For years, my wife and I would drive by the abandoned 11th Street South Shore line train station in Michigan City, Indiana, and dream. It was a big, beautiful old building, made up of crumbling white tiles. It was the kind of building that we used to build in America all the time when we still appreciated things like classical architecture and design.
The station has been out of use for decades, it was falling down, and it needed rescuing. Located in a part of Michigan City desperate for regeneration, the station was one of those beautiful old buildings, long empty, that was abandoned in plain sight. Ignored by the people who owned it, and ignored by the people who lived around it.
I always thought the old station would make a perfect secondhand bookstore. It was big enough that it would be a massive store; you could have shelves and shelves of thousands of books. You could call it South Shore Used Books or something to that effect. It would attract people to the area, like Lowry’s Books attracts people to Three Rivers. You could ride the train right to it from Chicago!
Time and tide wait for no one. When NICTD announced its plans to redevelop the areas around the South Shore Line Station on 11th Street, the plans included tearing down most of the buildings around the station and building a new development. But in honor of the beautiful building that once stood there, the facade of the station would be saved and integrated into the new development.
I was sad to see the station building go, but I was pleased that they wanted to at least save the facade and protect a little bit of heritage. During construction, they painstakingly took the facade down and put it into storage.
Fast forward a few years, and construction has continued on the giant building. The new parking garage for the station is complete, and crucially, the new train station is complete. Well, more of a waiting room. The station is still outside, but they’ve taken the facade and made it the new entrance to a massive new waiting room for passengers to stay warm (or cool in the summer). You’re able to park your car and walk right to the station platforms through the new waiting room.
The waiting room is airy, clean, and has bathrooms. There’s also a ticket machine to buy tickets for the South Shore Line (there’s no ticket office; none of the stations along the line have those anymore since most people buy their tickets electronically these days). There’s some beautiful new art they commissioned that shows off the history of the South Shore Line (and there’s a timeline showing the history of the rail line). It’s all really well done.
Generally, I’m against ‘facadism’ – taking the front of an old building and then building something completely new behind it. But in this case, when it was either use the facade or throw it out, I’m fine with it. My only real complaint about the whole thing is that because of the placement of the actual train station, you can’t get a good view of the facade or photograph it properly without the new station being in the way.
A minor gripe.
But I’m so very glad they saved this little bit of heritage. So much is going to be changing in Michigan City in the coming years; a lot of blight is going to be swept away, so I hope this stands as an example of a sensitive reuse, respecting what came before while still doing something new and innovative. It will be so easy to just sweep everything away and build anew. It takes effort to preserve something, anything.
I’m glad this got preserved, even if I can now never open that bookstore inside.
On a recent visit to Kalamazoo, Michigan, I was sad to learn that an icon of Southwest Michigan letters had closed. Whenever I was up that way, I was always sure to stop in at the Michigan News Agency; it was a lovely place to pick up newspapers and stock up on magazines (it was also a nice bookstore as well).
If I were in Kalamazoo, I would always do two things: pick up some donuts at Sweetwater’s Donut Mill and visit Michigan News Agency.
So, when I knew I was going to be in Kalamazoo on other business, I planned to stop in and pick up some new magazines (I have been making an effort lately to read more magazines, and my phone less). When my son and I showed up, there was a handwritten sign that said closed, and “thanks for everything, Kalamazoo.”
I peered inside and saw that all the magazine shelves were empty, but the books were still there. A single light provided sad illumination.
When we sat down for lunch, I opened up my phone to find out what happened and was sad to learn that the owner, Dean Margaret Hauck, had died, and her business died with her, as her children weren’t interested in running a newsstand. Dean Hauck died in February 2025 at age 86, which is a ripe old age, and it was surprising to realize she ran the place practically until she died. In pictures, I recognized her; she was always the one to check me out when I bought magazines. I didn’t realize all this time that she was the owner.
Her children have plans for the storefront, but they don’t appear to involve running a newsstand.
Which is a real shame. There are very few real newsstands anymore in the Midwest. In fact, Michigan News Agency was one of the last. According to my cursory research, the last ones left are the Chicago Main Newsstands in Chicago and Evanston (which I have been to and love as well). There was a time when every town and city had a news agency. Even LaPorte, Indiana, had a news agency where you could buy newspapers from all over the world (but it closed shortly after we moved here).
It’s blindingly obvious that we currently live in troubling times, and one of the fundamental, wonderful things about America is its vibrant print media tradition. Many people don’t read print magazines today, preferring their phones over everything else, but they’re still being printed and not just about politics. There is quite literally a magazine for every interest – whether it’s tattoos, model trains, airplanes, geography, or even British country life. Newsstands are a treasure trove to discover these wonderful niche publications that are still going at it, despite all the forces against them.
I’ve recently started reading print magazines again. Like most people, I’m obsessed with my phone, but I’ve found that it’s broken my brain in ways that I’m only starting to understand. It’s destroyed my attention span when I used to love reading long-form writing in the media. So, for the last few months, I’ve been going to bookstores and newsstands and buying up stacks of magazines, and reading those instead of reading my phone. It’s really done well to repair my brain a bit, and it’s lovely to have the tactile feel of a magazine with the printed word on the page.
So, I was very excited to go up to Kalamazoo to stop by and get another stack of magazines.
Oh well.
Chicago Main Newsstand is just as close as Kalamazoo for me, so I guess I’ll just go there more now. There are also a few regular bookstores around that have decent magazine selections – like Reader’s World in Holland, Michigan. Even my local Barnes & Noble has a passable collection. But the nice thing about Newsstands, is they keep old magazines on the shelf until they sell out, so it was a good way to get, say, a stack of a month’s worth of Economist magazines at a time.
I feel sorry for Dean Hauck; her life was dedicated to her newsstand, and it’s now closed for good. Like I said recently on another matter on Ephemera, once we lose these things, we won’t get them back. People aren’t opening new newsstands these days. I can’t imagine why anyone would bother, which I suppose explains the thought process of Hauck’s heirs.
Goodbye, Michigan News Agency. Goodbye, Dean Hauck. You both will be missed dearly.
Recently, I was a volunteer parking attendant for the annual Dunebrook Dragon Boat Races, which took place on Stone Lake in LaPorte, Indiana. My task was done once most people had actually arrived for the event. While directing traffic into a baseball field, I realized that I was actually on a paved trail, and, wondering where it went, I looked it up on my trails app.
It appeared that I could actually follow the trail all the way around the lake. As my wife still had a few more hours to volunteer, I took this as an opportunity to go on a nice, long walk around Stone Lake. For those who don’t know me, I’ve been trying to improve my health by walking every day (and I’m training for a much longer walk – walking Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, an 84-mile walk that takes a week).
My own ignorance was guiding me here. For some reason, I thought the paved path went all the way around the lake, and I thought it was only two miles.
I was wrong on both counts.
So, I set off on the walk, following the nicely paved path along the southern end of the lake.
Stone Lake is not one of LaPorte’s largest lakes, nor is it one of the most popular (that would be Pine Lake). But it’s this lack of popularity that makes it a bit more sedate. There are well-developed beaches here, with bathrooms and facilities in the summer to serve beachgoers. You can even rent a kayak. I’ve never swum in the lake; there have been far too many contamination warnings for that (I won’t even swim in Lake Michigan).
It’s not even particularly clear whether Stone Lake is a very natural lake, Indiana classifies it as a reservoir because it is linked by a small channel to Pine Lake. Either way, it’s about 140 acres in size and only a few feet deep. Most of the shoreline, which was wise of the city planners, is parkland, though there are a few streets with houses that line the lake. But again, it’s far less than on Pine Lake. There are a few boats, but not many like in the volume on Pine Lake.
I passed the beach facilities and headed on the newly paved path that passes along the Lakeshore. I followed it for about a mile and enjoyed looking at all the beach cottages, a few of which look like they have recently been renovated (and a few that were clearly renovated with Chicago money because they follow a similar style – usually painted white with black trim and shutters).
Screenshot
And then after about a mile, I found myself at the end of the paved path, which unceremoniously ended at a dock. This was where I learned the paved path didn’t go all the way around the lake. But my trail app said there were trails to follow. So, I followed along the road, which would lead back to trails through the woods that would follow the lake shore.
I considered packing it in and walking back the way I’d come. If I did, it would be at least a two-mile total walk for the day, but I thought, well, I’m a mile in, and it’s only another mile around the lake, you’re halfway, keep going. Then at the end of the day, you can say you walked around the lake (I was wrong in my distance calculation here).
I walked to the boat landing area where fishermen put their boats in the water. I found the trailhead and followed it as best I could. This was not an enjoyable part of the walk. I generally like walking through the woods, but this was clearly a well-developed mountain biking track, and I kept worrying that I would be in the way of an angry biker trying to enjoy the paths.
This is where I would start to criticize the haphazard nature of the paths around Stone Lake. I don’t have a problem with the mountain biking tracks. And I was lucky that I didn’t encounter any that day, but there should be at least one dedicated foot traffic-only path around Stone Lake.
One reason is that I don’t want to get run over by someone moving too fast on a bike, and the other reason is that the paths were designed for biking; they do not go straight through the woods, they zigzag and go up and down in a way that makes walking unpleasant. I just wanted to walk around the lake. But I found myself zigzagging back on myself several times, while also watching out for bikers. I just kept dutifully following the trail app, which thankfully didn’t guide me too far away from the shoreline. For large parts of this section of the walk, you can’t even see the lake. It’s right there, but none of the trails allow you to see it.
Finally, I got to a section I’d walked on before and realized that I needed to get out of these biking trails before I got hurt. So, I cut through the trails and found myself in the middle of a neighborhood. The map indicated that further down the street, a proper hiking trail would start up again.
So, I followed the street, again, no sight of the lake at all, and found the trailhead. There were a few kids riding, I think, hoverboards through the woods, and we would end up crossing paths several times (or rather, I would be in their way as they were trying to hoverboard their way through the woods). Even though this was meant to be a hiking trail, it zigzagged very much like the biking trails I’d just left, and these teens were using the trail as such. It was… annoying.
Other than this group of teens, I mostly had the whole walk to myself, only occasionally encountering another person or a dogwalker. It was quiet in the quiet bits, and it was lovely to walk through and only hear nature as my companion on the walk. I just wish I hadn’t been in constant fear of being run over by a bike.
Eventually, I found myself back on the main trail next to the lakeshore. Clearly for walkers now. I crossed the neat metal bridge of the channel linking Stone Lake to Pine Lake and found myself in a parking lot next to Pine Lake. Then, I found the paved trailhead and walked the rest of the way to where I started.
In total, by the time I was back at my car, I had walked three complete miles, much more than I’d intended to walk that day.
I’d managed to walk around the lake, and I was rather proud of myself. But if I had to ‘review’ my walk, I would say that it was only moderately successful. LaPorte has spent a lot of money in recent years upgrading its parks and trail systems. But if they really need to take the initiative and either pave the trail all the way around the lake, or develop a hiking trail that’s separate from the biking trails (or develop a clear separation of the two). Then you have one singular experience that someone can tackle in a morning or afternoon.
Frankly, I’m not sure if I’ll do the walk again. I like the distance of it, but I was very well aware that I was walking in places or shared spaces that were not ideal for walking. I wish to encourage the LaPorte Parks Department to develop a walking trail around the whole lake. It’s also, and I should admit this, completely likely that I followed the completely wrong trail. Very possible since I’d never done the walk before.
It is nice that you can even walk around the whole lake, for the most part. The shoreline for Pine Lake is practically 95% controlled by private landowners, so there is absolutely no way to walk around LaPorte’s biggest lake (which, at one point, was two lakes made into one lake). I think I will try walking around Clear Lake next; it’s a similar size to Stone Lake, and it has public trails all the way around it.
After my walk, I waited in my air-conditioned car for my wife to finish her volunteering work, and I fell asleep. So, I guess the walk tired me out!
Michigan City, Indiana, has several notable landmarks along its Lakeshore, and most of them are industrial or institutional. There’s the cooling tower that everyone thinks is a nuclear power plant (it is not). There’s the NIPSCO generating station. There’s the State Prison, with a history going back to the Civil War. There was a lot more industrial heritage in Michigan City, but most of it has been swept away (for example, Pullman rail cars used to be made here). We’re about to lose something else, and I’m afraid that no one seems to be cut up about it, and that bothers me. I’m talking about the Coal Tower over the railroad tracks along Route 12.
It is not exactly what many would call beautiful. It’s a hulking mass of concrete sitting over some railroad tracks. It has been out of use longer than it was ever used. But it has been part of our built landscape since it was constructed about 100 years ago. It was purpose-built – and state-of-the-art technology – to drop coal into steam engines quickly and efficiently. But by the 1950s and 60s, steam was a thing of the past, and it wasn’t needed anymore. But because it was built of reinforced concrete, it wasn’t going anywhere, so it was easier to just leave it than do anything about it.
So, the structure has rotted in a way that concrete crumbles, bit by bit, but never in any real danger of falling. But in the time it became redundant, until today, it has become a landmark, and not just for locals. It’s no secret that this area is enjoyed by people who aren’t from here, especially those from Illinois who come to Indiana and Michigan to spend their summers along our lakeshore (this is primarily because Illinois doesn’t have the good beaches, while we do). The coal tower was a way marker. Since everyone had to pass by it, everyone knew where it was. If you were going up to, say, St Joseph or Holland, Michigan, from Chicago, then the tower would be your halfway point. If you were staying in Beachwalk in Michigan City, you could tell people to turn before the coal tower.
This hulking mass is now a part of the built landscape of this area. It’s been made beautiful by many artists who have painted it or photographed it in the right light. It’s been romanticized in a way that can only happen when something has just been around and is not going anywhere. We don’t really build things to last in this country, but this coal tower has survived a century, even while being completely useless for half a century.
And now, it’s being torn down.
It’s a simple math equation. The nature of the concrete structure meant the authorities that own the tracks (Amtrak), could ignore it. But the condition of the structure is getting worse, and with several passenger trains a day passing underneath it, Amtrak has a choice. They can either start maintaining the structure to arrest any further decay – a structure they don’t use or need at all, or they can tear it down and never have to worry about it again. They’ve chosen the latter. I don’t expect the people who run Amtrak in Washington, DC, to understand what a landmark the structure is. But I wish they did.
It’s coming down. Soon. This week, I saw the demolition crews surveying the scene to plan how they were going to take it down (and I’m very curious as to how they intend to do it – will they just blow it up?). It’s a major operation to remove the coal tower. They will have to close a critical cross-country rail line for five days to bring down the tower and clean up the mess it’ll cause. I suspect they’ll be working around the clock to make it happen. And then, in a few weeks, there will be no sign at all that it was ever there.
In the United Kingdom, a country I admire greatly, partly because they go to great lengths to protect heritage and the built landscape, if something was torn down and was considered a historically significant building, they would require whoever tore it down to rebuild it brick by brick. We don’t have laws like that here. Once something is gone, it is gone forever.
No one is ever going to build a coal drop tower over the railroad tracks again. There will be a lot of change coming to the Michigan City lakeshore in the coming years. The NIPSCO plant will be shutting down and demolished. The State Prison should be shutting down (though recent policy changes indicate that might not happen), and new buildings are being constructed with funding from Chicago developers. I hope that in the process of this new renaissance in Michigan City, we don’t completely sweep away the heritage and landscape that made this place unique.
Did you know that Lighthouse Place Mall used to have a restored building from the Pullman Factory? It was a gorgeous and smart reuse of an old building that respected the heritage of the place while coming into new use. Then one day, practically in the cover of night, the owners of the mall deemed it unprofitable and tore it down before anyone could object. There’s only a field of grass now where that beautiful old factory building stood. It’s been a field of grass for twenty years now. Once these things are gone, we never get them back.
When 37Signals launched Hey.com a few years ago, I was intrigued. I liked many of the ideas that underpinned it, but I also tend to like the way the owners of 37 Signals – Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) – think about and solve problems (I’m an avid Basecamp user). I was not put off by the cost.
The only thing that stopped me from trying it outright was that you were declaring ‘Day Zero’ for your email, and they didn’t support your own domain name. I really didn’t want a hey.com email address. They solved that latter problem within a year (but you still start over when you move to their email).
My situation changed for my personal email, so I decided to give it a try. A few years ago, I started forwarding my longtime Gmail address to a new email on my own email domain that I’d started using (it was easier to give out than my full name, which is hard for some people to spell right, @gmail.com). I used Google Apps for this email’s new address. But I wasn’t happy with it – I quite like Google Apps/Workspace for my work email, but I found it too much for personal email.
It seemed like the perfect time to try Hey.com. I could keep my longtime Gmail address, which forwards all my email anyway, and try it on my new domain.
I signed up and tested it out. It took a few days to get used to the way Hey.com worked, but from the start, I liked it. I’m coming up on six months of using it, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on it – and whether or not I plan to keep it or start using it for my business.
Things I Like:
I like sorting my email into buckets with the irritatingly named ‘Imbox’ – it took a few days of training to get it right. But six months on, it pretty much sorts my email for me without having to think about it.
I love the thumbs-down feature for never hearing from someone/something again. This, to me, is the killer feature of Hey.com, and I can’t figure out why Gmail hasn’t stolen it yet. Gmail has a block function, but it only works sometimes. Hey.com’s block function works all the time. You never hear from them in your “Imbox” again (but there is a folder where you can find all these emails you blocked, just in case something was mis-sorted).
I like the automated bin for receipts and confirmations. I didn’t realize how many of these stupid things were crowding up my inbox. Happy they just get put somewhere for storage, and I don’t have to mark them as read or anything.
The calendar is nice, and I’m happy it’s included in the price, but I don’t use it. My life isn’t busy enough that I need hardcore calendaring. iCal suffices for the few things I need to be scheduled and reminded of.
Things I didn’t like:
I already mentioned having to start from scratch. Six months on, I’d love to be able to search my 20-year email archive in Hey, but I can’t. So when I do need to find something, I still have to go into Gmail and look for it (they recommend backing up to your computer, but nothing really beats Gmail search when you need something fast). I’d never give up the Gmail address anyway, as it’s connected to so many registrations and accounts (I’ve had this Gmail account since you needed to be invited).
The Feed. In principle, I like the concept of the feed. But what I learned after a few weeks is that it just made it really easy to ignore all the newsletters I was subscribed to, even the ones I cared about. Putting them all in one place showed me that I was subscribed to too many, and it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t keep up with them. The Feed has become another ‘to-do’ list of things to go through. But since it’s in its own tab, I don’t go through it at all. There’s pretty much six months of newsletters I haven’t read or looked at. Which I guess means I didn’t want them in my life anyway. Not sure what ‘solution’ I’m looking for here. But maybe I should go through the feed and rethink my favorite newsletters so I at least see those (or move them to RSS).
I also learned that for personal email, I don’t actually send many emails. 99.99% if my Hey usage is just receiving email. I barely send any.
Set Aside is another useful feature on paper, but in practice, since I don’t live in Hey.com, I forget about the things placed there anyway.
Verdict
I like Hey. It’s well thought out, easy to use, and I like the price. Really, it’s just helped me ignore a lot of unimportant email, which I suppose makes it worth the price in time saved. I’ll probably keep using it for the foreseeable future.
I really wanted it to work out enough to entice me to use it for my business email, but I don’t think I will. I’ve used Google Apps on my own domain for Anglotopia for almost 20 years. My email archive is a very valuable business asset on its own, and it’s important to my daily operations as I’m constantly searching through it for things. Having to start over with Hey just does not appeal. The search in Google Apps/Gmail is amazing (so is Hey’s).
Google’s lackluster attempts at email sorting are good enough (I use the Primary, Promotions, and Social Tabs). I just wish it had a screener like Hey. I get a lot of email from people I never want to hear from again, and the block function just doesn’t work properly. I also use the entire suite – I use Google Meet for calls and Docs for files, etc. I get good value out of the $7 a month I pay for it. The thought of starting over and moving to something new just doesn’t appeal to me right now. But that might change if I feel like my email is overloaded. But it’s really not.
Have you used Hey.com? What do you think about it?
For the last couple of years, my household has been an Amazon Firestick and FireTV household. It made sense, the sticks were cheap, they had access to all the streaming services and I could use them with Plex, which is now our preferred way to consume most entertainment (we have our own NAS Plex server, have ripped all our movies, TV shows, and music onto it).
The problem, though, is that the Firesticks have gotten worse and worse. Between a new user interface and buggy software updates, they constantly crash, they’re SLOW, and the biggest problem we had is that Plex would just not work a lot of the time. We even had instances where we’d turn off our FireTV and it would be off – but the audio would still be playing!
I use Plex for several hours a day and I was getting increasingly frustrated. Watching Plex on our Samsung SmartTV was so much better, so I knew it wasn’t Plex itself.
I kept thinking it would get better with more software updates between Plex and Firestick. Firesticks just continue to get worse. The software is just way too buggy and slow. And honestly, I think it’s because Firesticks are just bare minimum ‘computers’ – the chips are underpowered, there’s not enough memory and they simply cannot handle modern streaming.
There had to be another way, right?
I didn’t want to go back to Roku – mostly because their sticks and boxes have the same problem. They’re cheap, which means they’re crap. I also don’t like Roku’s habit of advertising to you.
Other than building a dedicated streaming box from scratch and hooking it up to my TV, what were my options?
It looks like the two options are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield. Both cost about the same. I researched both.
Since I’m firmly in the Apple ecosystem for computers, phones, and tablets, I figured, the Apple TV was the best option. When I looked at the specs, I got excited. The current iteration of the Apple TV uses iPad chips. When I use Plex or any streaming service on an iPad, the experience is great. So, maybe it’ll be great on the TV?
I took a leap and bought one. Quite a leap as they’re expensive, almost $200 when you add in taxes. A Firestick is $50 (sometimes less) but you get what you pay for!
I plugged it in and set it up. And within hours, it was like that moment when you put on glasses for the first time after getting a prescription – I suddenly realized what I was missing out on – frustration-free streaming TV!
The Apple TV is FAST. So incredibly snappy. Switching between apps is like the blink of an eye.
Was Plex any better?
Hell yes, it was. The interface is better, it’s so fast and snappy. In the almost three weeks of usage, it hasn’t crashed once. It’s never slow, and it’s not buggy at all. It does what it’s supposed to do and it does it well.
The Apple TV remote takes some getting used to – it’s very sensitive so you end up selecting many things by mistake. I also love the screensaver feature, which adds some color and character to the room when you don’t want to watch TV. I haven’t used the Firestick in weeks and I don’t think I ever will again.
The Apple TV is expensive, but the benefit is that it’s basically a small, powerful computer. The software is great, and crucially, Plex finally works that way I’ve always wanted it to work.
As time goes on, I will be replacing all our Amazon Fire-based TV devices. I’m so done with buggy, underpowered products that just don’t get any better.
So, if you want to use Plex on your TV and want the best experience, do it on Apple TV. Spend the extra money, it’s very worth it.
Update: After I wrote this, I also added another Apple TV to our bedroom TV and, while I bought the ‘slower’ HD version, it’s a substantial improvement over the FireTV. If you’re considering the Apple TV – I recommend getting the 4K version as it has a faster chip and is noticeably snappier than the HD version.
Strange is the word I would use to describe it. My wife and I canceled a special trip three times during the plague year. So when we got confirmation of our COVID vaccine dates, the first thing we did was rebook this ‘lost’ trip.
America is in a bit of a strange place right now – vaccination numbers are high, ‘normal’ life is resuming. But COVID is still an ever-present threat and dictates everything you experience while you travel through the air in the United States.
I’ve always liked flying, it used to excite me. It did not this time. I just wanted to get it over with so I could get to where I wanted to go. The problem is that we were flying across the country – so it was going to be a long flight.
So, as I’m writing this, despite the CDC saying you no longer need to wear a mask when you’re inside or outside if you’ve had the vaccine, you still have to wear it on an airplane and going through an airport.
The flight from ORD to LAX is at a minimum of four hours. You’re supposed to arrive two hours early and add time at the end for your arrival and you’re looking at at least 8 hours wearing a mask with few breaks.
I was not looking forward to this.
So first, our airfare was extortionate. Airlines are operating as full flights as possible. We’d booked the trip with a flight credit, but because we decided to go over Memorial Day weekend, it was $800 additional to get the seats. We figured we deserved it after everything we went through in the last 14 months.
We were very leary of our flight leaving as we’d watched the news and it kept saying how it was going to be so busy and whatnot. We expected long waits at security. Honestly, it was not long at all – we practically sailed through security.
But once through, we were with more people than we’d been with in the same place in the last 14 months. It was terrifying and my anxiety levels were quite high. We had to tell ourselves that we had the vaccine, this was low risk. Everything is fine.
EVERYTHING IS FINE.
It doesn’t help that the United terminal at ORD is rather cramped so people were very close, even when people attempted to respect the social distancing rules.
We had an extra set of hands as a friend arranged for us to be guided through the terminal with a greeter from Air General Travel Services. He helped us through security, helped with our bags, and kept us company, making sure we got on the plane and departed. It was comforting and helped! If you’re unsure about returning to flying or need an extra hand getting through the airport – I highly recommend getting in touch with them! Check out their website here.
Everything went smoothly, our flight was on time. People boarded the plane in an orderly fashion. I applaud for United staff for handling it so well and keeping people in line. They did well! Throughout the airport and on board, there were ample warnings about how you were legally required to wear a mask and that there were very real penalties if you refused to comply. For the most part, everyone listened to directions (a few people didn’t listen when the flight attendants told people to remain seated until their rows were called to deplane).
The plane was a 737-900 and the flight was full. I’ve become rather claustrophobic as I age and I will admit that when you combine wearing a mask, it felt like the walls were closing in. We left on time, flight time was about 4 hours.
So, the mask.
This was by far the worst part.
The elastic on masks always make my ears hurt after a while. It was never really much of a problem because I never had to wear them for extended periods. But on the flight, my ears were screaming after an hour. There were, however, short breaks. You get a break when you eat or drink. I also took it off in the bathroom and gave myself a chance to breathe.
I don’t mind doing my part, but it’s irritating that we have to keep the mask mandate on air travel when we don’t anywhere else. I watched a movie on my laptop and that helped keep my mind off the confined space and the mask. Before I knew it, we landed in LA and once we got into our rental car, the mask went off and it was heaven to breathe fresh California Pacific air.
Coming home was a bit stranger. When we’d left the airport in Chicago was heaving with people. We were flying home on a holiday, so we expected LAX to be the same.
It was a ghost town!
The terminal was practically empty with only a couple of flights. Most of the restaurants and stores were closed, which was irritating as we had only one option for lunch and it wasn’t very good. We wish we’d stopped somewhere before we got to the airport.
Waiting for the flight was leisurely. People respected distance. Mask wearing was 100% except when people were eating. United staff once again handled things perfectly and before we knew it, we were on the plane and heading home.
I learned a trick the second time around. I put the elastic loops of my mask around the headphone cups on my noise-canceling headphones, this took the strain off my ears and made the flight home much more pleasant. I watched another movie to keep my mind off things. Despite a bit of turbulence, we arrived in Chicago early. The United terminal was again empty and we were in our car quickly. We were in bed by midnight.
So, all in all, everything was a bit weird but everything went smoothly. It was definitely worth the trouble for a quick weekend away. It was an odd experience sleeping somewhere not my bed for the first time in so long.
I have another trip later this year that we’ve rescheduled several times. This one is transatlantic though. After struggling with the mask-wearing for so long on a flight half as long, I’m not sure if I want to do a transatlantic flight until the mask mandate has been lifted. Problem is, no one knows when that will be. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to go on the trip anyway. So much is still in flux. I’ve been waiting three years to take this trip, so I might have to be a big boy and deal with it. We shall see.
That being said, we had a wonderful time finally going on a long-deferred trip and any mild inconvenience was very much worth it.
The Internet Archive Way Machine can be an incredible resource. But it can also be bad for your publication. For several reasons. One being that they’re literally copying your content without your permission. That’s reason enough to not want to be included. But the novelty of being in the Internet Archive meant that I honestly didn’t really care. It was fun to see old versions of my website that I remember from the ‘good ‘ol days.’
When your site has been around for 14 years, it’s changed a lot!
However, recently I had my websites removed from the Internet Archive. The main reason? It’s evidence. Evidence that can be used against you. There are bots patrolling the internet looking for usage of content – whether it’s images, videos, or audio. And even if you’ve legitimately licensed something, that doesn’t stop these bots and the lawyers they employ to patrol ownership of content.
Even if you delete something, a record of it exists in the Internet Archive forever. After being at the receiving end of several legal threats related to content we’d removed years ago, I decided that the novelty of being in the Internet Archive had worn off.
So, I looked into how to get it removed.
It turns out, the process is rather straightforward. You don’t need to file a DMCA notice or anything (but you can if you want to go nuclear). Blocking their bots doesn’t help. It will just stop them from crawling further if they even follow what a robots.txt file says.
All you need to do is ask.
Simply write an email from the domain you use for the website to info@archive.org and ask them nicely to remove your website. This opens a ticket in their system, and they will respond to you, usually within a day, with instructions on how to do so. You will have to provide several bits of evidence that you’re the actual website owner.
I had to put pages on the websites, that only they could see indicating I had ownership rights. I had to provide a photo ID and also proof from my domain registrar and hosting service that I, indeed, owned my websites. It took five minutes to gather the info. Within a day, they’d responded and removed my websites from the archive. When I checked, sure enough, they were gone.
So, hats off to the Internet Archive for making the process smooth and relatively painless.
Link shorteners were very in vogue in the early 2010s but they seem to have fallen out of favor somewhat since most social networks now automatically shorten links (and don’t count links against your character count) and popular networks like Instagram don’t really even allow links at all. Bitly was the elephant in the room for link shortening and they do offer a white-label service. But it’s expensive. A link shortener is a ‘nice to have’ for a business but frankly, it’s not worth paying $29 a month.
As always, I was keen to find my own solution, to fit my own specific needs, and pay as little as possible for it.
At the most fundamental level, a link shortener takes a long link, and shortens it and redirects it to the long link when it’s clicked. It’s basically a fancy .htaccess redirect script.
Jealous of my boss’s very, very short link shortener (mj.ie). I set out to have my own for my business brand, Anglotopia.
I tried lots and lots of combinations. I wanted the shortest version possible that had at least the word ‘anglo’ in it. The problem was that since it’s a common word, there wasn’t a lot of TLD’s still available using anglo. Eventually, I settled on Anglo.top. It seemed ideal as it had most of my company name in it and it was still relatively short. I registered it and then set up a link shortener. I was informed shortly after that .TOP is actually not a very good domain to use for something like this – because it’s has a heavy association with SPAMMERS – so if you use the links in email or social media, it is more likely to get blocked or filtered out.
So, back to the drawing board.
After some digging, I found that anglo.im was available directly from the Isle of Man Domain Registry (but strangely not through my register of choice these days – Blacknight). It was a bit pricey – £40 a year – but that was still cheap enough to be useful for this project. I could also use it for other things. Short domains are great! And versatile – I may even use it for email one day. I was able to secure ‘anglo.im.’
So, how do you go about setting up a link shortener?
First, you need a server. Any Linux server will do. I happen to have my own dedicated server with Blacknight, so I can put whatever I want on it. I used Softaculous to install YOURLS in seconds, which is an open-source PHP URL shortener. While the tool is pretty basic, with a very dated interface, it works really, really well. It makes the links and tracks the links so you can get stats on how many times something was clicked.
You can set up bookmarklets and Google Chrome extensions to make short links without even having to log in to the service because it has a handy little API.
I’m a fan of automation. With a full-time job and a side-business that takes a lot of spare time, I really didn’t want to have another thing to do – that being creating short links every time I publish or share something. Thankfully, YOURLS integrates easily with WordPress. If you install the BetterYOURLS plugin, you can then automatically create a short link when you publish a post (and customize it if you wish).
When I publish an article on Anglotopia or Londontopia, it’s automatically shared to Twitter and Facebook, so I wanted the links that were shared there to also be the short link. This proved a bit trickier. But I found a workaround.
How to use YOURLS with Jetpack URL Shortener
Download and install Jetpack
Enable the Jetpack URL shortener under the sharing settings.
Install BetterYOURLS, activate and setup with your API key
Then, this is the key part, now go to Jetpack and then deactivate the Jetpack URL shortener
Then, when you publish an article it’ll use your own custom short URL on Twitter and Facebook. If you don’t do this, it won’t work. It took me a few hours to work this out…
Initially, I ran into issues that when these posts were published to Facebook or Twitter, it was not pulling the right Open Graph image, or none at all and when you tried to ‘refresh share attachment’ on Facebook, it still wouldn’t work. I never found a solution to this problem, but a while ago the problem seemed to fix itself.
So, for minimal investment – just £40 (about $50), I was able to set up my own branded URL shortener for all my links that I publish and when people share links from Anglotopia, it uses the short links as well. There’s really no reason to do this, other than to have another way to be branded on the internet. But as we know, links are the currency of the internet and if they’re something you can control, you absolutely should.
I also recently registered jwt.im, which are my initials, to have the shortest possible URL for when I share links personally or on this personal blog. It’s not 4 letters, but five is close enough! I also found this really short domain useful for setting up a 1 letter email address for registering for things quickly or logging into accounts on smart tv’s – a painful process when you have to type in a long email address.
I dislike eBooks. Well, I don’t dislike the idea of them, they’re fine. I dislike having to make eBooks. I’ve been publishing books for years, and the worst part of publishing a book is making the ePub file (the standard eBook file). It’s hard. It’s fiddly. It’s a pain in the arse. And it takes forever.
But making the eBook version of any book these days is critical – often you will sell as many copies of the eBook as you will of the print version. Making the ePub file, however, is such a pain in the butt, it’s always the last thing I do when prepping a book for publication. Because I bloody hate it.
Laying out a book for print is a lot of work too. But I’ve done it so much for Anglotopia’s books and our magazine, that it’s a breeze compared to making an eBook. With the print layout, you have complete control of the end product. How it looks when it’s printed, how many pages it is, what pictures are included. Everything. The book will look exactly when printed how you’ve laid it out on the computer.
With an eBook, none of these things applies.
You can no control over the end-user experience. When you make an eBook, you have to strip the text down to its base thing – which is just words organized in a linear fashion. There is no design. There is no layout. There are no pictures. How it looks to the reader depends entirely on their e-reader, tablet, platform – and what font they prefer – whether it’s lit or how large it is. You don’t even know how many pages it will be because it will be different for every user. So, an eBook has to be as little as possible, to work on every platform.
This is ridiculously hard to pull off.
I learned this early on when I was formatting Anglotopia’s Dictionary of British English. Having paragraphs is one thing, having a listing of words and definitions with different fonts and boldness and size, is entirely too much for ePubs.
And that’s what’s weird. ePub is the standard for eBooks. It’s what all the platforms use. But what it really is, is an HTML file, filled with code. With as little formatting as possible.
When making an eBook you need just two things – the book itself and a table of contents, so users can navigate the book. Making that is really hard. Over the years I’ve used KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), Createspace (before it was fully swallowed by Amazon), Ingram Spark, Nook. All made it terrible to make an eBook despite all having software that tried to make it easier. With them all, I’d have to spend days formatting the damn thing. When you’ve reached the end of writing a book, rewriting it, editing it, editing it again, crying a few times, and then laying it out for print, doing it all over again for the eBook is that last thing you want to do.
There has to be an easier way.
I’m in the process of publishing a new edition of one of Anglotopia’s old Guidebooks – 101 London Travel Tips. The 1st edition was written almost a decade ago, it was time for an update. But I wanted the print version to be a beautiful print guidebook, with lots of pictures. It’s turned out great. I can’t wait to release it. But this past week, with all the other tasks done, one task was left: make the ePub version. I didn’t want to do it so badly, that I considered hiring someone to do this one task, but I’d already spent enough prepping this new book.
Sigh.
I guess we’re going to have to do this.
First I tried to convert the InDesign document into an ePub. But that just made an unformatted mess that didn’t recognize chapters existing. I tried to find an online web-based tool to make one. There just isn’t one – ePub tools are built into the publishing platforms, no one has just made one that works independently.
Finally, after some googling, I downloaded Sigil. I’d tried to use in the past but found the software impenetrable (just look at the interface in header screenshot – no icon is even labeled!). But I read some articles that told me what to do and sat down on an evening this past week to just make the damn eBook. I followed the directions and…. It was a breeze. Once I accepted the fact that everything nice I’d designed for the print version would be stripped away and mastered how to make the table of contents, it was easy to format the 101 ‘chapters’ in the book and make an ePub file.
I finished it in two hours while watching TV, uploaded it to Ingram – was told there were a few validation errors that were easy to fix (Sigil and the original Word Document for the text had added extra crap to the code that was breaking things). And boom, it was done. Uploaded and ready to go. You can already pre-order it.
When I tested it on my tablet, sure enough, it looked like an eBook. Which is, as I said, not great for this page designer. But it looks fine for an eBook, and that’s all that matters. Slightly irritating that all the time I spent selecting the 101 perfect pictures for the print version, was useless here as they are completely absent from the eBook (pictures always look like shit in eBooks, because you can’t control layout, size, format, they’re just THERE and increase the file size of the ePub, better to leave them out altogether). Never underestimate the benefit of taking the time to learn a new process. I’m still going to hate making eBooks, but I’ll hate it a little less and it will take a lot less time than it took before.
