I saw a John Berger quote recently and tracked it down to “Drawn to That Moment,” collected in Berger on Drawing, edited by Jim Savage (Aghabullogue, Ireland: Occasional Press, 2005). This is on p. 71.
To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.
The sentence I saw quoted was this, a gem I isolate for its beauty: “A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at.”
(No library in Canada had this book, and I got it through interlibrary loan from Rice University in Texas. Resource sharing departments are wonderful.)
Over the summer I read The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, and I highly recommend it to anyone who regularly keeps notes, even if not on paper. I keep my work notes digitally (in Org), which is the best system for me in my work, but for everything else I use paper. Whatever your methods, The Notebook is full of interesting examples that will give you ideas about how you can keep your own notes. If you don’t use paper, it may convince you to try: there are many mental and memorial advantages to using paper over a screen, as Allen discusses.
Cover of The Notebook
This is a popular book, not a scholarly one, but it is well researched and will lead the curious reader on to many intriguing sources. Allen writes in a lively, engaging way. Aside from notebook users, anyone interested in stationery, documentation or the history of scholarship should also look at it, but it has wide appeal. (If you know someone is particular about their pens and pencils or where they write things down, this will be a great present for them—but make sure they don’t already have it, because many stationery lovers stay current.)
Reading this got me using a notebook again. Years ago I moved to notepads where I would jot down quick notes and ideas (I like Rhodia paper), or sheets of paper I would later file, but now I’m back to using a notebook and I wish I’d been using one all along. I’m documenting things, grappling with ideas and showing my work as I go, gluing in snippets from magazines, writing in quotes from books, doing sketches, and more. I’ve missed having a notebook at hand, and it’s a delight to flip through it whenever I want. It will be nice one day to have a whole shelf full I can review.
The notebook I like
I tried out a few different notebooks (not a Moleskine, the artificiality of which Allen documents) and settled on a sketchbook from Above Ground Art Supplies here in Toronto. The size is right, the binding is sturdy, and the paper has a bit of tooth and can take not only fountains pen ink but light washes when sketching.
The Notebook is filled with examples, but it is not exhaustive. A review by Henry Hitchings in the TLS no. 6292 (03 November 2023) said:
Other maestros of the notebook who come to mind are Beethoven, Einstein, Thomas Edison and Antonio Gramsci—the last two of whom Allen doesn’t mention. His account never pretends to be comprehensive, and the emphasis is on groundbreaking uses of notebooks rather than on their most felicitous deployment, but I was struck by the absence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Madan, Katherine Mansfield, Northrop Frye and Samuel Beckett.
Hitchings mentions that Allen does not draw on the work of Matthew Daniel Eddy, who I will investigate, but there are many sources in the notes and bibliography that bear looking up. I read The Reckoning by Jacob Soll thanks to Allen, and will soon go on to The Information Master, about Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The person I really missed was Harriet M. Welsch from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic children’s novel Harriet the Spy. Surely she did more than anyone else to get children to keep notebooks—and keept them private.
But Allen can’t include everything. What he does cover spans hundreds of years and is rich with interesting, rewarding and inspiring examples of how people have written things down.
Over the summer I read Ross King’s Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven (2010), which is an excellent book on the Group. It really brings the individuals to life: too often now they are made out to be an undifferentiated mass of seven (or ten men) who all did the same thing, but of course they were each different. I think the one I’d most like to meet is J.E.H. MacDonald, who seemed to have an awful lot of fun. “My religion is the Arts and Letters Club,” he said.
A quote from chapter 35 of The Duke’s Children (my copy is the new expanded edition) by Anthony Trollope. The Duke of Omnium is talking with a few other men after a small dinner party. Silverbridge, his son (known by a courtesy title), offers a thought about the House of Commons.
“I hear men say that it isn’t quite what it used to be,” said Silverbridge.
“Nothing will ever be quite what it used to be. There will always be changes.”
A Mastodon note last night (I still can’t bring myself to say “toot”) from @teledyn@mstdn.ca pointed out the HTTP Observatory, which “enhances web security by analyzing compliance with best security practices.” You put in a URL and it gives you a score on the site’s security, with tips on how to make it better.
I put in this site and got 65/100. With a bit of work I got to 115/100! I was pretty pleased about that. Then I discovered I had broken some small things because the settings were too restrictive. I fixed that and now I get 125/100!
Here are some notes about that, in case it’s useful to me in the future or anyone else before then. Note: I am no expert, I’m not even a web developer any more. I’m just a person running a static web site built with Jekyll who hacked on some HTTP headers.
Headers
Header information is normally used by your browser to understand what it should do with the web page content that follows. It’s rarely of interest to people unless they’re doing something technical. If you run curl --head https://www.miskatonic.org you can see only the headers for this site, which look like this:
(No cookies are set because there are no cookies. There is also no logging. I know nothing about anyone who looks at this site.)
Everything up to Content-Length is generated by the web server, which here is Apache hosted on Pair. Everything after that is set by me. Here’s a rundown. Browse Practical security implementation guides for more about all this.
X-Clacks-Overhead
Header set X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Terry Pratchett"
(This is how I set the header in the .htaccess file where I can configure things. You might set it differently in your situation.)
This remembers Terry Pratchett. See X-Clacks-Overhead. This has nothing to do with security; I just think Terry Pratchett is one of the greatest writers of the last fifty years.
Now, I don’t have any JavaScript running on my site, so it’s not going to be a problem. Well, I don’t have any of my own JavaScript, but I do sometimes embed a YouTube video, such as in this post about Molly White’s Become a Wikipedian in 30 Minutes video. To make that work I have to have that special frame-src configuration.
As I understand it, default-src being ‘self’ means that by default, while looking at this site the browser should only load resources from this site, unless otherwise specified. Having style-src as ‘unsafe-inline’ means I can set CSS inline, specifying font-size: smaller right in a web page. It should be in a CSS file, and maybe I’ll fix that one day, but I’m not going to fuss about it right now. In media-src there’s an extra data: that says it’s all right to load media (such as images) that are specified right in the HTML with a data URL. I had to add this to do away with a warning, which confused me because I never load any media this way. Maybe I’ll figure it out later.
Using Firefox’s developer tools was a huge help in figuring all this out. I’d load the site, hit Ctrl-Shift I to pop it up, go to the Console, and reload over and over as I tweaked settings. (Whether or not JavaScript was enabled changed things, so test with it off and on. Privacy settings and add-ons may also affect things.)
This isn’t as tightly locked down as it could be, but it’s much better than it was before.
X-Frame-Options
Header set X-Frame-Options DENY
X-Frame-Options helps prevent clickjacking, as does the frame-ancestors setting above. This option is obsolete, but so what.
Referrer-Policy
Header set Referrer-Policy no-referrer
With this Referrer-Policy setting, if someone follows a link from my site to another there is no header passed along telling the destination site that they came from here. This could be needed in some situations, but not here.
X-Content-Type-Options
Header set X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
X-Content-Type-Options tells the browser “not to load scripts and stylesheets unless the server indicates the correct MIME type.” It’s nosniff because it stops the browser from content sniffing.
Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy
Header set Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy same-origin
Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy “lets websites and applications opt-in to protection against vulnerabilities related to certain cross-origin requests.” Setting it to same-origin means “limits resource access to requests coming from the same origin. This is recommended for URLs that reply with sensitive user information or private APIs.” I’m not doing anything that even needs to worry about this, so I set it to the most secure option, because it will never matter.
Strict-Transport-Security is an important one: it says that the site should only ever be accessed with HTTPS. The age setting is in seconds, and it equals one year. I don’t know if it matters any more, but you can add your domain to the HSTS Preload List as well.
Wow! That looks very long and rather suspicious. The URL has a lot of domain names (such as chrt.fm) in it. What’s going on? The best tool to find out is curl. Here’s what I ran at the command line, with the output:
The --head option has curl report the HTTP header (mostly metadata) instead of downloading anything. Notice the HTTP 302 response and the location line. That tells the client (browser or podcast program or whatever) that it should look to this URL to get what it wants. But if we get that URL …
Another location header, still containing a lot of things that look like domain names in it. It’s going to take a while to get to the bottom of this.
I wrote myself a little function (for bash, the shell I use), so I can supply a URL and get the location header back.
$ function get_location() { curl --silent --head "$1" | grep location | sed 's/.* //'; }
$ get_location "https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/47G541/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748"
https://chrt.fm/track/47G541/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Nice!
Next I wanted to write a short script that would work through all these URLs until it got to the bottom. I spent five or ten minutes on this but ran into some kind of problem with checking if a string was empty or something like that. I thought, “Wait a minute. Simon Willison would use an LLM to do it for him!” So that’s what I tried, with DuckDuckGo’s Llama 3.
I told it:
Write a bash shell function that uses curl to find if a given URL has a location header, and if so, return that location URL.
It gave me:
get_location_header() {
local url="$1"
local location=$(curl -s -I -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{redirect_url}" "$url")
local code=$(echo "$location" | cut -d' ' -f1)
local redirect_url=$(echo "$location" | cut -d' ' -f2-)
if [ "$code" -eq 301 -o "$code" -eq 302 ]; then
echo "$redirect_url"
else
echo "No location header found"
fi
}
I said:
It is possible that running that function on a URL returns a URL that itself returns a location header. Use that function to write a recursive shell script that works through multiple levels of location headers until there are no more.
It gave me:
follow_redirects() {
local url="$1"
local max_redirects=10 # prevent infinite loops
while [ $max_redirects -gt 0 ]; do
local location=$(get_location_header "$url")
if [ "$location" != "No location header found" ]; then
url="$location"
max_redirects=$((max_redirects - 1))
else
echo "Final URL: $url"
return
fi
done
echo "Error: too many redirects"
}
I tried that and it worked, but not how I wanted. I said:
That works, but make it show each URL as it recurses.
follow_redirects() {
local url="$1"
local max_redirects=10 # prevent infinite loops
while [ $max_redirects -gt 0 ]; do
echo "Checking URL: $url"
local location=$(get_location_header "$url")
if [ "$location" != "No location header found" ]; then
url="$location"
max_redirects=$((max_redirects - 1))
else
echo "Final URL: $url"
return
fi
done
echo "Error: too many redirects"
}
I said:
That works nicely.
I'm glad to hear that! The `follow_redirects` function should be helpful for tracing the chain of redirects for a given URL. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask!
Here’s how to run it all in a bash shell:
$ function get_location_header() {
local url="$1"
local location=$(curl -s -I -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{redirect_url}" "$url")
local code=$(echo "$location" | cut -d' ' -f1)
local redirect_url=$(echo "$location" | cut -d' ' -f2-)
if [ "$code" -eq 301 -o "$code" -eq 302 ]; then
echo "$redirect_url"
else
echo "No location header found"
fi
}
$ follow_redirects() {
local url="$1"
local max_redirects=10 # prevent infinite loops
while [ $max_redirects -gt 0 ]; do
echo "Checking URL: $url"
local location=$(get_location_header "$url")
if [ "$location" != "No location header found" ]; then
url="$location"
max_redirects=$((max_redirects - 1))
else
echo "Final URL: $url"
return
fi
done
echo "Error: too many redirects"
}
$ follow_redirects "https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/47G541/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748"
Checking URL: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/47G541/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Checking URL: https://chrt.fm/track/47G541/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Checking URL: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Checking URL: https://mgln.ai/e/433/claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Checking URL: https://claritaspod.com/measure/traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Checking URL: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?updated=1717391748
Checking URL: https://dcs.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?key=8cd61d704fe268b21da14bc81f17f7ba&request_event_id=9706319f-431f-465d-a85d-d55053cbb184&timetoken=1720741181_4922C6F958D58D4C0673A8DE2476B183
Final URL: https://dcs.megaphone.fm/QCD6489207092.mp3?key=8cd61d704fe268b21da14bc81f17f7ba&request_event_id=9706319f-431f-465d-a85d-d55053cbb184&timetoken=1720741181_4922C6F958D58D4C0673A8DE2476B183
I knew I had to use function to make bash know these were functions, but I could have told Llama to give me something I could copy and paste right into the shell. Also, it’s using short options for curl (such as -I) where I prefer long ones (such as --head) in anything scripted, because it helps readability. I could have told it to change that as well.
It works very nicely, and what’s more, the scripts are good. Better than anything I could hack in a few minutes, and I’ve never used local in a shell script in my life, but it seems like a good practice.
Now I can feed that into my audio player and finally listen to episode 202 of Philosophize This! I see it’s thirty-seven minutes long, which is shorter than it took me to write this.
The scrollbar in Firefox disappears when the pointer isn’t moving. For example, the top right of this site looks like this.
Part of a web page; no scrollbar
If I touch the touchpad, it appears and looks like this. It’s very small.
Part of a web page; tiny scrollbar
Thanks to this note by @mgorny@treehouse.systems I learned how to make it better. Go to about:config (and agree to the danger) then set widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled to false and widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override to 24 or so. The scrollbar becomes permanent and clearly visible. I like this for a several reasons, a main one being that it’s always obvious how long a page is and where I am in it.
Part of a web page; nice big scrollbar
That’s far more technical than it should be to tweak this, but Firefox has bigger problems to fix (such as not getting bogged down in AI nonsense).
From The Fall of the Sparrow (1955) by Nigel Balchin. This scene happens in 1935 in England; the narrator is talking to people going to protest the British Union of Fascists.
Leah sat up and said, “Listen …” and then paused and closed her eyes again. There was a moment’s silence. Then she said quietly, “It’s like this. The Fascists go down there every Sunday, and a good many week days as well. They choose the places where they know there are a lot of Jewish people. They get up and they preach hatred of the Jews, and all that crazy Hitler stuff about their being responsible for everything. If a Jewish person passes he’s insulted, and if he says a word in protest he’s manhandled. Or she, if it’s a woman. Of the people listening, ninety per cent don’t agree with what’s being said. But they’re not organized and the Fascists are. People aren’t going to risk being knocked about. So they keep quiet and let the Fascists talk.”
I said, “But if they don’t agree …”
“Wait a minute. By the time this has happened week after week and the people see that no one stands up to the Fascists, they begin to think that nobody can—that it’s all hopeless. And since everybody likes to be on the winning side they begin to wonder whether the safest thing isn’t to start wearing a black shirt themselves. See?”
Jason said, “It’s a bluff, you see, Henry. Of course Fascism always is. After all, Mussolini’s march on Rome …”
“It’s a bluff,” Leah said curtly. “But it’s a bluff that’s got to be called everywhere, every time it’s tried. Every time. Everywhere.”
Miskatonic University Press
