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RYAN TATE
Journalist in Brooklyn, New York
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2024.02.11
The room was filled with a smell of night and firs, and Moomintroll thought:
“Good. A family has to be ventilated at times.” He went out on the steps and
started out into the damp darkness.
“Now I’ve got everything,” Moomintroll said to himself. “I’ve got the whole
year. Winter too.”
Tagged:
* #tove jansson
* #moomin
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2024.02.02
“It was a different world. Toft had no pictures and no words for it, nothing had
to correspond. No one had tried to make a path here and no one had ever rested
under the trees. They had just walked around with sinister thoughts, this was
the forest of anger. He grew quite calm and very attentive. With enormous relief
the worried Toft felt all his pictures disappear.”
Tagged:
* #moomin
* #tove jansson
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2024.01.22
Turn on CC/subtitles for English lyrics
Tagged:
* #Youtube
* #aki kaurismäki
* #fallen leaves
* #maustetytöt
* #suomi
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2023.06.13
Bret Victor in a talk with profound implications for modern communications:
“The wrong way to understand a system is to talk about it, to describe it. The
right way to understand it is to get in there and model it and explore it. And
you can’t do that in words. And so what we have is people are using these very
old tools — people are explaining and convincing through reasoning and rhetoric
instead of the newer tools of evidence and explorable models. We want a medium
that supports that… that is naturally show and tell.”
Related posts are below the talk.
The Tyranny of News
For centuries the cost of distributing information polarized publishing between
books, which were comprehensive and timeless, and newspapers
tumblr.com
Journalistic Lessons for the Algorithmic Age – The Markup
A farewell letter from Julia Angwin
themarkup.org
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2022.06.16
The Intercept, modern careers, and Aki Kaurismaki - Ryan Tate
The Intercept, modern careers, and Aki Kaurismaki - Ryan Tate
ryantate.com
I wrote about my time at The Intercept
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2020.09.16
TIPS ON USING THE ESPRO P7 COFFEE PRESS
I make coffee using a stainless steel, double filter, 32 oz french press called
the Espro P7. It’s a big improvement over conventional french presses —
producing a cleaner cup and keeping coffee hot and insulated — but you may need
to substantially alter your brewing process to obtain an equivalent cup of
coffee, particularly if you are a bit finicky about coffee. Below are some tips
It brews more quickly
The P7 seems to need about 25 percent less time to extract equivalent flavors
from a given amount of coffee than a conventional glass press. I hypothesize
this is due to the insulated stainless steel walls keeping the water hotter
during the brew process.
You may need a trick to keep the lid on during brewing
The P7 has a double filter exposed to coffee both below and on the side of the
plunger. This innovative design is superior to a conventional flat, single
filter at removing coffee bean particulate from your brew slurry, but occupies
much more space in the press:
With a conventional press, the filter protrudes below the lid only perhaps 1 cm
and it is no problem to keep the lid on while brewing by simply retracting the
filter into an “up” position. With the P7, retracting the filter in this way
creates perhaps 5cm+ protrusion, seriously limiting how full the press can be,
particularly if you do not wish the grounds to be touched by the filter. In
fact, I had trouble filling even to the “minimum” fill line in the beaker with
the lid on and filter attached.
Nonetheless, you can brew the P7 to maximum capacity with the lid on by simply
removing the plunger mechanism from the lid prior to the start of brewing. This
involves unscrewing the filter from the plunger stem, perhaps five seconds of
work (and something you do when cleaning anyway). Then remove the plunger stem.
Then you put the lid on by itself. Then you attach the plunger and screw on the
filter before brewing.
(In practice you don’t actually remove and re-attach the filter every time you
brew. You just never put it on in the first place, after disassembling it to
clean, then you attach it when it is time to plunge.)
There is no need to let the coffee fines “settle” after you plunge
With conventional french presses, some connoisseurs like to give 30-60 seconds
after they plunge to allow fine particles that made it past the filter to settle
on top of the filter as gravity pulls them down; this keeps them out of the
dispensed coffee. The technique is suggested by (for example) James Hoffman and
Tim Wendelboe. It is superfluous in the Espro P7 in my experience, so you can
just skip that step.
(One exception: I have found more darkly roasted beans that are ground quite
fine, for drip coffeemakers, can, in fact leave particulate that makes it past
even the P7 filters. This is not an issue for me now since I have moved to a
slightly coarser grind, see next section.)
You may want to adjust your grind settings
If you are still grinding your beans quite coarse for french press, buying a P7
offers a good excuse to experiment with finer settings, since the filters can
handle finer grinds. You may find more desirable flavors are extracted from the
coffee at finer grinds, and/or that brew time may be shortened.
Conversely, some people, per Wendelboe and Hoffman above, were already grinding
finer for the french press than conventional wisdom has historically dictated,
for example all the way down to drip coffee maker levels. They may find that the
higher, more even brew temperature of the insulated P7 actually encourages them
to go a couple of notches more coarse. This is because the hotter water in the
P7 is extracting more flavor from the beans, and, for the same quantity of
coffee and brew time as a conventional press, may produce bitter and overexacted
coffee, particularly at fine grind settings.
Personally, I use a Baratza Encore burr grinder, and went from a setting of 15
(drip) with my Bodum to a setting of 21 (Chemex) with the P7. The Encore manual
suggests a setting of 30-32 for french press, in keeping with traditional advice
for conventional press filters.
Consider making more coffee in fewer batches
When I used a Bodum french press, I would make one cup of coffee at a time,
three times per morning. This ensured that each cup was hot and properly
extacted; the filter on a conventional press exposes too much of the used coffee
grind to any liquid left in the beaker, in effect continuing some of the brewing
process rather than properly holding the coffee.
With the P7, not only does the coffee retain more heat due to superior
insulation, it is also much better sealed off from the coffee at the bottom of
the pot. So now I make all three cups at once. It can take me an hour or two to
dispense all the coffee and it remains very good.
A note: The P7 is actually bad at making small batches like a single cup of
coffee. It retains so much brew under the filter compared to a conventional
press that it is pretty inefficient to make a single cup. Espro makes smaller
models if you want to make a single cup.
You will “waste” a bit more coffee
Even brewing a near full press of coffee at a time, the P7 seems a bit less
efficient than my Bodum, Since the filter rides higher up the sides of the pot,
per the picture above, it seems more volume is left outside the filter.
I intended to quantify this difference with a test, but unfortunately my Bodum
pot shattered before I could do this. I can report that the P7 yields about
850ml of coffee when you brew 1100ml of water and 61g of coffee beans. Although
this seems significantly less efficient than the Bodum, it is completely worth
the slight extra waste, in my experience, to get the superior tasting coffee.
The espro coffee tastes so much “cleaner” I can’t go back.
Bringing it all together: How I brew
So given all the above this is specifically what I do to brew an excellent cup
of coffee in a P7, in case anyone finds it useful. For context, my water is
always 208F (via our trusty Zojirushi pot).
(Remove plunger rod and filter from lid per above if not already separate. I
always leave mine separate after washing.)
Ensure the two filters, detached from the lid, are twisted and clicked together.
This will make it faster to attach them later.
Grind 61g coffee at medium coarse (Chemex, 21 on Baratza Encore), put into P7
pot.
Put pot on scale, zero scale. Start count up timer.
Fill pot with 1100g (ml) of water, making sure to wet all grounds.
Put lid on pot.
At 1 minute 20 seconds, remove lid, stir grounds, re-attach lid.
At 2 minutes, remove lid, stir again, skim foam from top with a spoon (per
Wendelboe in this video at 3:30).
Attach plunger to lid: Put plunger rod through lid, screw filters on to it.
At 3 minutes, place plunger + lid on top of press and press.
Dispense and enjoy coffee, returning to pot for more as needed. It stays pretty
hot! In fact, I pour half cups initially in order to let the dispensed coffee
cool more rapidly.
Notes
As you can see, I brew at a 1:18 coffee:water ratio, which works well for the
beans I buy, which tend to be medium roast and relatively fresh. I also prefer
sweet flavors to bitter; based on what my local coffee shops serve, other folks
seem to enjoy more bitter compounds and may like a richer ratio.
I also think finer grinds will probably work well with the P7, given (probably)
some adjustments to the timings above, although some beans (darker roasts) seem
to “shatter” more in the grinder into finer particles which can escape the P7
filter, and for those you may want to experiment with providing time for the
grounds that make it past the P7 filters to settle.
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2020.08.28
THE BIG LEBOWSKI SUPERCUT THAT EMERGED FROM A RATHER STRESSFUL PERIOD
At one point around 2010 I was researching and writing a book while working full
time as a gossip blogger at a very fast-paced website. I was basically working
both weekdays (on the blog) and weekends (on the book) and as the stress built I
coped by making elaborate fatty foods, shaking increasingly esoteric cocktails,
and watching the Big Lebowski, which had been something of a touchstone since I
saw it as a fifth year senior at Berkeley.
The cocktails and the fatty food paired well with the Lebowski, and the newly
invented iPad allowed me to combine these activities in bed, until my laughing
and spilling woke up my wife one too many times and my little Lebwoski parties
were banished to the couch.
Anyway the book was successfully published and the blogging job gave way to a
slightly slower paced magazine/website job. After a breather I released some
audio transcription software I had written during the book project. But I never
got around to releasing a video I had made in the same period about the Big
Lebowski. Until today.
It’s truly the work of a disturbed mind. While watching the movie literally
dozens of times I was able to notice, despite the whisky sours and daiquiris and
martinis and yes White Russians, that the filmmakers (Coen Brothers) repeated
certain phrases and speech patterns a lot, seemingly strategically. This is, it
turns out, a known tick of theirs, but I was curious the meaning, and threw
myself into compiling examples of the repetition and reading books about the
movie.
After I compiled enough examples in a text file I decided to begin splicing
copies of those examples out of a digital copy of the film and smushed them
together into a sort of rough “supercut” compilation. Then I spent months (very
occasionally) obsessively editing and adding new clips to these supercuts. Then
I would forget about the project for months or years, watch the last supercut,
and make a new, better, version.
Anyway it looks like the last version I made, version 24, was done in January
2019, and the one before that was made in 2015. And it looks pretty good! If you
really like the movie maybe give this compilation of repetition a watch, I think
it builds and builds and toward the end you may find some examples you had not
noticed before. Only 1 minute 48 seconds and pretty fast paced. Enjoy.
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2020.07.23
THE TYRANNY OF NEWS
For centuries the cost of distributing information polarized publishing between
books, which were comprehensive and timeless, and newspapers, which were
essentially diffs of information in books. Centuries ago, as today,
understanding a newspaper was impossible without a lot of background knowledge,
although back then you were more likely to have this context, your leisure
options and reading choices being quite constrained.
The cost of printing and distribution, and in particular the cost of books,
constrained the availability of material that might bridge this gap and educate
readers about topics that were both vital and complex — information that was a
bit timely and a bit deep, with a medium shelf life, neither entirely fresh nor
perfectly comprehensive. This sort of information, with the potential to quickly
educate the citizenry, particularly as society grew ever more complicated,
tended to get published only when there was a particularly strong political or
commercial imperative to justify the cost. Revolutionary era pamphleteers, door
to door encyclopedia salesmen, and independent product guides like the Whole
Earth Catalog come to mind.
For some reason, 25 years into the age of widespread internet use, we have only
begun to disrupt this paradigm. In fact, news has proliferated online, and in
this medium tends to provide little to no additional background information as
compared to print, offering an occasional hyperlink that provides precious
little additional context, and mostly contemporaneous context at that (that is,
news articles tend to link to other news articles or to press releases or the
like). Many of the new information forms that have emerged online only serve to
heighten the importance of news or even more ephemeral information: Aggregators
like Reddit (adding only importance ranking and brief comments), social networks
like Twitter and Facebook (heavy on opinion and personal moments), and the
democratic cinema of YouTube (tending toward the viral and off-kilter). Books,
meanwhile, seem to have changed very little online, although their digitization
has made them more conveniently available, and, arguably, slightly widened the
number of authors of which a given reader avails herself.
This state of affairs is odd, given that the web was created by a scientist with
the specific complaint that “keeping a book up to date becomes impractical,” in
particular when organiziing “general information about [nuclear] accelerators
and experiments,” which would seem to envision a platform that accomplishes
quite a bit more than circulating newspaper articles.
But if you’re attentive you can start to see examples of how the web can foster
new forms of information that go further than news in educating citizens,
providing a deeper understanding on a range of topics before, or in the absence
of, relevant books. To wit:
* Wikipedia - A resource that is both criminally underfunded and routinely
underestimated but which nevertheless dominates both the Google results and
reader mindshare for any given topic. Why? Because it takes the time to go
deeper (and thus more educational) than news; because it organizes by topic
rather than by what recently happened; and because it has relentlessly honed
a useful system for harnessing the work of a distributed team of volunteers
(the sort of work news organizations would be wise to engage in more often).
* StackOverflow - A network of sites that has brought about nothing short of a
revolution in how software engineering knowledge is exchanged. The site was
consciously designed (per the podcast made by its creators as they created
it) to foster knowledge with a considerable shelf life, information that for
months or years would surface on Google to help programmers looking for
solutions to their challenges. The system of software, rules, and human
moderators used to make this happen is so consciously attuned to this goal
that it is routinely criticized for being so strict as to border on
unwelcoming. And at times the site fails to keep pace with the rapidly
churning world of software libraries that have become central to applied
computer science. But no one has argued that StackOverflow failed to achieve
its primary goal. Its business model, the last time I checked, revolved
around helping tech companies hire engineers.
* Wirecutter - A site that creates product guides with a shelf life of
approximately one year and which has changed how many people buy things
online. Wirecutter has become so widely used and imitated that it’s easy to
forget that this format had to be invented, and invented at that by Brian
Lam, who as editor of Gizmodo had overseen the production of a great many
reviews with much narrower scope and a much shorter shelf life. After he
retired from Gizmodo to Hawaii he made a site with a much more laid back pace
and, relatedly, with more depth and educational value per article.
I think we are going to see more sites that fit this general mold — medium shelf
life, between books and articles; greater depth and educational value than news
articles, but less than books; relying more on expertise and less on reporting.
This is the part of the web, and of publishing, and of the digital world, that
really excites me right now. It is where we as a society are going to heal some
real systemic weaknesses and build some real strengths. And how we will finally
end the tyranny of news.
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2020.06.01
RENÉE FRENCH, ACTOR, NURSE, JUST NEEDED A LITTLE SPACE
Before she died last month, Renée French was a nurse at New York Presbyterian
Columbia Hospital. At some point before that, she rendered an unforgettable
performance in downtown indie film icon Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes as
herself, or at least a version of herself with the same name, leafing through a
gun magazine in a restaurant. She was poised and smoldering, gracefully
insisting, to a persistently helpful waiter, that she be left alone to simply
drink her coffee. “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” she says at one point,
as he pours an unsolicited refill. “I had it the right color, the right
temperature — it was just right.”
Coffee and Cigarettes was released in 2004, but French’s scene was shot some
time during the preceding 18 years, during which Jarmusch filmed the movie’s 11
distinct stories. It’s not clear how much acting she subsequently did; IMDB
lists just one other performance credit. Presumably, French might have found
more work had her performance in Coffee been released sooner. (Jarmusch did try
to do so, at one point reportedly nearing a deal to showcase the shorts on MTV
before concerns about glorifying smoking scuttled things.)
After Jarmusch memorialized French on his Instagram, photographer Stephen Torton
wrote about her recent life, saying in a comment, “Renee was a single mom and a
front line nurse who died after months of near round the clock work.“ Another
commenter wrote, “ She helped my mom when she was at her lowest during the peak
of this pandemic. I’ll be forever grateful for her compassion and love for
helping others.” French was a longtime New Yorker, and other friends remembered
her working at and patronizing various downtown bars in the 1990s. “She cared
about fellow humans,” one wrote. Jarmusch remembered her as “a truly rare and
remarkable human being… kind, selfless, beautiful.”
It’s clear, in other social media posts, that French was grappling with the
emotional toll of her work. At one point she wrote, as the pandemic waned, “I am
struggling coming out of this ‘dream’.” Another time: “Just wanna have a few
drinks and SLEEP.“
In the week and a half since I learned of French’s death, my thoughts have
repeatedly returned to her. I saw Coffee for the first time maybe a month ago,
part of a Jarmusch binge that began in March, as the city began its move
indoors. In her work we see that peace is necessary for compassion, that
providing solitude is as much an act of love as active care. I wish as a city
and community we could have provided Renée with more of these things, and
looking at what we together have gone through, and what many brave people have
fought for, these last few days, I think they clearly are also needed by our
most vulnerable citizens. Let people alone to live in peace, to care for others
and to pursue happiness.
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2018.08.13
THE NEW MICROJOURNALISM
I’m noticing a new sort of news site: Supported by philanthropy and reader
contributions and focused on a relatively tight niche.
One example would be the venture forthcoming from Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson,
who will build a team to cover algorithms and “the impact of technology on
society.”
Another might be The Trace, focused on gun violence in the U.S.
Then there’s The Appeal, which is zoomed in on local prosecutors across the
country.
One obvious benefit of this model is that it can be very attractive to donors,
from major individual givers to grant committees to readers and grassroots
activists. They get a clearer sense of what they are supporting than they might
with a broader news organization. As reader and philanthropic support becomes
more central to the sustainability of journalism, this clarity becomes much more
important. At the same time, as advertising revenue falls away, raw scale
(pageviews, unique visitors), which has tended to mitigate against journalistic
focus, becomes less important.
Another benefit of the microjournalism model is that the community of readers,
tipsters, commenters, and social media posters that forms around the site might
tend to be more impassioned.
The downside, I’d imagine, might be a lower bound on the size of that community.
Of course, a niche site that succeeds can always broaden; Angwin and Larson, for
their part, have clearly scoped out a meaty topic beyond algorithms, for
example, and envision, as Angwin put it, “a substantial newsroom that aims to
publish daily.”
There is, of course, an old microjournalism, but it was and remains commercial —
the trades, who cover any conceivable topic where a critical mass of advertisers
can be found. At one point during the dot-com downturn of the early aughts, a
coworker and I at a tech magazine joked that we’d end up at one of two competing
publications we had discovered covering the practice of raising meat goats.
The trades have been notoriously captured by advertisers. By making it easier to
raise funds from, solicit information from, and publish to a small community,
the internet may have enabled a journalism that is more adversarial than the
trades and blessed with more resources and investigative power than the first
wave of individual independent bloggers.
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2018.03.22
The past two days in New York, with the spring snowstorm and glorious aftermath,
have been among the most beautiful since I moved to New York in 2014. (And I’m
pretty bad at capturing on my iPhone how stunning Park Slope looks this
morning.)
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2018.03.16
There is no moment, seen properly, that does not contain God, joy, beauty or
whatever your particular name for that ecstasy is.
Caterina Fake, possibly referring to a collection of music, Salon.com, 1998.
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2016.10.21
GOODBYE, DAVID BUNNELL
I am quoted in Owen Thomas’ San Francisco Chronicle obituary for David Bunnell,
a pioneering tech publisher who, along with his son Aaron, gave me my first
journalism job at long-gone Upside magazine. He also stared PC Magazine, PC
World, and Macworld; working at a pioneering early PC maker called MITS in New
Mexico, he edited articles for company’s Computer Notes publication by Bill
Gates and Paul Allen about their new company Microsoft’s version of the BASIC
programming language.
You can find other obituaries from Harry McCracken and Karen Wickre. Below are
my own scattered thoughts upon learning of David’s passing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: David Bunnell
From: Ryan Tate <ryan.tate@theintercept.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2016 13:24:50 -0400
To: “Thomas, Owen” <-redacted-@sfchronicle.com>
I had not. This news is devastating, and not just on a personal level, but on a
professional one as well, because it comes at a time when the technology sector
needs more than ever the sort of humbling, irreverent, technically sharp
journalism and satire that David pioneered. I saw all of his work, especially
at Upside, where I worked for David and his late, remarkable son Aaron, as
paving the way for to critical voices against technological overreach and for
publications like Valleywag and The Intercept, which extended the work he helped
begin to cut through the zealous optimism and confidence games of Silicon Valley
and thus help distinguish true innovation from banal corruption.
What was most brilliant about David, in my eyes, was that he always saw the
essential humanity of the Valley, and the nitty gritty implications of
technological change for ordinary people, even at times when the prevailing
wisdom said that technology floated above, and apart from, mundane human
struggles and foibles. This is someone who relentlessly tried to use computers
and other innovations to improve the lives of the poor, who gave his own time
and energy to help those less fortunate than himself, who was happy to speak the
truth about large corporations, who was skilled at mocking self-important
executives, and who fundamentally always wanted to bring the personal computing
back to where it started o the ideals of a countercultural movement intended to
empower those at the margins.
On a personal level, David=’s work was a part of my life long before I met him.
I subscribed to Macworld as a teenager and later, in college, was delighted to
discover the cheeky online tech industry column he had commissioned from Tish
Williams, who wrote Upside's “Daily Tish.”When I entered business journalism
after college, the tech boom was in full swing, and the Bay Area was overflowing
with reporter jobs, but I didn’t consider applying anywhere but at Upside, where
I had been freelancing for David’s son Aaron. When Aaron, all of 26, passed
away, David helped pull the rest of us through the emotional devastation, and he
did his best to shield us from the industry collapse the followed shortly
thereafter. Long after Upside folded up shop, I would see David around Berkeley,
and he would talk about his latest ventures, which involved innovations
in health. He had my wife and over for dinner; another time we dined together at
a local barbecue spot after finding we were both, by chance, enjoying an evening
alone at the bar. Though I avoided the topic, I always sensed that Aaron’s loss
was an emotional blow from which David never fully recovered. And yet in a way
he became warmer, and more alive, in the wake of that tragedy, especially after
he had been away a good long while from the Silicon Valley hustle.
I will always be deeply grateful to David Bunnell, a man as loving as he was
smart and as critical as he was awe-struck, who saw the potential of technology
even as he recognized the emptiness of tech as an ends unto itself. As we are
sucked ever more completely into electric screens and the global tangle of wires
and radios that network them together, I hope the rest of us learn to keep the
world in perspective as well as he did.
> On Oct 20, 2016, at 12:43 PM, Thomas, Owen <-redacted-@sfchronicle.com
wrote:
>
> Ryan, you may have heard of David Bunnell’s passing. Do you have any
memories to share?
>
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2012.12.20
INTRODUCING TYPINGPOOL, MY SOFTWARE FOR EASY AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION
Today I’m releasing Typingpool, software that makes audio transcriptions easier
and cheaper.
Typingpool chops your audio into small bits and routes them to the labor
marketplace Mechanical Turk, where workers transcribe the bits in parallel. This
produces transcripts much faster than any lone transcriber for as little
one-eighth what you pay a transcription service. Better still, workers keep 91
percent of the money you spend.
At the end of the process you have an interactive transcript that can be opened
in your web browser, with audio embedded every paragraph or so. Having audio
right next to the corresponding text greatly eases double-checking and
correction. No conventional transcript is this interactive or easy to fact
check.
You use Typingpool through a series of command-line programs, distributed as a
Ruby gem. For the non-geek, Typingpool can be a pain to install, and if you’ve
never used command-line programs it will take extra effort to learn. But if you
create many transcripts Typingpool can save you a great deal of time and money.
And while you have to pay the workers who handle your audio on Mechanical Turk,
Typingpool is completely free.
Typingpool runs on Mac OS X and Linux.
Background
Typingpool builds on techniques outlined by Andy Baio in a popular 2008 blog
post, which showed how audio could be divided and uploaded to Mechanical Turk
for “cheap, easy audio transcription.” I used Andy’s techniques to quickly
transcribe hours and hours of interviews conducted for my book on side projects,
The 20% Doctrine. (Thanks to my editor Debbie Stier for pointing me at
Mechanical Turk!)
Unlike the process in Andy’s post, the process I settled on is highly automated.
Andy’s process works great for occasional transcription jobs, whereas mine is
designed for people who frequently need to make transcripts. Instead of manually
editing my audio, laboriously creating Excel spreadsheets, and copy/pasting text
into a transcript as Andy did, I outsourced these tasks to software. Instead of
clicking around on the Mechanical Turk website, I sent it jobs automatically,
through the API.
To automate, I ended up writing a whole library of Ruby code, after simpler
approaches failed. This code became Typingpool. I’ve been using and developing
it since Feb. 2011.
How it works
Here’s the high level view: You point Typingpool at some audio files. Typingpool
converts the files to mp3 format, merges them together, and chops them into
1-minute chunks (adjustable). Then you tell Typingpool how much you want to pay
to transcribe each chunk and which template you want to use to create worker
assignments (several templates are included, all customizable). Typingpool
uploads your audio and assignments to Amazon’s servers, where they are
immediately made available to workers. As assignments are returned, you can use
Typingpool to approve or reject each one. As you approve more and more
assignments, your transcript grows until it is complete.
You can cancel a transcription job at any time. You can provide a list of
unusual words in the audio so transcribers are more accurate. You can re-assign
chunks that have expired or been rejected. You can set deadlines for how long
each worker may take on assignment, when assignments are pulled from Mechanical
Turk, and how long you have to review an assignment before it is auto-approved.
You interact with Typingpool through a collection of command-line programs:
tp-make, tp-assign, tp-review, and tp-finish. You may sometimes need to use the
program tp-collect. Another program, tp-config, is used only when installing
Typingpool. A simple config file controls defaults (it’s at ~/.typingpool and in
YAML format) and a cache file keeps network connections to a minimum.
Output
The final output of Typingpool is a folder on your computer containing a
transcript file. The transcript file is HTML – a web page you can open in your
browser – with audio chunks embedded alongside each associated transcript chunk.
The project folder also includes supporting files, including a CSV data file
used to store raw transcript chunks, Amazon Mechanical Turk HIT information, and
other metdata; Javscript code that swaps in Flash players on browsers that don’t
support mp3 files in audio tags; the original audio files and the audio chunks
generated from them; and a CSS file.
The folder is laid out like so:
> Chad Interview/
> -> transcript.html | transcript_in_progress.html
> -> audio/
> -> chunks/
> -> Chad Interview.00.00.mp3
> -> Chad Interview.01.00.mp3
> -> ... [snip]
> -> originals/
> -> chad1.WMA
> -> chad2.WMA
> -> data/
> -> assignment.csv
> -> id.txt
> -> subtitle.txt
> -> etc/
> -> audio-compat.js
> -> transcript.css
> -> About these files - readme.txt
> -> player/
> -> audio-player.js
> -> license.txt
> -> player.swf
Details
For further details, keep reading below, or jump to your preferred section here:
* Usage
* Installation
1. Configure your Amazon account.
2. Install prerequisites(rvm, audio tools, Ruby, and perhaps a package
manager).
* Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
* Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
* Ubuntu Linux 12.10 Quantal Quetzal
* Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Precise Pangolin
* Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Lucid Lynx
3. Install the Typingpool gem.
4. Run tp-config.
* Frequently Anticipated Questions (FAQ)
* Why won’t it work on Windows?
* Why not just use a transcription service?
* Isn’t the quality poor?
* Does Typingpool help exploit workers?
* What sort of work should I reject?
* Usage: Additional details
* Maintenance
* Problems?
* Source
* More
Usage
A typical workflow will use the bundled scripts in this order:
tp-make -> tp-assign -> [wait] -> tp-review -> tp-finish
tp-review may be called repeatedly, until transcripts for all audio chunks have
been processed. Similarly, tp-assign may be called repeatedly, for example to
re-assign chunks rejected using tp-review, or to re-assign chunks that have
expired.
(An alternate workflow would go like this:
tp-make -> [manually upload data/assignments.csv to Amazon RUI] ->
[wait] -> [approve/reject assignments via RUI] -> tp-collect ->
tp-finish
)
Example:
> tp-make 'Chad Interview' chad1.WMA chad2.WMA --unusual 'Hack Day,
> Yahoo' --subtitle 'Phone interview re Yahoo Hack Day'
>
> # => Converting chad1.WMA to mp3
> # => Converting chad2.WMA to mp3
> # => Merging audio
> # => Splitting audio into uniform bits
> # => Uploading Chad Interview.00.00.mp3 to
> ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com as Chad
> Interview.00.00.33ca7f2cceba9f8031bf4fb7c3f819f4.LHFJEM.mp3
> # => Uploading Chad Interview.01.00.mp3 to
> ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com as Chad #
> Interview.01.00.33ca7f2cceba9f8031bf4fb7c3f819f4.XMWNYW.mp3
> # => Uploading Chad Interview.02.00.mp3 to
> ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com as Chad #
> Interview.02.00.33ca7f2cceba9f8031bf4fb7c3f819f4.FNEIWN.mp3
> # => ... [snip]
> # => Done. Project at:
> # => /Users/ryantate/Desktop/Transcripts/Chad Interview
>
>
> tp-assign 'Chad Interview' interview/nameless --reward 1.00
> --deadline 90m --approval 6h --lifetime 2d
>
> # => Figuring out what needs to be assigned
> # => 85 assignments total
> # => 85 assignments to assign
> # => Deleting old assignment HTML from ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com
> # => Uploading assignment HTML to ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com
> # => Assigning
> # => Assigned 85 transcription jobs for $85
> # => Remaining balance: $115.00
>
> [Wait...]
>
>
> tp-review 'Chad Interview'
>
> # => Gathering submissions from Amazon
> # => Matching submissions with local projects
> # =>
> # => Transcript for: https://ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com/
> Chad%20Interview.29.00.263d492275a81afb005c8231d8d8afdb.
> UEMOCN.mp3
> # => Project: Chad Interview: Phone interview re Yahoo Hack Day
> # => Submitted at: 2012-08-11 17:00:36 -0700 by A9S0AOAI8HO9P
> # =>
> # => Chad: ... so it had sort of some geek history. And the
> # => weather was really bad. But it was an indoor event,
> # => right? So people were staying indoors. And like very
> # => early... And there was all this really expensive gear
> # => that the BBC had. Like these cameras that guys were like
> # => riding around on and stuff, huge sound stage, bigger than
> # => the one we had in Sunnyvale.
> # =>
> # => Two hours into the event, we heard this big lightning
> # => strike, because we were up on a hill in London. And all
> # => the lights went out and the roof opened up in the
> # => building. What we didn't know is the fire supression
> # => system in that building which got blown up by the
> # => lightning during a fire would cause the roof to open
> # => up. So we had all these geeks with equipment and all this
> # => BBC equipment and it was literally raining on them.
> # =>
> # => (A)pprove, (R)eject, (Q)uit, [(S)kip]? (1/20)
>
> a
>
> # => Approved. Chad Interview transcript updated.
> # =>
> # => Transcript for: https://ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com/
> Chad%20Interview.30.00.263d492275a81afb005c8231d8d8afdb.
> RXNKRN.mp3
> # => Project: Chad Interview: Phone interview re Yahoo Hack Day
> # => Submitted at: 2012-08-11 17:00:58 -0700 by A9S0AOAI8HO9P
> # =>
> # => Blah blah blah blah okay I am done typing byeeeeeeee
> # =>
> # => (A)pprove, (R)eject, (Q)uit, [(S)kip]? (2/20)
>
> r
>
> # => Rejection reason, for worker:
>
> There's no transcription at all, just nonsense
>
> # => Rejected
> # =>
> # => Transcript for...
> # => ... [snip]
>
>
> tp-finish 'Chad Interview'
>
> # => Removing from Amazon
> # => Collecting all results
> # => Removing HIT 2GKMIKMN9U8PNHKK58NXL3SU4TCBSN (Reviewable)
> # => Removing from data/assignment.csv
> # => Removing from local cache
> # => Removing HIT 2CFX2Q45UUKQ2HXZU8SNV8OG6CQBTC (Assignable)
> # => Removing from data/assignment.csv
> # => Removing from local cache
> # => Removing HIT 294EZZ2MIKMNNDP1LAU8WWWXOEI7O0...
> # => ... [snip]
> # => Removing Chad Interview.00.00.
> 263d492275a81afb005c8231d8d8afdb.ORSENE.html from
> ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com
> # => Removing Chad Interview.01.00...
> # => ... [snip]
> # => Removing Chad Interview.00.00.
> 263d492275a81afb005c8231d8d8afdb.RNTVLN.mp3 from
> ryantate42.s3.amazonaws.com
> # => Removing Chad Interview.01.00....
> # => ... [snip]
If you have additional questions, they may be answered in the section “Usage:
Additional details” below, or in one of the links in the “More” section, also
below.
Installation
There are four broad steps to install Typingpool:
1. Configure your Amazon account.
2. Install prerequisites(rvm, audio tools, Ruby, and perhaps a package
manager).
* Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
* Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
* Ubuntu Linux 12.10 Quantal Quetzal
* Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Precise Pangolin
* Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Lucid Lynx
3. Install the Typingpool gem.
4. Run tp-config.
1. Configure your Amazon account
The below assumes you’ve already got an account on Amazon.com that you want to
begin using for Mechanical Turk and Typingpool. It walks you through signing up
for Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon S3, and obtaining the security credentials
you’ll use to configure Typingpool later.
Visit requester.mturk.com. Click “Create an Account” in the top right corner. If
prompted, sign in with your usual Amazon account. Fill out the “User
Registration” page, using your own name for “Company Name” (unless you
personally have your own named business entity).
After you’ve created your account, you’ll want to put some money in it to cover
the cost of your first Mechanical Turk assignment. If you don’t have plans to
immediately use Typingpool/Mechanical Turk, you can skip this step.
To fund your first assignment, click “Account Settings” in the top right corner.
Then click “Prepay for Mechanical Turk HITs” under the section “Your Balance.”
You’ll be prompted to enter an amount. Put in just enough to cover your first
assignment:
minutes of audio
-times-
how much you’re willing to pay per minute (default $0.75)
-times-
1.1 (to cover the 10% Amazon surcharge).
So for 60 minutes of audio at $0.75, you’d put in $49.50.
There’s no automated way to get your prepaid balance refunded, so only pre-pay
what you plan to immediately use, at least at first.
After entering the amount, click “Continue to Amazon Payments.” You might be
prompted to log in with your Amazon account again. You’ll be prompted to add a
credit card and to confirm the amount of the pre-pay.
Next you’ll need to sign up for Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service. This is
the website Typingpool uses to make your audio files available to transcribers
around the world.
Visit aws.amazon.com/s3. Click “Sign Up” near the top right corner. You may be
prompted to sign in. Use your usual Amazon account.
Fill out the contact information form.
Enter your credit card details. Amazon S3 will charge small amounts for when
Typingpool uses it to temporarily host your audio. These fees are a tiny
fraction of what you spend on transcription. For example, I paid 1.08 cents to
host an hour-long mp3 on S3 for three days versus $49.50 for the workers and
Mechanical Turk fees.
At this stage, you may be prompted for a phone number to verify your identity.
The call is automated and painless.
Your account will either be confirmed or Amazon will promise to email you when
it’s confirmed. In my experience, Amazon may “forget” to send this email even
when your S3 account is up and running.
Next you will need to obtain Amazon S3 security credentials for use with
Typingpool. Go to aws.amazon.com and open the “My Account” menu near the top
right corner. When the menu opens, select “Security Credentials” at the bottom.
Scroll down to the “Access Credentials” section, which contains a subsection
called “Accesss Keys,” which contains a subsection called “Your Access Keys.”
There should already be one key, if not click “Creare a new Access Key.”
Copy the letters under “Access Key ID,” then paste them somewhere you can get to
later, like a text file or Word doc. Click “Show” under “Secret Access Key,”
then copy the secret access key, then paste it under your access key. You’ll use
both these keys later to set up Typingpool.
2. Install prerequisites
In this section you’re going to install the various bits of external software
Typingpool needs in order to run. There are quite a few such bits!
You’ll need rvm, the Ruby Version Manager, since Typingpool needs a newer
version of Ruby than presently ships with any Mac or Ubuntu Linux system.
You’ll need audio tools like ffmpeg and other miscellaneous prerequisites (xml
and zip libraries, etc.).
You’ll need a Ruby of version 1.9.2 or better.
If you’re installing on a Mac, you’re also going to install a general package
manager called Homebrew (or MacPorts, if you prefer, see instructions in
parenthesis). The package manager will let you more easily install the audio
programs Typingpool needs.
Don’t worry, I’ve tested this process on something like nine different system
configurations and will walk you through it. Find your operating system below to
begin.
Jump to:
* Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
* Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
* Ubuntu Linux 12.10 Quantal Quetzal
* Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Precise Pangolin
* Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Lucid Lynx
Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
* Make sure your Mac is up to date: Select Apple menu/Software Update. Install
any updates.
* Install Xcode from the Mac App Store: Open the Mac App Store, search for
Xcode, and click Install. Finish the install by launching Xcode and
installing device component support when prompted.
* Install Xcode command line tools: Launch Xcode, select Xcode/Preferences from
the menus, select the Downloads tab, and click Install next to Command Line
Tools.
* Install rvm(Ruby Version Manager): Launch the Terminal (click on the
magnifying glass on the top right of your screen, type Terminal, and select
the Terminal application). Type
> curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
and hit the Return key. Respond to any prompts in the affirmative.
* Close and re-open the Terminal window to load rvm: Close the current Terminal
window by clicking the red button in the top left corner of the window. Open
a new Terminal window by selecting the Shell menu and then “New Window.”
* Install Homebrew: In the Terminal, type
> ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
and hit Return. Respond to any prompts in the affirmative. Leave the Terminal
window open.
(Or, install Macports: Go to http://www.macports.org/install.php, select the
installer for your OS X version, download it, and launch it. Respond to any
prompts in the affirmative.)
* Install dependencies: In the Terminal, type
> brew tap homebrew/dupes
and hit Return. Then type
> brew install autoconf automake openssl libksba ffmpeg mp3splt mp3wrap apple-gcc42
and hit Return. This can easily take 45 minutes since many basic Unix tools
must be compiled. Afterward, leave the Terminal window open.
(Or, for Macports: In the Terminal, type
> sudo port install gettext apple-gcc42 openssl curl-ca-bundle ffmpeg mp3splt mp3wrap libxslt libxml2 libiconv zlib
and hit Return. You will eventually be prompted to install Java SE; respond
in the affirmative. If you wait too long to respond to the Java SE prompt,
you may need to re-type the line above. The whole process can easily take 1
hour 45 minutes since a whole universe of basic Unix tools must be compiled.)
* Install and select Ruby: In the Terminal, type
> rvm install 1.9.3 --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/opt
and hit Return. Then type
> rvm use 1.9.3 --default
and hit Return. Leave the Terminal window open.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
* Make sure your Mac is up to date: Select Apple menu/Software Update. Install
any updates.
* Install Xcode: You’ll need to do this from your original system DVD from
Apple. Insert the OS X Install DVD into your Mac, open the DVD icon from your
Desktop (if needed), open the Other Installs folder, double click on
Xcode.mpkg. Follow the prompts to install Xcode with command line tools.
* Update Xcode: Select Apple menu/Software Update. There should be an update to
bring Xcode to version 3.2.6.
* Install rvm(Ruby Version Manager): Launch the Terminal (click on the
magnifying glass on the top right of your screen, type Terminal, and select
the Terminal application). Type
> curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
and hit the Return key. Respond to any prompts in the affirmative. Leave the
Terminal window open.
* Close and re-open the Terminal window to load rvm: Close the current Terminal
window by clicking the red button in the top left corner of the window. Open
a new Terminal window by selecting the Shell menu and then “New Window.”
* Install Homebrew: In the Terminal, type
> ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"
and hit Return. Respond to any prompts in the affirmative. Leave the Terminal
window open.
(Or, install Macports: Go to http://www.macports.org/install.php, select the
installer for your OS X version, download it, and launch it. Respond to any
prompts in the affirmative.)
* Install dependencies: In the Terminal, type
> brew install ffmpeg mp3splt mp3wrap
and hit Return. Leave the Terminal window open.
(Or, for Macports: In the Terminal, type
> sudo port install ffmpeg mp3splt mp3wrap
and hit Return.)
* Install and select Ruby: In the Terminal, type
> rvm install 1.9.3 --disable-binary
and hit Return. Then type
> rvm use 1.9.3 --default
and hit Return. Leave the Terminal window open.
Ubuntu Linux 12.10 Quantal Quetzal
and Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Precise Pangolin
and Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Lucid Lynx
Special notes for the desktop and server versions of these operating systems,
and for 10.04 Lucid Lynx, will be noted in parenthesis.
* Update packages: From the terminal, type
> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get upgrade
* Install dependencies: From the terminal, type
> sudo apt-get install ffmpeg mp3splt mp3wrap curl libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libavcodec-extra-53 zlib1g-dev build-essential libyaml-dev libreadline-dev
(For 10.04 Lucid Lynx, type
> sudo apt-get install ffmpeg mp3splt mp3wrap curl libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libavcodec-extra-52 zlib1g-dev build-essential libyaml-dev libreadline-dev
)
* Install rvm and Ruby: From the terminal, type
> curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
* Configure the Terminal app for rvm(Ubuntu Desktop only): Select Edit/Profile
preferences, select Title and Command, check “Run command as login shell.”
* Update your current shell: From the terminal, type
> source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
(Ubuntu Desktop users may skip this step and simply open a new tab within the
Terminal app.)
* Select ruby: From the terminal, type:
> rvm use 2.0 --default
3. Install the Typingpool gem
From a terminal window (or the Terminal app on Mac), type
> gem install typingpool
and hit Return.
4. Run tp-config
From a terminal window (or the Terminal application on Mac), type
> tp-config
and hit Return. When prompted for you Amazon Access Key ID, paste the first
string you copied into a file at the end of step 1. When prompted for your
Amazon Secret Access Key, paste the second string you copied into a file at the
end of step 1. At all other prompts, it is fine to just hit Return to accept the
default.
Frequently Anticipated Questions
Why won’t it work on Windows?
Typingpool relies heavily on some Unix-specific audio tools, including ffmpeg.
Max OS X and Linux are both essentially Unix systems that can run these tools
natively. Windows is not.
Why not just use a transcription service?
You should absolutely use a transcription service if you’re comfortable with the
cost and turnaround time. There is even onethat farms the work out to Mechanical
Turk, making it somewhat more affordable.
Typingpool is a good alternative if you are looking for lower costs and/or
faster turnaround. By chopping the file into chunks that can be transcribed in
parallel, you can get a finished transcript faster. By dealing with end workers
yourself, you can get a lower price.
You also end up with audio embedded every paragraph or so in your transcript, a
nifty feature that makes it very easy to double check quotes. As far as I know,
no transcription service offers that.
Isn’t the quality poor?
The quality is lower than with a professional transcription service, and that’s
precisely the point. Typingpool is a “worse is better” solution that works well
in certain cases. It is cheap and fast, but rough and provisional. It’s a great
tradeoff if you want to skim and search the transcript and then easily -– thanks
to the embedded audio every paragraph or so – double-check the text. This works
well if you’re trying to remember a quote for a work of journalism.
Conversely, you shouldn’t use Typingpool to produce a transcript of your
multi-billion-dollar corporation’s quarterly earnings call, or to create a legal
document to submit to a court –- at least not without double checking every
single word against the audio.
Does Typingpool help exploit workers?
Like any tool, Typingpool could probably be used that way. Please don’t use it
that way! Typingpool defaults to paying $0.75 a minute, and I often offer
$1.00/minute, which produces transcripts very quickly, tends to attract better
workers and is still roughly half the best rate I’ve seen for high-speed
professional transcription. I have had success completing transcripts at lower
rates, and Baio four years ago was able to findplenty of workers at
$0.40/minute. But lower prices generally translate to slower transcription and
lower quality.
Also, bear in mind that just because you pay Mechanical Turk workers a lower
rate through Typingpool than you’d pay a service doesn’t mean the workers are
actually getting paid less or are worse off. The money you pay to a professional
transcription service with high accuracy will typically pay for multiple people
to work on each section, and will also support the overhead of managers who
delegate the work. With Typingpool you are doing the management work yourself,
paying workers directly, and accepting lower accuracy. This helps explain why
the professional transcription jobs I have come across on Mechanical Turk have
always paid a fraction of the rate I offer directly to workers.
What sort of work should I reject?
Up to you. You should take a look at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk requester best
practices guide. My own philosophy is that I generally only reject assignments
when it looks like someone failed to put in much work. You’ll sometimes find
people submit empty assignments, or nonsensical assignments. They are hoping you
will fail to review the assignment before the (mandatory) auto-approval deadline
and then they will get paid.
When someone submits very bad work, for example because they seem to have issues
with idiomatic English, I will often approve the work and then block them so
they can no longer submit future work. Typingpool is careful to always show you
the worker ID associated with an assignment, but you must go onto the Mechanical
Turk web interface to ban people.
Usage: Additional details
* When you want to preview your assignments, run tp-assign with the −−sandbox
option and with −−qualify ‘rejection_rate < 100’ (to make sure you qualify to
view your own HITs). Then visit http://workersandbox.mturk.com and find your
assignments (a seach for “mp3” works if you left mp3 set as a keyword in your
config file). When you are done previewing, run tp-finish with the name/path
of your project and the −−sandbox option.
* When you assign your transcription jobs via tp-assign, you must supply a
template name or relative path as the second argument. In the example above,
the named template is “interview/nameless.”
The template “interview/nameless” is a great general-purpose template. It
instructs the transcriber not to worry about the names of the speakers, and
instead to use labels like “male 1,” “male 2,” etc. This allows the
transcriber to work quickly and usually results in a viable transcript, since
you can consult your memory or the original audio to figure out who is who.
To find what other templates are available, navigate to the directory where
typingpool is installed (`gem which typingpool`) and then go into
lib/typingpool/templates/assignment and its subdirectories. Anything that
ends in ‘.html.erb’ is an available template. You may also create your own
templates in the directory listed in the “templates” param of your config
file.
The templates interview, interview/phone, and interview/noisy require you to
have passed the names of two voices to tp-make when you created your project.
The first voice should be the name (and optional title) of the interviewer,
and the second the name (and title) of the interviewee, like so:
> tp-make 'Chad Interview' chad1.WMA chad2.WMA --voice ‘Ryan, hack reporter’
> --voice ‘Chad, a software engineer’ --unusual 'Hack Day,
> Yahoo' --subtitle 'Phone interview re Yahoo Hack Day'
* When you’ve rejected some submissions in tp-review and need to re-assign
these chunks to be transcribed, simply re-run tp-assign with the name (or
path) of your project. You may select the same template, reward, deadlines,
etc., or pick new ones. tp-assign will be careful not to re-assign chunks for
which you have approved a transcript, or which are pending on Mechanical
Turk.
* When some chunks previously assigned via tp-assign have expired without
attracting submissions, simply re-run tp-assign as described above to
re-assign these chunks. Consider increasing the dollar amount specified in
your −−reward argument.
* When some chunks previously assigned via tp-assign have been submitted by
workers but not approved or rejected in time for the approval deadline
(assign/approval in your config file or –approval as passed to tp-assign),
Mechanical Turk has automatically approved these submissions for you and
you’ll need to run tp-collect to collect them. (Yes, it’s silly you need run
a whole different script instead of just calling tp-review as usual. I’ll fix
this in a future version.)
* When you want to cancel outstanding assignments, simply run tp-finish with
the name of your project. If your assignments have already attracted
submissions, you may be prompted to run tp-review first.
* When tp-make, tp-assign, or tp-finish tells you it failed an upload,
deletion, or Amazon command, simply re-run the script with the same arguments
to re-attempt the upload, deletion or Amazon command. Typingpool carefully
records which network operations it is attempting and which network
operations have completed. It can robustly handle network errors, including
uncaught exceptions.
Maintenance
* Cache: If the cache file grows too large, you’ll need to delete it manually.
It may be safely deleted as long as no Typingpool scripts are running. Its
location is specified in the 'cache’ param in the config file. (The config
file is at ~/.typingpool and the cache, by default, is at
~/.typingpool.cache.)
Typingpool takes no steps to limit the size of the cache file. It prunes the
cache of project-specific entries when you run tp-finish on a project, but
the cache may grow large if you work on many active projects in parallel, or
if you fail to run tp-finish on projects when you are done with them.
* tp-finish: You should run tp-finish PROJECT each time you finish a project,
where PROJECT may be either the project name or path. Assuming you have no
submissions pending or awaiting approval, this clears all traces of the
project from Amazon Mechanical Turk, from Amazon S3 or your SFTP server, and
from the local cache. This will keep your local cache from balooning in size
and will minimize your S3 charges or SFTP disk usage. It will also help
Typingpool scripts run faster by reducing the number of HITs you have on
Amazon Mechanical Turk; many Typingpool operations involve iterating through
all of your HITs.
Problems?
If you hit any issues, or think you’ve found a bug, please feel free to email
me: ryantate@ryantate.com
Source
If you’re a ruby user, you can obtain the Typingpool source code by typing on
the command line:
gem install typingpool
The source code is also available on Github:
https://github.com/ryantate/typingpool
Typingpool is distributed under the MIT license.
More
* Run any script with the −−help option for further details on how to run the
script (e.g. `tp-make −−help`).
* See the docs for Typingpool::Config (`ri Typingpool::Config`) for details of
the config file format.
* See Amazon’s Mechanical Turk documentation for guides and overviews on how
Mechanical Turk works:
* Requester help
* Requester user interface guide
* Requester best practices guide
* Mechanical Turk concepts
* See the documentation on ffmpeg (`man ffmpeg`) and related libraries for
clues as to how to make Typingpool support additional file formats.
Typingpool can work with any file format that ffmpeg can convert to mp3
(libmp3lame). You may need to install a lib via your package manager to
enable this.
* For an overview of the concepts on which Typingpool is built, see Andy Baio’s
guide to using Mechanical Turk for transcription.
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2012.11.11
MY FAVORITE FALL MEAL (SO FAR)
I’ve made the below meal twice so far this fall and it’s fantastically autumnal.
Also, fairly forgiving to prepare. I basically stumbled across the main course
flipping through one of my go-to cookbooks after aimlessly picking up a handsome
chunk of pork shoulder from the butcher. Words like “with Cider and Cream” tend
to jump out at me.
1. Shoulder of Pork with Cider and Cream
American Cookery, James Beard.
Online recipe (photo)
Basting seems to be out of fashion right now, but it really works here;
you’ll be able to taste the apple cider in the finished roast, and the juice
that doesn’t stick to the meat or (blackened) to the pan will end up
flavoring the cream gravy. The apple flavor compliments the
nutmeg/ginger/salt rub very well.
Notes:
* You’ll notice the recipe is technically for a “leg of pork;” Beard says
later in the chapter to treat shoulder “in the same fashion as leg of
pork.”
* My copy of the cookbook (1972) calls for an internal temp of 165. You’ll
notice the one on the website calls for an internal temp of 145. Between
you and I, an internal temp of 130 when removing from the oven is probably
ideal, assuming high quality meat (if the meat is cheap/factory farmed, go
to 145). You’ll get an extra 5-10 degrees in the center after resting.
* The recipe calls for a ~10 pound roast, a whole shoulder or leg. I used a
partial shoulder about half that weight each time. That ran about $40 at
my fancy schmancy butcher, but you’ll obviously get a lot of mileage out
of that much meat.
* He does a thing where you flame the roast with applejack. I forgot to do
this the first time and honestly I’m not sure it made any difference at
all. The second time I forgot to remove my insta-read thermometers before
flaming so now they look like this. Anyway, don’t go out and buy a bottle
of applejack for this recipe.
* If you do a half recipe you’ll likely end up with some blackened apple
cider on the bottom of your pan (there are fewer fat drippings to absorb
heat and keep the cider from steaming and reducing). Don’t panic,
everything is fine. The black bits will stick and stay out of the
drippings you use for the gravy, and you can get them off with some Bon
Ami or Comet after an overnight soak. (To minimize this, go heavier on the
basting, and baste more frequently, early in the cooking, to cool off the
bottom of the pan.)
* Notice how the gravy involves pan juices, heavy cream, butter, and egg
yolks? To pour on your fat laden shoulder roast? Ha ha, delicious heart
disease. Anyway, you can skip the whole last part of the gravy recipe,
where you stir in the yolk(s) and remaining cream. I did this on accident
the first time and frankly I thought the gravy was better. It’s, uh, just
a little heavy with the yolks and extra cream in there.
* If you do a half roast (5 lbs), don’t forget to cut the gravy recipe in
half too!
2. Buttermilk mashed potatoes
The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, Judy Rodgers.
Online recipe
This is one of the top two or three standout recipes in this fantastic
cookbook, along with the famous Zuni Roast Chicken with Bread Salad, the
sublime rosemary roast potatoes, and the wonderful polenta, hanger steak,
short ribs, oxtail, and brasato recipes (among others!) You should buy this
cookbook! “The Practice of Salting Early” section alone is worth the cover
price. If you are a meat eater, it will change your life. Or should, at
least.
Notes:
* The online recipe lists milk and cream/half-and-half. Do milk or cream or
half-and-half, 2-3 tablespoons total.
* Rodgers recommends that the milk/cream/half-and-half (but not the
buttermilk) be hot when mixing in. I achieve this by putting it in a pan
set on the stovetop (not a burner) as the roast cooks in the oven. You’ll
want to add an extra tablespoon or so if you do it this way in case it
reduces.
* Rodgers recommends the butter be just melted. You can microwave or do as
with the milk in the bullet above.
* Rodgers says to serve immediately “or keep warm, covered, in a double
boiler, for up to 30 minutes.” I think it’s actually superior after 10-30
minutes in the double boiler because it will be warmer than if you serve
it straightaway. Also, it greatly reduces the stress of timing the
different courses since now you have a broader window for serving. If you
do the double boiler, it’s easiest to reserve the water you boiled the
potatoes in, since it will already be hot.
* Don’t slack on the whipping, especially after the last addition (butter).
Get the potatoes nice and fluffy! (The potatoes in the image above are
underwhipped.) And make sure there is enough salt in there.
* Did you buy the cookbook yet? Go buy it! The roast chicken and bread salad
are just staggering.
3. Fennel Baked in Stock and Tomato Sauce
Adapted from How To Cook Everything, Mark Bittman.
Online recipe
The strong anise flavor of the fennel stands up well to all the fatty flavor
in the other dishes, as does the tomato sauce.
The original Bittman recipe is just “baked in stock” but I was lacking in
stock so filled around half the required liquid with juice from my whole
canned tomatoes (think San Marzano or Muir Glen). The rest was either stock
and/or water with wine and/or dry vermouth. The recipe is typical of Bittman
- simple, easy, absolutely delicious (buy his cookbook too, if you
haven’t).
Notes:
* Replace half the stock with tomato sauce, such as the juice from a can of
San Marzano whole tomatoes.
* Pretty sure I skipped the Parmesan. You’re, uh, probably getting enough
dairy in the other two dishes.
Eat with a hearty, casual red table wine (Côtes du Rhône, Sangiovese, Syrah,
etc.) or a nice beer. Happy autumn!
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