Pour kettle and let steep the gods of tea. I built NewsBlur and Turn Touch.
1307 stories
·
874 followers

Iceland embraced a shorter work week. Here’s how it turned out. “Iceland’s...

1 Comment
Iceland embraced a shorter work week. Here’s how it turned out. “Iceland’s economy is outperforming most European peers after the nationwide introduction of a shorter working week with no loss in pay, according to research released Friday.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Read the whole story
samuel
3 days ago
reply
How was it released Friday if nobody's working that day?
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Share this story
Delete

800-Year-Old Story of Guy Thrown in Well Proven True by Archaeologists

2 Shares

In a frankly unbelievable turn of events, a team of archaeologists in Norway have identified a man thrown into a well 827 years ago as the exact same individual described in an Old Norse saga.

The approximately 40-year-old individual was referenced in the Sverris Saga, an 800-year-old text that describes a military raid in 1197. The history notes that, during the raid, a dead man was thrown into a well. The research team now believes the story may actually refer to remains discovered in southern Norway nearly a century ago. Furthermore, the man seems to be from a region of Norway with high levels of inbreeding, and his body may have been tossed into the well as a form of biological warfare.

The team’s study—published today in Cell—showcases the remarkable precision of DNA testing and the utility of multidisciplinary research. In this case, the team used genomic analysis to better understand the identity of the so-called “Well-man” and radiocarbon dating to certify the approximate age of the remains, which were first discovered in 1938 in a well on the site of Sverresborg Castle.

“The man thrown into the well in Sverris Saga was completely anonymous—literally nothing was known about him from the text except that he was a man and that he was dead,” said study co-author Michael Martin, the study’s senior author and a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, in an email to Gizmodo. “The genomic data added some more details—now we can describe something about how he actually looked, and that his ancestry traces from a completely different region of Norway.”

The notion that the bones in the well belonged to the individual referenced in the Sverris Saga was first suggested when the remains were first discovered, but genetic testing didn’t exist in 1938. DNA’s structure wasn’t even determined until the 1950s. But in recent decades, advances in recovering ancient DNA (or aDNA) directly from remains have provided a bevy of insights into population genetics, paleoenvironments, and even personal life histories. In 2014, co-author Anna Petersén, an archaeologist at the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage research in Oslo, returned to the site to complete the excavation. By 2016, all of the well-man’s bones and teeth were excavated.

As noted in the 182-verse saga, the man was dead when he was tossed in the well, which was then filled with boulders. The body remained there for nearly eight centuries, until it was found in the 1938 excavation.

The one-for-one identification was made thanks to analyses of ancient DNA extracted from the dead man’s teeth. The man’s genome indicated he had blue eyes, fair skin, and blond or light-brown hair.

The team was even able to zero-in on the approximate origin of his ancestors: the modern-day county of Vest-Agder in southern Norway. Sverresborg Castle—the ruins of it, at least—is in central Norway. The unique genetics of the southern Norwegians compared to those in other parts of the country was known historically, but the genome of the Well-man showed the genetic drift already existed 800 years ago.

The radiocarbon dating of the man’s bones—specifically, ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the bones—yielded an age of 940, give or take thirty years.

“Animals who eat a marine-based diet have older carbon in their bodies, and the resulting radiocarbon dates need to be adjusted according to how much of the carbon is derived from a marine diet,” Martin said. “After we estimated that 20% of his diet came from marine sources, and then applied a corresponding correction, the radiocarbon date fit well with the expected date of the castle raid.”

Correcting for the effect gave the team a revised date range of 1153 to 1277 CE, with the Sverresborg castle raid in 1197 CE falling neatly within that range.

The team has eyes on other historic Norwegians for future studies. Saint Olaf, Martin noted in a Cell release, is supposed to be buried somewhere in Trondheim Cathedral. If the venerated Norwegian were found, it would provide a unique opportunity to trace the genetic history of a saint.

Read the whole story
samuel
10 days ago
reply
Cambridge, Massachusetts
acdha
10 days ago
reply
Washington, DC
Share this story
Delete

NewsBlur’s native macOS App offers news notifications directly on your desktop

2 Comments and 5 Shares

If you’re like me and like to have NewsBlur sitting open all day, then you’ll love the new NewsBlur macOS app. It’s a first-class app that supports all of NewsBlur’s features, from intelligence training to sharing/blurblogs.

Introducing the NewsBlur macOS app, available for free on the Mac App Store.

The macOS app also supports all of the themes, so it can turn itself into dark mode automatically.

It’s configurable and supports ay=utomatic hiding and showing of the feed list so you can focus on the stories you want to read. Use your mouse to swipe left and right on both stories and to swap which pane is visible.

In the Grid view, you can swipe right with your mouse to temporarily show the feed list, giving you a compact view of your news stories without having to give up screen real estate.

Training is supported natively, so you can hide those stories you don’t want to see while highlighting those thast you do.

It’s important to be able to train, because you can set notifications to be sent from either your Unread list or your Focus list, ensuring you only see the notifications from sites you want to see. And clicking on those native macOS notifications takes you directly to the story in the new macOS app.

If you have any ideas you’d like to see on macOS, feel free to post an idea on the NewsBlur Forum.

Coming up soon are the discover feeds feature, where you can see related feeds based purely on semantic similarity (and not based on mined usage data), as well as real-time updates to the macOS app similar to the dashboard on the web.

Read the whole story
samuel
10 days ago
reply
Shared directly from the new macOS app
Cambridge, Massachusetts
ReadLots
10 days ago
People here keep talking about newsblur. Maybe I should give a try some day.
iustinp
9 days ago
Wohoo, this is good news. One less Safari tab that needs to be kept open!
iustinp
9 days ago
Bug report: in dark mode, the "expand/collapse" folder buttons are very white and obnoxious. In the browser, no such arrows. I can't paste here a screenshot, just test it.
samuel
9 days ago
You can post screenshots as feedback on the forum: https://forum.newsblur.com/t/newsblur-s-native-macos-app-offers-news-notifications-directly-on-your-desktop/10987
Belfong
5 days ago
This is a surprise! Native Mac app! Awesome announcement!
fxer
8 days ago
reply
Bend, Oregon
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
deebee
8 days ago
reply
Best software anywhere
America City, America
alexanglin
8 days ago
Love NewsBlur, but I don't agree. It's missing so much of the expected interface on MacOs that is different from the web that the experience is undifferentiated.

New comment by conesus in "Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users"

1 Comment and 3 Shares

I run NewsBlur[0] and I’ve been battling this issue of NewsBlur fetching 403s across the web for months now. My users are revolting and asking for refunds. I’ve tried emailing dozens of site owners and publishers and only two of them have done the work of whitelisting their RSS feed. It’s maddening and is having a real negative effect on NewsBlur.

NewsBlur is an open-source RSS news reader (full source available at [1]), something we should all agree is necessary to support the open web! But Cloudflare blocking all of my feed fetchers is bizarre behavior. And we’re on the verified bots list for years, but it hasn’t made a difference.

Let me know what I can do. NewsBlur publishes a list of IPs that it uses for feed fetching that I've shared with Cloudflare but it hasn't made a difference.

I'm hoping Cloudflare uses the IP address list that I publish and adds them to their allowlist so NewsBlur can keep fetching (and archiving) millions of feeds.

[0]: https://newsblur.com

[1]: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Read the whole story
samuel
17 days ago
reply
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
philipstorry
16 days ago
reply
Oh great, another threat to RSS, just what we needed...
London, United Kingdom

jefftriplett/django-startproject

1 Comment

jefftriplett/django-startproject

Django's django-admin startproject and startapp commands include a --template option which can be used to specify an alternative template for generating the initial code.

Jeff Triplett actively maintains his own template for new projects, which includes the pattern that I personally prefer of keeping settings and URLs in a config/ folder. It also configures the development environment to run using Docker Compose.

The latest update adds support for Python 3.13, Django 5.1 and uv. It's neat how you can get started without even installing Django using uv run like this:

uv run --with=django django-admin startproject \
  --extension=ini,py,toml,yaml,yml \
  --template=https://github.com/jefftriplett/django-startproject/archive/main.zip \
  example_project

Via @webology

Tags: uv, jeff-triplett, django, python, docker

Read the whole story
samuel
22 days ago
reply
I really like the defaults he setup here. Also firs time hearing of a `justfile`, which is basically a Makefile with arguments.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Share this story
Delete

easiest cinnamon rolls

1 Comment

What if I told you I had a from-scratch cinnamon roll recipe that was effortlessly veganized, required no kneading, and could be coming out of your oven in just over two hours? And what if I told you’d I’d been making it for years and didn’t tell you about it because I thought, for some bizarre reason, that the site didn’t need another breakfast bun recipe? Yes, I’d throw a jar of cinnamon at my head too. Good news, though, you can stop yelling now because I’ve come to my senses.

magical cinnamon buns-01
magical cinnamon buns-02
magical cinnamon buns-04

Read more »

Read the whole story
samuel
37 days ago
reply
Got my weekend plans
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories