Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Thursday 31st October, 2019 #

  • Zuckerberg doubles down on Facebook political ads policy after Twitter ban - Pretty interesting situation where the two biggest social networks have opposite policies, I wonder how things will look in 1 year from now
  • The Whole Earth Web Archive - "proof-of-concept to explore ways to improve access to the archived websites of underrepresented nations around the world"
  • I Miss the Old Internet
  • Microsoft's GitHub blocks Catalan protest app
  • Twitter to stop taking political and issue advertising on their platform worldwide
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Tuesday 29th October, 2019 #

  • The two-value syntax of the CSS Display property - Only available in latest Firefox 70 currently but worth knowing about it for when the other browsers implement it
  • Top Linux developer on Intel chip security problems - 'They're not going away'
  • Spotify releases quarterly results, is doing quite well, podcasting is being picked up by about 14% of users, but faces lots of competition from Apple and Amazon
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Saturday 26th October, 2019 #

  • Jim Henson Co. and Disney team for new Earth to Ned puppet alien show - Cool idea for a show
  • How colorize the output of a custom git-log command
  • Everyone has JavaScript, right?
  • Facebook introduces a News tab for US users, they have an "editorially independent" curation team and there is a focus on local news, publishers need to be in their News Page Index
  • How BoJack Horseman broke animation's tedious bro culture - I haven't watched many episodes of BoJack, with this perspective it might be enjoyable to watch - A recent female character that I quite like is Sam Fox in Better Things, I haven't really analysed it much but I like her style
  • Create an Eleventy (11ty) theme based on a free HTML template - Very practical set of tutorials that show how to take a site and convert it into a static generator based site
  • Why We Don’t See Many Public GraphQL APIs
  • One of the people behind Krita which is an open source painting application (I think it's similar to Photoshop) has a writeup of the Blender conference - Lots of interesting figures about Linux and open source software development in the world of visual effects
  • Microsoft snags hotly contested $10 billion defense contract, beating out Amazon
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Friday 25th October, 2019 #

  • The real quantum supremacy race is between China and the US - I’d like to see 1 single application of quantum computing that would make the world a better place, so far what I’ve seen is that a cat gif would have more positive impact on planet earth than all this fancy quantum computing stuff
  • Zuck Testified Before the House Financial Services Committee and It Did Not Go Well for Him
  • www. is not deprecated - I'm amazed that I failed to see that www is just another subdomain that essentially makes it clear that at the end of the url is a web server, and I make good use of subdomains - I think it stems from the fact that I learnt not to use www several years before I learnt what subdomains were, so I never thought about it again - As the article rightly points out, there are many other types of servers that can run on the internet and can and do use other subdomains for example email often uses mx. - Anyway subdomains are very cool :)
  • How ssh port became 22 - I love how straight forward things were back in the day, what a different world we live in now
  • Pretty cool looking site for an analogue synthesizer, kind of surprised it's just plain javascript and jquery/jquery-ui under the hood
  • Embed Neovim in your browser - turn any website textarea into a vim by connecting to headless neovim installed on your computer, so you can for example edit your github comments using vim
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Thursday 24th October, 2019 #

  • BBC News launches Tor mirror
  • Google researches have carried out a “Quantum Supremacy” experiment and been able to run a calculation in 200 seconds that would normally take 10000 years on today’s supercomputers - IMHO it would be more impressive with a slightly less stupid experiment name - Ordinarily I would be wondering if it ran NodeJs but I guess NodeJs is probably roughly equivalent to caveman pictures now, my enthusiasm for quantum is pretty low
  • Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden - I didn’t make it through all of this, wow he sure talks a lot, a lot of what he says is very interesting, but he’s like some sort of speaking champion
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Wednesday 23rd October, 2019 #

  • U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them
  • Facebook Pledges $1 Billion to Ease Housing Crisis Inflamed by Big Tech
  • Comparing two branches in Git
  • Rename a local and remote branch in git
  • The Internet and the Third Estate - Well written piece, if a bit long, that looks at the history of the concept of society being made up of "estates" and then an analysis of the current situation and how the internet, and specifically Facebook, is changing the landscape
  • Bulletproof node.js project architecture - I feel like this piece is a bit scattered but there are quite a lot of good ideas in it, it's interesting to see async and classes being useful in nodejs
  • The Illusion of choice and the need for default privacy protection - A look at why in the world of websites, consent is not the right way to handle privacy
  • Netlify have released some features around build tools, adding a way to create plugins
  • SpaceX aims to provide internet coverage with Starlink constellation as soon as mid-2020
  • Firefox 70 for developers - Changes for web developers
  • Firefox 70 arrives with social tracking blocked by default, privacy report, and performance gains on macOS - The tracking reports feature is pretty cool, I'd love if they expanded this to show which web apis sites were using, also lots of new stuff for developers in this release
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Tuesday 22nd October, 2019 #

  • Assange in Court - I didn’t get through all the legal details of this article but it would seem that Assange is visibly in very ill health, big loss of body weight and struggling to answer basic questions, and might be being badly treated in custody (in the UK), his trial is being rail-roaded and there are questions as to how the court is handling the situation
  • Web platform podcast - Off the Main Thread - this edition of the podcast discusses web workers, lots of interesting new possibilities and architectures, I hadn’t realised how much of a different model of client applications it enables, pretty exciting stuff - I worry though about all the bad things it could enable too, what will it mean for privacy surveillance and lock-in, will it be possible for to turn off web workers if necessary, will we all individually have enough permission to do that, will the applications still work without them when the ai apocalypse happens?
  • NASA Needs New Strategies to Protect the Solar System From Earthly Contamination
  • SpaceX submits paperwork for 30,000 more Starlink satellites, if all planned satellites get launched they will be responsible for about a fivefold increase in the number of spacecraft launched by humanity
  • Microsoft announces Secured-core PCs to counter firmware attacks
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Sunday 20th October, 2019 #

  • If a tweet declares war, is it illegal to take it down? - Would have been nice to have something uplifting after the previous happy link, but this is what is in my feed today, and it is quite interesting but I didn’t make it through the whole article, too much of a downer, hopefully this is one of those things that nobody will feel the need to test
  • First all women multi woman spacewalk completed - Finally
  • What can software authors do to help Linux distributions and BSDs package their software? - I did not know there was a big dislike of npm by Linux package maintainers
  • Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
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Saturday 19th October, 2019 #

  • Catalonia has created a new kind of online activism - New activist groups are using technology to organize protests anonymously, it's kind of complicated because on the one hand people need to be able to protest because society and life changes and the state needs to be able to adapt, but also you don't want to destabilise everything whenever there is some problems, I hope the different sides don't get to entrenched with these issues and technologies
  • Working out before breakfast has ‘profound’ effects on overall health
  • Coffee Is Hard - A short peice about coding old school computer games, life and death, and the start of the HN comment thread is really nice too
  • free-for.dev - This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers
  • The new Firefox WebSocket inspector that is already in FF developer edition will be released in devtools for Firefox 71
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Friday 18th October, 2019 #

  • Should We Rebrand JavaScript? - For pretty much the entire article I personally was thinking "actually I quite like javascript" but then right at the end the author suggests WebJS and ServerJS which I actually quite like
  • The power of JSON.stringify replacer parameter - Really useful for sanitizing objects before printing them for example to logs
  • My favourite Git commit - Quite a good illustration that sometimes long git commit messages can be very useful, I mostly agree with the author, but the commit message he presents is really quite long
  • The Wayback Machine - Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways - Improved Save Page Now, and also the addition of Collections, Changes and Show All Captures - The new features sound great, I tried the new Save Page Now, but the screenshot it took appears as "This page is not available on the web" and the saved page looks like it was from yesterday which is sort of confusing, probably worth checking again in a few days, perhaps there are some rollout issues - The old Save Now feature doesn't appear to be working, it's returning an error since yesterday
  • JAMstack Tools and The Spectrum of Classification - Really good overview of all things JAMstack, posts like these are really needed in this space which can seem quite scattered, but when you have the classifications it's actually very structured
  • Facebook chief rules out banning political adverts
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Wednesday 16th October, 2019 #

  • How to Build a Low-tech Internet - This article kind of blew my mind, the story from Kerala India where a 750 kbps internet connection is shared by 3,000 people is so different to the reality of fast internet, also it occurred to me that linkblogs actually work quite well in sneakernet / store and forward type situations, maybe even for reading and publishing, I'd love to know how the networks are setup, even with a 24 hour latency that's sort of how linkblogs are meant to be consumed
  • Google announces Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL
  • 30 years after communism, eastern Europe divided on democracy's impact
  • Firefox’s New WebSocket Inspector - This feature looks cool but it appears to only be in FF developer edition, which I installed a few years ago and it really messed up my OS install, I hope they add this feature to regular Firefox
  • Twitter explains when it will remove abusive tweets by world leaders
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Tuesday 15th October, 2019 #

  • I saw a flock of perroquets fly by yesterday just before sunset
  • Setting net.tls.mode: requireSSL results in "unsupported value for tlsMode requireSSL"
  • Sudo Flaw Lets Linux Users Run Commands As Root Even When They're Restricted
  • A Controversial Plan to Encrypt More of the Internet - "end-to-end encryption or encryption at rest cuts everyone out except the data's owners, while DNS encryption only shifts trust"
  • How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch
  • Here's Apple's statement on Safari Fraudulent Website Warning and Tencent
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Sunday 13th October, 2019 #

  • Emergency Vim Commands - This article will equip you with the necessary skills to become a vim first responder
  • Are we living in a simulation?
  • PewDiePie goes on the record - Wanted to read this but it’s behind the NYT paywall, kind of amuzing side note - my brain always parses his name as PewPewDie no matter how many times I read it, it’s like there is a weird brain electro magnet somewhere that won’t let me read the name correctly
  • Ask HN - What do you self-host? - Pretty interesting thread if you are into self hosting stuff at home, interesting to hear about different people’s setups
  • Learn a Little Network Engineering
  • What to do when you get Sherlocked by Apple
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Saturday 12th October, 2019 #

  • This new machine lets you cut your own vinyl records at home
  • How to sync your fork with the parent repository - I was looking for an article that describes exactly this just the other day, this one is pretty good, though I found I had to also do a git fetch —all or I got a weird error
  • Mastodon 3.0 - A lot of new features including anti-harassment tools, moving accounts, better search, custom emojis categories, OStatus deprecation, auto-suggestions for hashtags, trending hashtags, new and improved audio player and UI Slow mode
  • Larry Wall has approved renaming Perl 6 to Raku
  • Planting Tiny Spy Chips in Hardware Can Cost as Little as $200 (Also it's relatively straight forward to do)
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Thursday 10th October, 2019 #

  • Why older people should be allowed to change their legal age
  • How to update a repository's origin branch to be SSH
  • Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer - Interesting that they have moved away from JQuery to mostly Vanilla JS, also that they use a lot of web APIs like Websockets, WebXR, WebRTC, and Intersection Observer, and that they are big supporters of the open web
  • A thoughtful article that questions the prevailing notion that technology developments are a form of inevitable evolution
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Wednesday 9th October, 2019 #

  • Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by 50% - Super nerdy but quite interesting work, seems like it would be a good idea to know more about the build process for these compiled bits of software that everything else runs on
  • Researchers Are Making Memes Accessible to the Blind
  • Meats in Space - ISS experiment produces the first lab-grown meat in space - It's strange to imagine that quite probably the kids of the future will look back at us saying "can you believe they actually used to eat the animals?"
  • macOS 10.15 Vista - Some of the user reports from the Catalina upgrade aren't all that good
  • The China Cultural Clash - A lot of US - China clashes recently over free speech and trade
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Tuesday 8th October, 2019 #

  • MacOS Catalina is a transition period for Apple - This is something I was vaguely aware of since reading some of the writeups from the lastest WWDC but it's only today after reading the Catalina reviews that it's now clear that it's quite a big change that is in motion, and it could effect a lot of things including web development
  • Some more details on the issues DJs are facing with XML file export being removed from the latest macOS Catalina
  • Spread the word: the Iraqis translating the internet into Arabic - I don't speak any arabic, but to me the language sounds like music, it seems to do things that aren't possible in other languages, needless to say I like this arabic translation youth movement project a lot
  • macOS Catalina breaks compatibility with DJ apps that use iTunes libraries - They have "permanently removed" the export feature
  • We’re Entering the Era of Big Podcasting
  • KeyDb - A Multithreaded Fork of Redis That’s 5X Faster
  • China and Taiwan clash over Wikipedia edits
  • Supreme Court allows blind people to sue retailers if their websites are not accessible
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Monday 7th October, 2019 #

  • The Off-the-Radar Baseball League That’s Trying to Reboot the Game - Pretty interesting article, some baseball leagues are experimenting with rule changes with the aim of changing the pace and quality of the game, similar things have happened recently in football (what they call soccer in america), the stealing first base rule is kinda wild, some of the other rules do make sense, but I feel a parallel with web development, like the pitcher who played through the minor leagues for 10 years only to make it into the majors and have a rule change potentially end his career, kind of like GDPR and other bullshit regulations that are crushing the internet, but for baseball
  • Governments around the world seems to be targeting encryption - I am no expert but what it appears to boil down to is whether keeping secrets in our societies is OK, and if so who is allowed to keep secrets
  • Interesting discussion between Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress, Automattic) and David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails, Basecamp) discuss Wordpress market share, monopolies and power in OSS - I think Wordpress is phenomenal software, I would love to build websites using Wordpress, but it’s written in PHP and I’m a NodeJS guy, I think it would be pretty rad if Automattic built a Wordpress entirely in Ruby and also of course one in NodeJS - forget or perhaps de-focus market dominance and help build out the entire web ecosystem - How can some of us non-PHP developers benefit from all the knowledge they have accumulated building Wordpress?
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Sunday 6th October, 2019 #

  • Enterprise Software Is Dead - I hadn't read an 'X is dead' article for a while now, and this one actually makes a few good points, is it dead, not too sure about that, but it's definitely true that the enterprise software environment is vastly different than it was 10 years ago
  • s3st - A command line utility that allows you to stream data from multiple S3 objects directly into your terminal, could be useful for processing log files stored in s3, for example running a grep on them
  • The Netherlands Surpasses Wildest Predictions For Tesla Model 3 Sales
  • Auth error when restoring to mongodb 4.2 that does not have auth enabled
  • I had no idea it was the anniversary of Steve Jobs' death yesterday, here is a tribute thread started by current Apple CEO Tim Cook
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Friday 4th October, 2019 #

  • I’m a Safari Truther Now - The title of this article made me smile, I guess for some the reaction might be an eye roll, but anyhow it’s quite a nicely written ode by a user that enjoys his Safari browser
  • Chrome will autoupgrade mixed content to HTTPS in February
  • Vaping lung injury toll tops 1,000 - Quite scary, it appears vaping is dangerous and could actually cause death
  • China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains - The trains would cover a distance of 2200 km in about 2 hours running at speeds from 600-1000 km/h - That is a fast train
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Thursday 3rd October, 2019 #

  • I would say that broadly speaking I am a fan of both Steve Jobs and Richard Stallman, I had a odd thought today, sort of a thought experiment/fan fiction, what if Jobs had had all the values that Stallman has vis-a-vis free software, what would the story have been, what part would he have played in the development of the cause? It's kind of difficult to image
  • Logs were our lifeblood - Now they're our liability - I think this idea that logs are a hazardous waste product is a pretty interesting way to look at it
  • iPhone 11’s Deep Fusion camera is available now in iOS 13 public beta - I really want to see this triple camera thing, it’s kind of weird but might be kind of cool
  • Scientists Uncover New Organic Molecules Coming Off Saturn's Moon Enceladus
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Wednesday 2nd October, 2019 #

  • And finally the same link again on the day archives page
  • This is the same link but on the archives month page
  • It's now possible to link directly to a message in a linkblog, when the page loads the message is momentarily highlighted, also works for messages in the archives - I haven't figured out exactly how to integrate it into the UI yet but here is an example
  • Highlight, then fade highlight, for list items dynamically added to a list
  • PureOS Librem 5 overall software architecture stack diagram - It's based on Debian
  • The mysterious bug that was causing macs across Hollywood to become unbootable was caused by a Google Chrome update, some installations of OS X 10.8 or earlier are effected
  • Jet fuel from thin air - Aviation's hope or hype? - I'm surprised this hadn't occurred to me before, but even more surprised that I haven't read about it anywhere: is creating fuel from air and water, the two things that humans rely on on for survival a good idea?
  • Why big ISPs aren’t happy about Google’s plans for encrypted DNS - Though the article does cover interesting details it misses the worry that moving dns settings from the OS to the application could cause a lot of issues
  • Purism starts shipping its Librem 5 open/free phone - if I’m honest something about the company name Purism/pureOS sort of weirds me out a bit but I very much like the product concept, it would be really awesome to have a mobile device running entirely free software
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Tuesday 1st October, 2019 #

  • I Used to Fear Being a Nobody - Then I Left Social Media
  • Bosch Hopes Triggering Explosions Will Actually Make Electric Cars Safer When They Crash
  • KITT Pretends To Be a UFO - Knight Rider
  • Tesla has a new feature where the car can drive autonomously and pick you up nightrider-style, sounds cool but there have been some reports of issues, this article has some user submitted video that make the feature look rather sketchy
  • Git over an ssh tunnel (like through a firewall or VPN)
  • How to calculate number of months between two dates using javascript - This answer is almost correct /getDate/getTime/g to get the right answer
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