October 15, 2022

Newsletter Leaf Journal CV 〜 Hire this newsletter

Welcome to the 105th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. I must begin by noting that the waterproof keyboard came through for me when I spilled coffee on it yesterday, but that is neither here nor there. What is here is the newsletter, and what is there (below) is the newsletter content.

Table of Contents

1. Leaves From The Week That Was
2. Leaves From Around The Web
3. The Old Leaf Journal
4. Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week
5. Notable Leaf Journal
6. News Leaf Journal
7. Taking Leaf

1. Leaves From The Week That Was

I was busy with my day job over the last week. As a result, I published a proverbial photo gallery, with all five of my posts being photo posts. Moreover, I published a higher quality version of some of the photos on my photos account at Pixelfed.social. Without further ado, let us look at pictures.

• Gulf Stream Boat Sculpture at Brooklyn Bridge Park
  N.A. Ferrell. October 8, 2022.

  This public art piece had been sitting in Brooklyn Bridge Park since May. It took me a while to finally report on it in The New Leaf Journal. See Pixelfed image.

• Falcon Sighting at Brooklyn Bridge Park & Falcon Photos With Retroboy Camera App
  N.A. Ferrell. October 9, 2022.

  I published two companion articles together on October 9, 2022. The first documented a falcon sighting at Brooklyn Bridge Park with photos from my real camera app. The second featured three photos of the Falcon with my “Retroboy” camera app on Game Boy Camera mode. I published one of the Retroboy images to Pixelfed.

• American Beauty Pasta Mural in Brooklyn
  N.A. Ferrell. October 13, 2022.

  After a three-day hiatus, I returned with a post on a vintage “American Beauty Pasta” mural seen in Brooklyn’s Columbia Street Waterfront District. See Pixelfed version.

• The Brown Leaf Turtle
  N.A. Ferrell. October 14, 2022.

  This is one of my better BlackBerry Classic photos. Moreover, I took it before The New Leaf Journal went live. What took me so long to publish? See Pixelfed version.

I published several Leaflet microposts throughout the week. I will link to most of them in my “Around the Web” section below. Two Leaflets, however, do not appear elsewhere - so I will link to them below.

• Wicked Car With Hat Update
  N.A. Ferrell. October 8, 2022.

  After seeing that my 2020 article about a car with a hat was suddenly receiving some traffic, I updated it with retouched versions of the original photos (see Pixelfed version of the better photo).

• Missing Columbus Day For Lack of Planning
  N.A. Ferrell. October 10, 2022.

  I had planned to write a Columbus Day article this year. However, I lost track of time.

• My Thoughts on the Meta Quest Pro
  N.A. Ferrell. October 11, 2022.

  Summary: Embarrarsing.

• Game Boy Operator and the Steam Deck
  N.A. Ferrell. October 14, 2022.

  The Game Boy Operator is a neat device which sits between a Game Boy cartridge and an emulator on a computer. I have an Operator. I do not have a Steam Deck. Nevertheless, this is a neat story.

2. Leaves From Around The Web

In this week’s Leaves Around the Web, I took a number of articles posing questions and then changed the questions.

• TikTok profits from livestreams of families begging
  Hannah Gilbert, Mamdouh Akbiek, and Ziad Al-Qattan for BBC News. October 12, 2022.

  One would think from the headline that this article would present another opportunity for me to call for TikTok to be banned. I included all of those calls in my Leaflet, but this represents the rare TikTok story where the most disconcerting thing is not TikTok itself.

• Google discontinues Google Translate in mainland China
  Zen Soo for the Associated Press. October 3, 2022.

  I approached the story from a novel angle in a Leaflet. How does Google Translate compare to Baidu Translate for going from Mandarin to English (and vice versa)?

• NYC Council measure demands MLB bypass streaming agreements
  Rich Calder for the New York Post. October 8, 2022.

  The logic behind the measure is that the MLB receives government subsidies from New York City, and thus that all Yankees and Mets games should be available to New York City residents without needing to pay for a separate streaming service. I see the logic, but I proposed an alternative solution.

• Privacy Advocates Say NYC’s Fix for the ‘Digital Divide’ is a Hyper-Surveilance Mess
  Karl Bode for Vice News. October 11, 2022.

  While the surveilance concerns about New York City’s kiosks (note: I have never seen anyone use the kiosks) are well-founded, I noted in a Leaflet that I have bigger concerns about aesthetics – specifically the plan for 32-foot-high kiosks.

• Shifting the Hoverton Window
  Josh Blackman at The Volokh Conspiracy. October 13, 2022.

  An interesting piece on the debate sparked by Judge James Ho of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit when he stated that he would refuse to consider future Yale Law School graduates for judicial clerkships.

• 13 Independent Linux Distros That are Built From Scratch
  sreenath for It’s FOSS. October 14, 2022.

  I have not personally used any of the Linux distributions on the list, but I would be interested in trying Nix OS and Void Linux.

• How to Cut a Kabocha Squash (Japanese Pumpkin)
  Namiko Hirasawa Chen at Just One Cookbook. October 12, 2022.

  Some people have tried to cut a kobocha. Other people have not. The former will understand why this article exists.

• We make meat-stuffed matsutake mushrooms and learn something important about luxury food
  Date Roll for SoraNews24. October 8, 2022.

  Sticking to the book is sometimes the best strategy.

• Juno Tablet is a Linux tablet with an Intel Jasper Lake processor for $429 and up
  Brand Linder at lilipunting. October 13, 2022.

  Tablets are underrated. I use the 2013 Nexus 7 on which I installed LineageOS last year as a daily driver. Linux tablets are a good idea, although $429 (starting price) would be too steep for me for a tablet. Hat tip to Ambient Irony for linking to the story, which you would have also found if you subcribe to my Hacker News submissions feed.

• Kodak is Hiring Film Technicians: ‘We Cannot Keep Up with Demand’
  Matt Growcoot for Petapixel. October 12, 2022.

  Signs of a possible renaissance in analog photography.

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let us dig into our archives for a three-part series and a random recommendation…

• Introducing the 1922 Better Homes in America Demonstration Week
  N.A. Ferrell. October 9, 2021.

  I introduce an event hosted by the Warren G. Harding Administration in 1922.

• Calvin Coolidge’s 1922 “Better Homes” Remarks
  N.A. Ferrell. October 10, 2021.

  Then Vice President (and soon-to-be President) Calvin Coolidge’s Better Home remarks.

• Herbert Hoover’s Better Homes Remarks: “The Home as an Investment”
  N.A. Ferrell. October 11, 2021.

  Then Commerce Secretary (and soon-to-be President) Herbert Hoover’s Better Home remarks.

• The Bees of October
  N.A. Ferrell. November 6, 2020.

  I have not seen any October bees so far in 2022.

4. Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week

I list our most-visited articles of the previous week in each newsletter. In keeping with our newsletter schedule, these “Newsletter Weeks” begin with Saturday and end on Friday. The statistics come courtesy of our local and privacy-friendly analytics solution, Koko Analytics – which I reviewed. The week of October 1 to October 7 was the 41st Newsletter Week of 2022.

#	Article	By	Date	22Top5
1	The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei	NAF	3.14.21	41 (25)
2	Review of /e/ - An Android Alternative For Mobile Phones	NAF	11.21.21	10 (5)
3	Ghostwriter Markdown Editor Review	NAF	10.8.21	3
4	Calvin Coolidge Describes His Mother, Victoria	NAF	3.13.21	NEW
5	Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021)	NAF	11.27.21	40 (7)

Newsletter Week 41 was a strong week on the whole. At the top of the ranking we saw my tsuki ga kirei piece regain the first-place ranking after two weeks behind my Murena phone review, which dropped to second. The tsuki ga kirei article has now matched the 25 weeks it sat atop our weekly ranking in 2021 in notching its 50th first-place finish overall.

There were more points of interest in spots 3-5. My Ghostwriter review had its best week on record in earning its third consecutive weekly top-five. This was followed by a 2021 article I wrote about a small section in Calvin Coolidge’s autobiography about his late mother. The Coolidge article never registered much in our view statistics before, but had a very strong week thanks (most likely) to sudden search engine interest. The ranking was rounded out by my F-Droid app review, which needed a strong Thursday and Friday to make its 44th top-five in the 46 weeks it has been live.

5. Notable Leaf Journal

This week’s Notable Leaf Journal section will relate to the News Leaf Journal section below. Hypothes.is is a social annotations service. After signing up for an account (all accounts are free, there is no paid plan), you can annotate and take notes on articles from around the web. Hypothes.is makes thise process easy on Chromium-based browsers with an extension. Firefox and Safari users can use a bookmarklet. When you find an article that you want to annotate, click the extension or bookmarklet to summon the Hypothes.is overlay on the page. Annotations can be public or private, and Hypothes.is allows users to create private groups.

You can see my new profile and follow my annotations via feed.

For open source fans out there, I note that Hypothes.is is fully free and open source.

Now for the segue…

6. News Leaf Journal

Once I figured out how Hypothes.is works and how to create groups, I saw its potential for adding some interactivity to The New Leaf Journal. I have created a New Leaf Journal group on Hypothes.is for which I plan to provide a sign-up link. All you will need to do is follow the link and create your free Hypothes.is account to participate (your account will not be tied to our group, it is a general-use account for Hypothes.is). Group members will be able to annotate and comment on New Leaf Journal articles, and I will check in to see what is happening and respond to any interesting thoughts or questions. I doubt that we will have too many people, but it should be an interesting experiment. This will be one part of my project to make it easier for New Leaf Journal readers to engage with our content since the only options at the moment are email and Webmentions.

I am not posting the Hypothes.is link in this newsletter because I want to write a short guide to the group first. However, the guide along with the link will be published in the next week, so you will find it when you check in to The New Leaf Journal. I will also feature it in Newsletter 106 on October 21, 2022. (For people reading this newsletter after that date, please check The New Leaf Journal for information on how to join our annotation group.)

In a very niche point of interest, I added links to two additional feed formats, Microformats 2 and JF2 Post, to our list of feeds. This will not be relevant to the vast majority of visitors, but if you are familiar with the formats, we have them available. Most readers who want to subscribe to us by feed (including the instant newsletter) should use the RSS or ATOM feeds (a minority of feed readers can parse JSON feeds, which we also offer).

Finally, I have begun making use of my Pixelfed account again. When I publish images on The New Leaf Journal, I greatly limit their size and compress them. This is done in the interest of site performance and your bandwidth (for mobile users). On Pixelfed, I post very large, full quality versions of the images that I post on The New Leaf Journal. I thought that it would be nice to make readers aware, so I am now, that I will be posting links to the images on my Pixelfed profile and I will archive versions of the images from Pixelfed (the latter in the event that Pixelfed is ever inaccessible).

7. Taking Leaf

Thank you for joining us for another exciting edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. While I am still a bit busy with my job, I hope to publish some literary articles in the next week in addition to my photo-centric posts (more of those are in the pipeline). I also look forward to fully introducing one part of our new “commenting” system next week. If you enjoyed our Newsletter content, you can find our email and RSS subscription options on our Newsletter Sign-Up page.

Until October 21,

Cura ut valeas.