Various fixes 4

In preparing for the webinar this Wednesday I'm sure I'll run into some bugs.  Collecting them here.
I find this to a bit confusing. Is this taking a string and turning it into a string? I know it's taking one resource and turning it into another it's just that my expectation of `into` is that I can simply look at the type signature and tell *what* it's doing (not necessarily *how* it's being done). In this case type information isn't enough, since you need to know something about the string itself to be able to tell what's happening. Not sure what can be done about this except documenting this behavior explicitly. An example in the docstring might be nice too, if it doesn't require too much setup.