Author: Nadreck

The Republic of Newsletters, the Isle of Blogging

Continuing with the topic of the revival of blogging, emailed newsletters and small communities, Warren Ellis also recently commented:

I miss that long moment when the web seemed full of people doing the same thing, or thinking in public. It happens in the Republic Of Newsletters, now. But it was nice to have all those little radio stations broadcasting in the night.

And later stated:

I’ve seen the idea circulating for a while: come off the streams, own your own platform for your own voice and your own complete statements. It seems like a reactionary step, from some angles. But maybe that great river, The Conversation, was, like every river followed to its source, a dead end. The resurgence of the Republic Of Newsletters may be one aspect of a return to the ocean, dotted with little pirate radio stations broadcasting through the night again.

I like this metaphor (or combination of metaphors), and I agree. I’ve got a few newsletters I’m subscribed to at the moment, and I really appreciate them, particularly the ones that are a little more human, sharing a bit of the personal alongside whatever other interesting things they’re wanting to share. The same can be said for my favorite blogs, the ones I read without fail and never gloss over.

Ursula Le Guin

To Ursula Le Guin: You were an astounding writer, and by all accounts an equally astounding human being. I’m grateful for your stories and your thoughts, and what you brought to this world. Rest well.

In John Scalzi’s piece on Le Guin’s passing, he said it quite aptly:

Look at the top tier of writers in science fiction and fantasy today — names like Jemisin and Gaiman and Jeff VanderMeer and Catherynne Valente, as well as rising stars like Bo Bolander and Amal El-Mohtar and Monica Byrne — and you see the unmistakable traces of Le Guin in their work. Multiple generations of her spiritual children, making the genre more humane and expansive, and better than it would have been without her. And all with stories of her.

[…]

The speaking of her name and of her words goes on, and will go on, today and tomorrow and for a very long time now. As it should. She was the mother of so many of us, and you should take time to mourn your mother.

Link: Automation

In the vein of technological art, Andrew Campana built something that generates poetry based on the automated subway announcements of the Japanese train system. Some of the combinations can end up really interesting:

The ceiling is passing through on Platform 26. Please contact us.
The local train is moving on Platform 23. Please take care of yourself.
The express train is listening on Platform 1. Please give it back.

Nintendo Labo

Nintendo’s been doing a lot right with their latest console (the Switch). It’s got a pretty compelling use case, and has become the go-to console for some really fantastic gaming experiences (looking at you, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey). It also looks like they’ve managed to win over and embrace indie developers, as indicated by a steady stream of titles. I think one of the things they’re getting right (aside from building some amazing games themselves) is an appreciation for play and whimsy, as evidenced by their latest addition to the system: the Labo. Go watch the trailer:

I love pretty much everything about this idea.

Going to Japan

I’ve been talking about wanting to go to Japan for years — Japan and Greece were my go-to bucket list destinations going as far back as when I was 11. I still haven’t visited either of those countries, 25 years later, and it’s high time I corrected that. Just booked tickets for a trip to Japan for my birthday in April! I’ll be there for 11 days (well, I’ll be gone for 11 days, but 10 days there due to timezones and transit). My plan is to bookend my trip with a few days in Tokyo on either side, then take a train down to Kyoto and Nara in between.

I tend to look for quieter spaces, and I’m fascinated by a lot of the shrines and temples, but I’m also going to try and hit some other stuff (keeping an eye on tickets for the Ghibli Museum for instance). I’ve not done much foreign travel (and basically none to non-English speaking countries), so I’m a little nervous about it, but also excited to finally do this. Do you have any tips for things to check out or stuff I should prepare for in advance?

What I Use: RSS

I encourage people to subscribe to my site via RSS, when mentioning I have a site on the Facebooks and Twitters and similar. This may seem a little archaic (that is so 2008), but honestly RSS is still one of my go-to solutions for finding worthwhile things to read, watch, or experience.

One of the big reasons you don’t really see RSS mentioned anymore (despite folks actually using it often, without realizing it… looking at you, podcasts) is because Google stupidly shut down Google Reader, which was the de facto standard for reading your feeds. That killed a lot of momentum for its use.

While RSS may be limping along, it’s not dead, and a lot of sites actually do have RSS feeds, still — they just aren’t as prominently noted or advertised or linked anywhere.

Of course, even if you do decide to use RSS, there’s still the hurdle of finding an RSS reader you actually like. A lot of folks go with a web-based option (ala Google Reader), so they can read on whatever device they happen to be on. There’s also some pretty nice apps for sale (for instance, NetNewsWire), if you’re so inclined, and a lot of RSS-adjacent apps (like several web browsers, and even Apple Mail) are available as well. Personally, I use Vienna RSS, which is an open source project made for macOS. I’ve tried a bunch of other apps and methods, and this is the one I keep coming back to (there was a gap where development wasn’t really happening much, so I looked around a fair bit, but regular updates are happening again). It’s fairly fast, robust, and seems to handle a ton of feeds well. If you’re looking for a reader, I’d say it’s worth a try.

I recently went through and cleaned up my RSS feeds, getting rid of dead feeds. I just want to say, to all those bloggers who have continued to post after the blogging fad wore off: I salute you, and I’m still reading.

Extracting a Nested JSON Value in Python

First, some context: I’ve been working on some Python libraries at work that do things with sets of json data. This is generally pretty easy: Python has a nice library for reading json, so it can be worked on as a native dictionary object in Python. This is great for simple json objects, but there’s some pretty complex json data sources out there, whether it’s being returned as part of an API, or is stored in a file. Sometimes you need to access a specific value from a key buried a dozen layers deep, and maybe some of those layers are actually arrays of nested json objects inside them.

While both arrays and dictionaries are native to Python, so you can do this, it’s kind of a pain. Thankfully, many smart people have already been tackling things like this, which is how there are now handy libraries implementing a (pseudo-standard) approach for getting the value given a specific json path. (There’s even an online evaluator to help you craft a good jsonpath.) The one I’ve been using is called jsonpath-rw. When I looked at the docs for jsonpath-rw, I was a little frustrated, and I wanted to take a minute to write out my eventual understanding, in case there are other folks in a similar boat to me.

Note: I’m not primarily a programmer (currently I’m a Technical Writer, and prior to that I was a QA Engineer — mostly exploratory, not automation), so while my example works, there’s probably more robust and pythonic ways to do the same thing. Continue reading “Extracting a Nested JSON Value in Python”