Saturday 31st August, 2019 #

• npm bans terminal ads - The ban includes "Packages that display ads at runtime, on installation, or at other stages of the software development lifecycle, such as via npm scripts"
• How JavaScript Grew Up and Became a Real Language - I like the bit about how big an event the release of Google Maps was, I still remember it clearly, and remember exactly where I was and how exiting it was, for me that's when the web started to get really interesting, it's amazing how commonplace maps are today

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Wednesday 28th August, 2019 #

• Has Kenya's plastic bag ban worked? - I think it’s good that manufacturers are now actively looking at alternatives that are better for the environment
• Government expected to suspend Parliament from mid-September - I don’t get what’s going on here, and I have no idea why they mention the queens speech, doesn’t the queen always do a speech at this time? Anyway this tweet thread is quite something
• Dave Chappelle under fire for discrediting Michael Jackson accusers in Netflix special - What I like about what Chapelle is saying is that when you see or hear of someone behaving in a way you dislike it’s important to ask why that might be happening, I’m not sure he’s asking the exact right question in this case but at least there is a why
• Privacy Fundamentalism - This article makes some good points, though I’m not sure overall I completely agree with the conclusions, I think websites should self host as many javascript libraries as possible, and ultimately if a website decides to use a 3rd party service these should be listed somewhere on the site with a description of the service and what data is being sent to the 3rd party, as far as I remember I think linkblog does this but I have to check again to be 100% certain - I think there could even be improvements on that, for example per feature listings of 3rd party providers used, but eventually it does add a lot of complexity for the website developer
• BBC to launch Alexa rival that will grasp regional accents

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Tuesday 27th August, 2019 #

• Does every programming language have a central package repository? - I found this post interesting, I think mainly because I’ve recently started compiling all my programming language installations from source, so the mechanics that underly a language are front of mind
• Some pretty neat bash history shortcuts
• EU ‘would block trade deal if Britain reneged on bill’ - Something seems a bit sketchy about this £39bn Brexit bill the press has been reporting on, looks as though the bill will be paid off in any case since with all the delays the UK has still been paying the EU as a member
• There is an interesting flow chart of how vote of no confidence works should that Brexit scenario unfold

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Saturday 24th August, 2019 #

• Quite liking the 'I hereby order' meme, I think he might need to use sudo though
• Google Photos can now search for text that appears in images - I’m not too familiar with this product but this is a pretty neat feature, especially the fact you can copy and paste the text out of the image once you’ve found it, would be good to know if any of the data gets funnelled up to the cloud or if it’s all done on device
• Amazon fires - Brazil sends army to help tackle blazes
• lazygit - A simple terminal UI for git commands
• How to return to the flow faster - this workflow sounds interesting, I started keeping todos in the code a few months back, it’s been working quite well because you are forced to keep them up to date or the code gets messy, I’m definitely going to check out lazygit which the author mentions

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Friday 23rd August, 2019 #

• Emmanuel Macron says he will block EU trade deal with Brazil over Amazon forest fires
• A gun-toting Russian humanoid robot is on its way to the International Space Station
• The Double Dishonesty of Boris Johnson’s Brexit Proposals - I'm no expert in this matter, but reading this it seems to me that if anyone was to impose border checks in northern Ireland it would probably be the EU
• Red Arrows stage display over New York City
• The Amazon is on fire - how bad is it?
• How to Start Earning Your Side-income as a Developer
• How to pass bash arrays as function args - I’ve been having issues with this recently, the issue arises because bash always expands the variable, turns out in bash 4.3 it’s possible to pass by reference, also works for associative arrays - Still quite a lot to have to think about when doing something that is trivial in other languages, anyway at least it’s possible, maybe this new method will mean I stop instinctively avoiding arrays because until now they have been very difficult for me to handle
• How To Use Bash Parameter Substitution Like A Pro - I’ve read the section covering this topic in the bash manual several times but it never sticks, I regularly use a few of these - these are great examples, now I have a few more items on my tool belt :)
• Things You Didn't Know About GNU Readline - Really great programming article, I use readline everyday, was aware it existed but most of the detail was new to me
• Amazon fires - 'Our house is burning', Macron warns ahead of G7

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Thursday 22nd August, 2019 #

• How craving attention makes you less creative - Ted talk by Gordon Joseph Levitt - I listened to the audio of this talk, I liked it, it made me think of attention in the contexts I spend time in, attention isn’t the primary focus of linkblogging for me, but I think it has changed over time, some days it’s about weaving some sort of internal narrative, other times it’s about just knowledge, sometimes about showing appreciation or concern, and other times just to remember how things were some time in the future, anyway enough words it’s a good talk
• Monty Python's - The Funniest Joke in the World (la blague qui tue) - Surprised I hadn't actually seen the entire sketch until now
• Why DNS on blockchain is the next step after DNS over HTTPS
• Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's
• On re-reading the Weatherspoons article looks like I misunderstood, it's cheap beer both for a no deal Brexit and a no-backstop-no-customs-union deal Brexit, so I think cheap beer is back on!
• Document your Javascript code with JSDoc
• Merkel - Backstop alternative 'possible within 30 days' - Cheap beer is off now, that didn't last long, I tell you I can't handle all this last minute seesawing
• India needs to reduce ecommerce restrictions to revive economy -Amazon executive
• Wetherspoon boss Tim Martin pledges to cut beer prices to ‘unbelievable low’ if we leave EU by 31 October - Well that's some good news at least
• Study reveals surprising top three countries with the healthiest foods
• Select commands from bash history
• Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg (born 7 January 1967) is a British former politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015
• The results from Facebook's conservative bias audit - This appears to have been led by Nick Clegg, who was previously the leader of the Liberal Democrats political party in the UK, he is now the Facebook VP of Global Affairs and Communications
• Amazon opens its biggest global campus in India

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Wednesday 21st August, 2019 #

• Mozilla and Google take action to protect users in Kazakhstan
• Microsoft Edge gets a Beta channel as launch looms closer
• WeBsItEs
• CoOl
• sOmE
• Git cherry pick from another branch
• Huawei goes all Art of War on us: Switches on 'battle mode' and vows to 'dominate the world' - Remind me, where is the indie web again? Where did all these pro-war a-holes come from? We’re all on this planet earth thing together
• Big Blue open sources power chip instruction set - This isn’t my area of expertise but my gut feeling is that we need more open source at this level in the tech stack, so this might be an important development
• Daniel Craig's Next Bond Movie Finally Has a Title - "No Time to Die" - I've really liked Daniel Craig as bond, every one of the bond films I have watched with him in it have been top notch, I'd like to see him in some non-bond films, if I ever get to watch another movie again
• John Gruber on the We Company - "They’re more like a cult than a tech startup"
• Opera 63 initial release - Improved private browsing mode
• Jekyll 4.0.0 Released

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Tuesday 20th August, 2019 #

• The EU believing that Theresa May is literally the UK is like a newbie internet user that confuses Google for the entire Internet, I can see why they might make this mistake, but it's a mistake none the less
• Brexit - The EU is still not aware of what a negotiation is, it appears they believe it consists of everything being brought to them all wrapped up in a nice present, with expensive wrapping paper

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Monday 19th August, 2019 #

• An Guide to Working With Introverts
• Indians in Uganda - "There is a sizable community of people of Indian origin living in Uganda, but it is less than in previous times. In 2003, there were an estimated 15,000 people of Asian descent (majority Indians and Pakistanis) living in Uganda compared to approximately 80,000 before they were expelled by dictator Idi Amin in 1972"
• Priti Patel planning to ‘end freedom of movement rights’ on 31 October - There is so much to unpack in this one Brexit article, Priti Patel is the UK Home Secretary, her background is very interesting, she's from Uganda but presumably based on her name is of Indian ancestory, in the early 70s a lot of indians got kicked out of Uganda, a coup d'etats was necessary, because they had come to dominate much of the Ugandan economy - Anyway enough of the history lesson go read wikipedia - So on her policies that on the surface might seem like a good idea, but in reality won't restricting immigration to knowledge workers create a big imbalance in society? And also enforcing english speaking skills will have a negative effect on Brits wishing to move abroad because now they will have to learn the language of their intended destination, learning english is a lot safer bet than learning most other languages in the world, better would be to offer government paid english lessons to new arrivals, and / or free languages lessons for Brits wanting to move abroad
• Vegetable joke is funniest gag at the Edinburgh Fringe - Some of the jokes in this are pretty funny
• Using Wall Street secrets to reduce the cost of cloud infrastructure

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Sunday 18th August, 2019 #

• Netherlands building ages - This section of the map shows the different building ages of Amsterdam, pretty cool map, there are more buildings from the 1600s and 1700s than I expected
• Apple announces that it will treat tracking with the same severity as security vulnerabilities in it's web browser Safari
• 'Plastic recycling is a myth' - what really happens to your rubbish?
• Building node from source, the overly complicated version from the repo docs - Also not mentioned in the docs is the fact you can set the install directory by passing the path as --prefix arg during configuration
• I've just been installing node from source, the git repo docs make it look like it's really complicated, but it's actually rather simple - the developer experience is a bit poor though, right at the end of the install a load of firewall popups...urgh which doesn't happen when installing perl and ruby from source, their install from source docs are better too
• I keep wanting to like javascript promises, but to me they just look almost like the caolan/async library (which uses callbacks), but with complicated error handling and debugging - async/await just adds even more cognitive overhead where you have to add stuff in many different places (where you define the function, where you invoke the function, where you handle the errors), it looks messy to me
• Microsoft Has First Major Impact on Chrome - Their change improves battery life by optimising disk caching of certain media content during acquisition and playback
• Start Your Own ISP - This site is dedicated to helping you start your own Internet Service Provider - Specifically this guide is about building a Wireless ISP (WISP)

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Saturday 17th August, 2019 #

• Peter Fonda, star of Easy Rider, dies aged 79 - Perhaps this is why there’s a lot of interesting film related news today, Easy Rider is such a good film with great acting, to this day I still want to learn how to drive big bikes because of that film, maybe one day
• Highlights from Git 2.23 - git-checkout is getting split into two commands git-switch (for actions on branches) and git-restore (for actions in files)
• Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender - Rather interesting to see the open source product make headway in professional VFX shops, they say it enables them to work with many more smaller studios where 3D Studio Max and Maya are cost prohibitive
• free and open-source tools for analog filmmaking

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Friday 16th August, 2019 #

• 5 Interesting Uses of JavaScript Destructuring - Not sure I'd really use many of these in real life code, I hardly ever swap variables, arrays with lots of commas and missing values looks a little weird to me, defaults for array items yeah maybe, destructuring strings might actually be useful, destructuring dynamic properties meh...the code I write is way too boring for such fanciness :)
• The foods you'll really need to stockpile for a no-deal Brexit - Although it appears to be based on the same data as a similar article from 10 days ago (that I linked to), this one is saying the opposite, namely that there will likely be food shortages - Chocolate, cake, beef & pasta are among the listed items
• Startup Success Outside Silicon Valley - Data from Over 200 Exits in 17 Cities - The standout figure in this article is France, every country listed is 1 order of magnitude less than silicon valley, but France is 2 orders of magnitude less than silicone valley - Now the french aren't dumbs dumbs, so what is going on here? Why do they have such a different pattern when it comes to tech investment? What are they seeing that the others aren't?
• Wework isn’t a tech company; it’s a soap opera - I didn't make it through the whole article, mostly read the beginning and skipped to the end (I read code, legal stuff not so much), but it sure looks like there is some intriguing stories behind all of this

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Thursday 15th August, 2019 #

• Google, Samsung, EU invest in Belgium's MolenGeek - We need more projects like this, really great example of how tech can help to regenerate sketchy neighbourhoods and bring communities, youth and cultures together
• Twitter is thinking to introduce a feature to follow topics of interest
• Freakonomics Podcast - How Much Does Your Name Matter? - A pretty thorough exploration of naming in America, I wish more places in the world did this sort of thing
• Stuff You Should Know Podcast - Iran-Contra Affair: Shady in the 80s (Part 1) - Just in case you thought that the US never does shady stuff internationally, this two parter does a fantastic job of exploring what happened in this case, it's also interesting that it's even possible to have this sort of retrospective podcast, I haven't heard any similar podcasts originating from other parts of the world - Also Iran used to be like London in the swinging 60s
• Webkit which is the web browser engine used by the Safari announces the WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy - It's quite a good read to get a clear picture of what areas of your web browsing are trackable
• Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents - I didn't make it through this whole article, there is some interesting information in it, but it's quite one-sided, even some of the diagrams are clearly very biased, it makes me wonder if it would be a good idea to have some zones on the planet that are completely free from any sort of technology, because when technology is everywhere how will we know what things were like before, it might be very very difficult (maybe impossible) to roll back these surveillance systems, and what if they actually make things a lot worse, there are areas where computers make things better, but it's also rather clear that they can also be whirlpool of frustration, and you wouldn't want that to happen at the city of state level
• Facebook makes a really confusing change to it's groups settings, it's now possible to have a group that is both private and visible, privacy is no longer privacy, IMO it would have been better to add a flag called "findable", rather than break the privacy concept
• Neuralink Launch Event - Looks like we're becoming sort of vulkans with AI, what they aren't telling you is that the AI will be based on Vicky Pollard from Little Britain

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Wednesday 14th August, 2019 #

• Milky Way’s Black Hole (which is 4.6 million times the mass of the sun) Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours - life forms all over the galaxy have been heard saying roughly the same thing - “I’m not saying it’s aliens, but OMG it’s definitely aliens” - also “Help I’m being oppressed”
• Julián Castro buys anti-Trump ad on Fox News – to ensure the president sees it - the whole racism arc is getting pretty yawn worthy, could really do with some actual aliens to give it a bit of a refresh, the fact that Castro took out an add on Fox so Trump would see it, that’s pretty good, might even be a little amuse bouche of our future, so actually maybe it’s not that good after all
• Best of little Britain - it’s a funny comedy but maybe an actual real life version of this might be a lot less funny
• Brexit - Hammond says PM's demands 'wreck' chance of new deal - Says no deal would create a little England
• Google and Mozilla are changing how their browsers display information from extended validation (EV) certificates
• Spotify’s pitch to podcasters: valuable listener data - Apparently one place where there are not many concerns about user privacy is podcasting, I sure hope Spotify doesn’t go all data creepy
• Security researchers find that DSLR cameras are vulnerable to ransomware attack

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Tuesday 13th August, 2019 #

• How open-source will Tumblr become?
• IndieWeb Link Sharing - bookmarklet, serverless function and the github api, pretty cool, I’m not saying it’s all about the links, but it’s totally all about the links :)
• How to delete (tmutil delete) all old backups from TimeMachine - keep only current full backup
• How does deleting old backups from time machine work - A pretty good explanation of how Time Machine implements it's incremental backups (it's based on unix file system hard links)
• Jio in India is growing at a fierce pace, they have added 10 million net subscribers every month in the past year - That's a lot of new customers
• Verizon agrees to sell Tumblr to owner of Wordpress

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Monday 12th August, 2019 #

• Brexit - Man in charge of French Channel ports - "Britain will be a third country"
• India's Reliance bets on tech for growth, partnering with Microsoft for cloud services, launching fibre broadband
• The New York Times is still detecting Chrome Incognito Mode after Google’s fix
• I'm a big fan of the "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's definitely aliens" meme, I find it enormously funny, however it occurred to me today that technically it might be racist to say this, because well if you replace aliens with any earth based group, then it would probably be considered a racist statement, but racism isn't at all why I find the meme funny, or is it? I don't know anymore, I guess to find out we would need to ask some actual life forms from other planets if they are offended by this meme - (I've been thinking about this all day now, it's blowing my mind)
• New Issue: Jeykll install fails with bundler errors
• Is the Queen remainers’ secret weapon? Don’t bet on it
• Ireland tells Boris Johnson there will be no backstop renegotiation - EU on no deal Brexit: “British will be the big losers”
• What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type? - I haven’t had time to read this yet but it looks quite interesting
• Ask HN - Configuration Management for Personal Computer? - Quite a topical thread for me given all the work I’ve been doing on my dotfiles the past few weeks
• Talk about unintended consequences - GDPR is an identity thief's dream ticket to Europeans' data
• The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers

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Sunday 11th August, 2019 #

• Hollywood shows jobs of the future - Spatial Computing camera systems - This new camera technology is very cool, I'm not so keen on the AI stuff personally
• Gwyneth Paltrow’s Newest ‘Oh, You Were in a Marvel Movie With Me?’ Victim: Samuel L. Jackson! - This sort of thing happens to me literally every other day, the day before yesterday someone gave me change for a 50 when I was certain I gave them a 20, today I came back to my laptop and it was turned off, I was certain I didn't shut it down, the certainty takes a little while to wear off and then it's like maybe I did give them a 50, and perhaps I did shut the laptop down after all, really annoying - Of course I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's totally aliens
• Scientists Develop Robotic Contact Lenses That Zoom When You Blink
• 8 deepfake examples that terrified the internet - Wow some of these are pretty far out
• Web APIs in Node.js Core - Past, Present, and Future
• Fast Food Rivals - Logo Mashups

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Saturday 10th August, 2019 #

• Linux / Unix: Rsync Copy Hidden Dot Files and Directories Only
• iTerm2 project will be adding / improving a backup feature, this would be really great feature
• Trump is drafting an order to regulate Facebook and Twitter for bias
• Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony - Huawei puffs up new distributed OS
• Splitting the Technology ‘Stack’ - An example of trade wars opening up fronts in unexpected places, there is the possibility that there could be some interesting developments with open source hardware, but also there are a lot of downsides to having very different technology stacks
• The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News
• America’s social-media addiction is getting worse

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Friday 9th August, 2019 #

• The baffling origin of London Stone
• I've been thinking about this the past few days, and it's not really going anywhere logically so I'm just going to brain dump it here in the hope that I can get on with stuff I really actually need to be doing - maybe all this democracy and parliaments business is just a bit of a flash in the pan and perhaps monarchies are going to start to become fashionable and functional again - Not sure how I feel about that, I do know that I find game of thrones daf, but I understand that I am in the minority with that point of view
• I've been reading the Feathers library docs today, which describes the library as an "open source REST and realtime API layer for modern applications" - There are a lot of feature and architectural choices that I really like, but I can't shake the feeling that it is trying to insert itself into some places it shouldn't be, or perhaps it's trying to do too much, it's as if it's something I've seen before but just a fresh coat of pain has been added with some of the bits re-arranged, not entirely sure what it is, but there is something that feels off about it - Maybe at some stage I will have more time to investigate more thoroughly
• Apple Is Locking iPhone Batteries to Discourage Repair
• Frontless.JS is a minimalistic node.js SSR stack for building universal (isomorphic) javascript applications
• How To Get Started With IPFS and Node - Learn what the InterPlanetary File System is and how to store data with it
• iTerm2 - Showing the PHP, Ruby or Node version in your status bar - I managed to restore the iTerm2 settings that I was having an issue with earlier, so this short tutorial was a nice to see popup, iTerm2 has a lot of cool features under the hood
• How to create and run cron jobs in Node - I've been looking for a module like this for a while now, this looks really useful

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Thursday 8th August, 2019 #

• A few interesting factoids about Alfred Hitchcock that I wasn’t aware of
• I am also having some sort of Pulp Fiction mini fractal, in my case iTerm2 is Mia and the shot to the heart has only partially worked, technically Mia is alive, but it's a new Mia, the old Mia is no more :(
• In what appears to be some kind of fractal of the Vincent and Mia story from Pulp Fiction, Linux Journal Ceases Publication - An Awkward Goodbye
• US will be 'on doorstep' ready to sign UK trade deal after Brexit, says Pompeo
• We may not be running out of helium after all

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Wednesday 7th August, 2019 #

• The Addams Family Trailer (2019)
• UK pushed out of Interrail scheme after dispute
• Celebrating the subtle (and not-so-subtle) genius of Pulp Fiction, 25 years on - it’s hard to understate how important this film was for me, I get a somewhat giddy feeling even thinking about it all these years later (I'm not sure if that is something new though, I don't remember having that feeling at the time), it’s almost as if life was in black and white when I entered the cinema, then when I exited it was in glorious colour, several new layers had been added to my imagination and perception - this podcast is a really nice wonder back through that period
• Brexit - Food industry seeks no-deal competition waiver - this is reassuring "Half of the food we eat is produced in the UK. The rest of our food is imported, with 30% coming from the EU and 20% from other countries. There will not be an overall shortage of food in the UK after we leave the EU."
• Seashells - lets you pipe output from command-line programs to the web in real-time, even without installing any new software on your machine - really neat idea for a product/service, wish I’d thought of this, I’d like to read their privacy policy though, I wonder if piping your logs to a 3rd party is a security risk
• No-deal Brexit - 'Big unanswered questions' for UK music
• Europe launches second EDRS space laser satellite

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Tuesday 6th August, 2019 #

• I'm curious to know how many of the UK and EU negotiators are divorcees, it might be a very useful experience to have gone through, conversely happily married and unhappily married people might actually be quite unsuited to Brexit negotiating
• The problem with a never ending trade war is that much like a bad marriage that never ends, there are a million and 1 ways that it could manifest itself...so all the trade related avenues are exhausted, well there is still education, the environment, currencies, even quite fundamental things you wouldn't expect like language and even fashion, and so so many more ways that people will feel justified to redress their grievances, and eventually you don't even remember the original reason or cause, it's just bad news - And as for the EU's claim that there is no basis for re-negotiation, that's a load of rubbish the basis for round 2 is the output of round 1, the EU can't expect a nice solution to be delivered to them all wrapped up like some sort of birthday gift, they need to sit around the table and figure it out with the UK
• EU officials: No basis for 'meaningful' UK Brexit talks
• US labels China a currency manipulator as tensions flare
• EU diplomats are saying that Boris Johnson has no intention to negotiate and wants a no deal Brexit - the fact that the EU’s main plan was a hole in one single round negotiation, and since they have repeatedly said they will not renegotiate, it very much looks like it is they that had no intention of negotiating and were angling for a no deal Brexit, they have no incentive because even if the UK doesn’t pay the settlement they will claw it back with tariffs, had they said that was their plan all along the UK could have saved a lot of money, instead they have been dragged into every possible scenario testing every detail so that if ever another country decides to leave everything will be nice and smooth, and it’s all paid for by the UK and what’s more the EU will still say it’s them that are the ones hard done by - the danger of no deal is that it could result in s never ending trade war

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Monday 5th August, 2019 #

• Punpedia - The Online Encyclopedia of Puns - puns are simultaneously good and bad at the same time, I'm amazed at how using language in a way that wasn't intended is so comical, of course I had realized this before but there is something about seeing the shear volume of puns on this site that made me realize that my reaction to puns is very strong and almost automatic, like when a doctor hits your knee with a reflex hammer
• Innocence lost - what did you do before the internet? - I'm not sure how I feel about this new fact, that my generation is the last of the people that grew up without the internet, it sort of reminds me of the 1st world war veterans, maybe when we are old we'll get some medals and get to attend parades, the floats will actually float in he air like hover boards
• The Congos - Don't Blame On I (Black Ark, Jamaica) (1977) - This tune was randomly selected by my ipod shuffle feature
• How to check the character encoding of a string in bash - the reason I had to use this was because I encountered a weird bug where two different strings that looked the exact same were being treated completely differently by the shell - I had copied and pasted them from two different web pages that used different character encodings, it was so weird that I made some quicktime screen recordings of me figuring it out - what are the chances of that happening today? pretty close to zero - now do you believe in the unseen?
• Saudi Arabia Says Women Can Travel Without Male Guardians - The timing of this is spectacular given my previous post, and also because today I opted for a falafel sandwich for lunch, which in my mind is quite arabic, so it feels a bit like a celebration - I've been to Saudi Arabia and it was a very pleasant place, with a unique identity, but I definitely had a feeling that women were treated quite differently, so I think this is a really great development

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Sunday 4th August, 2019 #

• 'Something resembling hell': how does the rest of the world view the UK? - Sort of an interesting read, I think a lot of the negativity is because many of the countries featured they don’t have any good bands, and of course marmite, they’re still upset about marmite, honestly it’s quite nice on toast with a cup of tea, also they are upset that her majesty the Queen didn't do the Brexit negotiations
• Brexit - UK calls on EU to renegotiate or face no deal - the thing I find surprising in all this is that the EU believes that they can finalise Brexit, one of the most complicated events in the past 100 years, in 1 round of negotiations, that somehow 1 person, Theresa May, can decide the fate of the entire UK, it really makes you wonder if they are on drugs, or maybe it's just a sign that they don't much like our democracy and parliament and would much prefer that we had a monarchy of days gone by where they just need to convince 1 person that can make it happen by chopping off a few heads
• New Issue: Restoring iTerm2 settings form a backup of com.googlecode.iterm2.plist file
• CheckHealth in Neovim - Short tutorial that shows how to setup python, ruby and clipboard providers in neovim
• How Digital Advertising Markets Really Works - I haven’t fully read this yet but it looks like important info in this time of increased oversight in tech by governments
• Earth Overshoot Day 2019 -we’ve officially exhausted the Earth’s natural resources for the year
• Gear Travel Bloggers Carry - Derek Baron’s (Wondering Earl) Minimalist Tech Setup

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Saturday 3rd August, 2019 #

• Killing a process and all of its descendants
• Best ever map of Milky Way shows our galaxy is warped in an S-shape
• New Issue: bundler doesn't install from rubygems.org - tlsv1 alert protocol version
• Serious question - Why is setting up python so bloody complicated? And everytime I have to install it the whole setup has changed - It should be a 1 line install and maybe an addition to a bash config file, anything more is too complicated - Python developers you should be embarrassed releasing this garbage code that breaks important things like vim
• The Real Dark Web - "We rarely acknowledge the vast majority of web developers" - Let's always remember that the 3 pillars of web development are html, css and javascript, if anyone tries to say there is a 4th pillar called ai, tell them to take a hike, *presumably* you will still be able to, that's just my personal opinion
• Writing a Simple MVC App in Plain JavaScript - There are a lot of similarities architecturally between this and the frontend code of linkblog, it's not some futuristic shiney framework, and it sure could be improved but you can easily open it in your browser and see what is going on with the html, css and javascript
• Branching Out from the Great Divide
• Europeans increasingly rejecting air travel
• Facebook adds it's name to Instagram and WhatsApp - Now it’ll be “Instagram From Facebook” and “WhatsApp From Facebook”
• An interesting study into corruption in the police force, the misconduct tends to happen in a networked way

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Friday 2nd August, 2019 #

• The web without the web
• Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers
• Should we worry about the robots and mind-reading apps remaking our world? - Zuckerberg: “Presumably this would be something that someone would choose to use”

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Thursday 1st August, 2019 #

• US style political rhetoric is making appearances in countries across Europe - Personally I'm rather bored of the "so and so destroyed so and so" type stuff, but I do quite like a nice healthy dose of vulgarity every once and a while, seems like we should be putting a Euro-twist on this trend, a sort of acid house remix of it
• Monorepos and npm - A ‘monorepo’ is when you store the code for numerous projects or modules in a single repository, rather than keeping them separate
• Cypress.io: the Selenium killer
• LightSail 2 has used sunlight alone to steer around Earth
• Boris Johnson’s new senior aides want to legalise cannabis in the UK - Probably quite a good way to appeal to younger voters, but I think it could also take a lot of pressure off of law enforcement, I like the bit of historical context about the victorians
• Indian government likely to cave in on data localisation stance after pressure from US - I've commented on data localisation policies before, I think they add a lot of complexity and act as a big barrier to new startup companies, it's not a feature that is easy to add, in a lot of cases you would have to re-architect the entire application, so effectively it would cement the position of the big tech companies because smaller businesses would not be able to comply with the rules - It's the same the world over, the governments only care about the big guys, from the new EU GDPR laws to data localisation in India, all the legislation being put in place has the effect of making it more difficult for startups, the motto seems to be "if in doubt just beat up the new guys", of course publicly they say they are doing the opposite

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