Published
Added a new category, excavation. It relates to memories that I’m trying to unearth and document, things of unquantifiable significance that feel important to write down. Not much there at the moment, I’d like to work through a few more.
Published
We watched “Power Up: The Work of Sister Corita” this morning. The talk was given by graphic designer Barbara Glauber (see Heavy Meta and Yale School of Art) at The Cooper Union in November 2018.
It is a superb talk, and I’m beyond pleased that we were able to find and purchase a secondhand copy of the out-of-print book Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent online.
We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.
Sister Corita was a nun, artist, and educator that worked in LA in the 50s-60s and in Boston later in life. See the ten Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules.
Corita Kent used appropriation without irony or cynicism. She identified, combined, and repurposed the hopeful in the everyday. She was a prolific giver that shared seemingly without expectation of return. She used optimism as activism.
Ignore the persuaders
It is interesting that her appropriation of advertising copy seemed to wane later in life. Maybe advertising began to feel less optimistic to her, instead more sinister and insidious.
I wonder at how difficult it must have been to leave the order. Not just because it meant a return to the secular after a lifetime of regulation and restrictions, but also because it meant that she had to leave the resources of the art school, the playground she had so carefully cultivated. Her later work is still incredible, but it seems more weary and a little more laboured. “Bogged down” is one way of describing it. Her prints from the 70s almost veer in to motivational poster territory.
Salute your source
How to create or maintain the playground required for work with her sort of radical optimism? A major element is the physical space, both small (the room / studio) and large (the community / city). It is also the mental space.
Both of these spaces come at a premium now, though. I struggle to get enough of either.
It feels like there may be some sort of third space offered by working with the web, but I haven’t figured this out yet. When I try to work digitally, I get bogged down. How to experiment with the web in a way that is as gestural and intuitive as a line drawing?
The images here are from the Corita Art Center website. See their online Collection for high-quality images and more details about her work, including transcriptions of the text within her prints.
They are currently seeking donations to acquire these pieces. Donate to the Corita Art Center here.
Published
These are about 8 cm (3 ½ “) in diameter. They come out pretty flat and very slightly chewy, with crispy edges and top.
Published
I rely heavily on messaging services since many of my friends and family (probably the majority) live outside of the UK, as do some critical professional contacts. I mainly use WhatsApp for encrypted messaging but have wanted to move away from it for some time due to concerns about Facebook. The recent news regarding the integration of WhatsApp, Instagram messages, and Facebook Messenger has been the catalyst for actual change within my group of peers.
The Q&A below is an amalgamation of many different conversations I am having at the moment about moving to a more privacy-first messaging app. I have focused on Signal and Telegram for the time being since they seem to be the most likely candidates.
I’ve done my best to pull together this information in a fairly short time, and some of it is new to me. If any of it seems incorrect, let me know.
There are many ideological arguments against the “I have nothing to hide” viewpoint, most of which I agree with. That said, it can be near-impossible to agree 100% on ideology, so perhaps it is better to consider the practical.
When your messages are not encrypted, their contents are visible to anyone that has access to them. In an ideal world that would only be you, the recipient, and whatever app you use to manage your messages. Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated and there are many weak points that can be exploited. For example, if the WiFi network you’re on is insecure, your messages will be exposed to unintended prying eyes. Think of the last time you connected to WiFi in an airport, hotel, or cafe. Was it always password protected? Was it clear who supplied the network?
You may not be worried even if your messages were compromised, surely there is nothing in your messages that could be of consequence. But what about the photos of your adorable 4 year old niece from your sister? The online banking details you sent to your partner since the rent payment failed and they needed to sort it out? The message to your worried mother about your blood test results? The company Twitter password you sent to a co-worker that urgently needed access?
There are some things that are best kept private, and encryption lets you do just that.
It is certainly a great step in the right direction, but whether it’s enough depends upon how much you trust Facebook and how you feel about Facebook’s role in the spread of misinformation.
As things currently stand, WhatsApp’s privacy policy allows limited data sharing with Facebook even though messages are encrypted end-to-end. Since the integration between WhatsApp and Facebook is only being strengthened, I feel it is reasonable to think that the data sharing will continue or possibly grow.
I don’t personally have much confidence in Facebook regarding their use of my data, no matter how minimal, so WhatsApp is not my first choice for encrypted messaging.
I’m with you! It’s frustrating. I don’t have a good answer for this, except that personally I’m going to try to cultivate a little more patience for multiple apps. The WhatsApp / Facebook “monopoly” is kind of what led us here in the first place.
Besides that, the best advice I can give is to frequently Kondo apps and micromanage your notifications. Smartphones give you great, granular control over notifications nowadays, so take full advantage. Turn off the chimes, turn off the lock screen notifications, turn off the message previews. It makes managing multiple messaging apps (and your sanity) a lot easier.
And finally, if you feel like one particular app is a really great fit, then advocate for it! If you’re enthusiastic about it and get your friends / family on board, you may find you have fewer apps to juggle.
It depends upon the limitations of your specific device.
Signal currently supports Android and iOS. You can find more information about Signal’s operating system requirements in their documentation. Telegram currently supports Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. You can find more information about Telegram’s operating system requirements in their FAQs.
I am not sure about the memory or disk space usage for the different apps though, this is something I would have to look in to further.
This is a very understandable and tricky concern. How best to approach this depends completely on your specific circumstances and relationships. It is impossible to give general advice, but I’ll give it a go.
You could delay the conversation, however I would say that even if you do not have the “should we make the switch” conversation with your contacts now, it will likely come up at some point due to the current trajectory of WhatsApp. When you do broach the subject, perhaps consider focusing on the practical upsides of switching to an encrypted messaging app (see answer to first question above for more on this).
If you feel you simply can’t bring this up, then of course you could always continue to use WhatsApp for certain conversations and use a different app for others. Though every app provider would probably prefer you believe otherwise, there is no rule against using multiple apps!
On a more general note, the mis-use of personal data has led to previously unimaginable consequences and turbulence in recent years. As such, every decision related to the transmission of personal data, even something as mundane as choosing a messaging app, is unavoidably political. So though we cannot avoid the political nature of the choice, we can control how we treat that choice. We can be passive, or deliberate.
If the messaging service is already controlled by private investors, perhaps not much. Here is a very brief summary of how Telegram and Signal are structured as organisations. Note that much of the information that follows has been gleaned via Signal article and Telegram article on Wikipedia.
Telegram is owned by Telegram Messenger LLP and has been funded by Digital Fortress LLC. They have stated that they are not for profit but are not structured as a nonprofit, possibly due to the overhead involved in setting up an official nonprofit. The sustainability of their business model is unclear, however they did put together an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to fund a new blockchain platform and cryptocurrency. Activity around this seems to have halted in early 2018.
Signal is owned by Signal Messenger LLC which is funded by the Signal Foundation, a 501(c) nonprofit organisation whose mission is to make “private communication accessible and ubiquitous”. Much of the funding ($50 million) used to create this nonprofit came from Brian Acton, a WhatsApp co-founder. Acton left Facebook in late 2017 and is now the foundation’s Executive Chairman. Signal’s open source Signal Protocol is said to be used by a number of large entities (including WhatsApp) for encryption. Part of Signal’s ongoing business model may be to offer services in relation to their protocol, though that is just speculation.
Because of Signal’s nonprofit status, I feel more confident in Signal’s longevity as an independent entity.
Regardless, there will always be churn in this sector, so I would expect to switch again some day. I look at switching messaging apps in a similar way to how I look at switching banks. It is a big hassle to switch, but eventually the arguments for leaving outweigh the reasons to stay. So I switch, and then I keep tabs on it to ensure it remains the best of the options that are open to me.
Perhaps! The best place to find out is the app’s own website, they’re jumping to tell you all of the great things their app can do. Another place that might be worth checking is Slant.
Personally, I am most concerned about conversation backups and mute / unmute capabilities.
I want to have some way of backing up my conversations in case I ever lose my phone. But with convenience comes a cost. Backups are notoriously tricky with encrypted messaging since they introduce another potential weak point, the server that stores the backup. With Signal, you can back up on Android but not iOS (though iOS backups do seem to be on their roadmap). Telegram seems to allow backups of some sort, but it is unclear what this means for encryption. The only easily-available information I could find currently was their related FAQ “Why not just make all chats ‘secret’?” and their founder’s blog post “Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default?”
Both Telegram and Signal seem to support conversation muting according to various documentation and articles I found online. The muting duration and other functionality offered by each service will likely be slightly different from WhatsApp.
The three biggest factors in choosing a messaging app are probably the user base, features, and data privacy.
From a data privacy perspective, Signal is likely the best choice. Signal is fully open source, meaning that the security in every aspect of the service can be reviewed and is publicly-verifiable. Though Telegram has an open API and protocol, the backend software is not open source so the security cannot be fully evaluated by a third party.
From a features perspective, it is probably safe to say that WhatsApp is the most fully-featured encrypted messaging app out there currently. It is hard to tell how those features might change over time in light of Facebook’s plan to integrate it with Facebook Messenger and Instagram. Telegram used to be more fully featured than Signal, but at the moment it seems about neck-and-neck.
In terms of user base, it seems impossible to get very accurate numbers. The better thing to do, perhaps, is to just ask around. See what your friends and family are already using. There is a very good chance that certain circles will prefer one to the other. Personally I have more friends on Signal than Telegram, but that may relate to the sector that I work in.
But as a final point, maybe just don’t choose. There is nothing wrong with using multiple messaging apps. I use FaceTime and iMessage with my family because they all happen to have iPhones (though Apple’s not perfect!). I use Signal with lots of friends. I’ll probably hang on to WhatsApp ultimately as well, for a little while at least, since certain contacts are going to struggle to switch to a different app for one reason or another.
A closing thought. Though I’ve focused on Telegram and Signal here, there are a lot of other encrypted messaging apps out there to explore.
For mobile, take a look at Viber, Line, Threema. For business-y stuff, maybe take a look at Wire or Keybase. If you’re just talking desktop and are interested in getting a little techy, check out Freenode and Scuttlebutt.
This is a conversation worth continuing.
Published
Grandpa showed me the album of his WWII photos and postcards when I got to see him at Christmas. I didn’t know it existed.
Grandpa couldn’t bring his camera with him when he was deployed, it would have been confiscated during inspection. Luckily his friend Renee Neuman brought his box camera when he came back from leave, so Grandpa got to borrow that sometimes. They developed the photos in soup bowls. He said that Neuman unfortunately passed about 5 years after returning from the war. I asked about the cause, but he said he wasn’t sure.
The photos here are all positioned in order on a single page captioned “Diving for movie film in 40 ft of water”. Grandpa laughed when describing it.
Their LST ran aground in Pearl Harbor, so they had to stay there for repairs. While there, another ship came along and they exchanged 35mm films. Unfortunately the film from the other ship fell in to the harbour. It wasn’t financially valuable, but very valuable in terms of morale so they asked tower to send a diver to recover the movie. The diver wasn’t happy, he had been at a party, but he did recover the film.
Most of the photos in the album are of Grandpa and the others from his ship doing jobs here and there or “just horsing around” as he said. There was a lot of down time. There are a few landscapes of Hawaii, Guam, the Kwajalein Atoll, and the Enewetak Atoll. Some are in the aftermath of a tsunami. There were also some intense images towards the end of the album, hard to tell if they were photos or postcards. Some would be pretty gruesome for postcards, others were of the signing of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri. At any rate, Grandpa said he hadn’t taken those final album images. He developed a bunch of negatives for other people, so if these weren’t postcards then they may have been copies of others’ photographs.
There were two photos of a large cemetery in Guam with many small Christian grave markers. Grandpa had gone to school with one of the men buried there, he and Grandma had gone to senior prom with this boy and his date. After graduation, he went in to the Marines and was killed. Grandpa took photos of the grave for the man’s family.
Grandpa carried a pocket-sized spiral bound photo album with him throughout WWII filled with photos of family and friends, but mostly of Grandma. It’s very worn apart now. The sleeve with the photo of Grandma and him in his uniform also includes a pressed four leaf clover and a Japanese stamp.
In the back of the main album, there was originally a college photo of Grandma with a gardenia behind her ear. That’s on the wall of his apartment now, with other family photos.
Published
Over the holidays, Grandpa showed me Effie Bradley’s daily memoranda. Effie was his grandma on his mother’s side, so my great-great grandmother. I asked if Effie was short for anything, he wasn’t sure. It may have been Euphemia, but maybe Effie wasn’t a nickname.
The relative that typed up the memoranda was June Bradley Piper, Grandpa’s double cousin. Double cousins are related via both parents (two brothers partnering with two sisters). I’d never heard of that before. I think June was named after Grandpa’s paternal grandfather June Piper. I didn’t know June was used as a male name. Via Wikipedia: “As a boy’s name, June reached a peak in 1922 at 697th, but then also declined and left the top 1000 list in 1939.”
Published
10 years ago today, I spent a few days at a very hospitable couple’s house in Appleby-in-Westmoreland, Cumbria. I was about two weeks in to a six-month stint studying illustration at Glasgow School of Art. This is the River Eden at sunrise when we walked in to town to pick up the paper.
They had a beautiful stone house on Battlebarrow and kept chickens in the backyard. I’d never seen a house quite like it, you just don’t get places that old in most of the US. They put a hot water bottle in my bed at night and introduced me to QI, both firsts for me. I was only there for a couple nights, and they made me feel very welcome in the UK during a time when I felt pretty untethered.
Published
I’ve been spending a bunch of time on the Host site recently and just wrote up some thoughts about working with Netlify CMS and GitHub Pages on SB-PH’s tucked-away blog.
TL;DR
Though it’s an unusual setup for a client site, I like the stack and would consider using it again for a similar project.
Edit 23 Jan 2019
I just deployed some small fixes (force curly quotes via the smartify filter, prevent Cards from showing if no image), but the site doesn’t seem to be updating. It’s updated if I navigate to https://hostofleyton.com/index.html but not https://hostofleyton.com. Kind of weird. This StackOverflow thread seems useful, as does GitHub’s own troubleshooting page.
Published
This was originally posted on sb-ph.com. I’ve moved it to my blog since we’ve decided to remove the blog from that site.
Heads up: this post is kind of old! I’ve got mixed feelings about this approach now for a few different reasons, in no small part due to Uploadcare’s new pricing. No dig at them, they gotta do what they gotta do, but it puts this out of most of my clients’ budgets. If you’re interested in additional thoughts on JAMstack CMSs, you might want to take a look at this post.
We’ve recently been exploring a lightweight CMS setup for the Host site. This post summarises the thought process behind our decision to work with Netlify CMS and GitHub Pages.
TL;DR
Though it’s an unusual setup for a client site, I like the stack and would consider using it again for a similar project.
There are two potential downsides that would rule out Netlify CMS for most of our client projects. One is that user account setup isn’t super straightforward, the authentication method makes this a little more complicated than normal. The other is that the hosting “ownership” is tied to a GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket repository. All-in-all, this approach demands a slightly higher level of technical know-how from the client than most other CMSs we regularly use (Craft, Kirby, WordPress, etc.).
The upside is the relatively low cost to the client, both in the short and long term. Netlify CMS is free, as are a few selected static hosting providers (Netlify and GitHub Pages spring immediately to mind). The login authentication is the only step that requires a server, since the keys have to be kept secret. Previously, the server would be the big ongoing time and money sink. Certain platforms however, such as Netlify, offer selected webtasks / microservices / cloud functions for free.
When evaluating these pros and cons against the Host website requirements, it became apparent that it would be a pretty good fit. The original Host static site was built with Jekyll and jekyll-seo-tag, so we knew it would work nicely with GitHub Pages and Netlify CMS. GitHub recently introduced free private repositories for up to 3 users, so we felt less concerned about the site hosting being tied to a repository that we own since we could transfer it to Host at some point without feeling pressure to make the repository public. And the Host folks are a pretty tech savvy bunch, so I wasn’t worried about them being daunted by things like repositories or GitHub-linked authentication.
So I got started with Netlify CMS. The first thing I dove in to was the widget (field) configuration, and I was impressed. The widget configuration options are more fully-featured than I would have expected for a ~1.5 year-old CMS. While configuring the widgets I also gave the custom editor Preview components a try, however ultimately I abandoned that experiment and disabled the editor Preview. It’s out of the scope of this project, and the maintenance of these React components alongside a non-React site seems a little dicey. Something to explore separately at a later date perhaps.
Media management is a concern on static sites, and this one is no exception. We could have gotten away with hosting the images in a directory in the GitHub repo, but we wouldn’t have any nice image transforms for faster page speed and would have had to ask the client to do all of the heavy lifting with image resizing and optimisation. I would have also worried about the repository size spiraling out of control with overly-large image files. Netlify CMS v2.1.0 offers the Uploadcare media widget by default though. Uploadcare’s free tier seemed to be a very good fit for the Host website, so we got that set up as well. The implementation was pleasingly straightforward. As someone who has spent a lot of time debugging image transformations in more traditional CMSs, Uploadcare’s URL-based system is refreshing.
The final critical step was the authentication configuration. Netlify CMS offers a number of different methods. We knew we wanted to use GitHub Pages for hosting, so the two most likely options were Git Gateway with Netlify Identity or GitHub with Netlify. We went for the latter. It does require that all users have a GitHub account (unlike the former), however this ultimately feels like the right approach since much of the site documentation lives in the repo’s Readme file and we feel it gives the client a bit more ownership over and awareness of the inner workings of their site.
The authentication was a little more complicated than the rest of the Netlify CMS setup. I followed the GitHub Backend instructions, which are relatively minimal and more geared towards a site hosted on Netlify. I found this article more helpful since it addressed what we were after, a Netlify CMS-powered site hosted on GitHub Pages. One potential “gotcha” in these steps is that the OAuth application should be registered on whichever GitHub account owns the repo. I added it to my user account initially which was incorrect, since our organisation account owns the repo.
After following the GitHub backend instructions, I only ran in to two hiccups. I’m documenting them below since I didn’t find much related information elsewhere.
One problem was a post-login “dead end”. After clicking “Login with GitHub” and signing in successfully in the pop-up window, the user should be redirected to the Netlify CMS dashboard automatically. Instead, it just said “Authorized” and did nothing. This is because I hadn’t added the website URL to the Netlify project. I had assumed I didn’t have to add the URL since Netlify is not hosting the site, however the Netlify authorisation callback script checks the host URL against the custom domains. Once I added the URL to the project in Netlify, the issue resolved itself. Note that I did not repoint the DNS to Netlify since we still want to host the site on GitHub Pages, so it shows a little error / warning regarding the URL’s DNS records. This is not a problem.
So I was now being redirected successfully to the dashboard, but the dashboard was just a white screen. The console indicated an error with loading netlify-cms.js from Unpkg, specifically:
Refused to execute as script because "X-Content-Type: nosniff" was given and its Content-Type is not a script MIME type
This seemed possibly related to some security-related GitHub Pages headers, so I decided to grab the JS from the Unpkg URL and commit it to the repo and no longer use a CDN for the script. This immediately fixed the problem.
I’d like to do a bit more exploration of Netlify CMS moving forward since it could be appropriate for more use cases depending upon the developers’ roadmap. I will probably look at the Git Gateway with Netlify Identity route for authorisation as well. Besides Netlify CMS though, we’re really interested in exploring Kirby 3. Kirby 2 has been excellent for a number of small-ish websites (<5 stakeholders, not a ton of relational data), so we’re excited to see where they’ve taken the newest version and if it could work with projects of a slightly larger scale.
Published
I’ve been behind. The past two months haven’t been great. But things are looking better, and the holidays couldn’t have come at a better time. We were in the US this time around, got to see more friends and family than I could have hoped. Here are some of the things we got up to.