Six seasons of the awesomest video series about Friends. There’s also a newly reenergized podcast version so subscribe to that if audio is your favorite medium!
http://quakerspeak.com/welcome-to-quakerspeak-season‑6/?fbclid=IwAR1zbq8SwVPqaPecEEQSAoJrJ7MdSW2htwMxrjq5Xi51UCGMzI9MQt7deDE
The Friend editor Joseph Jones interviews best-selling Quaker author Bridget Collins. One of my favorite part is the balance between discipline and waiting inspiration:
On a day-to-day basis my biggest struggle – if I’m finding it hard to find the words – is over whether I need to wait for inspiration to come, or whether I’m just being lazy and underprepared. Whether I’m letting fear or procrastination stop me. The Quaker method has a lot to say to that. You know, you wait in silence and if it doesn’t come then it doesn’t come. But also you have to be disciplined, and prepared, for that to work
https://thefriend.org/article/my-ministry-is-the-jokes-and-kittens
I really like Tim Carmody and Kottke.org is one of my favorite blogs. This isn’t Quaker but it feels really relevant for those of us trying to save independent publishing from being subsumed by the Facebook Borg and so maintain countercultural, non-corporate spaces like Quaker communities.
This is a prediction for 2019 and beyond: The most powerful and interesting media model will remain raising money from members who don’t just permit but insist that the product be given away for free. The value comes not just what they’re buying, but who they’re buying it from and who gets to enjoy it.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/
What’s your favorite QuakerSpeak? To celebrate the QuakerSpeak video series’ fifth anniversary, project director Jon Watts asked the Friends Journal staff to pick their favorite videos. What would be your favorite QuakerSpeak?
This week we unveiled the next slate of themes for Friends Journal, one which takes us all the way through the end of 2020 (I can’t get over how much further away this feels than the calendar says it is). This is the sixth round of themes since we introduced the format back in the beginning of 2012. We’ve kept the pattern the same – nine themed issues a year, with two non-themed issues for more eclectic material we get (
Before 2012, the mix had been flipped for years: two annual special issues, with the rest a catch-all from the incoming submission slush pile. I feel that more frequent themes have helped us steer clear of the rut of repeating the same articles on a too-frequent basis. We’re also seeing more articles consciously written for us (as opposed to be shopped around to various progressive publications). Most importantly from an editorial perspective, the process also forces us to reach out to people, directly and on social media, to encourage them to write. One of my never-ending, never- reachable goals, is to always be encouraging new voices in the magazine. This is one tool to help get there.
We’ve already started getting feedback from individuals that their favorite cause isn’t covered in this latest list. I’m okay with that. We don’t cover everything every round. Core concerns of Friends get covered on a regular basis in the non-themed issues. Some authors are also really creative in finding a hook to bring their cause into seemingly unrelated topic. Also, I think we’ve covered all of the major topics in the last seven years — sometimes multiple times — and those articles are still be read and shared and commented on.
Many of these themes come from reader suggestions. Others come from more random conversations we have. One of my favorite this time is the issue on Gambling. That was inspired one late-January 2018 morning when a new Friend called in to ask us if we had any articles on the topic. Apparently, she had been chastised at meeting that weekend for suggesting there should be a prize for whoever guessed the correct number of valentine candy hearts in a jar. She wanted to understand the Quaker testimonies. Much to my surprise there hadn’t been much in recent Friends Journal articles. I randomly asked on Facebook whether we had “essentially dropped” our testimony on gambling. The resultant Facebook thread quickly made it obvious that Friends have an issue-worthy amount of feelings on the topic.
Have fun looking over the list. If you have suggestions, let me know (I will write them down and remember). If you want to encourage people to write, please please do. Also, send me a message if you want to get on a monthly email list in which I promote an upcoming writing deadline. The next coming up in for March’s issue, Outside the Meetinghouse.
I must admit to loving old libraries and geeking out on histories. In this week’s installment of QuakerSpeak, Mary Crauderueff, curator at Haverford College’s Quaker Collection, talks about some of the favorite parts of her work:
You have things like membership records, marriage records, and marriage certificates. You have minutes of the business meetings and you have committee minutes. Other cool things that we have are deeds for meetings and meetinghouses. People will sometimes come to various Quaker archives and say, “Our meeting is in this dispute with the township. We need to find the original deed to the meetinghouse and we think that you have it. Can we look at it?”
http://Quakerspeak.com/working-in-a-historical-quaker-library/
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Philadelphia TV station interviewed Quaker Norval Reece: Bucks County Quaker, Civil Rights Activist Reflects On Time With MLK
Reece is a proud Quaker and believes it’s his Quaker roots that sent him to Dr. King’s side. “I was raised to believe all people are equal, are born equal, created equal,” he said. Reece met King in 1967 at the old Robert Morris Hotel in Philadelphia. He spent several hours with the civil rights icon. Reece says that night he, King and a few others planned a poverty march for the following spring, but King never made it.
Norval was an activist with AFSC back in his youth, served as a Pennsylvania secretary of commerce, and became a cable television entrepreneur. He’s pretty ubiquitous in Quaker circles these days, linking the activist and entrepreneurial in interesting ways. My favorite part of the video is when they casually redisplay a picture they had blurred out near the beginning (the one in the preview) and don’t bother naming the guy walking just ahead of him.
Oh dear: a few weeks ago Wess Daniels started a Twitter discussion about the new Mac app Cardhop. In the thread he asked me about other apps which apps I find essential. I thought I’d type up something in ten minutes but then the draft post kept growing. I’m sure I still missed some. I guess I didn’t realize how particular I am about my computing environment. 🙂
Okay, maybe it’s a bit OCD but I hate cluttered Mac menubars running along the top of my screen. This app was just rebuilt for High Sierra and is an essential tool. I have most everything hidden and have set up a keyboard shortcut (the little-used right “option” key) to toggle the full menubar icon set.
This is my favorite calendar app. It sits in the menubar, ready to give a beautiful agenda view with just a single tap. It can open up to a full view. Manage calendars is easy and the natural language processing is suburb.
Just released, this is Fantastical’s newest cousin, an app for managing contacts from Flexibits. It works with whatever you have set up for contacts on your Mac (I use Google but iCloud is fine too). Given Flexibit’s track record, and Cardhop’s resemblance to the discontinued Cobook, this is likely to be a winner for me.
I’ve been a Chrome user since the week it debuted but lately I’ve been trying to switch to Safari, wanting its superior battery management and syncing of bookmarks and tabs with iOS. Many of Safari’s annoyances have lessoned as Apple itinerated with each release. There are enough extensions now that I can get by. I am, though, one of those weird people whom John Gruber identified: wannabee Safari users who really like Favicons in tabs. Fortunately, Faviconographer has come along. There are occasional oddities (floating icons, icons that don’t match site) but overall it improves the Safari experience enough to make it a win over Chrome.
Uses the built-in content filtering system built into Mac Safari. Good syncing with the iOS app. “Content filtering” (aka blocking) has become an important security concern and let’s face it: the web runs so much better without all the crap that some sites throw in along with their content. You can whitelist sites that respect readers. Honorable mention in Chrome or as an alternative for Safari is uBlock Origin, a great blocker (and distinct from standard uBlock, which I don’t recommend).
Lets you remap the generally useless Caps Lock key. I have it mapped Brett-Terpstra style so that a single click opens Spotlight search and a hold and click acts as a hyper key (imagine a shift key that you can use for any keystroke).
Remap keys and key combinations. With Karabiner, I can use it to have Capslock‑C open a particular app, for instance.
I used to think VPNs were a luxury but with people hacking in on public Wi-Fi accounts and the loss of privacy, I’ve signed up for this easy-to-use VPN service. One account can power multiple devices so my laptop and phone are secured.
It’s been around for years. I currently have 13,000 notes stored in Evernote, including every issue of the magazine I work for going back to the mid-1950s. There was a time a few years ago when I was worried for Evernote, as it kept chasing quirky side projects as its main app got buggier and buggier. But they’ve had a shake-up, ditched the distractions and have built the service back up. Most of my projects are organized with Evernote.
There are a gazillion writing apps out there that combine Markdown writing syntax with minimalist interfaces (Bear, IaWriter, Byword) but Ulysses has edged its way to being my favorite, with quick syncing and ability to post directly to WordPress.
There are also a gazillion task managers. Todoist does a good job of keeping projects that need due dates in order.
You should be using a password manager. Repeat: you should be using a password manager. 1Password is rock solid. They’ve recently changed their economic model and strongly favor subscription accounts. While I’ve tried to limit just how many auto-pulling subscriptions I have, I understand the rationale and have switched.
A great email app for Mac and iOS that can display and sort your Gmail accounts (and others too). Almost too many options if you’re the kind to fiddle with that sort of thing but easy to get started and great with just the defaults.
The Big‑G should get a shoutout: it powers the databases for my email, calendar, contacts, and photos. All my hardware has migrated over to Apple, helped in large part by the opening up of its ecosystem to third-party apps.
What’s also useful to note is that all of the data-storing services are cloud based. If my phone or laptop disappeared, I could borrow a new one and be up to speed almost immediately. Since many of these apps run on databases run by Google, I can also switch apps or even have multiple apps accessing the same information for different purposes. There’s a real freedom to the app ecosystem these days.
Friends Journal