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Wednesday 31st July, 2019 #

  • C++20 is feature complete; here’s what changes are coming - honestly I zoned out after a few paragraphs of this article, but I’m linking to it because it probably is quite a good article, but also I really like the website design, it’s like dark mode but really readable, on my iOS device the text size is just right so the right amount of words fit on the screen and the contrast works really well especially against the links, there isn’t any clutter - one day maybe I’ll get back into C++, it’s an important language so it’s good to see it’s progressing
  • I hadn’t heard of the Data Transfer Project, an open source project to move data between cloud providers, but it looks interesting and Apple has just officially joined, data portability is a good idea, hopefully it’s not just for the giants
  • Facebook Closer to Augmented Reality Glasses With Brain Implant That Decodes Dialogue From Neural Activity - typescript for your head meh can’t say I’m all that into it, apparently typescript also cures weird debilitating illnesses
  • We'll block trade deal if Brexit imperils open Irish border says US - the US has been a player for a long time and still makes a lot of cool things, but the action in years to come might be shifting to other emerging markets
  • KaiOS which is the os on the Jio phones has the spidermonkey javascript engine built in, and appears to be based on Firefox os - I’m still unsure what the default browser installed on the phone is, some of the information I’ve read online is a bit confusing
  • Jio Phone Review - This is the phone that is becoming very popular in India at the minute, it’s not as flashy as a smart phone but it has an internet connection and importantly it has a web browser which means linkblog is accessible - I wonder what type of browser it’s running, and if the browser has a javascript engine
  • Learn a little jq, awk and sed - A post that fits in very nicely with the Stripe article link from earlier
  • Chrome 76 arrives with Flash blocked by default, detecting Incognito mode disabled, and PWA improvements
  • A look at how Stripe uses what they call “canonical log lines” in their stack to get visibility into how their system is operating - I’m struck by how much similarity there is with some of the logging I’ve setup on linkblog, of course they have developed their system with several additional levels of functionality, but it highlights how important logging is in running s saas
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Tuesday 30th July, 2019 #

  • Reasons why using bash set -e is considered bad by a lot of people, there is an allegory that attempts to illustrate the problem - nevertheless some people still find set -e useful
  • The Hottest Phones for the Next Billion Users Aren’t Smartphones - I’d love to test out linkblog on some of the phones mentioned in this article, probably the pages would render quite fast since it’s only text, not sure if bookmarklet would work to make posting links easier, in any case I would be so incredibly happy if I ever had a customer that was a mango, avocado and lychee street vendor sharing links to Hindi music and movies on YouTube
  • How the west got china's social credit system wrong - it’s interesting that one of the big surprises to the officials implementing the system was the attention that the system has gotten from the west, how long until the people setting the system up realise they too could fall into one of the cracks and maybe never get out? On the other hand if they don’t build it then the people currently stuck in the cracks will eventually so they sort of have to - might be a better idea to get people out of the cracks first, otherwise the competing systems will ensure people in cracks stay in cracks, and eventually everyone will be stuck in a crack
  • Influencers are unhappy that Instagram is getting rid of likes - there are no likes on Linkblog :)
  • GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea and Crimea - Having to be concerned about government sanctions seems like it shouldn’t need to be a factor that developers should have to be concerned about, self hosting just got more attractive
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Monday 29th July, 2019 #

  • The 7 best YouTube channels for freelancers
  • This made me smile a bit, and then sigh, I wonder if they had something that was as annoying and useful as email in their day
  • New Issue: nvm install crashes bash script when bash is set to exit on error
  • TypeScript is a waste of time - probably quite a controversial point of view, but I think some of the points raised in the article are worth considering, personally I quite like boring javascript, arrow functions meh occasionally, promises meh sometimes on the frontend, typescript meh it adds a lot of clutter with not that much in return, although I guess it probably depends on the code base
  • The Creams - Let's (Justin Van Der Volgen Dub Version) (My Rules, US) (2016)
  • Boris Johnson is focusing on the Union - I like this approach, wouldn’t it be great if we took what we learnt from Brexit to build a better little Union - What would that look like? Presumably it would be easier to leave? Perhaps easier to join?
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Sunday 28th July, 2019 #

  • Elon Musk says that Teslas will soon be able to stream Netflix and YouTube
  • Dish is about to become the 4th US carrier, this piece profiles Charlie Ergen the billionaire behind the company
  • A look at Oliver Schusser who lead iTunes international operations for 15 and now is in charge of Apple Music - I think the hands off approach they took to podcasting is what resulted in a wonderful ecosystem developing, and it's interesting to learn what other avenues they have been pursuing when it comes to the music side of the business
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Saturday 27th July, 2019 #

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Sunday 21st July, 2019 #

  • Comedian Reenacts The Way Actresses In Old-Timey Movies Would Talk To Men They Had Just Met
  • Apollo 11 - Buzz Aldrin greeted by cheers on moon landing's 50th anniversary - I quite liked this unnexpected description of the Apollo 11 command module - "It’s like entering the Sistine Chapel and seeing the ceiling. You want to just sit there and take it in"
  • Writing a lunar lander game for an actual lunar lander
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Saturday 20th July, 2019 #

  • Mostly posting this because of the very excellent domain name, but the stunnel hack is pretty neat too
  • Interesting factoid - Drug cartels use the serial numbers on dollar bills as ciphers to prove identity and also as delivery receipts for cash/drug courtier drops, each party keeps 1/2 of the note
  • After creating another arrive, the calendar is updated again, but it's still missing some entries
  • There is some sort of wierd delay going on because even though I have posted several messages, they are not showing in the archives, and the calenar page now no longer shows the latest archives again...very wierd
  • Now that I posted my last post, the archives have started showing in the calendar!
  • The internet archive appears to be having issues today, I have run a backup severl times but they don't show up in the calendar view
  • I can confirm that Mac nightmares are in fact very very real
  • Mac nightmares - 7 Mac Startup Options Every OS X User Should Know
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Friday 19th July, 2019 #

  • Tetris Effect review – makes your skin tingle and your mind hum - I don’t play a lot of games, actually I don’t ever play any games, but I used to and I played a lot of Tetris when I was young, this version of Tetris re-imagined looks like some next level type stuff, maybe the nightmares are a bit more enjoyable
  • We are in the middle of a housing crisis – it’s time to bring back rent controls (in the UK)
  • Some quite staggering PHP stats - around 74% of PHP sites online are running on an end of life version of the runtime and need to upgrade to continue to get security fixes - A large proportion of the worlds websites run on PHP
  • Twitter’s Redesign Isn’t About You - I think the biggest news is that it’s a PWA, that’s pretty cool
  • HN Thread discussing the Kazakhstan MITM of all https traffic
  • WeWork Co-Founder Has Cashed Out at Least $700 Million Via Sales, Loans - It’s rather mind boggling all the things that become possible once you are running a large profitable company, seems like a completely different world
  • Kazakhstan government is now intercepting all HTTPS traffic
  • Polly.js - Record, Replay, and Stub HTTP Interactions - I use nock for this in server-side integration tests but this library also works on the client and the interface looks quite intuitive
  • The fundamental right to seek asylum
  • Backpacker, Go Home - How Tourism Is Ruining Everything (or Not)
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Thursday 18th July, 2019 #

  • Midway through reading this article about Brexit Kippers I had the idea that once a year in parliament all MPs with posh accents should swap accents for a day with the MPs with non-posh accents, wouldn’t that be fun? Well I think it would be fun
  • Quite an eventful day, I had to use an actual magnifying glass for something I was doing, that doesn’t happen very often, also my eyes aren’t what they used to be
  • Modern Script Loading - I’ve been pondering using javascript modules in the linkblog frontend code for a while now, so this article was moderately interesting, but also...using modules on the frontend feels kinda clunky to get things working in all browsers
  • The PGP Problem - An interesting article and discussion about the issues with PGP, seems like a lot of the modern day crypto solutions are towards centralized platforms, which unfortunately is a move away from open standards
  • Google have launched a mobile plan called Google Fi Which looks interesting especially the international roaming and data options
  • EU - Commission opens investigation into possible anti-competitive conduct of Amazon
  • FaceApp denies storing users' photographs without permission - legitimate russian developers are getting a lot of push back because of all the recent election meddling that emanated from Russia
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Tuesday 16th July, 2019 #

  • Parents Name Their Baby 'Google' - I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner, I’m wondering now how today’s voice assistants are going to interfere with the kids learning, the kid will probably feel like they have permission to do anything what with everyone saying OK Google all the time, I guess if that does happen then maybe we’ll see more baby Googles
  • Putting a price on our data won't make the platforms stop abusing our privacy
  • Some pretty big news in the James Bond world - black female actor 'is the new 007'
  • There aren’t enough space explosions to explain strange radio bursts
  • At what time of day does famous programmers work? - this is a pretty cool script, when I get some time I’m going to run it on my repos
  • The inside story of Twitter's new redesign - Really interesting to see what the social media giants are doing, the features look pretty nice
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Monday 15th July, 2019 #

  • Craigslist's Craig Newmark - 'Outrage is profitable. Most online outrage is faked for profit' - I like Craig’s optimism, and I share his fondness for birds, there is something quite calming about watching birds doing their thing, building nests, flying around
  • Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users - some interesting stats, also interesting that you need more tests if you have very distinct groups of users, it makes sense
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Sunday 14th July, 2019 #

  • Being multilingual alters your experience of time - The article looks at how different cultures visualise the abstract concept of time, pretty fascinating, it’s amazing that different cultures are able to communicate at all, time is just one concept that varies a lot between cultures, makes me wonder how many other basic concepts vary like this
  • asdf-vm - Manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool, extendable via plugins - I’m pretty happy just using nvm but if you have to work with many runtimes this could be a useful tool
  • Estonia's new e-residency security focus
  • Shopify and the Power of Platforms - A look at Shopify’s fulfilment offering and how it differs from Amazon’s in interesting ways
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Friday 12th July, 2019 #

  • Loved, forgotten, abandoned - Thailand’s cinemas once ruled the kingdom - If you are at all into movies, this is a good read with some interesting anecdotes and great photography
  • Why I’m Stopping the Fan-Supported Podcast Experiment - It’s interesting that for some podcasts ads are a better fit than listener supported funding
  • Trump 'not a fan' of cryptocurrency, blasts Facebook's Libra
  • Warner Bros Studios fire - Crews tackle blaze for 15 hours - The studio in Hertfordshire is where films such as Harry Potter, James Bond, Fast and Furious and the Mission Impossible have been made
  • How U.S. Tech giants are helping to build China’s surveillance state - "We are dealing with thousands terabits per second"
  • Podcasters need listening data, so Nielsen is going to call people’s homes to ask for it
  • Apple begins exporting India-made iPhones to European markets
  • Google workers can listen to what people say to its AI home devices
  • 'Ain't goin nowhere' - New Orleans residents brace for possible hurricane
  • Hunt exhorts UK envoys to 'speak truth to power' in coded rebuke to Johnson
  • If you are curious about linkblog.io uptime, checkout the status page, it's not twitter for sure but currently averaging about 98-99% uptime which I think is quite good
  • Twitter goes down during White House social media summit
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Wednesday 10th July, 2019 #

  • There always seems to be one more thing that needs to be added or updated, so with that in mind, today is as good a day as any other day for opening, so I've enabled trials on linkblog.io, you can now setup an account and try the software out, it's the very low-key and unnoficial (re-)opening day :)
  • I have found an excellent programmer named Steve Wozniac - I attended a talk by Steve Wosniac, it was back when I was getting into computer science, I remember it was in a university lecture theatre somewhere in the UK and he was talking about the early days of computers and apple, his talk was entertaining and quite inspiring - It's cool to see that he was writting code as well as designing and building the hardware
  • Pinboard was 10 years old yesterday - Maciej Cegłowski writes a bit of a retrospective, his description of what it's like to run your own online buisiness solo is spot on
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Tuesday 9th July, 2019 #

  • Abolish Eton - Labour groups aim to strip elite schools of privileges - I didn't know such a movement existed, I can see how elite schools could be problematic to building a cohesive society, on the other hand they would probably push the general education standard to be quite high
  • Instagram introduces some interesting anti-bullying features - Generally speaking I don't like hellbanning type features, where someone is banned but they are not told about it, but this seems to be a little different, it applies only to comments on posts and is contolled by the original poster of the post, so it's a bit like a partial hellban, I'm curious to see how it will playout, presumably the bullied will be happier, I wonder what would happen in an extreme case where a so called bully is restricted by all the people that he/she follows, there will be an almighty integrity problem between digital space and RL space which depending on the situation at some stage might need to be resolved in some way
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Monday 8th July, 2019 #

  • Why Stella McCartney reckons washing clothes is unfashionable
  • US World Cup win proves female players deserve equal pay, team says
  • Mozilla has no plans to enable DNS-over-HTTPS by default in the UK
  • Now you can check in on Bill Nye’s solar sail as it orbits Earth
  • Following on from my password issues from a few days ago, my password manager today has started overwritting new passwords with old passwords, I suspected this happened a few times before, but this time I saw it happen directly - I changed the password in the web browser, tested it, checked that the passwrod was saved, then synced my iOS device and the password in the web browser got overwritten - It's bad enough when something breaks, but when multiple things break all at once on different layers, that's a catastrophy
  • I've just been reading the migration docs Stripe has published for their push to get all their customers to rewrite their entire billing systems in user 60 days or everything breaks - It's not a simple update either, as far as I can tell from the docs it completely breaks all my server-side code, and forces me to do a much more complex integration - It's a bit like someone handing you a grenade with the pin removed and saying "here you go, deal with it or you will die", I'm hoping that I've missed something in their docs, how are others dealing with their bombshell?
  • Wimbledon 2019 - The Serena Williams–Andy Murray Mixed-Doubles Match Shows the Future That Tennis Should Be Embracing
  • Data can now be stored inside the molecules that power our metabolism - They were able to encode a 6142-pixel image
  • How to write idempotent Bash scripts - every time I finish a big piece of work a few days later something appears in my feeds that would have been so useful, happens every time, these bash script tips are excellent
  • How to Use User Mode Linux - if only I had more time I would love to try this out, maybe sometime in the future
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Sunday 7th July, 2019 #

  • Why Europe should build its own social platform for news
  • Vinnie Jones's wife Tanya dies after long illness - I met Vinnie Jones once a long time ago, it might have been in a shopping mall, I don’t remember exactly what I said, it wasn’t much, something like I like the films you’ve been in, and the characters you’ve played, anyway I hope he’s doing alright
  • Tributes to victims of 7/7 London Bombings - I remember the chaos on the day, the streets flooded with people, and the unease everyone felt using public transport for ages afterwards, it really doesn’t feel to me like it was such a long time ago
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Saturday 6th July, 2019 #

  • I am having really severe internet access issues this evening
  • UK slavery network 'had 400 victims' - if there are secret slavery networks organised involving foreign nationals doing low paid jobs, how do we know there aren’t similar secret slavery networks that include domestic nationals perhaps even doing higher paid jobs? And of course the other question that springs to mind, are there direct equivalents abroad, as in secret slavery networks in foreign countires where brits are slaving out other vulnerable brits?
  • Hey Apple, I think you need to look at how keychain is implemented - I haven't had to use it much but both times I did I got almost completely stuck - First I couldn't delete an entry on my laptop, I had to restart the app almost 10 times and it also kept crashing, then yesterday on an iOS device I was trying to reset a password I had in my non-apple password manager but the interface hardly makes any distinction between 3rd party password manager passwords and icloud key chain passwords so I thought I was saving my password to the password manager but it was actually going into icloud, I was stuck in this horrible password reset loop, while out and about, also sometimes the clipboard breaks and you can't paste the password, and there are popups everywhere, apps opening and closing, frustration level infiniti, I only figured out what was happening today
  • Border Patrol Agents Post Sexist AOC Memes & Mock Migrants In Yet Another Secret Facebook Group - It would be interesting to know what the root of their racist behaviour is, did they have bad experiences growing up with foreign people, or was it just instilled in them by their parents, in which case did their parents have bad experiences with foreign people?
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Friday 5th July, 2019 #

  • Our Brain Uses a Not-So-Instant Replay to Make Decisions - I think this is pretty interesting research, it’s long been known in sports that replaying physical movements in your head is beneficial to real life performance - I gets some memory benefit from so called replay personally however I find it’s also often really annoying because it’s not particularly selective, at least when it happens while awake, so I find thoughts that were a waste of time back in my head via replay and then I actively have to refocus back into something more worthwhile - it depends on the context though sometimes the looseness and innacurracy of replay can be beneficial creatively
  • Wikipedia co-founder slams Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter and the ‘appalling’ internet - I don’t know that much about decentralized social networks, linkblog isn’t decentralized, and it’s probably border line not even a social network, but I do want people to easily publish and run sites on their own domains, that’s part of linkblog’s mission, I am an independent software developer and it’s tough, really tough, so I’m glad to see someone prominent like Larry Sanger standing up for the open internet and independent developers and against regulations that just make things even more difficult than they already are
  • Ann Widdecombe causes quite a stir in her first speech at the EU parliament - given the rather nasty kick in the teeth I got yesterday as direct result of EU regulations, I am quite sympathetic to her comments, I like that she is standing up to the bullies in the EU
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Thursday 4th July, 2019 #

  • This was the first result from a duck duck go search for "Freedom Cat" - Happy 4th of July everyone
  • It's barely 48 hours after I completed and deployed the latest linkblog version that includes a re-write of the billing system, which took an impossible amount of work, I am so broken it really isn't in any way funny, and I receive today a notice fom Stripe saying that I will need to update my integration because of new European regulation (SCA) - I understand Wikipedia is embroyelled in some sexism issues today, well I am not going to comment on that, however they should consider adding an enormous danger sign on the Wikipedia page that I am pointing to here
  • HTTP Debugging for JavaScript - I haven't tried this though the features looks kind of interesting especially the pro features
  • On the Post-Ive Future of Design at Apple
  • In the UK the police face calls to end use of facial recognition software
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Wednesday 3rd July, 2019 #

  • Wimbledon 2019 - Seven British singles players reach the second round
  • iPod Touch gen 7 review - Does exactly what you’d expect it to
  • Alex Morgan's World Cup tea celebration against England causes a stir - Personally I've been drinking a lot of coffee lately as I code into the small hours, but I did have a cup of tea yesterday as it happens, first one in a while, anyway I like these quirky goal celebrations
  • England lose in the semi-finals - USA move forward to the finals where they will play Sweden or the Netherlands - Watching a football match via text in a web browser there is quite a lot of suspense as you wait for the next update, it's a lot better with javascript, at least you don't have to refresh the page over and over :)
  • England v USA Women's World Cup 2019 semi-final - I've spent the last 30 mins trying to find a live video stream of the match but haven't found one, seems that watching live sports on the internet is getting more difficult, anyway looks like USA is leading 2:1
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Tuesday 2nd July, 2019 #

  • In the early hours this morning I deployed the latest version of linkblog to the production servers, so far today everything seems to be working - There are a lot of structural changes that make the underlying platform stronger, and the load balancing is setup in a way that makes SSL on custom domains possible, the other big change is that it's possible to signup for a 2 week trial before committing to a yearly subscription - This last part of the build has been really quite difficult, hopefully the vampires will stop sucking my blood during the night now, either way there will be linkblog
  • Domain overseer lifts all price caps on .Org domain names
  • For example here is the robots.txt for on my linkblog custom domain
  • Google open-sources robots.txt parser in push to make Robots Exclusion Protocol an official standard - The current setup on linkblogs is that robots.txt only allows crawlers on custom domains, the idea is that it's easier to backup your linkblog to sites like archive.org
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Monday 1st July, 2019 #

  • Microsoft developer reveals Linux is now more used on Azure than Windows Server
  • The internet is run by an unaccountable private company - This is a problem
  • Zuckerberg defends free speech, even when the speech is false - I like his stance on free speech
  • David Attenborough praises Glastonbury for going plastic-free
  • Black Sabbath super fan's living room rebuilt in museum - I didn’t listen to that much Sabbath back in the day but I did have a few Ozzy Ozzborne albums that I was listening to on my walkman a lot, such a distinctive voice and riffs that sounded like nothing else, years later when he did the reality TV I thought that was pretty cool, I watched what I think was his last interview, that’s what he said anyway, it was a good interview but he seemed really happy to be done, I found that a bit weird because isn’t it great fun to be a musician? I guess playing the music is fun but the captivity of an interview probably wears thin pretty quickly
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