Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Thursday 28th November, 2019 #

  • Bill Gates-backed Heliogen targets 1,500°C solar thermal - Seems like this has the potential to be interesting technology but I would have thought that the applications they mention such as making steel would require very large solar arrays and I wonder how the variance in the suns output would affect production
  • Twitter pauses plan to delete inactive accounts
  • Introducing Bootstrap Icons
  • A short but sweet description of the SVG viewBox element
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 27th November, 2019 #

  • Why Amazon won’t dominate in groceries - I think this is an important area to watch because the upgrading of the food supply chain to a highly technological infrastructure will have a big impact on all of us, I’d like to see some data about how the different approaches affect society at large, inequality, happiness, health, integration, diversity, education, mobility, what happens to these aspects as we roll out all this tech? Would be a great topic for some citizen journalism imho
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 26th November, 2019 #

  • Virgin Galactic’s real goal may be point-to-point travel around Earth
  • Firefox-maker Mozilla details internet security and privacy projects
  • Paywalls and the greater digital divide - Knight poll asks 'Who should pay for news?'
  • Web development on Chrome OS
  • Elon Musk promises Cybertruck vs. Ford F-150 rematch after controversy - The thing that struck me from seeing the vehicle side in the video on this post, is that you really could use the cybertruck as a skateboard/snowboard/rollerblade/bmx ramp
Become a Patron!

Sunday 24th November, 2019 #

  • John Gruber Cybertruck
  • Cybertruck steel ball launch event window smash
  • Elon Musk announces there have been 146,000 reservations so far for Cybertruck since the launch announcement, also it's bulletproof
  • There are a lot of people worried about the sale of the .org domain to a private equity firm, the .org domain is traditionally used by non-government organisations
  • Diagram.codes - Diagram generation tool - This looks pretty cool, it's probably the easiest way I've seen to create a sequence diagram, lots of other diagram types too
  • CNAME Cloaking, the dangerous disguise of third-party trackers
Become a Patron!

Friday 22nd November, 2019 #

  • Meet the Cybertruck, Tesla's Ford-Fighting Pickup - I don't know much about electric cars, but I want to see these driving around
  • Farewell to snowboard pioneer Jake Burton Carpenter
  • FAB - Frontend Application Bundles - Docker containerization type paradigm for front end web applications, oh boy, just say HTML/CSS/Javascript
  • Build your own React - This looks interesting, something to read later if I get immersed in any react projects
  • Design APIs - The Evolution of Design Systems - There are quite a lot of moments of surprising clarity in this article, but I found it's confusing matters too, also designer power grab, much?
Become a Patron!

Thursday 21st November, 2019 #

  • A massive scandal - how Assange, his doctors, lawyers and visitors were all spied on for the U.S.
  • How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE
  • Losing the News - The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions
  • The Firefox UI is now built with Web Components - Seems like this is a pretty big achievement
  • Facebook is making Visual Studio Code it's default development environment - Also interesting in this article is that internally Facebook uses Mercurial rather than git
  • Google updates their policy on political ads in response to the general concern about online platforms being used to mislead elections
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 20th November, 2019 #

  • Elon Musk’s Starlink Satellites Are Already Causing a Headache for Astronomers
  • Native File System API
  • Local-first software - you own your data, in spite of the cloud - I've read about this concept before, and I'm really interested in it, I was looking at the Native File System API a few days ago, only the user has to add access to the file system each time at tab opens which makes it impractical to use with local copies of the data
  • Some interesting news from JQuery - They have migrated the code base from AMD to ES modules
  • Astronomers Detect Water Vapor Around Jupiter's Moon Europa
  • The 40% keyboard
  • Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'
  • Your Daily Podcasts Playlist Makes Finding Your Next Favorite Show Easier Than Ever
  • Linux's commands and tricks I'm using in my daily job as a developer - The most useful one here is probably the ssh tunnel to a database command, but I use quite a lot of these too, for instance watch is really useful
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 19th November, 2019 #

  • The Language Agnostic, All-Purpose, Incredible, Makefile - I've been wanting to learn how to use make and makefiles for a while now, this article looks like it covers a lot of the main topics, and there are some examples of how it can be useful in working with ruby/npm hopefully I'll get some time in the future to re-read this in more detail
Become a Patron!

Sunday 17th November, 2019 #

  • I've been seeing a lot of mentions about the Brave browser recently which has reached v1.0 - This article summarises it's features which are very much about privacy but also there is some sort of blockchain based ads system - It's built by Brendan Eich creator of the Javascript programming language and co-founder of the Mozilla project
  • NYT Magazine piece the portends that the internet of eutopia is now dead and it's been taken over by the internet of scum - Worth the read just to see what the current MSM brush strokes are painting
Become a Patron!

Friday 15th November, 2019 #

  • Handling Errors in Express - Some useful tips here, quite focussed on async/await but also general stuff about creating errors in express
  • NodeBB - Forum software powered by Node.js and built on either a Redis or MongoDB database
  • Latest release of node process manager pm2 4.2.0 now available, some interesting features like highlighting specified string in logs output, sysmonit and sysinfos commands among others
  • Instagram Announces Global Expansion of Hidden Like Counts Test
  • Apple News+ has struggled to add subscribers since first week of launch in March - On launch they added 200 000 subscribers but that figure hasn't increased significantly, and is small in comparison to Apple Music which has 60 million subscribers
Become a Patron!

Monday 11th November, 2019 #

  • What Newspapers Can Teach Us About Web Design
  • The new dot com bubble is here - it’s called online advertising - This article was interesting but I found it was too long and didn’t make it to the end
  • A New Open Source Library & Pattern for Sharing Bash - Lots of bash related things in my feeds today
  • bpkg is a bash package manager - like npm but for bash, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a ‘bash package’
  • Bats-core - Bash Automated Testing System (2018)
Become a Patron!

Friday 8th November, 2019 #

  • YouTube’s homepage has had a redesign - Looked the same to me at first, but the before and after gif in this article shows the difference, also new "Add to Queue" feature
  • Rightwing columnist smacks journalist Glenn Greenwald on Brazil radio show
  • OpenAI has published the text-generating AI it said was too dangerous to share - Might explain the high percentage weird names people have in news stories
  • A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day
Become a Patron!

Thursday 7th November, 2019 #

  • What Is a Shell? - I liked this relatively short article because it goes one level deeper than other similar articles, mentioning the execve system call that the shell calls, and I think in the context of describing what the shell does this adds a lot of interesting context and detail
  • Twitter is rolling out Topics, a way to follow subjects automatically in the timeline - Sort of an interesting feature, but too many algorithms imo, personally I like the simplicity of the hashtag
  • This AP article on the Saudi/Twitter story is a bit odd, they interview a person called Adam Google, considering Google the company was incorporated in 1998, it's pretty strange to have someone with the surname of Google - They also use quotes from "a critic" with no name
  • Ex-Twitter employees accused of spying for Saudi Arabia
Become a Patron!

Wednesday 6th November, 2019 #

  • How to generate a test version of the Stripe webhook header string - This wasn't mentioned in the API docs so linking to it here as it is quite useful
  • ngrok - Public URLs for a variety of use cases such as developing webhooks integrations, sending previews to clients, testing chatbots, demoing from your local machine, ssh access to your rasberry pi
  • Smart TV companies are making the BBC pay for prominence
  • Henry Kissinger Warns That AI Will Fundamentally Alter Human Consciousness
  • There are calls to ban microtargeting in political ads
  • Highlights from Git 2.24 - I’m always surprised by how many features are added in git releases, in this one macros for enabling groups of settings, new history rewriting tools and a lot more
  • localtunnel exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing - similar functionality to the previous link
  • Expose local servers to the internet - Pretty useful web tool for developing webhooks
Become a Patron!

Tuesday 5th November, 2019 #

  • Using MongoDB as a realtime database with change streams
  • The Future of DEV - I find that I am linking to quite a lot of articles from dev.to recently, they write good articles about dev so it's interesting to read about their future plans
  • GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta in 30 countries
  • GDPR is missing the point, says Edward Snowden - "The problem isn't data protection, the problem is data collection" - "It's not data that's being exploited, it's people that are being exploited"
  • Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week- Productivity jumped by 40%
  • I had't heard of the Collections feature in Microsoft Edge, looks to be useful, makes sense to be able to easily export data into their other cloud web tools
  • Introducing the new Microsoft Edge and Bing - Release date for he new chromium based Edge browser is set for January
  • Introducing Our New Company Brand - Facebook introduces new branding to make it clear which apps are part of the Facebook suite (Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra), the branding will use different coloring depending on context
Become a Patron!

Friday 1st November, 2019 #

  • European Gaia-X Cloud Project Draws Backlash From U.S. Tech Giants
  • The next quantum computing buzz phrase / slogan - “The Quantum Advantage”
  • Tech workers get extra geeky and ghoulish as Halloween takes over Seattle-area offices
  • Hands-on guide - developing and deploying Node.js apps in Kubernetes - This guide is well put together, very readable, appears to have just the right details, but as I read it the same feeling that always occurs when I read a Docker/Kubernetes tutorial occurs, at some point you start wondering how far down the rabbit hole you are, each step makes sense and I can see how it would be super useful but also so many layers of complexity have been added, it's like they've added an entire OS inside the OS that you are already running, sure it looks slick when it's working, but what happens when something stops working and you are deep in the woods - Anyway I like that Kubernetes is open source, but I worry about everything being reliant on Docker, what happens if they start having issues?
  • htop explained - Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux
  • Facebook’s political ad ban created a disaster in Washington state - "People just find workarounds" - I guess if only companies selling products are allowed to buy adverts then the politicians will just court random companies that will stick political ads in their product ads, it could be a whole new era of media politics
Become a Patron!