Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Monday 30th September, 2019 #

  • Variable fonts & the new Google Fonts API
  • The Iceberg of React Hooks - I don't do a lot of programming in React but if I ever do it feels like this article might be useful
  • US steps up efforts to limit China’s control of critical minerals - It’s news about an area very low down in the stack but since everything is built on top of these elements it is quite important to be aware of the happenings in this space
  • Interesting twitter thread covering the soon to be signed Cloud Act between the UK and US, which would change how encryption is dealt with legally
  • The Great Public Market Reckoning
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Sunday 29th September, 2019 #

  • Practical Ways to Write Better JavaScript - Personally I’m a bit less convinced by promises and async/await but generally pretty good advice in this article
  • A developer goes to a DevOps conference
  • Elon Musk Just Unveiled Starship, SpaceX's Human-Carrying Rocket
  • SpaceX starship update currently live - Interesting fact from Elon's presentation "The sun which planet earth orbits is slowly getting bigger, and if humanity had taken just 10% longer to evolve then we would be engulfed in the sun's expansion and would never have had the chance to become a multi planet civilization" - They are looking to increase the planet's current total per year capacity to move weight to orbit from 200 tonnes to 200 000 tonnes
  • MIcrosoft has removed the "use offline account" option when installing the OS
  • Under new UK-US treaty social media companies such as Facebook would have to give UK police access to encrypted messages
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Wednesday 25th September, 2019 #

  • Adobe Fresco iPad Drawing App Now Available - The product video makes this look pretty amazing, anyone that has ever enjoyed drawing at any stage in their life is likely to quite like this
  • Visual Regression Testing in Design Systems
  • How TikTok Holds Our Attention - Overall I liked this piece, it starts off a bit slow and then gets good when the author details their experience in being on TikTok, it does go on a bit long and takes a few turns into some of the darker sides of the platform, but it's a good read with some interesting insight into one of these 'modern' video social media platforms
  • Microsoft's new 'Data Dignity' team could help users control their personal data - This seems like a good direction to go in, but will it be just some buzzword factory, or will they actually do some valuable work that can be used in the real world - How about just starting with boring old websites and data and do the crazy mixed reality blockchain ai apocalypse Gerard Lanier stuff till later?
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Tuesday 24th September, 2019 #

  • My Talk at Microsoft - Richard Stallman
  • NPR is projecting that it will make $55 million in corporate sponsorship revenues from podcasts in fiscal year 2020
  • Mysterious AVID issue knocks out Mac Pro workstations across Hollywood
  • Chris Coyier's random notes from a JAMstack roundtable
  • DoHProxy - A guide to set up your own round-robin DNS-over-HTTPS proxy for privacy
  • Bob Iger on why Disney walked away from Twitter - ‘The nastiness is extraordinary’ (Not in a good way)
  • Twitter bans financial scams in new policy
  • Google Play Pass bundles 350 Android games and apps for $4.99 per month
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Saturday 21st September, 2019 #

  • Meet the Bots that Help Moderate Stack Overflow - It is interesting that SO is using a lot of bots to help with the giant amount of data they have to process and moderate, and it’s definitely cool that they are publishing the code open source (at least some of them have MIT license), but I worry about these sorts of bot armies, once they are all finely tuned what’s to stop them being repurposed and used in other perhaps more controversial use cases?
  • Disclosing new data to our archive of information operations - Seems like the big bad in this space is to use networks of fake accounts, but it's kind of confusing as to what is allowed and what is not allowed, and I wonder over time aren't the people doing this just going to use this data as feedback to improve their networks and tactics? Maybe it would be better to improve the other side of the equation
  • Mysterious magnetic pulses discovered on Mars
  • Latest iOS major release has some bugs, probably best to wait for the update with fixes due for next week
  • YouTube removes verification status and predictably users go bananas
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Friday 20th September, 2019 #

  • Automattic the company behind Wordpress is raising a Series D $300 million round of funding from Salesforce Ventures, not a lot of insightful commentary on it yet so I'm linking to the announcement on Matt's blog
  • German ministry wants to take back control of 'digital sovereignty', the dependency on US based Microsoft is seen as risky
  • Switzerland which is outside the EU, has some quite interesting new copyright laws that are not in line with the policies of it’s EU neighbours
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Thursday 19th September, 2019 #

  • A reflection on the departure of RMS - More toxicness from the disaster that is the RMS situation, I'm linking to it because it's topical, but it's kinda horrible and toxic
  • Why not GitHub? - Some reasons that self-hosting repos might be better than using Github, mostly it's a good user experience but being able to redirect is a pretty big plus for self-hosting
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Tuesday 17th September, 2019 #

  • Git Aliases I Use - I don’t use git aliases but I do have about 10 bash aliases that are git commands, very similar to the ones presented here, it’s a lot less distracting to your flow using the aliases
  • The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company - There’s a lot of similarity with the linkblog setup, they seem to be quite a bit further along but really a lot of things are very similar, keep things simple and boring, great writeup
  • The blog post that kicked Richard Stallman out of everything (part 2)
  • The blog post that kicked Richard Stallman out of everything (part 1)
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Monday 16th September, 2019 #

  • Linus Torvalds: Linux 5.3 - Kind of interesting notes for this release
  • How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen - "Be thankful that you’re not connecting with the world at FlankSpeed"
  • The chinese company behind TikTok is now shaking up news aggregation - I wasn't aware of the Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent acronym BATs, and in another amazing co-incidence the place where I am living has become infested with actual flying bats - As far as using AI to create news feeds, I'm definitely not sold on the idea, if it's anything like the hundreds of bats that try to get into my room every evening, then the AI is will be trying to lock you in, with BATs AI why would you ever want to leave? And of course how.
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Sunday 15th September, 2019 #

  • This talk covers a class of programming tools called model checkers - I wasn’t aware that this class of software even existed, seems like it could be very useful
  • Björk made music’s first “VR pop album”
  • What does the Internet make of us? - I liked the beginning of this article however it does waffle on quite a bit, but the bit I really liked was the comparison of being on the internet to the experience of 'weightlessness', it kind of, sort of, does feel a bit like that
  • Black Hat 2019 - The Craziest, Most Terrifying Things We Saw
  • The Death of Design Portfolios - I find this interesting, especially that designers need new more dynamic tools to display their work, I post a lot of the things I do to my linkblog as I do them because helping to tell a story is what a linkblog is rather good at, my hope is that in the future some of the features such as tags can be evolved to make this experience better
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Saturday 14th September, 2019 #

  • Spotify Acquires Music Talent Marketplace SoundBetter
  • I’ve updated the freelancer project so the Stripe integration complies with the new EU SCA regulations
  • Audible has been running a program to create captions to public domain works but it’s had complaints from copyright holders - I’m curious to find out why (and how) copyright holders would block access and use of public domain works
  • Cloudflare stock pops 20% in first day of trading
  • Iger Departs Board of Apple, Disney’s New Streaming Competitor
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Friday 13th September, 2019 #

  • The 5 Big Features of TypeScript 3.7 - I'm not a user of Typescript but this article contained the previous 2 links that I found interesting and just posted so it's only fair that I link to the original content here too :)
  • tc39/proposal-optional-chaining - Another stage 3 javascript proposal that would make life so much better
  • tc39/proposal-nullish-coalescing - This stage 3 javascript proposal is for the introduction of the ?? operator, would fix a bug that has bitten me several times in the past
  • Firefox Premium for Enterprises is now available - Interesting that the bulk of it's revenue currently comes from Google, who develop the Chrome web browser
  • Facebook lays out the 4 values that guide it's Community Standards - Authenticity, Safety, Privacy & Dignity
  • Slack launches dark mode for macOS, Windows, and Linux
  • Elevating original reporting in Search - I like their approach here, but it's not clear to me which of their products is using these new algorithms, is it just the regular google search tools or some news products they have? How and where will I visually see these new original articles?
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Thursday 12th September, 2019 #

  • I read up a bit on DNS-over-HTTPS, otherwise known as DoH, a few weeks ago and thought that it was quite weird that the setting was inside the applications rather than the OS and also that everything was going through Cloudflare, and so decided not to set it up, but this article goes into some more detail about why the current implementation of DoH is not very good - It's kind of worrying that Firefox has taken this approach
  • Another Interstellar Object Detected in the Solar System
  • Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet
  • Looks lie Apple has been developing some type of Augmented Reality software for iOS devices, possibly to be used with apple headsets
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Tuesday 10th September, 2019 #

  • Google faces a new antitrust probe by 50 attorneys general
  • Hugo and IPFS - A pretty good write up of using IPFS to implement a blog that scales to serve 5,000% spikes instantly
  • Reverse interview - This is a list of questions which may be interesting to a tech job applicant
  • Sunsetting Python 2 set for January 2020 - I hope this makes installing and configuring python easier
  • Running GitHub on Rails 6.0 - They make some pretty good arguments for staying up to date with the latest version, interesting to see a big player like github setting some good best practices and leading by example
  • Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers
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Monday 2nd September, 2019 #

  • This tutorial gets the Stripe elements tutorial working because on Stripe website the form is missing some CSS and doesn't render correctly
  • Using Stripe Elements to collect credit card details
  • How to hide the zip code in a Stripe elements form
  • How can I style a Stripe Elements input with Bootstrap?
  • I’ve read 3-4 javascript articles today that use the word ‘magic’, is this some kind of trend? Anyway pretty much in each case it boils down to ‘callbacks’
  • How the Node.js Event Loop Polls - Bytesize article that covers how libuv interfaces with the operating system kernel system calls to receive event notifications, it's a good article because it goes deep (all the way down to the packet level) but does it very quickly only detailing the information that is necessary to understand the mechanism, in this case I think fast is good because since it's quite a foundational concept it's easy to get confused or distracted by all the stuff that is above it in the stack
  • I'm pretty sure I've read this before, but I was reminded today by a video I was watching, nodejs is always described as being single threaded, but in reality it's not because all the asynchronous operations are in fact done in worker threads
  • Understanding and protecting against malicious npm package lifecycle scripts
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Sunday 1st September, 2019 #

  • A faster JS interpreter in Firefox 70 - Kind of technical but pretty interesting
  • I do very much like Gmail, it's a really great email web app, but I find that relatively often I accidentally delete/move/archive emails - While scrolling the page, some icons popup so smoothly under the mouse cursor as you drag and drop to scroll that you don't notice it until you are releasing the cursor to do the next scroll, and then you see a flash on the page and it looks as if something disappeared from the list, so instead of terminating the scroll you might of actually activated some other function, but then there is no way to check what happened, so you are left wondering did I just delete/move/archive an important email?
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