Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Tuesday 30th April, 2019 #

  • Interactive search/replace regex in Vim?
  • 2019 European election - A party-by-party UK guide
  • Jack Dorsey at TED proposes that Twitter could shift to users being encouraged to follow hashtags, trends and communities, rather than focus on following individual accounts
  • Anti-social behaviour 'nightmare' ignored - "Anti-social behaviour is often treated as a series of isolated incidents, rather than taking into account the cumulative effect that it has on its victims" - The article focuses on the anti social activities by gangs that are illegal like drugs and prostitution, but that's just one side of the spectrum, there are all sorts of things that gangs do to intimidate that are not stricly speaking illegal in nature but they do have a profound effect
  • A doorbell company owned by Amazon wants to start producing “crime news” and it’ll definitely end well - In unnexpeted news for today, wierd idea for local news, the article's author is really not into it, the article is quite long but the whole premise is worth exploring as it's rather novel, I'm curious to see how this story develops
  • I've been getting into the bleepy acid tones and break beaty beats of Planet Euphorique (Quebec, Canada) artists today
  • Replace whole line containing a string using sed
Become a Patron!

Monday 29th April, 2019 #

  • Imperial launches world’s first Centre for Psychedelics Research - No word yet on whether they will have thumping techno music, fire breathers and a chill out room, or what the sound system is going to be like
  • The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over - Good to see what the latest feed trends are, posting almost the exact same photo twice in a row is ok - Be authentic, go it? Simples :)
  • Lorem Ipsum... but for photos
  • Why is there no US rival to compete with Huawei?
  • In case you were wondering how these fit into the wider universe - "The Milky Way has several satellite galaxies and is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which form part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is itself a component of the Laniakea Supercluster"
  • Mostly astronony gibberish but there is one factoid in this article that stood out to me - "Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way" - That's right, aparently galaxies can have satelite galaxies, as far as I am aware that's an entire galaxy of solar systems orbiting a bigger galaxy of solar systems - Similar to how the Moon orbits the Earth, the Large Megallanic Cloud orbits the Milky Way Galaxy
Become a Patron!

Sunday 28th April, 2019 #

  • Subtractive synths explained - Everything you wanted to know about the most widespread synthesis method in music technology
  • Docker Hub Database Hack Exposes Sensitive Data of 190K Users
  • Google worker activists accuse company of retaliation at 'town hall'
  • Being poor in the digital age - “The poor experience these two extremes - hypervisibility and invisibility - while often lacking the agency or resources to challenge unfair outcomes”
Become a Patron!

Saturday 27th April, 2019 #

  • Fatboy Slim - Better Living Through Chemistry (US version - Skint Records / Astralwerks)
  • Mozilla is deprecating thier IRC server, and replacing it with "something off the shelf, a product not a protocol" - they site abuse and harassment as the main reasons and will require authentication to use the new system
  • On the dangers of 5G networks - "What is existential to democracy is allowing totalitarian regimes - or any government - full knowledge of everything you do at all times, because the tendency is always going to be to want to regulate how you think, how you act, what you do - The problem is that most people don’t think very hard about what that world would look like"
  • "I found it inexplicable when I first started dating my wife that she required Close Captioning on at all times when watching anything on a screen - But now I’m kinda into it"
  • 731 love songs for Europe - the couple who drove 20,000 miles to unite the continent
  • London Extinction Rebellion mural is a Banksy, says expert
Become a Patron!

Friday 26th April, 2019 #

  • Defibrillation is a treatment for life-threatening cardiac dysrhythmias, specifically ventricular fibrillation and non-perfusing ventricular tachycardia - A defibrillator (good name for a movie) delivers a dose of electric current (often called a countershock) to the heart
  • The Beach Bum should start a cult -- and not just the midnight movie kind
  • Ecuador legalized gangs - Murder rates plummeted - Really they are just pie clubs
  • Some entity is messing with my internet connection again, APIs that I use are disapearing from DNS, but when I check online the APIs are definitely still up, just my daily kick in the teeth, nothing to see here please move along...
  • Huawei row - Top civil servant demands leak inquiry co-operation - how is it that the network antennas are non-core? Surely the antennas are a rather crucial part of the network? It's like saying that the roads aren't a crucial part of the transport network
  • Regulators on four continents are preparing for a long-awaited "showdown" with Facebook - One gets the impression that there is a certain amount of relishing of the situation going on in the old media circles, not content with their astonishingly large portion of the pie, they are trying to gobble up even more, leaving us startups scrambling for the remaining (highly regulated) crumbs, thanks old media, it's not like it was already virtuallty impossible - What good is regulation in changing behaviour anyway, it sure hasn't changed the old media appetite for pie, if anything it's made it worse - They say it's about changing behaviour, it's not about changing behaviour, it's about pie, and even if it is about changing behavior it's only about changing behaviour so that they get more pie
  • MC Solaar - Nouveau Western
  • Quite thorough look at Ireland's involvement with US tech corporations over the past 30 years, how it jump started it's economy in the 1950s through free trade and encouraging foreign investment, and their role recently as GDPR has been introduced by the EU
Become a Patron!

Thursday 25th April, 2019 #

  • 'It's not play if you're making money' - how Instagram and YouTube disrupted child labor laws - I bet there are even cases where the parents / families don't even tell the children that they are on social media
  • Microsoft is now a $1 trillion company
  • Extinction Rebellion - Climate activists block London Stock Exchange wearing LED signs that say "Climate emergency", "Tell the truth" and "You can't eat money"
  • Saudi Arabia really "gets into the spirit of things" and carries out a co-ordinated string of 37 executions across the country, including a crucifixion - Remember they are major investors in Silicon Valley via their investment company Soft Bank
  • SoftBank invests in Alphabet business for cellphone antennas (non-core network components according to the UK government) in the sky
  • Hard to get exited about brain reading tech in this climate of all pervasive survelllance even if it is useful for people that have lost their speech because of illness
  • Made in China, Exported to the World - The Surveillance State - One thing that I find suprising is that surely a big risk especially in countries that are rife with crime and corruption, is that it's only a matter of time before it's the criminals that will be using the systems to plan and excute their crimes? Seems like a very risky short term solution to a problem that is irreversible - Also quite worrying that there are European nations buying Chinese survellance tech
  • I can't shake this feeling that Anne Widdecombe and Nigel Farage in Europe is going to turn into some kind of Brexit Western
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 24th April, 2019 #

  • John Gruber - "It’s a sign of deep dysfunction within Samsung, one of the biggest companies in the world"
  • Emilio Estevez uses some public domain footage in film, so Universal Studios forces original public domain footage offline - Yet another example of the awfulness of copyright filters
  • Plate Echo - The Greatest Studio Effect Of All Time! Plate echo for the win :)
  • The Dread of Waiting for the Supreme Court to Rule on L.G.B.T. Rights - I'm so glad that the LGBT communities are having a better time than years gone by, and there's plenty progress still to make, but it occured to me today that being straight might become old fashioned, I mean there's no cool 4 letter acronym, and it's not curvy, curly or even wiggly, just plain old boring straight, hopefully this isn't going to become an issue, thought it was worth mentioning
  • Brexit - Anne Widdecombe leaves Tories to stand in Euro elections for Nigel Farage's new party - That's a bit unnexpected, I thought she was dead
  • Blocking social networks after terrorist attacks can do more harm than good
  • Reddit Rolls Out Collections and Events Posts to All Communities (EXCLUSIVE) - I like the sound of these new features, Reddit is such a power house of the web
  • Huawei will help build Britain’s 5G network, despite security concerns - There is a danger of becoming complacent in deciding that there are "non-core" components in the network, an entity that was out to cause harm, might like the shadow that the non-core moniker gives them, and remember what MacGyver was able to do with only an armrest, a curtain rod and a toothpick - I'd like to see the government publish a list of these so called non-core components, which presumably shouldn't be a problem given their non-coreness
  • Microsoft Paint to remain part of Windows 10 after all
  • Trump meets with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 23rd April, 2019 #

  • I'm having severe internet access issues, but it's more worrying than the usual "I just got cut off", it's very selective, only some sites are being blocked, it appears to be the DNS server that I'm using that is selectively not returning IPs for important sites that I use, but the DNS provider (a famous and well known provider) has no issues on their status page
  • "Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming"
  • MongoDB Compass - The GUI for MongoDB (Not sure if this tool is new, I hadn't seen it bofore)
  • Using Clean Architecture for Microservice APIs in Node.js with MongoDB and Express - Worth watching, it's a really well explained video covering a web architecture for building applications in Node.js where all the different concerns are seperated, uses a layered model implemented by dependency injection and factory functions
  • Google Employees Say They Faced Retaliation After Organizing Walkout
  • Complaints that NPM Inc have fired staff for trying to unionize
  • Apple spends more than $30 million on Amazon’s cloud every month, making it one of the biggest AWS customers
  • Why Turning on HTTP/2 Was a Mistake - HTTP/2 has very different load characteristcs than HTTP/1.1 and this can cause application server to timeout during unexpected traffic spikes
Become a Patron!

Monday 22nd April, 2019 #

  • Javascript debuggers are broken, and it's our fault - Not being able to debug code is one of the main reasons I've stayed away from some javascript higher level constructs and frameworks, there is hardly any point in writting code that you can't debug, you just end up in a worse situation
  • The global population pyramid - How global demography has changed and what we can expect for the 21st century
  • Police clear Extinction Rebellion protesters from Waterloo Bridge
  • There has been a wave of terrorist attacks (at least 8 locations) across Sri Lanka targetting Christian Churches on during Easter Sunday services, some hotels also targetted, death toll is at 290, social media websites have been taken down (hopefully temporarily) and a curfew imposed to try to stop any further unrest developing
  • Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools - That Started a Rebellion - IMO this NYT article is a bit weak and low on hard facts but I do find it worrying that Facebook has inserted itself into yet another really important part of communities and if parents and children feel there's something not right, we should listen to them
Become a Patron!

Sunday 21st April, 2019 #

  • I almost forgot, happy Easter! :)
  • How to iterate over associative arrays in Bash?
  • How to pass an associative array as argument to a function in Bash?
  • Immediately after my last post about Jesus, Mohamed and Buhda, the internet cut out for several minutes, just wanted to make a note of that here
  • I'm wondering how possible a software project would be where the 3 major components are called Jesus, Mohamed, Budha (in no particular order), it doesn't really matter what the software does, I'm just curious to know whether a diverse group of programmers would be capable of working together on such a project and what the dynamics would be like, naming shouldn't really affect things, but we all know that it does, quite a lot as it happens
  • French government open-sources in-house-made end-to-end encryption IM app named Tchap - Node.js build system, React based app with entirely static content that runs on your web server, can also run as Desktop electron based app - Interestingly the name of the app sounds like the french slang expression for "you're escaping", also translates to "you escape", and is based on a project called Riot which is a client of another project called Matrix "an ambitious new ecosystem for open federated Instant Messaging and VoIP"
  • C.I.A says they have proff that Huawei was funded by Chinese state departments including the intelligence services
  • The French region with a new currency - There are lots of micro-currencies across Europe that help to strengthen local communities
  • "The figures show that if the land were distributed evenly across England’s population, each person would have just over half an acre – an area roughly half the size of Parliament Square in central London"
  • Half of England Is Owned by Less Than 1% of Its Population, Researcher Says
Become a Patron!

Saturday 20th April, 2019 #

  • The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities
  • How Selective Empathy Can Chip Away At Civil Society
  • An interesting factoid about Winston Churchill that I did not know - "In 1945, George VI offered to make Churchill the Duke of Dover - the first non-Royal dukedom to be created since 1874 - as well as a Knight of the Garter; Churchill turned down both" - I don't know I'm just some smuck, but isn't that a bit rude, I mean the bloke won the war for us and you offer him to be the country's doorman, maybe it's an honour white cliffs of dover and all that, politics is a fucking minefield
  • 420 - Seven charts on how cannabis use has changed
  • Turpin captivity case - Children forgive parents for torture - 13 Children in captivity for years and starved them
  • How Xi Jinping became a networked authoritarian thanks to his little red app
  • Microsoft acquires Express Logic for its real-time internet of things operating system
  • Mozilla relaunches open source IoT platform Project Things as WebThings
  • Marcus “MalwareTech” Hutchins (Now a security researcher) pleads guilty to entering a conspiracy to distribute the Kronos malware, aiding and abetting its distribution
  • A ransomware attack took The Weather Channel off the air
  • There's definitely a devil / satan thing going on today
  • Where pinball machines live forever - Some great bits of pinball history in this short, quelle collection!
  • Software Heritage and GNU Guix join forces to enable long term reproducibility - Has a logo that looks a bit satantic
  • My internet got cut off a few minutes after I made that post about Google and old devices, and only just got reconnected now - just making a note of that here
Become a Patron!

Friday 19th April, 2019 #

  • Hey Google! It's a fucking disgrace that your website YouTube does not work on older devices - websites that provide important infrastructure should work on older devices, if YouTube could play videos on your laptop when you bought it, that should be the case for the duation of the device, which should be many many years!
  • Sort of interesting factoid - The supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center (i.e the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy) is 4.3 MILLION times the mass of our tiny little sun
  • So what if Zuck did 1 week regular religion, 1 week satanism? At what point would people be like "Oh it's just Mark doing his satan thing"? Maybe he could sneak in a bit of satan on Thursdays? Probably wouldn't even be a big deal after a while
  • Facebook says it stored millions of Instagram passwords unencrypted on its servers - This morning I'm wondering what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was converting religion, would it even be possible for him? What if he decided to become a satanist?
  • Can You See The Curvature Of The Earth From A Plane?
  • My obnoxious answers about email newsletters
  • Hail Satan? The film that will change your mind about satanism - "Is this how everyone different is treated?"
Become a Patron!

Thursday 18th April, 2019 #

  • Google accused of sabotaging Firefox, again
  • 'The dust goes through my veins' - portraits of former Welsh coal miners
  • On the importance of obscurity in society and how we should be building our modern technologies with this in mind
  • While the subject of innadequate user tools is hot, currently my view of the kernel is that it's basically the process where bad applications hide all their dirty bad behavior - Activity monitor shows all the processes are using hardly any CPU yet several times per day the kernel is running at 400-500% CPU and can last for hours, but obviously some process is giving the kernel too much load, but there is no way to figure out which process it is - fs_usage and syscallbypid.d command line tools give some info but it's not enough, I need to know eactly why the kernel is running hot and what is causing it, which seems to be impossible to do with the current toolset
  • I'm wondering if Taiwan is going to become "Nice China", could be a strategically effective way to get into places, and I don't think the US has an equivalent territory
  • UK makes digital pron top shelf - UK to introduce porn age-checks in July
  • The Man Who Made Your iPhone Wants to Run Taiwan - A Sea Goddess Backs Him, He Says - The title photo in this piece is an instant classic, looks like it would have been quite an event to be at, very interesting development right off the back of the announcment of Foxconn entering into India a few days ago
  • Popular Apps In Google's Play Store Are Abusing Permissions And Committing Ad Fraud - A lot of Chinese companies are using these apps for surveillance, we need much better tools on these iOS and Androind devices to see exactly what data each app is sending and to where - Basic request analytics and firewall tools - We need to be able to easily turn off all outbound connections system wide and only allow connections that we have reviewed and approved
  • Oh noes Charlie Chaplin might be stuck inside your Samsung Galaxy Fold screen!
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 17th April, 2019 #

  • Jack Dorsey is captain of the Twittanic at TED 2019 - Was this article written by one of the writters from Days of Our Lives?
  • Oppenheimer Analysis - The Devil's Dancers (Minimal Wave Records - UK)
  • Assessing the damage at Notre Dame Cathedral – in pictures
  • Julian Assange book mystery solved - The book he was holding as the police arrested him was a book by Gore Vidal the founder of The Real News Network, who has had a longtime aversion to U.S. military force and surveillance - I still think it looked like he was wearing a rubber glove on his left hand
  • Let's Encrypt to transition to ISRG root - The article explains pretty well the situation and what is happening but it's rather slim on how to actually avoid issues - "All you need to do is continue to serve the old, cross-signed intermediate in the TLS handshake instead of the new one provided via ACME" - Would be nice to have some specifics about how to handle this with certbot
  • EU gives 'high-level' protection to whistleblowers
  • Pyodide - Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser (uses webassembly and emscripten)
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 16th April, 2019 #

  • This is pretty close to how my laptop is at the minute
  • 5-star phonies - Inside the fake Amazon review complex
  • Buster Keaton & Edward Cline - "Dinner Scene" ("Smart" City Dinning) - Even the hunger is on a string, but in the smart city you don't pull the strings
  • The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s
  • Iggy Pop's "Rockin' Rebels" - Playlist from his Radio 6 Music Show
  • Out of Buenos Aires, Argentina - Chantegui - Paper Plane (Mirror Records)
  • The New Cold War - It's China style internet vs US style internet and countires like Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are moving towards the former
  • Seems like multiple screen apps is a new thing, latest iOS is to introduce the feature too
  • Mass Production of iPhones to Start in India
  • Hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy fold - more than just a concept - Expensive but the fold concept is cool, the split screen apps is cool, 6 cameras is probably a bit over the top, I still can't get over the fact that these devices have 12 GB of RAM
  • YouTube shows 9/11 link on live videos of unrelated Notre Dame fire - No algorithms for ages and then 3 come at once
  • Freakonomic Radio Podcast - How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians) - Stephen Dubner talks with Spotify founder Daniel Ek
  • Thousands join Extinction Rebellion protests across London - Climate group blocks roads in capital and calls for peaceful acts of civil disobedience
Become a Patron!

Monday 15th April, 2019 #

  • Some floaty house music out of Germany - Jeremy - Soul Kicks (Tonika Recordings)
  • Sudanese people stop accepting the protocols - Protest leaders demand end of 'deep state'
  • New Berlin, Germany rapid transit route map
  • The war on beards - Study shows dogs are cleaner than bearded men - We need an equivalent study of women's arm pits
  • This article is about bullying and islamaphobia, but the thing that stood out for me was "The Yemeni American Merchants Association, which represents Yemeni Americans who own and run an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 of the city’s thousands of delis and corner stores, known as “bodegas”" - The US is pretty amazing, there are few places in the world that would allow immigrants to own so many trading establishments, and especially places that are so central to every day life in the community
  • Pepsi Plans to Project a Giant Ad in the Night Sky Using Cubesats - Oh no they're going to turn the sky above our heads into the million dollar homepage
  • How does it feel to be watched at work all the time? We are already at the stage where some companies are implanting chips in their employees, but it's ok "because you get beautiful charts" from the data? Is everybody smoking crack?
  • Assange - "He was a guest who was offered a dignified treatment, but he did not have the basic principle of reciprocity for the country that knew how to welcome him, or the willingness to accept protocols [from] the country that welcomed him" - What does "accept protocols" mean? It's quite an odd thing to say IMO, sounds like a euphemism for something else
Become a Patron!

Saturday 13th April, 2019 #

  • The all-singing, all-dancing Chinese Trump opera - Looks interesting I'd like to see some Chinese humour, but I can't play the video because it's flash :(
  • Meet one of Britain's youngest Imams - who uses Islam to combat gang culture - I wish I was more used to arabic script, it's so different to latin based languages that it all just seems like random squiggles to me, a lot of it looks like graffiti which I personally like a lot, but I don't see any words that I know or even any structure, I actually don't even see the word boundaries, I'd like some vague understanding of the writing system so it's less intimidating
  • While updating some SSL issuance workflows a few days ago I discovered that there is a --deploy-hook certbot option, so today I'm implementing some SSL certificate issuance workflows - certbot exposes a RENEWED_LINEAGE env variable when running the script - If you've read the previous film reivew I linked to you'll see why today's word of the day appears to be "lineage" - sort of adds a bit of weight to my outlandish infinite probablity drive hypothesis from Thursday - What on earth gives you the idea that I would start at some point to not want to share my views on this here internet? It's OK it's Sat the 13th today, nothing to worry about
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian review - an unholy work of satirical genius - the 40 year aniversary is Aug 17th (USA) / Nov 8th (UK)
  • Give priority to Julian Assange rape claim, home secretary urged - Yesterday I mistakenly thought based on the video from yesterday that he was sporting full beard no moustache, but it's clear from the latest pictures it's a 2-tone full beard mustache combo - The book and rubber glove are still a mystery
  • Infrastructure for container projects - umbrella project behind LXC, LXD and LXCFS
  • Docker implemented in around 100 lines of bash
  • www.sh - Web framework in Bash
Become a Patron!

Friday 12th April, 2019 #

  • The TTY demystified - Goes into more depth than the previous article, the history and the main concepts
  • Your terminal is not a terminal - An Introduction to Streams - A pretty good intro to the terminal, emulators, ttys and streams
  • The digital world is not designed to keep women safe - New regulations should be - I whole hearteldy agree that women need to feel like they can share their views on the internet, I don't want an internet that just has content written by men - the issue I have with this type of piece is that it does not paint a picture of the world as it is, the world isn't just some desolate wasteland where men harrass women, harrassment in the oposite direction happens too, perhaps of a different nature, but it happens none the less
  • Gmail becomes first major email provider to support MTA-STS and TLS Reporting - It's nice when old technology standards that work well, and that a lot of us rely on, get a major update like this
  • One thing that stuck out, in my opinion, about the black hole science thingy yesterday was something the lead guy said - I'm paraphrasing but essentially "we're scientists, we are so much betterer than those untrustworthy politicians, because you know...science!" - I'm no fan of a lot of politicians, especially at the moment, but I don't think that it's a very good way to be thinking about science and science's role in society, just my 2 cents - There is really good science stuff going on in Europe, but there are also lots of not so good happening too (open access to science publications, reproducability of reserarch results, politics in academic institutions, etc)
  • More Than a Data Dum - Why Julian Assange deserves First Amendment protection - The article's author led the team of lawyers that defended the Times during the Pentagon Papers time period where they published classified documents that related to US relations with Vietnam and were taken to court by Richard Nixon's DOJ
  • Tree of Reddit Sex Life - An exploration of all the nsfw content on Reddit in the form of a giant classification tree - We have a lot of variety in our sexuality!
  • Moon Landing by Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Appears to End in Crash - It's odd that this is only in the news now, isn't it a big deal when humanity sends a spaceship to the moon?
  • Web Components will replace your frontend framework - create scoped components using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript, just import a script, no need for transpiling
  • Are You Afraid of Google? BlackBerry Cofounder Jim Balsillie Says You Should Be - I wasn't aware that he had become such an activist against big tech, he's likely got a grudge against these companies, but on the other hand he does have trememndous experience in the sector and has an appreciration of the possible bad sides including the scale of surveillence capitalism and so called "smart" cities - Also why does he use Chinese terms to describe bureaucratic government officials?
  • Microservices on my mind! Break functional and orchestration responsibilities for better testability
Become a Patron!

Thursday 11th April, 2019 #

  • Video of Julian Assange being taken into custody - I'm wondering what the book he was holding was, and also does he have hands that are different colours or is he wearing a rubber glove on his left hand? That would be very wierd because last night I turned one of my rubber gloves (right hand) inside out to dry it out (possible leak). And of course importantly if the full beard no mustache look is now going to be in vogue, and lastly what do infinite improbability drives look like because there just has to be one laying about somewhere
  • Suspicious powder sent to Eric Idle sparks anthrax scare
  • Activist and Leather Jacket wearer Julian Assange has been arrested - "The Ecuadorian president, , has said Assange had “repeatedly violated” the conditions of his asylum in his country’s London embassy." [the quote I got from the guardian has since been updated, I am keping the originally published text here]
  • Stewart Brand talks about the LSD trip that inspired his Whole Earth Catalog - A lot of computer history that I wasn't aware off, quite a unlikely series of events
  • Operation Black Antler - Immersive Theatre Experience Raises Ethical Questions About Surveillance - Feels like leather jackets are a thing today
  • German Publishing Giant Claims Blocking Ads Is Copyright Infringement, In Yet Another Lawsuit Against The Industry Leader
  • Breakthrough discovery in astronomy - first ever image of a black hole
  • jQuery 3.4.0 Released - Nothing earth shattering, radio elements bug fix, __proto__ property ban for jQuery.extend, deprecating positional selectors and some performance improvements
  • Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there's no choice but to use it - Clear and consice article from a company that had to implement AMP outlining why the technology on the whole is not very good for the web, and mostly only good for Google
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 10th April, 2019 #

  • VexChords - Javascript guitar chord renderer, renders guitar chords in your browser
  • Building a dependency-free site in 2019
  • WordPressify is a modern workflow for your WordPress development, with an integrated web server and auto-reload - All the build tools are written in Nodejs!
  • China's toxic livestreaming culture - the vicarious lives of angry, alienated, uneducated rural gamers - Every article coming through my feeds today seems to be about streaming
  • Where will the colour ban stop? I mean the French and their "Allez les Bleus!" that's got to be racist too now because it's mostly white people that have bleu eyes right? Oh the French such terrible racists! Perhaps we should just ban all the colours!
  • When did the BBC start to publish all their videos in flash again? I can't play any video on bbc.co.uk
  • Fulham FC fan in California sues over 'racist' number plate row - White people are not allowed to support their football team now, I wouldn't be all that suprised if at some stage there is a movement to just completely ban both the word black and the word white
  • Content piracy is back, is wildy popular and now it's gone social using Facebook's new Watch Party video-streaming feature
  • Google Cloud announces 7 open source partners - Confluent, DataStax, Elastic, InfluxData, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis Labs
Become a Patron!

Saturday 6th April, 2019 #

  • What if humans hibernated through the winter?
  • How to get process id of called process - This is too difficult there should be an easy way, like with a bash flag, to print the pid of the process that just got started
  • As the UK updates its .eu Brexit advice yet again, an alternative hovers into view
  • links.markjgsmith.com basically never gets backed up, and when it does it does't backup the archives link on the top right of the page, I'd love to get internet archived, but it just doesn't do what it says it does unless you are some super duper mega site, cleary longevity doesn't even come into it, I've been running this linkblog for a while now :)
  • Boing Boing gets an internet archive backup daily (multiple times daily!), including all the links from the main page, and the links from each article
  • The Internet Archive has recovered 500,000+ of the 50,000,000 songs Myspace "accidentally" deleted during a server migration - This is great, it's just a shame that for the internet archive to back your site up that you have to be a myspace level site, it just doesn't back up a lot of sites
  • New WebKit Features in Safari 12.1
  • The lesson of this Brexit ordeal? The EU is a club worth belonging to - Makes some good points about how the EU is a strong group that has some clout in the world, but totally side steps every single one of the issues that the EU has and that are exposed on a daily basis during this Brexit saga, strength is a double edged sword
Become a Patron!

Friday 5th April, 2019 #

  • 21 people were killed on 21st November 1974 in the Birmingham pub bombing, the IRA call to prevent it came in a bit too late
  • There are moves being made to unionize in the video games industry following many 1000s of layoffs worldwide
  • News organizations have all but abandoned their archives - I very much agree that digital archiving is a massive issue, and everyone loves the internet archive, but as I have said before, in my experience the internet arvhive works in mysterious ways, at least for me, mostly it just does not work
  • Japanese spacecraft 'bombs' asteroid in scientific mission - The latest in the "let's blow things up really quite near the earth" race, asteroid was at a distance that is equivalent of a mear 2% of the earth's diameter - At what distance does it become safe to blow stuff up and not risk a space debris chain reaction catastrophe?
  • Ecuador to Expel Assange Within ‘Hours to Days,’ WikiLeaks Says - Is this the new drama now that Brexit extensions are going to be put in place?
  • Racist abuse of Juventus forward Moise Kean intolerable says Italy manager Roberto Mancini - "Even in England, where they are far ahead of us in the fight against racism, these things still happen"
  • Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry
  • Amazon to offer broadband access from orbit with 3,236-satellite ‘Project Kuiper’ constellation - I'm starting to get worried about this satellite space race that seems to be heating up, it's very risky develomnents and we have no backup planet, no way to retrieve space debris, they are talking about more than 10 000 satellites in the near future, at what point does it becaome an environmental issue? It would be more wise to stop sending up satellites until we have a proven safe way to recover from a space debris chain reaction catastrophe - a mistake in this area could mean the end of the human race in the distant long term
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 3rd April, 2019 #

  • Nasa says that when India shot down a satellite from orbit using a missile that it sent lots of space debris into unknown orbits that could collide with the international space station - Serious question: how could it be that their space scientists did not envision this?
  • French Pres Macron says EU cannot be held hostage to the UK political crisis - Apparerntly the new angle from France is that Brexit is actually Euxit - it's the EU that's leaving the UK, it's reversal time!
  • Sort of an interesting Brexit development - Junker has said that the UK would have to agree to the main points in the proposed agreement anyway even in the case of a no deal exit, which is a bit like saying that no deal doesn't really exist as a possibility, isn't it a bit late to say this now 5 days after the initial exit date?
  • Why there’s so little left of the early internet - I love the idea behind the internet archive but in practice I can never get the internet archive's wayback machine to actually archive links.markjgsmith.com, even though I have gone in and clicked save now several times recently, the saves never show up in the archives for the site, the last time it got archived was in August 2018
  • Facebook Removed Hundreds Of Indian And Pakistani Political Pages For Spreading Bad Information Before India's Elections
  • Time for some mexican punk - San Felipe es Punk - "Polo Pepo came from the 60s hippie movement, survived the government repression of the youth during the 70's and 80s, and finally found in punk the true spirit of rock and roll"
  • An interesting take on the south border crisis in the US, previous to Trump taking office there wasn't much of an issue, but all the campaigning has had a Streisand effect and now more people want to migrate to the US via the southern border because of all the publicity
  • Brussels on Brexit - would EU leaders say yes to an extension?
  • Apple News+ wrangled more than 200,000 subscriptions in first 48 hours - This article has a video walk through of the app, it does look very nice, lots of interesting looking content, one thing regular internet users are going to miss though is urls, doesn't seem like there is any way to link to articles
  • Media Companies Take a Big Gamble on Apple
Become a Patron!