The Newsletter Leaf Journal XXI 〜 A Short Piece
〜N.A. Ferrell
I just published our February monthly review article on the site proper. Because that covers much of what I would ordinarily discuss in your favorite (I hope) newsletter, I will keep the newsletter brief this week. Below, I review our content from the week that was and offer a brief story related to future New Leaf Journal content.
I still have not done all the testing I need to with the Buttondown newsletter service, so the next newsletter, like the previous newsletters, will be sent from Tiny Letter.
Content From the Week That Was
February 22 is George Washington's birthday. On February 22, 2021, I commemorated the special day with an article on a 1914 children's poem about him. In it, a mother explains to her young boy that being like Washington does not start with obtaining Washington's titles, but by appreciating and internalizing his myriad virtues. A refreshing little poem, if you ask me. It earned a few interesting comments in our Guestbook as well.
On Tuesday, I continued my bird in review series with a piece on the yellow-throated toucan. I had good content to work with from the January 1897 bird magazine that I am covering. There is, however, one unexplained incident of owl-bullying. Peculiar.
On Wednesday, I wrote a piece inspired by my day job as an immigration law writer and researcher. While looking into an issue regarding expedited naturalization for spouses of certain individuals who work abroad for the U.S. Government, I stumbled upon a statute which expressly appropriates money to the Department of Homeland Security for the hire of privately owned horses to use for official business. In this post, I examine the equine appropriation statute and discuss the important role that horses play in helping the Border Patrol work to secure the most inhospitable stretches of our Southern Border.
On Thursday, Victor published his second article in two weeks - this one covering his original music composition, Mondrian. Victor had assumed that everyone knew the name "Piet Mondrian," but discovered after debuting his song that Mondrian's paintings are more well-known than Mondrian's name. In the final section of the post, Victor explains that, despite the fact that he named his song Mondrian, the principal artistic inspiration for the song was the life and times of the great photographer, André Kertész. The article includes an embedded video of Victor's song with his original designs courtesy of a new and growing video platform, LBRY. We are planning on using LBRY to handle most future New Leaf Journal video content.
Not to let a Mondrian moment go to waste, I published an article about the Mondrian global theme for KDE Plasma on Friday. KDE Plasma is a desktop environment that is useable with many Linux distributions. My computer runs the Manjaro Linux operating system with KDE Plasma. KDE Plasma is highly customizable both in terms of appearance and function. The Mondrian theme changes Plasma's color scheme and icon sets with assets inspired by Mondrian's art. I have been using the theme since August - and review it favorably in my post.
Finally, I published an article yesterday about a snow picture I took on February 4. While walking one evening, I came across a very misshapen snowman with a disposable mask, standing in front of a snowbank black with car exhaust.
A Brief New Leaf Journal-Related Story
While I still have not gotten around to finalizing the set up of the new newsletter service, I did complete some notable site-related work this week. I purchased a cheap video capture device a few weeks ago. The device plugs into a computer via USB, and the other end of it has an HDMI slot. This allows one to stream anything with HDMI output on the computer.
I have no experience with this at all, so I worked to figure it out through trial and error - testing with my Nintendo Switch as the HDMI device. After a bit of work, I managed to get a nearly perfect stream of my game-play with Open Broadcaster Software, which I had just downloaded through the Manjaro Package Manager.
I was pleasantly surprised that an $18 video capture dongle could achieve such good results. Now, to be sure, I have no interest in live game streaming - but being able to capture video from devices that output HDMI will be useful for some New Leaf Journal projects - notably my upcoming Pokémon draft battle against Victor. If all goes well, each article on the battle will be accompanied by video. I made use of the capture ability in yesterday's snowman article as well - clipping an image from my Switch directly from my computer instead of having to remove my Switch SD card, which I had done for images for my Pokémon draft battle introduction in December.
Thank You For Reading and Subscribing
February continued our trend of gaining new visitors each month, and we hope to continue the positive trajectory in March while publishing new and interesting content. I look forward to reporting back next week with a new newsletter and, possibly, some updates about the newsletter itself.
I just published our February monthly review article on the site proper. Because that covers much of what I would ordinarily discuss in your favorite (I hope) newsletter, I will keep the newsletter brief this week. Below, I review our content from the week that was and offer a brief story related to future New Leaf Journal content.
I still have not done all the testing I need to with the Buttondown newsletter service, so the next newsletter, like the previous newsletters, will be sent from Tiny Letter.
Content From the Week That Was
February 22 is George Washington's birthday. On February 22, 2021, I commemorated the special day with an article on a 1914 children's poem about him. In it, a mother explains to her young boy that being like Washington does not start with obtaining Washington's titles, but by appreciating and internalizing his myriad virtues. A refreshing little poem, if you ask me. It earned a few interesting comments in our Guestbook as well.
On Tuesday, I continued my bird in review series with a piece on the yellow-throated toucan. I had good content to work with from the January 1897 bird magazine that I am covering. There is, however, one unexplained incident of owl-bullying. Peculiar.
On Wednesday, I wrote a piece inspired by my day job as an immigration law writer and researcher. While looking into an issue regarding expedited naturalization for spouses of certain individuals who work abroad for the U.S. Government, I stumbled upon a statute which expressly appropriates money to the Department of Homeland Security for the hire of privately owned horses to use for official business. In this post, I examine the equine appropriation statute and discuss the important role that horses play in helping the Border Patrol work to secure the most inhospitable stretches of our Southern Border.
On Thursday, Victor published his second article in two weeks - this one covering his original music composition, Mondrian. Victor had assumed that everyone knew the name "Piet Mondrian," but discovered after debuting his song that Mondrian's paintings are more well-known than Mondrian's name. In the final section of the post, Victor explains that, despite the fact that he named his song Mondrian, the principal artistic inspiration for the song was the life and times of the great photographer, André Kertész. The article includes an embedded video of Victor's song with his original designs courtesy of a new and growing video platform, LBRY. We are planning on using LBRY to handle most future New Leaf Journal video content.
Not to let a Mondrian moment go to waste, I published an article about the Mondrian global theme for KDE Plasma on Friday. KDE Plasma is a desktop environment that is useable with many Linux distributions. My computer runs the Manjaro Linux operating system with KDE Plasma. KDE Plasma is highly customizable both in terms of appearance and function. The Mondrian theme changes Plasma's color scheme and icon sets with assets inspired by Mondrian's art. I have been using the theme since August - and review it favorably in my post.
Finally, I published an article yesterday about a snow picture I took on February 4. While walking one evening, I came across a very misshapen snowman with a disposable mask, standing in front of a snowbank black with car exhaust.
A Brief New Leaf Journal-Related Story
While I still have not gotten around to finalizing the set up of the new newsletter service, I did complete some notable site-related work this week. I purchased a cheap video capture device a few weeks ago. The device plugs into a computer via USB, and the other end of it has an HDMI slot. This allows one to stream anything with HDMI output on the computer.
I have no experience with this at all, so I worked to figure it out through trial and error - testing with my Nintendo Switch as the HDMI device. After a bit of work, I managed to get a nearly perfect stream of my game-play with Open Broadcaster Software, which I had just downloaded through the Manjaro Package Manager.
I was pleasantly surprised that an $18 video capture dongle could achieve such good results. Now, to be sure, I have no interest in live game streaming - but being able to capture video from devices that output HDMI will be useful for some New Leaf Journal projects - notably my upcoming Pokémon draft battle against Victor. If all goes well, each article on the battle will be accompanied by video. I made use of the capture ability in yesterday's snowman article as well - clipping an image from my Switch directly from my computer instead of having to remove my Switch SD card, which I had done for images for my Pokémon draft battle introduction in December.
Thank You For Reading and Subscribing
February continued our trend of gaining new visitors each month, and we hope to continue the positive trajectory in March while publishing new and interesting content. I look forward to reporting back next week with a new newsletter and, possibly, some updates about the newsletter itself.
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