November 5, 2022

Newsletter Leaf Journal CVIII 〜 No palm injuries reported

The 108th Newsletter Leaf Journal features links to our newest content (including a visual novel review and Halloween photos), 10 articles from around the web, and other exciting news and notes.

Welcome to the 108th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter, like all of our previous newsletters, comes to you from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell.

Our first newsletter of November 2022 features the usual assortment of articles from The New Leaf Journal, links from around the web, and news and notes from our projects. Without further ado, let’s cut to the 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 week
5. Notable leaf journal
6. News leaf journal
7. Taking leaf

1. Leaves from the week that was

I published five articles since mailing the previous newsletter.

• Return of the Happy Halloween Daycare Ghost
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 29, 2022.

  I returned to the scene of a 2020 Halloween ghost sighting to review a new model of the same apparition.

• Flexible Hose Halloween Snake Creature
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 30, 2022.

  I speculate that the creative Halloween decoration covered within is actually intended to be a deep sea creature.

• Return of Shironagasu Island Review
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 31, 2022.

  A Halloween review of Return to Shiroganasu Island, a horror/mystery visual novel available on Steam (and soon on the Nintendo Switch).

• October 2022 at The New Leaf Journal
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 31, 2022.

  Find all of our October articles (52 combining regular articles and Leaflets) organized by category along with our most-read article ranking for the month.

• Flying 12-Foot Witch in Carroll Gardens
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 2, 2022.

  My last Halloween decoration piece of 2022 was not late because I had forgotten it, but instead because I only happened upon it on November 1.

• Mario Party’s Joystick-Wrecking Rotation Games
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 3, 2022.

  I offer words of wisdom from someone with experience about the original Mario Party now that it is available with the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass.

I only published one Leaflet in the last week, but it was worth celebrating (literally).

• Joining the 700 (Article) Club
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 2, 2022.

  My review of Return to Shironagasu Island was our 700th regular article. I celebrated with a list of our articles by 100s.

2. Leaves from around the web

Let’s see what was happening around the world wide web…

• I Fought The PayPal And I Won
  Jesse Signal on Signal-Minded. November 3, 2022.

  A genuinely inspiring story of successfully using PayPal’s self-serving terms of service against it.

• Walking with Nietzsche
  Riva-Melissa Tez for IM 1776. October 28, 2022.

  While the post is about walking where Nietzsche walked, it is much more about walking than philosophy.

• Ulster County hands out creepy ‘I voted’ stickers that went viral
  Ben Kesslen for the New York Post. November 3, 2022.

  I would trade the two stickers I received for one vote in June for one of these, but I do not think that my offer would be accepted.

• Hunting for Hieroglphyics at Philae
  The Nile Scribes. December 14, 2019.

  The story of the last known hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions. Speaking of which…

• The Last Hieroglyph
  Roger Pearse. November 1, 2022.

  A post on the last hieroglyph which discusses the article in the previous link.

• Beverage company releases a Puyo Puyo-like that teaches players about fiber in vegetables
  Tajiro Yamanaka for Automation West. November 2, 2022.

  This game is apparently free. I just may need to play it for a review…

• Is free Wi-Fi a good deal for coffee shops?
  Chris O’Brien for Phys.org. September 30, 2009.

  Where questions about wi-fi in coffee shops stood 13 years ago.

• GeoWorks: The Other Windows
  Ernie Smith for Tedium. June 20, 2019.

  The story of GeoWorks, an early Windows competitor in the consumer operating system space.

• The failed heir: The Hyper Neo Geo 64!
  Nicole Express. March 20, 2021.

  I dare say that the Neo Geo 64 was the most complicated-to-operate home console.

• 5 November 1942: B-17E Flying Fortress Damaged by Fire at Mareeba, QLD
  Australia at War. February 7, 1999.

  News from 1999 about breaking news from 1942.

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let’s dig into our archive…

• The L-Shaped Desk on Hamilton Avenue
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 3, 2020.

  Election day in the United States is upon us. Back in 2020, I wrote a very interesting election-day post about a photo of a desk on the side of the road.

• T-Mobile Mistakes My Age and Makes an Offer I Must Refuse
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 5, 2020.

  On my difficult decision to reject a kind offer from T-Mobile for people aged 55 and over.

• Tea, Bread, and The Spectator in England in 1710
  Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 10, 2021.

  A 1710 promotion for the Spectator featuring tea, bread, and butter.

• Bulding an Airline Res-O-Glas Guitar Copy
  Victor V. Gurbo. August 26, 2020.

  Victor V. Gurbo’s anecdote about building a Res-O-Glas guitar includes a general history.

4. Most-turned leaves of the 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 on The New Leaf Journal. The week of October 29 to November 4 was the 44th Newsletter Week of 2022.

#	Title	By	Date	22Top5
1	Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter	NAF	4.18.22	2 (1)
2	Reviewing the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter	NAF	5.10.22	NEW
3	The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei	NAF	3.14.21	44 (27)
4	Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013)	NAF	7.5.21	33
5	An Early Review of Pixelfed - Instagram Alternative	NAF	11.13.20	5

We had an interesting top five last week and the first top five in a while to feature articles from 2020, 2021, and 2022.

My two posts on the Mastodon-Twitter crossposter have been achieving high view counts (by our standards) since Mr. Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter. In the final few days of October, both posts recorded enough views to make their monthly top-12 debuts. This week, they come in at first and second in our weekly ranking. The top-finishing post is a very small leaflet on the utility while the second post is a full review. (I consider the Leaflet to be the favorite to hold on to the top ranking in the next week, but we shall see.)

My tsuki ga kirei post had its weakest week (in numerical terms) of 2022, finishing well behind the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter duo. However, it did enough to notch its 80th consecutive weekly top five going back to May 2021, and it is still in good position to complete a perfect 2022 in terms of weekly top-five appearances.

Our top-five, which was one of the most competitive of 2022, was rounded out by my Ubuntu Touch review and the 5th appearance of my 2020 Pixelfed review, which likely benefited from being linked to in one of the Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter articles. My 2020 article on the last stand of Constantine XI and my review of the Peekier search engine narrowly missed out, but both would have made the ranking in most other weeks.

Missing the top five for the first time since its Hacker News page 1 appearance in August was my review of /e/ OS, which came in 9th place on the week. Its 12 consecutive appearances was the fourth longest streak of 2022.

5. Notable leaf journal

Yakread is an interesting feed reading and discovery service created by Mr. Jacob O’Bryant. After signing up with an email, you receive five link recommendations from Yakread’s index (receiving recommendations via email). You can “like” or “dislike” individual recommendations, which helps Yakread make better recommendations in the future. However, unlike many algorithmic-based services, Yakread does not make users passive. In addition to being able to like or dislike recommendations, users can use Yakread to subscribe to RSS and atom feeds and receive items from those feeds in their daily (or less-than-daily) recommendations. Moreover, users can manually add interesting articles from around the web to Yakread’s index and those articles may appear as recommendations for other readers. Yakread also added the ability to subscribe to newsletters, but I have not tried that feature yet (note that this newsletter offers an RSS feed).

Yakread builds off Findka, a previous link recommendation service created by Mr. O’Bryant. I already have my own RSS/Atom feed solution, which will be subject of a November review, so I have no interest in a feed reading service. However, I have found that Yakread’s recommendations, while mixed, have pointed me to some interesting articles from around the web. Moreover, The New Leaf Journal has received a decent number of visitors (by our modest standards) from Yakread, suggesting that people are using the service.

Yakread is free to sign up for and use, so if it sounds interesting, you can give it a try. I may review it on The New Leaf Journal in the future if I keep using it and after it has had some more time to develop.

6. News leaf journal

I decided to remove our estimated reading time functionality, which I described here, because I noticed that the estimated reading times were appearing as part of the article in content summaries and snippets. While I like the idea of having an estimated reading time, most websites do not provide it and every implementation that I can think of has an issue that I do not like. Those of you who appreciate having them can read our content using a read-it-later service which calculates reading time based on your preferences (e.g., Wallabag, which I use, has this feature) or with a browser’s readability mode (e.g., Firefox’s readability mode handles estimated reading times and there are several extensions for Firefox and Chrome – but I have no extension recommendations here other than to look for an open source extension with reasonably modest permissions).

7. Taking leaf

Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the newsletter and have not signed up already, you can follow us via email or RSS feed. This newsletter’s parent site, The New Leaf Journal, offers its own feed collection.

Until our next newsletter on November 11,

Cura ut valeas.