with a single word. At the end of the service each of us are encouraged to pick a card. We can choose a word that resonates with us.…
Ok, so I installed ActivityPub on my hosted WordPress blog. I can view my Wild Rye blog account (phoutz@wildrye.com) through my Mastodon account. But I can’t view any posts. Also, while Mastodon indicates that I’m following Wild Rye, my blog isn’t showing up in my followers list. I have no idea what’s wrong and wouldn’t…
I just installed the ActivityPub plugin and activated it. Theoretically that means this blog is now a Fediverse server. But nothing seems different. And I have no idea if it will publish to Mastodon. So let’s see. UPDATE ONE I can find my blog username via my Mastodon account. And I can follow it. But…
There has been a fair amount of buzz around Automattic’s acquisition of the ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin. There are also a good number of tutorials on how to install, activate, and set up the plugin. But I haven’t seen a lot about why you would want your blog to be part of the “fediverse”, or…
Links, backlinks, tags, atomicity…what’s the most important part of your note-taking system? People. Denham Grey believes that any knowledge system that isn’t driving toward sharing and collaboration is pointed in the wrong direction. In fact, Grey is fairly skeptical about the PKM movement in general, with its focus on information organization at the expense of…
Alternative (Alt) text provides a textual description of your image. It is an HTML attribute that was initially intended to provide information about an element if the page did not render correctly. In the days when websites were accessed over slow dial-up modems, images were often very slow to load. Today Alt text is an…
Mike Caulfield makes a distinction between online posts that are “gardens” and posts that are “streams.” Streams are posts that you read, and then they move on, disappearing into history. They are utterances, meaning that they can only be correctly understood by what was said before. You can follow the chain of utterance back, thanks…
In a post titled The Memex Method Cory Doctorow notes that he thinks of his blog as a kind of commonplace book. It is a sort of digital journal where he collects whatever captures his attention and saves it for future use. The benefit that his blog gives him over a notebook or a PKM…
We recently packed up everything and moved to a smaller place. This means that anything truly important to me, that I need to get stuff done, is most likely packed up in a box in storage. It’s not chaos exactly, or disorder. It’s just that everything is ten times harder than it needs to be.…
In order to make something that feels truly “alive” at the deepest level it can help to imagine that you are “making a gift to God.” At each step of the making process you evaluate which option is the most authentic or “true” by evaluating how well it brings out the spirit of the thing…
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold. The repair doesn’t hide the damage – it accentuates the fractures and makes them a focal point, creating a more interesting and potentially more valuable object than the original. Part of the aesthetic of kintsugi is to acknowledge the damage and…
An act of creation is not just about making something new, something that never existed before. It’s also about the impact that the created object has on its surroundings. Think about public sculpture that is placed on a highway median simply because the space is available and the city council believes that art will “class…
