I came away thinking Biden kind of nailed it, as much as he could have. Except of course for the crazy name transposition in the beginning, but that's kind of classic Biden.

Maybe my standards have been lowered. I heard him making sense so I wasn't really thinking about whether he was meandering too much. 

I think they trained him to slow down, they figured out he makes more sense that way. 

I don't know that it will be possible to remove him after this, unless he really trips over himself between now and the  convention.

I wish he would step down but I no longer think it is likely.

Thank you for reading my op ed 

Today I did the old-fashioned thing and filled out the good old contact the president form, asking him to please not run for reelection. It was a strange feeling. There is no drop-down choice for "please stop."

Roxanne and I were married on Saturday in a tiny ceremony in our backyard, with our immediate families and two formally dressed cats. The third cat slept through it.

The skies parted, the sun came out for a miraculous two-hour window and we were able to tie the knot beneath the now-mature chocolate vines of the arbor Roxanne erected five years ago. You might think we planned it this way.

Then the bride proceeded to her grilling station, as one does.

So, deepfakes are officially out of control.

Someone connected with us fell for one that could’ve cost him a fortune the other day, and he’s not 80, they had his son’s voice and caller id.

And this morning I fell for an incredible fake SpaceX live stream until fake Elon started trying to get me to send him crypto. But understand I was watching what I was absolutely sure was the real launch feed for 20 minutes before that, complete with live commentary.

And of course, YouTube's algorithm fell for it too. The scam artists took advantage of the originally scheduled launch time to go live with a very accurate copy of the real channel. Damn.

Check the receipts. Check URLs, text people back and let them know it's an emergency that you confirm something you think you just heard them say, call people back, ask their girlfriend if they’re really in jail or just busy in a meeting and not getting back to you.

This is one of those moments when someone who has been paying a lot of attention to what's going on with a technology decides it's time to start telling their friends and relations and anyone who will listen to be really damn careful. Be really damn careful.

This weekend we checked out POST (Philly Open Studio Tours) in our neighborhood. I particularly enjoyed this artist, Carol Cole. She does gorgeous things with found objects.

This is actually pretty close. Pad kaprow is a very simple recipe. Normally there would be oil involved.

Ingredients:

• One jalapeno, minced
• Three garlic scapes, minced
• Three green onions, minced
• Two dates, minced
• 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
• 1 tablespoon Bragg's liquid aminos (or soy sauce)
• Six white button mushrooms, sliced
• Small box of shiitake mushrooms, sliced
• One red bell pepper, sliced
• 1 cup basil leaves, chopped
• 2 cups green beans, coarsely chopped
• 1 1/2 boxes extra firm tofu

Slice the tofu and bake it in an air fryer for 25 minutes at 400 degrees, coated with balsamic vinegar and a good sprinkling of sesame seeds.

Meanwhile, combine jalapeno, garlic and onions and simmer in a tablespoon or two of water in a wok or large pot over medium heat for one minute or until fragrant. Wait until the water is starting to spit before adding tha jalapenos etc.

Meanwhile, combine dates, rice vinegar, aminos and another tablespoon of water.

When the jalapeno mixture is fragrant add add the date, vinegar, animo and water mixture. Stir and simmer another minute.

Add the mushrooms, stir and simmer for three minutes.

Add the green beans, basil leaves, chopped tofu and another three tablespoons of water and simmer until it brings out the color in the green beans, stirring occasionally.

Serve over rice, or rice noodles.

A user has asked if I would consider adding direct messaging to OPW. Hmm.

I can think of one constraint on that feature right away: the bar to establish your right to DM someone needs to be pretty high. Like maybe you have to be mutual followers to start with, and then you can request DM access from that person. Even then I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's certainly not posting once a day. But it has a lot of important applications in situations that call for compassion, rather than being a stickler for the "spirit of things." Hmm.

Private comments to specific responders on a particular post have also been mentioned as an idea. Perhaps you, as the original poster, would be able to reply to a commenter privately.

That  stays closer to the idiom of One Post Wonder, but I think that it could generate confusion, e.g. accidental references to things said in private comments in public comments on the same post.

What do you think?

I fixed a lil' bug that caused comments to contain HTML markup tags if edited again later. Thanks to both users who reported this, and apologies for not figuring out how to reproduce it the first time.

Unfortunately, in writing this post I encountered a second bug I can't fix before work this morning. It affects the second rich text block in the same post. Sigh. Will dig into that. These are ripple effects of recent modernization of the codebase, which I can't regret really. There is no other bug. I ignored my own "Alternative Text" placeholder and confused the alternative text field with a new rich text block because I am not awake yet. As an amateur UX designer I can see how that confusion happens, so I might need to more clearly flag these.

Two pictures from the American Museum of Natural History: one from the new Invisible Worlds exhibit, one compelling traditional exhibit. If you check out Invisible Worlds, be sure to pay attention to how the little kids interact with the pressure-sensitive floor. You can pay attention to the Serious Content For Grownups on the second loop.

100 feet down in a former copper mine. Which is also a former prison. The past is a terrible place, never go there. Old Newgate Prison is worth a visit, though. The curation of the place... nowadays... has tipped heavily in the direction of rethinking incarceration. Also: nice vein of malachite in there.

Speaking of the past, thanks to U. and L. for bringing some nasty bugs to my attention. These bugs affected the process of accepting an invitation. Most were blatant, which is not so bad, because it was easy for L. to spot them and for me to fix them.

But the last one makes me kick myself: for *coughs* some time now, when accepting an invite, the dialog box giving you a chance to give a "friends" key to the person who invited you just didn't work properly. This is fixed, and will hopefully make it just that little bit easier for newcomers to communicate with the person who invited them in the first place.

Thankfully there was no issue in the opposite direction.

Is OnePo fully accessible? Um... yeah almost certainly not, because I haven't had it tested rigorously for that, nor have I consulted anyone with a disability about their actual experiences. Those steps would be good to take.

One bit of accessibility progress though: alternative text for images.

Adding an alt text field for images in posts was easy-peasy. Adding this to images in comments was an absolute bear, because of the lil' shortcut pattern I had before: tapping the image button on a comment immediately prompted you for an image file, and then immediately uploaded it, and you were done!

This was a nice pattern in a lot of ways, very light and breezy, but also totally brittle: the moment you wanted to add alt text it didn't work for us at all.

So I reworked the image comment editor, and now there is an alt text field beneath an "Upload Image" button, all proper-like.

There's another win today though: image uploads should be considerably faster, especially over slow links, and especially when the original file is large. That's because images are now resized on your device before they are uploaded.

It's true that this puts a slightly greater burden on the local device, but in practice it's a device every web browser has been ferociously optimized to handle, and most likely handles in dedicated hardware. That's because every website is crammed to the gills with images that don't precisely match the size of your screen. So asking your device to do this is reasonable, and it significantly reduces the workload for the server.

"Uh... yeah Tom, that workload must be awful with somebody posting once every hour or so!" Yeah, true, but I still get to learn useful things about doing this kind of stuff at scale, even if scale hasn't really happened here.

Anyway, here's Wonderwall. Photo-comment away, and let me know if anything breaks!

P.S. Hovering the mouse etc. will not display the "alt text." That's because it is truly set up as alternative text (e.g. the "alt" attribute) for accessibility purposes, and regular browsers intentionally don't display it by default. That "text on hover" thing you may be thinking of is the "title" attribute, and describing an image effectively for those who can't see it isn't really the same use case.