1. What happened when I started a feminist society at school is a wonderfully written article documenting the troubles encountered by some humans trying to promote their equality with other humans

    One of the worst parts of this is the school blatantly victim-blaming:

    As such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of other students at the school.

    Seeing as the activism was happening on the web, I read this as “give up, don’t offend the misogynists, they might hurt you”, which could hardly be called “support”. The pseudo-politicalese “take steps to recommend” is vague and and improvable.

    Clearly such institutions cannot be trusted to support the fight for equality.

  2. Ben Werdmuller: I don't get why you'd use markdown to blog on your own site. Markdown is useful: an easy-to-use notation system that allows you to mark up your text in a safe, fast way. Because you're never letting your users write raw code, there aren't any worries about them posting malware or exploit attempts, or accidentally writing bad markup. At the same time, simple lines and dashes are converted to valid HTML. Everybody wins. But when you're writing your own site, you don't need to worry about those things. You don't care about you posting malware or exploit attempts. (Either you want to, or you won't.) You also don't need to worry as much about bad markup - and if you're not proficient in HTML, you can install a WYSIWYG editor, like the one in WordPress. Unless you're a Dr Jeckyll who morphs into an id-like alter ego without warning, you don't need to worry about your own trustworthiness as a user of your own system. On a self-hosted #indieweb site, all #markdown does is restrict what you can do. It has a syntax to learn, just like basic HTML does, and because you actually have to keep in mind which HTML tags it uses when you write it, it's actually a little bit more complicated to remember. I like a lot of the goals of new publishing platforms like Ghost (I backed it on Kickstarter) but this feature sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I'm not at all sure this is the best writing experience on the web. And I don't see what's wrong with HTML. Updated to add: I've had lots of feedback by people who point out that they just want to write text, not HTML, which is more than fair enough. But surely this shows demand for a smarter, context-sensitive rich text editor rather than another syntax to learn. Why couldn't an editor know to start creating bullet points when you type an asterisk and a space at the beginning of a new line? 13m

    @benwerd I use markdown for initial authoring purely for speed, esp. when typing on mobile devices. After that I just edit the HTML. I’ve yet to come across a WYSIWIM editor which satisfied my semantic, well-structured HTML needs, any suggestions?

  3. When dealing with character encoding issues I repeatedly get this feeling that we need to throw away computing and programming and redesign it all in a way which prevents stupid, hard-to-debug problems from happening live in trees and eat pita bread all day

  4. Starting today, I’m publishing the approximate weight of the waste I’ve thrown away. Similar to , I hope to use this to establish reference points and actionable improvements to my lifestyle.

    313g of today

  5. UI : service which finds the average number of characters/words/lines in a note and automatically makes the “new note” box that size. Potential extension: Make it one line bigger/smaller to encourage longer/shorter writing.

  6. Just finished Laputa, Castle in the Sky again. It may not have the strongest plot out of all the Myazaki films, but it does have, in approximate order of appearance:

    • Crazy awesome airships
    • Mysterious crystals
    • Flying pirates
    • Bad guys who wear dark glasses at night, inside and underground
    • Pseudo-Welsh miners
    • A hermit who talks to rocks and has a beard
    • Robots. Lots and lots of robots. One of them looks after birds nests and picks flowers. Others destroy things with their crazy laser vision.
    • Stylised lightning which looks like dragons
    • And at the end: a flying island which looks like a giant jellyfish, floating gracefully into orbit

    The robots look like this:

    My point being that anyone who demands any more than this from a film probably doesn’t deserve it.