It has been an absolute blast tinkering with my website theme, using Obsidian and tinkering with my own fork of ghosty-posty, and now configuring n8n to take my posts on Ghost and then sending it where ever I want.
So far it’s going to Mastodon but I have more plans soon.
Simon Batt
Getting media to work on Linux is more complex than you may think. Not because of the technical aspects (although that, too, is pretty tricky), but because of the legality of distributing proprietary software and patent-encumbered codecs. While companies like Microsoft can grab a license and bake the tech into their products, it's a lot less feasible for Linux distributions designed to be freely downloaded and redistributed.
Linux developers have used workarounds for this limitation for decades now; if you've ever downloaded a Linux distro and then spent some time enabling third-party repositories to get multimedia codecs, you already know what it's like. But one patent from 2001 prevented DivX videos from being patent-free worldwide, and the good news is, it has just expired.
So far I have had a blast using ChatGPT to help me create the blog I have wanted for years. It has:
AI isn't to be used all of the time but if I had to learn how to code all of this on my own I would have never gotten to where I want my site to be and in a matter of hours I have a working Ghost site that looks and feels like how I want it to.
This Longform episode with data journalist Mona Chalabi, who has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, and won a Pulitzer for her work, was so good I listened to it twice in one day.
In the podcast she speaks about the ongoing Israel and Palestine war and her feelings on it and the bad reporting that is happening on publications with good reporters.
Mona also spoke a lot about the disparity between white journalists and non-white journalists and pulled no punches when it came to pointing out the hypocrisy in news media today when it comes to overly scrutinizing non-white journalists when white journalists can get away with so much more without so much as a second glance.
Max (host): Do you think that you’re going to find a place in journalism where you feel like you belong?
Mona: I’m reading the editorial pieces right now from different organizations, right? Different newspapers, different press outlets. I find it astonishing that our independence and our, like, neutrality is called into question when we sign a letter in support of Palestinian human rights. But you can write an editorial that is about Israel’s right to defend itself and you’re still good to be editor in chief somewhere, right? Those editorials make it very, very clear for me that not only do your standards of journalism fall down when it comes to Israel and Palestine because you’re not representing the facts correctly, but also this is an institution that doesn’t really value Arab life in the same way that it values white life.
I want to say that there is a demand on so many people who are marginalized and who are working in newsrooms to be absolutely meticulous in our transparency of our experiences and how we got to here. And I actually think that the same thing should be demanded on the part of a lot of white journalists. There are so few Arab journalists, let alone Palestinian journalists, working for North American news organizations, UK news organizations, Western news organizations, period. And this is something I’ll say now that I would have never dared to say before in a place like the New York Times.
I would wager, I wish I could find data on this, I would wager there are fewer Arab journalists than there are journalists who have done birthright. And this is part of my question about protest right? Why is it that for you to sign a letter saying you support Palestinian human rights means you are no longer a credible journalist? Your neutrality is under question. But if you have gone on an all expenses paid trip to Israel by the Israeli government with the stated intention of fostering better relations, better sympathy for the state of Israel, your objectivity is not under question.
Max: What I hear you saying is there are [unequal] levels of transparency.
Mona: Yes. And that there are ways of equalizing it. I think that’s exactly right. In some ways, I don’t even resent the scrutiny that I’m being held to. In some ways, what I resent about it is that other people aren’t being held to the same standards.
And actually, if my white colleagues were held to the same standards, I think the whole industry gets better. So no, I don’t really see a natural place for myself anywhere right now. I really don’t.