parker higgins

The tremendous influx of traffic to Mastodon got me thinking that it might finally be time to set up my own instance, and how-to posts from Jacob and Simon have only increased that interest. But as a little branding excercise, and especially if I want to offer accounts to a few close friends, surely I could do something a little more fun than just my first and last name.

Sorry I Haven’t Posted for a while!

I do of course intend to return to the blog, yadda yadda, lots of updates to share. One quick thing that merits an update today is that I’ve co-constructed a crossword puzzle with Ross Trudeau over at Rossword Puzzles. Go check it out.

Towards the beginning of this year I ran a Kickstarter campaign for a monthly zine of archival material from the year 1923.

I’m releasing new software today for solving crossword puzzles in the terminal. cursewords is a small Python program to open, navigate, and solve puzzles stored as .puz files. If you’re a Mac or Linux user, you can install it today by running pip3 install --user cursewords in your terminal, and then use the cursewords command to open a .puz file on your computer.

After a little over a year of service, @LinkArchiver, the Twitter bot that automatically made Internet Archive backups of the links you tweeted, has archived its last link. In that time it archived somewhere around 7.2 million links total from about 9,000 users.¹ The last link it archived was this LA Times story about Verizon throttling California firefighters, tweeted on Thursday morning.

Twitter should allow users to “hide” old tweets so that they are only visible to that user, and selectively “un-hide” individual tweets from that collection so that they once again become available at their original URL, in quote tweets and threads, and in sites where they are embedded around the web.

One thing I enjoy is Norway’s public service broadcaster’s production of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo, which was first broadcast in real time, over seven or so hours, in 2009. It’s predictably pretty quiet stuff, but—at least now that it’s on Netflix—there are in fact subtitles of what little dialog there is.

A little over a month ago, I launched one of the Special Projects I’ve been working on at my new job at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The Threatened Outlets collection at Archive-It aims to capture the archives of news sites that we deem vulnerable to “the billionaire problem,” wherein wealthy individuals or organizations can eliminate unflattering coverage through litigation or by purchasing media companies altogether. From the launch announcement:

I had the opportunity to catch the new movie The Florida Project this week, without any background on how it was made or what it is about. That’s my preferred context for seeing movies, but it does sometimes lead to my feeling a bit adrift in the theater, or—in this case—stressed that something catastrophic was about to go down. Still, I feel like I end up with a better idea of what the movie is actually about if I don’t know the plot going into it. Here’s the trailer, if you want a sense of it.

When I decided to add realtime weather effects to @choochoobot, I knew there were a few qualities I wanted to find in a data source. Ideally I would find something free and reliable that didn’t require me to agree to many developer terms or sign up for an API token. Google shuttered its undocumented Weather API in 2012, and Yahoo’s offering, which has changed a few times over the years, now requires an account and a consumer key and secret.