Julia Evans blogs about technology, and today’s post Batch editing files with ed is an excellent example of her clear-headed style.

Like Julia, I’ve had a longtime aversion to the Unix ed editor, based purely on ignorance. The magic key that Julia’s blog post unlocked for me is that ed is just like vi, but without a visual interface.

As I have vi burned into my muscle memory, this was a powerful revelation.

Julia closes the deal with a pointer to the book Ed Mastery, which I’ve just purchased based solely on the strength of her recommendation.

I’m so looking forward to taking my new-found text-unmangling skills out for a ride.

If you find yourself in need of an even broader approach to Ed, may I humbly recommend the biography of my great-grandfather Big Ed Caswell. It won’t help you edit text files, but it will teach you something about steely determination.

By virtue of my dual US-Canadian nationality, I’ve been voting in U.S. elections for as long as I’ve known I’ve had that right (that I voted for Ralph Nader means that, essentially, it’s my fault that George Bush became President).

When you register to vote in the USA, at least in New York, you have the option of declaring a party affiliation, and if you take this option you’re allowed to vote in the primary elections, held in advance of the general elections to allow parties to select their candidate. As I’ve never been a joiner, I’ve always checked the “Independent” box when registering, but this year I decided I would declare as a Democrat because, well, if there was ever a year when every Democratic vote counted, this is it.

In all general elections for New York’s 25th Congressional district to this point I’ve voted for Louise Slaughter, a well-regarded progressive feminist Democrat who was elected to serve the district 16 times, from 1986 to 2016; it was a no-brainer.

For this fall’s election, however, given Slaughter’s death in March, the Democrats are looking for a new candidate, and because I’ve registered as a Democrat, I’m eligible to vote in the June 26, 2018 New York primary. To this end, my ballot arrived today, and there are four candidates plus the option to write-in:

I have my work cut out for me, as it seems, on first blush, like there are four excellent candidates to choose between; from their own websites:

Joe Morelle

I am inspired by the promise of a future that is as strong, as resilient, and as bold as the people who call this great community home. I believe that, together, we can pick up Louise Slaughter’s mantle and fight to protect the fundamental ideals we all share: the need to ensure universal healthcare for all; to protect a woman’s right to choose; to keep our streets and children safe from the terror of gun violence; to create stronger economic opportunities for our working families; to fight against the opioid epidemic plaguing communities across our nation; and to dismantle the racial inequities that keep us all from achieving our full potential.

Adam McFadden

Adam McFadden, a native of Rochester, NY. Currently, serves as the Vice-President of the Rochester City Council representing the south district of the City of Rochester. He is the Chair of the Finance committee and past president of the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials where he helped to establish national initiatives that are implemented at the local level of government by black officials across the United States. Adam, also serves as the Executive Director of Quad A for Kids a not for profit organization committed to breaking the cycle of childhood poverty in the City of Rochester.

Robin Wilt

I’m Robin Wilt, a native to the Rochester area who has lived in Brighton with my husband, Nick, and our three sons since 2003. Having lived in other parts of the country, we chose to reside in this region because we believe it is the best region to raise a family. My 13-year-old son is a student in public schools, while my two older sons attend college at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Bard College of Simon’s Rock.

In addition to my work as a real estate professional, I have spent my entire adult life advocating for grassroots involvement and political engagement. In my role on the Brighton Town Board, I consistently offer a diversity of perspective that aligns with our community’s core values of education, equity and environmental justice.

Rachel Barnhart

A lifelong Democrat, Rachel has the skills and experience to fight the Trump administration’s corrosive policies and major ethical lapses. She has a proven track record of holding the powerful accountable and fighting for transparent and ethical government.

Rachel started speaking truth to power at Rochester’s John Marshall High School. She showed courage by publishing an underground newspaper about educational inequality that resulted in her suspension. Rachel went on to graduate from Cornell University, where she was the editor of an alternative newspaper, The Cornell Perspective.

I have a few weeks to educate myself; it’s good to be reminded that there are progressives still at work in America, despite (or because of) the Trump-related chaos.

One of the things I learned in the process, from Robin Wilt’s campaign video, is that two great figures of American history, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, were neighbours and friends in Rochester. The two are memorialized in statue in a downtown park and in the Frederick Douglass–Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge over the Genesee River.

There’s no doubt that Thursday Pizza Pasta at Receiver Coffee Brass Shop is, in large part, how we survived the winter. Every Thursday until the end of May. Come while you can.

By way of beta testing the ability of my newly-printed postcards to withstand the travails of the postal system, I mailed one to myself on Tuesday afternoon; it arrived in this morning’s mail, two days later.

Setting aside that it took 48 hours for the postcard to travel from 101 Prince Street to 100 Prince Street–because the mail is processed in Halifax now, 300 km away–I was dismayed to receive the postcard with the stamp “cancelled” by a stroke of a ballpoint pen and missing a postmark completely:

Not only are the aesthetics of this offensive, but the lack of a postmark removes any formal record of the postcard having traveled through the mail at all.

My postal sources tell me that the likely reason for the pen-cancellation is that the postcard could not be mechanically sorted, needed to be hand-processed, and the postal worker who did the processed was not equipped with a cancellation stamp.

Even when this doesn’t happen, and the robots can do the sorting, the postmark and cancellation applied are for Nova Scotia, not Prince Edward Island, resulting in a troubling absence of postal sovereignty.

The same sources tell me that I can take mail to the central post office on Kent Street to be hand-cancelled; that’s my next test.

Frank Meeuwsen writes about the upcoming European GDPR and how its provisions might apply to personal websites (in Dutch). While he concludes that the GDPR does not apply to sites like his, he suggests that the spirit of the GDPR is something to aspire to, regardless (auto-translated):

Nevertheless, I do not think it’s a bad idea to give more clarity and transparency [to] what I store on my site and for what reason. Starting with the statistics.

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as well. Over recent years I’ve taken steps to evermore completely remove any tracking or data gathering from this site, removing third-party JavaScript, removing Google Analytics, turning off all advertising, changing my webserver logs to remove IP address logging. So much of what I was previously gathering, much of it simply “on by default,” technically or by convention, was of no use to me, so I’ve suffered no ill from these changes.

In the same spirit of codifying transparency that Frank demonstrates in his post, I’ve been working away at a Privacy Policy for this site. It’s a work in progress, and I’m trying to balance completeness with readability (and, for the moment, completeness is winning).

(I’d completely forgotten that Frank posted videos of the Reboot conference Pecha Kucha sessions back in 2006, including my own. Apparently I’ve been interested in public data for a very long time.)

Many years ago, my friend Dan made a robot to answer telemarketers, an effort that presaged Google Duplex, but without the pesky need for the AI.

The story of how Anne Marie Hagan forgave the man who killed her father, told to the CBC’s Piya Chattopadhyay on the May 6 episode of Out in the Open, is one of the most powerful pieces of radio I’ve heard in a long time.

Of all the things I’ve designed, set and printed for letterpress, this might be my favourite: a Prince Edward Island postcard.

The outline of the Island comes from the collection of letterpress cuts passed on to me by Ian Scott and Daphne Large.

The typeface is a font of Kaufman Bold one that artist Jennifer Brown pulled out of her garage for me, helpfully sorted for use by Christina Clorey. McGrew describes the face, designed by Max R. Kaufmann for American Type Founders in 1936, as having a “contemporary look and high degree of legibility,” which is certainly a quality we should all aspire to in all regards (you may recognize it from “with David Letterman” on the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York City).

On the reverse side–this is a postcard, after all, and deserved the usual accoutrements–is a “Printed on a 1915 Golding letterpress in Charlottetown” caption, a line-rule down the middle to separate message from address, and a box to indicate where the stamp should go:

With two sides, and two colours, each postcard took three trips through the Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress to complete. I printed a set of 75, and am pondering what the most appropriate venue for distributing them is.

Exactly at the appointed minute of 1:55 Atlantic today my Android mobile phone went into emergency alert mode, emitting an annoying klaxon-like sound and popping up an “Emergency Alert” notification that it then read out loud to me. This first alert was from the Nova Scotia Emergency Management Office; about 4 seconds later a similar alert came in from the PEI EMO.

I’m note sure why I got the Nova Scotia alert as well as the PEI one, but I’m assuming it has something to do with our shared 902 area code; I don’t begrudge the extra notice, though: if Godzilla is stomping through Truro, I want to know about it so I can batten down the hatches here.

Danny Gregory on the value of embedding yourself in a creative community:

You may think you are not a Van Gogh. But have you gone to Paris? Have you taken advantage of the impact a creative community can make?

Brings to mind Ian Williams’ post I have several criteria, from 2002:

I have several criteria for the places I want to live: as I’ve said before, I want a healthy gay population (even though I’m not gay, I feel more comfortable when the queers are around), an indie bookstore and movie theater, and a coffee shop that serves frappuccino-like crap with whipped cream. Bonus points also go to neighborhoods with ne’er-do-well teens on skateboards, really good basketball hoops with nets, a park within walking distance, and either the view of a large body of water or a mountain. Park Slope has all that stuff except the water or mountain.

But after looking at the map, I’ve hit upon another really good way to pick a place to live, especially in New York: check out the blogs per subway station ratio on the nycbloggers website. I’d say that if you didn’t know anything about the town, simply picking a subway stop that has 10 or more bloggers represented is a good place to start.

These days we can forget that in blogging’s flourishing heyday it was both a solitary act and one conducted in community (albeit community often far-flung).