Applying for a job is hard. Every time you don’t hear back, you can lose a tiny little something of yourself. You thus might try just that little bit less next time. So if you keep applying for unlikely-to-get jobs, you might eventually water yourself down, and dilute your application, until it’s a very thin cup of tea indeed.

Don’t do that. Apply when you have a real shot. Stretch a little, but not too much. Save yourself and your ego from the lottery trap.

Great advice, here and in the entire article. As someone who is embarking on a job search, it was encouraging to read this.

From the moment Steve Jobs announced it in 2007, anticipation for the first iPhone was off the charts. And when it shipped? … if you had a disability, the new hotness was just a cold, unresponsive rectangle of plastic and glass.

This is the story of how that changed in June of 2009, and what it has meant to people who are blind, have a hearing disability, or experience motor delays.

Apple’s dedication to accessibility on their platforms wasn’t always a given as this programme clearly shows.

This was a great documentary. It reminds me of a one-off or maybe a short series of programmes that might be broadcast on traditional radio. Podcasting is great, but I still adore the simplicity of just tuning in. You never knew what you’d hear.

Dave Winer:

If I had my druthers, everyone would write a blog like mine, and we’d have great tools for reading them in a myriad of different ways to please everyone. Innovation, independence, customization, variety and decentralization. Wonderful.

There’s something wonderfully human about this that I love.

Fyyd, a German podcast directory, offers a powerful search engine powered by traditional keywords and operators. Perhaps less useful, but more interesting is this tool for searching by the colour of a podcast’s cover artwork.

You can reload the page to get a new randomly-selected colour. My most recent was for #AD9023, a golden orange-yellow colour, which led me to an amusingly-named podcast called ‘Timber’.

Steven Aquino on Twitter:

One cool tidbit about Voice Control: It uses the TrueDepth camera on iOS/iPadOS to tell if you’re looking at the computer. If someone walks over and you turn your head, Voice Control will stop listening until you go back to your computer.

I think Voice Control is the thing I got most excited about watching the WWDC 2019 presentation a couple weeks ago. I am able to use my Mac without such features, but it looks so cool that I can’t help but want to use it.

Mr Aquino’s point helps illustrate that a lot of work – and thought – went into making the feature. So much so that calling it a ‘feature’ almost trivialises it.

I’m still very excited to play this game (again). It may be fun to explore the new features, like custom player-made dungeons, but I can be satisfied with the main adventure. I love that even inconsequential things, like the placement of enemies is the same. So much of this game is permanently etched into my brain.

I’m less excited by the art style, though. The glossy three-dimensional is fine, but the human characters’ faces are uncomfortable to look at. I don’t like the pointy featureless noses or the empty black eyes. I am probably in the minority. It won’t stop me playing the game, certainly.

I can’t wait to hear more of the music. We hear The Ballad of the Wind Fish as the trailer closes. The song was always moving, but hearing it in full instrumentation, it’s heartbreaking.

Hide the tampon in a pamphlet about women’s reproductive rights. Menfolk can’t stand any mention of women’s reproductive rights.

The other day it was Dave Winer, now today Brent Simmons writes about his blogging set up – how he writes and runs Inessential, as well as his microblogging and reading processes.

In a follow-up, he talks more about ‘short stuff’ and intensifies my interest in maintaining something that’s more like a traditional ‘blog’.

[This video] makes me realize the real reason I am blogging on Rocket Panda instead of something like SquareSpace or Tumblr. … The reason is because it’s my platform. I own every pixel of this website and I can control what goes on here and what doesn't.

Well said. Recognising and acknowledging this feeling can be a source of motivation for ourselves and others. I tend my front garden to have flowers that please me – and maybe others – but no one can dictate what is planted there.

Getting your own space online is feasible for anyone. If you have questions or need advice, ask friends or the authors of sites you admire. The internet is, ultimately, a friendly place and new voices are always welcome.

I have recently become interested in the IndieWeb effort. The belief that we should own our content and be in control of it resonates with me.

I can’t yet bring myself to mar my HTML with microformat declarations. For no good reason, I did add my site to the IndieWeb web ring, though.

The project was created by Marty McGuire during the IndieWeb Summit in 2018. The web ring concept is charming and feels like the internet of the 90s. That retro feeling is quickly balanced by a domain made of emoji characters. It’s almost painfully modern, being impractical to type.

Each site in the web ring directory is given an randomly-generated emoji identifier. I can’t help thinking that mine, ➕😞📭, with the prominent ‘disappointed face’ emoji, is appropriate.

Links to the next and previous sites from mine in the web ring are available in the page footer.

Japan plans to make it mandatory to charge for plastic shopping bags at supermarkets, convenience stores, drugstores and department stores as the country combats marine pollution by plastic waste.

Though this is only a small part of Japan’s plastic problem, I can’t believe I will live to see this day.

The price charged for a bag will be set by the shop. I expect that the price they charge, at convenience stores in particular, will be very inexpensive. Nonetheless, because the customer needs to be asked, perhaps they’ll consider taking their items without one.

I’ve never been to a supermarket where plastic bags were free, but the prices are typically 3 yen for a smaller bag, and 5 yen for a large one. They’re very cheap, but I almost never see them bought – most everyone has an ‘eco’ bag for life.

(I used to live near a shop which sold the city’s required bin bags as their ‘I forgot my eco bag’ alternative, which I thought was brilliant.)

Apple have revived the New York typeface, last seen in the pre-OS X days. Unlike the San Francisco face, which was wholly new, new New York is an update of the old version, and it looks great. It even comes in four optical sizes, so the type should look beautiful no matter how large or small it’s displayed.

It’s a pleasure to see ‘New York’ back in my fonts menu. I’m excited for its potential to improve the typography of web sites, much as San Francisco has done.

(Thanks to Rose for the tip-off.)

Dave Winer writes about how his homemade blog software, Old School, works. He’s an outliner guy and it’s based on outlines. It suits him and his style perfectly.

What I admire about Winer’s writing is that it’s simple. Partly because he’s thinking in outlines, some posts may only be a sentence. It’s like his ‘traditional’ blog and a micro blog rolled into one. I like this style a lot.

That is why for a couple weeks I’ve been playing with doing something similar myself. Some of the items I’ve written I wouldn’t mind having on the site front page. Others are more like journal posts: abysmally boring, even for the author. I need to figure out what I want it to be and where, or if, I want it to appear.

Congratulations are in order!

I’ve been using builds of NetNewsWire regularly since it got Feedbin syncing a week or two ago. It’s a joy to have it back on my Mac. Making it even better today, as Brent says, ‘it has a NetNewsWire icon’, and MarsEdit has its partner back on my Dock.