Sunday 31st March, 2019 #

• What process created the /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend file in Ubuntu? - I'm not entirely sure what's happening here but this stack overlflow page has a unicorn background and the mouse cursor is spewing multi-colored stars out of it, some sort of time travel feature, I like it a lot, I want this type of 90s fun on all the pages!
• Channel 4 News 'regrets' any offence caused after Jon Snow 'white people' remark during pro-Brexit rally reporting - I wonder if people would be as upset if he had said "there aren't very many black people", this is a storm in a tea cup, he clearly was not aiming to say something to marginalise the black community - Dear black people, dear white people, it would be nice if white people were still allowed to talk about white people in the future, without an avalancne falling on your head :), thank you
• Women still snookered by loopy men-only rule in 2019? Give us a break!
• Mark Zuckerberg asks governments to help control internet content
• RSS Is Better Than Twitter

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Saturday 30th March, 2019 #

• Everything I know about freelancing
• GPS Flaw - Security Expert Says He Won't Fly April 6
• May hopes to hold fourth vote on Brexit deal - One unintendd benefit of this whole Brexit process is that journalists are getting really good at these decision flow chart diagrams
• YouTube Exec Denies the Existence of ‘Rabbit Hole Effect’ that Definitely Exists
• Tesla cars keep more data than you think, including this video of a crash that totaled a Model 3
• YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes

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Friday 29th March, 2019 #

• LIVE - Keith Flint funeral and procession
• Panama Canal - I like this idea a lot
• The Prodigy's latest album No Tourists (2018) - "The title was not a reference to immigration or any political message, it refers to the album's theme of escapism. The want and need to be derailed. Don't be a tourist – there is always more danger and excitement to be found if you stray from the set path"
• Keith Flint funeral - The Prodigy fans to line streets
• Russia Orders Major VPN Providers to Block 'Banned' Sites
• Joel Spolksy moves from CEO to chairman of the board at Stack Overlfow - "In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see"

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Thursday 28th March, 2019 #

• How to use Apple Diagnostics on your Mac
• How to investigate high kernel task memory usage?
• The Matrix at 20 - how the sci-fi gamechanger remains influential
• I wonder if it would be possible to do some kind of Gource Visualization of the UK Parliament session, similar to those done for the Unix repo history, I bet this years would look quite different to other years
• "Whips are MPs or Members of the House of Lords appointed by each party in Parliament to help organise their party's contribution to parliamentary business"
• Brexit - May vows to resign before next phase of negotiations if deal is passed
• How to Find Non-Apple Extensions Lingering in Your Mac
• How to Fix Your Mac’s “kernel_task” High CPU Usage Bug
• Spotify is personalizing more playlists to individual users
• Sundar Pichai met with President Trump - "Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google, which uses “president” as a lower rank in its corporate structure. The company has four regional presidents, all of whom report to Pichai. Additionally, Sergey Brin serves as president of Alphabet, Google’s parent company." - this somehow feels like quite an interesting and perhaps unnexpected balance
• The Dreams Of A Man Asleep For Three Weeks - I post about sychologocal manipulations and oh look the very next day (that was yesterday for me) a piece comes across my feeds about long extended dreams that are indistinguishable from reality, what are the chances right?
• Microsoft says encryption laws make companies wary of storing data in Australia
• Cisco Fixes RV320/RV325 Vulnerability by Banning “curl” in User-Agent
• Belief in aliens could be America’s next religion - I don't think that the idea propsed here is all that far fetched but for different reasons - the chances of actual aliens arriving are very very slim, the nearest star systems are just too far away and light speed travel is likely not possible, but as is clear from the recent EU copyright laws coming into place, certain groups want to ensure that they remain in control of things, and by creating copyright laws you move the power from the corporations into much longer lasting structures, the next logical and even more stable structure is to bake something similar into religion type structures, these tend to last for hundreds and up to thousands of years, so a technology based religion makes a lot of sense, whether it's a good idea for humanity as a whole is something else, is there more freedom in tech (and future tech) than religion? The other thing that's actually quite likely is illusions created for psychological manipulation, certainly much more likely than aliens, but I could of course be wrong, might be kind of neat if there was an alien space ship orbiting earth - Another thought on this, thinking optimistically about humanities intensions, it might be worth spending some time encoding the shapes of the useful design patterns we have discovered in these recent years into stories that last like folklore and mythology, I wouldn't be all that suprised if we found a lot of these already in some of the stories, if the aliens were here in ancient times, that's probably what they would have done :)
• Apple’s news subscription service doesn’t have a lot of news

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Wednesday 27th March, 2019 #

• EU cannot betray 'increasing majority' who want UK to remain, says Tusk - It's always a bit difficult to get a clear picture of how things are going down in the EU Parliament, there is always such an under current of vielled hostility and general nastiness which is probably made worse by all the simultaneous translations happening, so everything is happening at an awkward rhythm, but having said that it is nice to hear some of the EU representatives say somrhing that makes me think they are seing the British as actual people rather than some numbers on a ballance sheet
• PM Modi announces India's successfully shoots down satellite in space - Cool thing to be able to do but given the catastrpohic possibility that a space debris chain reaction accident could happen during such an exercise I'm suprised this is being heralded as the next thing coutries are going to be trying to achieve in their space exploration journey, from what I've read such an accident could permanently ground the entire human race since we have no way to clean up a floating mess of tiny objects stuck in orbit
• Facebook to Fight Belgian Ban on Tracking Users (and Even Non-Users)
• Facebook rolls out 'Whitehat Settings' to help bug hunters analyze traffic in its mobile apps
• Restricting process CPU usage using nice, cpulimit, and cgroups
• Oxford college to investigate its own role in colonialism - I'm interested in this project because I'd like to get a better understanding of colonialism but in the context of the time period, I keep seing commentary about it but often it seems to compare and judge things that occurred in reference to how things are today, and given the amount of accelerating progess that has happened in recent times, that often isn't a fair way of looking at the past
• BBC pulls its podcasts from Google Podcasts and Assistant - It's all about robots.txt files this week
• I have resolved most of the prolems I was having with WebStorm broken features from yesterday, though the periodic slow downs are still occuring, when this happens the only thing you can do is wait often for 20-30 mins - We need better tools to see were resources are being used during slow downs, using htop and activity monitor doesn't show anything even when the whole system is in "slow motion mode"
• I can't figure out how to link to a specific comment in a Hacker News post, maybe I'm missing something here, but it would be nice to be able to link to a comment directly in the thread, because there are some really excellent comments that need to be read in context
• The culture war at the heart of open source - The article predicts a looming fracture of the ecosystem, I think there is much movement towards change, not sure a fracture as described would be beneficial but I could very well be wrong about this, the tea leaves in this swirl of the spoon are very far from settled at this point
• How to build your own CDN with Kubernetes - A neat idea, but the article sort of illustrates the issues I have with kubernetes, essentially it's a rolling ball of complexity that just seems to get bigger and bigger

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Tuesday 26th March, 2019 #

• Well I upgraded Webstorm to their newest and shiniest release and was quite hopeful at first, everything seemed very fast and crisp, then after a few hours noticed a few crucial features are broken, and now the whole UI has gone into slow motion mode again, even something as simple as opening the preferences is almost undoable - Bad software costs lives and so do bad people
• EU lawmakers voted to adopt new copyright rules - Pretty crappy result, I'm trying to find a way to see this in a positive light, maybe it's just a temporary shield until the EU internet tech sector develops more broadly with it's own identity, but also it's kind of dangerous because the old guard now have the power to squash new talent, is it harder to displace a massive multi-national government bureaucracy where lobbying and (propably) corruption is present or a set a multi-national corporations? At least with the corporations there is the chance of competition - If the shield is so effective that startups can't start, then what good is it, the real world equivalent of banning internet linking is banning talking or perhaps even thinking, IMO none of which are a good idea - Also I'd like to see an example of a law that doesn't get through the EU parilament, it's rather clear that it passes any law that the old guard wants, and disreguards the will of the regular people
• Huge Protests Across Europe Protest Article 13; Politician Lies And Claims They Were Paid To Be There - It's great that so many people are out protesting the proposed stupid copyright laws, but calling people "insane" so quickly is misguided, we are talking about such huge sums of money over many years that actually it's not that far fetched to think large multi-national companies would pay protesters (IMO), calling people insane is a sign of laziness - Let's keep the internet open for all but also think about what type of internet we want, do we want just a few massive corporations controlling everything?
• Brexit - MPs vote to take control of Brexit process for indicative votes
• Handsontable drops open source for a non-commercial license - Another example of companies struggling to put together offerings based on the open source software model
• Apple debuts Apple TV+ and Apple TV Channels for cord-cutters, integrated into TV app
• Apple launches $9.99 Apple News Plus with more than 300 magazines

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Monday 25th March, 2019 #

• Is ad blocking past 2 billion worldwide? - "Customers have proven their value by using these tools"
• Russian air force planes land in Venezuela carrying troops
• One Page Love - One Page websites, templates and resources
• Why I Switched from Python to Clojure
• Your Cortex Contains 17 Billion Computers - Neural networks of neural networks

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Sunday 24th March, 2019 #

• The Prodigy fans invited to line Keith Flint's funeral procession route - I hadn't heard of the death until just now, barely a few hours after posting about Brexit and rave, what are the chances of that happening in a normal world? Zero - The Prodigy was one of the first bands that got me listening to electronic music, I really bloody hated Gilted Generation at first, but then little bit little I started to like the sounds and the rhythms, now it's one of my favourite all time albums, I don't listen to it very often, a bit like a smart suit you keep for Sunday best
• And so the remainers are like ok we have an issue here, what can we do? And then as if by the heavens from above something emerged - You thought e's were good, well now we have a new drug, better than e's, better than cake, double the amount of letters, and so much more love, the new drug that's going to make everything SO much better is AI, it's going to be brill, for reals init mate
• iTerm2 Python API - Makes it easy to write Python scripts that control iTerm2 and extend its behaviour - Looks like it's Javascript for the browser and Python for the shell, might be time to dust off those Python books, just another language to fit into my head
• I don't know if this analogy is accurate or even useful, but maybe the whole EU thing is a bit like a rave, there are a lot of people having a wonderful time and it's clearly brilliant, and there are also a load of people that sort of want the rave to finish, and the remainers are like yeah come of man just one more song, and the others are like yeah but like your rave has been going now for fifty years and we can see you're clearly having a great time and there are all these lovely people from different nations, but we're having to constantly clean up all the mess and now your children are ravers and I just don't know what to say anymore, we just want to leave
• Brexit march - German-born vet Chris Reichmann, described it as a "carnival" atmosphere - with "lots of different nationalities" but "really British in a way"
• Based on this article from Dec 2018 Edge will be available on the Mac - "Microsoft is now bringing Edge to the Mac. We understand it’s not a move designed to grab more market share specifically; it’s more about making it easier for developers to test Edge."
• A first look at Microsoft’s new Chromium-powered Edge browser - I like that Microsoft OS now has an open source web browser, still looks very Chromish at this point, I wonder if I will be able to run it on OSX?
• Plastic buckets, broken printers shine light on Hanoi's poor - Practical, affordable and renewable with short term benefits, hopefully there is a longer term plan aswell
• An Introduction to Web Components - 5 part series that looks quite interesting covers the basics and how to integrate with major frameworks like Angular, Vue and React
• Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday - Looks interesting though I'm not sure that paying game developers directly for taking up people's time is such a good idea
• Kind of strange: For the past 15 mins my code repository wouldn't load in Safari, a browser I started using about a week ago and said so on the linkblog, the repo loaded fine in other browsers, I also tested using Safari with a different user agent set and it still didn't load, then it started loading again, I didn't change anything on my laptop during this, worth making a note of the event here
• More than 100,000 Europeans march against #Article13

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Saturday 23rd March, 2019 #

• Italy joins China's New Silk Road project - Pretty interesting development, there is a long history of trade with the East from cities like Pisa, Genoa and Venice since around 1000 years, but I think those trade routes have not been as active in recent years, it makes sense that Italy would lead here, they have a lot of experience in this region
• US removes North Korea sanctions - “President Trump likes Chairman Kim Jong Un and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary”
• For the past 3 days, Webstorm has been maxing out all my processor cores the UI becomes unusable, then when I check after a few seconds the processors stop being utilised, it's like the drones at the airport in the UK a few months back - I note that this started happening right after I posted about free software devils and the KJU army
• 'Fromage not Farage' - the best placards on the People's Vote march
• Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes
• Wakaliwood Film Ramon Film Productions - AHHHH! BAD BLACK Cooming May 14, 2019 !!
• Uganda’s Tarantino and his $200 action movies
• The social bookmarking platform Pinterest files for its IPO
• How Twitter's algorithm is amplifying extreme political rhetoric - It's an interesting feature that Twitter is trying out, it has the potential of being beneficial to users, but jamming in stuff into the main timeline is quite offensive and distracting, if it was more like the news ticker info that scrolls past on TV news that would be better, and a way to notify the Twitter algorithm that it's selection sucks would also be good

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Friday 22nd March, 2019 #

• Japan, the place with the strangest drug debate in the world - The article title is a bit hyperbolic but it's a pretty well written piece
• The MPAA says streaming video has surpassed cable subscriptions worldwide
• Anti-Muslim Hate Has Been Rampant on Reddit Since the New Zealand Shooting
• How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim - What kind of vim wizardry is this?
• European Wikipedias have been turned off for the day to protest dangerous copyright laws
• Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years - I still find it really bonkers that any one company could have 200 million customers, and Facebook has a lot more than that

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Thursday 21st March, 2019 #

• Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money - It seems to me that a lot of the money is in consulting, customisation, fixing things etc, which could be an issue because in the long term there is potentially a disincentive to making good quality software because for all the people doing the consulting, customisation and fixing, it's advantageous if things don't work quite right so they can come in and do what they do, in the worst case endlessly - But open source and free software is a net benefit to society so it's quite a complicated situation
• Norwegian phones sent personal information to China
• Facebook Messenger now has message threads
• New Paid Apple News Service Said to Feature Wall Street Journal - As iPhone sales start to decrease they are getting more involved with service products delivered via apps, looks like they will be competing more with people on their platform
• Chrome is to start bundling some javascript libraries in it's browser, could be interesting though it relies on web developers to correctly implement polyfills or sites will break in non-Chrome browsers
• Donald Tusk - EU will only back short Brexit delay if May’s deal passes - What happened to John Bercow's decision to not allow a 3rd vote, I guess the EU folks are just going to overrule/ignore that
• Another perhaps naive question, does KJU get to vote in the no-choice election?
• This is perhaps a naive question, but in a world where there is only free software, who writes the software, Is it everyone or just some people?

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Wednesday 20th March, 2019 #

• Install Fests - What to Do about the Deal with the Devil - I like this idea, one thing to think about is that the person has a way to remember the details of the conversation they actually have with the devil, in the moment it can be quite intimidating to meet the devil, even if he is quite a nice chap - Also at least there is an exit door, hopefully it's a real door, though even a fake door might be better than no door - it does remind me little of Kim Jong-Un's no-choice election, sure you can cross out the selection box on the ballot paper, but then what happens to you, well the KJU army happens to you - One more thought on this idea: perhaps there should be a computing devil on the outside of the conference as well
• We’re Asking the Wrong Questions of YouTube and Facebook After New Zealand - I don't like that the killers were able to stream what they did live on the internet, but I'm also uncomfortable that all these videos got blocked when people were trying to upload them, I imagine that if I were muslim I would be thinking that I would want people to know that an attack really happened, but how could I do that if all the platforms were blocking the video uploads? The reason there were so many uploads is because there was so much blocking, clearly after a few hundred videos uploaded and findable by search people would stop uploading them
• Opera adds unlimited VPN service to its Android browser for free - Quite an interesting move for a browser to make for the Norwegian company, I wonder how much it costs to run such a service, hopefully you can opt-out and/or choose another VPN service provider
• Google hit with €1.5bn fine from EU over advertising
• How the Guardian Went Digital - I find it interesting that news organisations are quite similar to software development companies that run agile methodologies with the daily morning meetings - it was similar to the VFX companies I've worked in where we watched the daily rushes together every morning - One thing that was different, it always felt to me like a lot more tension in the software companies daily stands - I wonder if it has something to to with the different type of entanglements the various groups are disentangling

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Tuesday 19th March, 2019 #

• Programmer migration patterns - I enjoyed reading this piece a lot more than I thought I would, the author somehow manages to buzz from place to place with rather elegant ease, dropping in just at the right moment, in the right place, with the right amount of words, neatly avoiding hazardous dead ends and dangerous cliff edges - Overall you get a pretty good view of one person's prespective of how things have been for the past few decades in programming without getting bogged down, and you come away with a rather clear structure for thinking about all the various languages, yet at the same time an appreciation that a lot of things have past, a lot of water has run under a lot of bridges
• Public disgrace - 82% of EU govt websites stalked by Google adtech cookies - Rather shocking, how is it possible that no one, not one single person thought to check this before GDPR got setup?
• Chinese goths post selfies in protest after subway incident - I didn't know there was a goth scene in China, when I was there it was mostly hip hop playing in the bars and clubs
• Grime music is being 'stifled', MPs say - It's good to see that politicians are getting involved in music culture, listen to the music, look at the society, try to make things better, put down knives and violence and find a way to live together, and make good and interesting and diverse music
• Russia's Putin Signs Into Law Bills Banning 'Fake News,' Insults - Quite hefty fines for individuals, public officials and companies that are deemed to have violated the laws, it's unclear to me whether it's the user or the platform or both that have to pay the fines
• Update on New Zealand
• If You Think Big Internet Companies Are Somehow To Blame For The New Zealand Massacre, You're Wrong
• Brexit - The House of Commons Speaker John Bercow rules out third meaningful vote on same deal
• Facebook's local news project frustrated – by lack of local newspapers

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Monday 18th March, 2019 #

• Head Technician - Escape - Goes pretty well as the background track to the previous Pulp Fiction link
• Pulp Fiction (Adrenaline)
• Dick Dale, godfather of surf guitar, dies aged 81 - A lot of guitar related news this week, Dick Dale was the guy who wrote the Pulp Fiction theme tune, also broke lots of amplifiers because of his remarkable playing style
• I can confirm that anonymous cowards entering my room while I am asleep and stealing my cutlery is definitely a problem, how do I know? Because I used said cutlery last thing before going to sleep and when I awoke this morning, the cutlery was gone - update: I found the cutlery, it was very literally hiding in plain site! All apologies to anonymous cowards, this cutlery based incident was not your fault
• Dutch PM compares Theresa May to Monty Python limbless knight - The analogy isn't all that good really, though she continues to take beatings, she isn't in any way saying that 'it's a draw', the whole saga is an illustration of how much it isn't a draw, it's a window on how the EU is structured and operates, it's the only platform at that level available in the region, and consequently it behaves intolerably
• Vim anti-patterns - A lot of very useful navigation and editing shortcuts
• Microsoft releases Application Guard extension for Chrome and Firefox - Automatically open non-trusted websites in a container sandbox where they can't access user data and the main OS

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Sunday 17th March, 2019 #

• Found this video yesterday, it dates from the crisis 10 years ago, it's something else, not sure how to describe it, rarely have I seen a person dissipate so much energy
• Jean Claude Junker is actually an old Alan Partridge - It must be this timeline, it's the same as the usual timeline only presidential candidates are punk rock hackers and it's also fast forwarded by about 30 years, I wonder what else is weird in this timeline?
• Brexit and the week that all but broke British politics
• The Smashing Pumpkins - Return of the Gish Guitar
• Nice Register Headline - "You're now in a timeline in which US presidential hopeful Beto was a member of a legendary hacker crew" - He was also a punk rock musician!
• 'Bunga bunga' model Imane Fadil's death investigated
• Rafael Nadal withdraws from Roger Federer semi-final with knee injury
• generative.fm - A platform for playing generative music in the browser
• Generative.fm - Endlessly unique ambient music - Not sure how I feel about this type of technology, it does seems very cool, I like the music but what happens if you get stuck inside it?
• Spotify Community Forum - Spotify Progressive Web App
• I find it super interesting that the EU Commission is being asked by Spotify to step in and adjudicate in it's issues with the Apple platform at the very same time the EU platform is embroiled in the Brexit saga
• Spotify launches a website called Time to Play Fair, where it outlined its complaints against Apple - It's a really lovely website, I'm wondering now if they could use their web development skills to help push PWAs forward
• Spotify responds to Apple, calling it a ‘monopolist’
• Facebook faces fresh questions over when it knew of data harvesting - "Facebook have tried to avoid telling the truth through these evasive responses to lawmakers. And Cambridge Analytica have tried to do it through insolvency"
• The Shortest-Lived Independent Country in History

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Saturday 16th March, 2019 #

• 9 steps to washing your hair less
• Command to list permission of file and all folders from root to the file's path
• One starts to get the feeling that there will be an infinite amount of road blocks for the UK as it leaves the EU - Seriously how is it even possible, just based on probability that such an obstacle course of nightmares could have been setup by accident? Leaving the EU has reached Shawshank Redemption / Escape from Alcatraz level of difficulty, expect the members of parliament to start wearing super heroes costumes in the coming months as the whole thing turns into some sort of comic book epic
• Digesting Apple's response to Spotify - A piece that attempts to illustrate point by point why Apple’s response to Spotify was full of double speak

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Friday 15th March, 2019 #

• Capitalisation Rules - I'm surprised by how many rules there are
• The Decivilization of Venezuela - An interesting angle on civilisation and the horrible situation in Venezuela
• Brexit vote result - UK to ask EU to delay withdrawal until at least June after MPs back Article 50 extension
• After the porn ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised - Traffic has dropped by 30%
• US to build six nuclear power plants in India
• Apple - Addressing Spotify’s claims

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Thursday 14th March, 2019 #

• Brexit video hiphop mashup - "Her last deal was the chronic"
• Google launches Android Q Beta 1 - A lot of cool looking features, if anything it feels a little unfocused to me, so many new things in so many areas - Last time I tried an Android device I was really impressed by a lot of things but in the end it didn't do the basic things right, I never figured out how to sync my pictures/video/music with iTunes and iPhotos, so I switched back to iOS after many months of frustration, I wonder if that's fixed now?
• MPs reject no-deal Brexit entirely in one of the most pointless votes in the history of elections
• Stuff - Create awesome invitations to small and large events - Simple alternative to Facebook events
• V8 v7.4 now supports JavaScript execution without allocating executable memory at runtime (JIT-less V8) - Good for platforms that prohibit write access to executable memory such as iOS, smart TVs, game consoles, also good for high security applications

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Wednesday 13th March, 2019 #

• How Japan is helping pensioners stay happy and have fun
• Why is no one signing their emails?
• Researchers find trapdoor in SwissVote election system - "Of course, if someone did want to introduce an opportunity for manipulation, the best method would be one that could be explained away as an accident if it was found"
• Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker - A really good writeup of moving a personal infrastructure to running on Docker, this makes it seem almost feasible, usually the number of rabbit holes multiplies exponentially as I read these Docker HowTos
• Outage.Report - Brings together outage reports of various companies that provide online services

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Tuesday 12th March, 2019 #

• UK and other EU countries ban Boeing 737 Max planes after Ethiopia crash - The crash last October in Indonesia where all passengers died was the same model plane
• The Firefox Send implementation is kind of neat, uses the Web Crypto API to generate a key, encrypt the file, then stores the key in the file’s url hash fragment, and since browsers don’t send hash fragments to the server, only the recipient gets the decryption key in the url the sender sends to them
• Introducing Firefox Send, Providing Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private
• The Last Play-For-Cash Fascination Parlour
• The Blogging Mindset
• NGINX acquired by F5 Networks ($670 million)
• Apple expected to launch streaming video and news subscription services at an event on 25th March
• Traduora - Open source translation platform for teams, self host on your own servers or choose from several hosted plans
• EU eyes cash demands as Brexit talks turn sour

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Monday 11th March, 2019 #

• It occurred to me that perhaps meanness / being mean is a group activity, so I looked it up and it turns out that what meanness means has actually changed quite a bit over the years from the greeks to the present day
• "The arithmetic mean, also called the mathematical expectation or average, is the central value of a discrete set of numbers - specifically, the sum of the values divided by the number of values"
• I've read several reviews of the new Ricky Gervais show After Life, I think it looks really interesting, there's this odd anticipation about it, a bit like when you're about to go for a swim in the North Atlantic, you know it will be good but also that it's going to be really bloody nippy, and also maybe this part of the Atlantic is the bit you're not meant to swim in, even though no such bit exists, it feels like such a bit might in fact exist, and actually maybe it would make more sense to just go and have a warm bath instead - these aren't regular feelings I get when watching a show trailer, I'm curious to know what it is that is causing me to feel this way in this case, perhaps that's why it looks interesting, and actually I'd also kind of like to know what it's like to be mean all the time, worth remembering that other shows about being mean all the time are probably available
• How-To - Your own dynamic DNS server (with PowerDNS & a MySQL backend)
• Using Let’s Encrypt for internal servers
• Google releases Bolo, a speech recognition app that helps Indian kids learn to read
• French Tech Visa for Employees - France has updated it's visa policies for tech workers, and the new policies look rather attractive
• Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Apple, Amazon and Google as they are acting anti-competitively because they hold all the data to the store they are selling in and they can prefer their own products over others - “Either they run the platform or they play in the store”
• Prometheus - Open-source monitoring solution
• Grafana - The open platform for beautiful analytics and monitoring

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Sunday 10th March, 2019 #

• Thousands of Russians protest against internet restrictions
• Bob Ross through Google's DeepDream - Really f-ing trippy as fuck
• Ethiopian Airlines plane crash - All 157 people on board the flight have died
• MongoDB no longer seeks OSI approval for SSPL
• North Koreans vote in 'no-choice' parliamentary elections - I'm faced with the possibility that the entire country of North Korea might be a satire / fake country, probably not the case, the BBC could be a satire / fake news organisation, or perhaps there is some missing information that would make this interpretation of how elections work more clear, because at least to me, a no choice election does not make sense
• Behind the Hype of Apple's Plan to End Mining - What those in the sustainability community call a “circular economy” - I wonder how those in sustainability avoid circular logic, if they have theories for entire economies that are circular then that might effect their reasoning at a more basic level, on the other hand maybe they would become better than others at spotting it, just thinking out loud
• ArchiveBox - The open source self-hosted web archive - Looks like a really interesting archive solution
• The Sharing Economy Was Always a Scam
• The one line of thinking that I can think of that might support Zuck's idea of privacy for groups for the masses, is that by making privacy groups available to everyone and anyone, the whole of society will share the results (good or bad), if only a select few can use privacy groups tech (current situation) then it's the rest of society that have to pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong
• Machines reading your emotions - Seems to me that we are building tech to insert algorithms as intermediaries into the most basic of human functions, at that level the dangers are multiplied, surely the most obvious is that people will just stop using their face as a method of communicating since the ephemeral nature of face based communication has been replaced by machines that never forget, also people that are trying to deceive others now have a fantastic training machine where they can repeatedly verify that their faked facial expressions are good enough, and these systems are being touted as beneficial to society? No doubt a tool soon to be added to Zuck's new Face book stalker privacy groups
• Facebook Just Shoplifted Snapchat’s Best Idea

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Saturday 9th March, 2019 #

• Looked and didn't find any full length Airwolf episodes on youtube, but in retrospect given how much I loved that theme tune, it's pretty obvious that I was always going to be very into electronic music, I just had to get through heavy metal, hard rock and grunge, then bust out of the "only music created by actual musical instruments in bands is real music" mindset, I still like all the music from my early years, but I also like so many other musical genres now too, but it took a lot of years
• Transcript leak - Inside Facebook's secret crisis meeting, where Zuck and Sheryl race to save social network's rep - After reading this I'm like shit maybe the fucking Register is a satire / fake news site, oh well in any case the article is a good read though
• Chelsea Manning - Wikileaks source jailed for refusing to testify
• Jan-Michael Vincent, star of Airwolf and The Winds of War, dies at 74 - I used to watch Airwolf a lot when I was young, I still remember the theme tune all these years later, as soon as the song started I was glued to the TV set for the next 30 mins, on planet Airwolf, on a mission, dang those guys were the coolest
• How to live and travel full-time by RV
• The Map to Nowhere - Intellectual denial of service attacks, part 2
• The Register's article about the Dutch government cookie wall GDPR story is not behind a cookie wall
• Dutch data protection agency says that blanket “cookie walls” that require visitors to accept all the cookies before accessing a site, violate GDPR, TechCrunch writes a story about it and puts the story behind a cookie wall
• Your computer hard-drive can be turned into an eavesdropping mic, good enough to recognise human speech and even music via shazam
• SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashes Down after Historic Test Flight - Glad to hear that the mission was accomplished successfully, I'm struck by the accuracy that is required for these missions, for example once demo1 completes it's missions, they have validated the design and 1 instance of building the spaceship, but don't they then have to run the same tests on demo2 the astronaut carrying vehicle? How can they be sure that the build is an exact replica? There are so many moving parts
• ink - React for interactive command-line apps
• Switching to variable fonts

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Friday 8th March, 2019 #

• Skepta - Man (Official Video) - I'm really into this track, it's a fucking tune, on the other hand I'm really not into gangs, and I'd like someone to tell me how Facebook privacy gangs is not going to create a secret encrypted Skepta holocaust, that's not a world I want to live in
• I just spent 40 hours in the past 4 days in buses, all day yesterday I was seated in the front seat so quite nice views
• Facebook’s Privacy Cake - I haven't decided if I think Facebook's move into the privacy groups space is a net benefit for all, I worry that there will be a sharp rise in gang stalking, which we now know happens - I think empowering the individual is a net benefit, giving people a bit of space to develop themselves, empowering secret groups on the other hand could be quite dangerous
• Facebook finds UK-based 'fake news' network

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Tuesday 5th March, 2019 #

• Worst internet connectivity I've had for ages, sites load then they don't load, then they do, just spent 3 hours sinking deeper into quicksand, blocked in every direction in the internet and out of it, maybe this is how it all ends
• Ronnie O'Sullivan in bizarre 'Australian' interview at Players Championship - Thought I'd try to squeeze out a link while I still have some internet connectivity, connection keeps getting cut off / blocked, haven't even been able to read this Ronnie O'Sullivan link because the page never loads, but from the headline it looks like it could be interesting - Finally loaded, bonza interview mate

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Monday 4th March, 2019 #

• Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today - Thought it would be interesting to post something that is for once pro-Trump, most of what comes across my feeds is very anti-Trump, I didn't watch the speech, but from the write up, which isn't totally one sided, seems like it was a rather good one
• NASA Wants to Place a Space Station in a Weird Orbit - It's an orbit that goes around the dark side of the moon

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Sunday 3rd March, 2019 #

• The promise and peril of "signification" - Just skip to the end, you know they'll just want to hijack right into your brain eventually, bypassing all those annoying intermediaries, personally I would be quite into a movement to regress back to the bygone tech golden age of the digital watch era
• France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants
• Intellectual denial of service attacks - Difficult to know whether or not to comment on this, I'm going to not comment :)
• SpaceX Dragon capsule docks with space station - Looks like commercial space flight has begun
• 25+ Photos of Celebrities Posing with Their Younger Selves
• Saudi Arabia has a government app which lets men track women and control their travel, including sms messages when passport is used, individual travel bans - Google has refused to remove the app from the Play store - Does make you wonder how much all the SoftBank investments influence policy in SV
• Square Inc. Co-Founder Tristan O’Tierney Dies at 35
• NITCH NOTES

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Saturday 2nd March, 2019 #

• Given how respectful asians are of their leaders, it must really blow their minds the way we report on our western leaders, I mean how would this sort of article even make any sense to them? Ideas that might seem really far fetched to westerners might seem very plausible, like for instance the idea that Donald Trump isn't really the president of the USA, that would enable the bonkers reporting to fit into their view of the world, but then the question quickly becomes is KJU really the leader of North Korea?
• Redesigning Github repository page - I pretty much agree with all of the proposed changes, especially the navigation, I too can never find the stupid releases tab, also full length clone link - yes, but I don't like his repository overview, I like having that whole section just the files, and in fact I wish there was a better file browser something like the octotree browser plugin
• The Beatles - absolutely wonderful recording studio "bloopers" - This made me smile, also I'm really into the fun use of text fonts in the video
• Great Essays and Essayists
• Space Force will not be the military branch that repels an alien invasion
• Live feed for the SpaceX Crew demo-1 mission launch, about 30 mins until lift off
• America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the ’80s - "software that runs on a dead programming language and can’t be used with a mouse" - It's actually pretty amazing that some of these systems are still functional, that would never happen these days
• I wonder if there is some well know feature of technology and perhaps even just a general thing that happens in life, that every route eventually turns into a cul-de-sac where you are forced to take some risky manoeuvre - Currently I am being forced into several unwanted upgrades, re-installs, and logins, and troubleshooting always seems to lead to yet more unwanted upgrades, re-installs and logins
• Remote Packet Capture for iOS devices
• Bangkok to Chiang Mai by train - I've also done this exact journey, really enjoyable trip, the stops are worth the extra few days travel, there is such a lot of interesting history in this part of the world, plus trains are a fun way to get around
• The rebirth of Ipoh Old Town - Another great trip report by James Clark, I really like his laid back and down to earth style, and because the reviews are structured as a photowalk it often feels like you are walking around town while learning a bit about the history and architecture of the location

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Friday 1st March, 2019 #

• Vim.dev is redirected to Emacs website
• I hadn't heard that Apple had transitioned to App based Safari extensions - Maybe that's the reason the browser is so much faster? Main problem I'm having now is that all the extensions are complaining that they won't work until I upgrade my OS - I really fucking hate forced upgrades, apart from being extremely fucking rude, they show profound disrespect of users, they are dangerous and risky - There is no point in having multiple browsers if transitioning between them breaks everything, we might as well just have 1 OS and 1 browser and live like robots (because presumably robots don't have much choice, but I could be wrong about that, I don't know much about robots)
• Reddit starts experiment of a money tipping feature
• YouTube to disable comments on almost all videos involving minors - It would be useful for sites that frequently link to youtube videos if it was possible to see the on/off status of comments from the url
• Node.js Meetups - This is a list of Node.js meetups

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