After spending a peaceful evening among the spectacular sandstone structures of Red Rock Canyon State Park I set out to explore a couple of ghost towns that I saw listed on a clickbait travel site in a feature called 20 Ghost Towns in California. I left Red Rock Canyon with a comfortable 40% charge and…
For my first day I wanted to go from Long Beach to: • California City • Burro Schmidt’s Tunnel • Red Rock Canyon State Park I was starting with a nearly full battery charge. Apple CarPlay, linked to the computer in my Ford F-150 Lightning, inserted a charging stop at an Electrify America charger in Mojave.…
Range anxiety is the boogie man if you want to roadtrip in an electric vehicle. Finding fast chargers along your route can be a kind of Easter egg hunt. And when you do find them they’re often occupied or out-of-order. I took my Ford F-150 Lightning out to Pioneertown without too much effort. I found…
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…
Early in his career as an architect Christopher Alexander began to notice that certain buildings, plazas, and parks had a transcendent quality. They were more interesting to look at, and felt better to be a part of, than many other buildings. There was a vibrancy and presence to this structures that set them apart. But…
The gardening analogy to hypertext and online writing has been around for a long time. Hypertext pioneers such as Cathy Marshall and Mark Bernstein saw that the new medium demanded a different set of skills and process than from traditional publishing. These skills were much more like gardening than production work. But the text that…
Niklas Luhmann talked about his box full of notes as if it was a flesh and blood research partner. He could question his notes and they would give him insightful, sometimes surprising answers. Not only did Luhmann talk about the notes as if they were a partner, sometimes he talked about them having a quality…
In a podcast about “Slow Productivity” Cal Newport suggests that organizations could do a lot to prevent employee burnout by shifting their goals to quality of output over quantity. This would let workers do their jobs at a more natural pace, working the way our brains are wired. But let’s say we can’t wait for…
In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus tells a story about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom is like a tiny seed. It starts small and then grows into a tree, spreading its branches to give shelter to the birds. I’ve been thinking about this parable a lot recently. Kingdoms typically spread by force and conquest.…
“Working with the garage door up,” brings to mind a garage workshop where neighbors can drop in, watch your progress, use your tools, and learn something in the process. You may learn something as well. Andy Matushack gets the idea from Robin Sloan, who talks about biking past the open door of a woodworking shop…
Andy Matushack’s Evergreen Notes are notes that grow and improve over time. They become valuable building blocks for thinking and writing. Most people take notes as a way to remember key facts and details. These are jotted down in a notebook and reviewed just before a test or a project. Evergreen notes, on the other…
I want to write faster. I want to write better. But I struggle with research in a way that’s more like hoarding than sense-making. The zettelkasten method of note-taking has given me a simple way to organize my research and bring a lot more clarity to the information I’ve collected. But I still get bogged…
When it comes to architecture and urban design we often hear about the designer’s intentions but we hear less often about the impact the design has upon users. But according to John Cary good design must be considered within the web of impacts on users, stakeholders, and community. At every level, design is a matrix…
A clean sheet of paper contains the set of all possibilities. The blank page can become a picture, a story, a poem. Anything that can be imagined can be represented on this blank sheet of paper. Because there are no limits to the possibilities that can be contained on a single sheet of paper, this…
