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2019/11/28 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 www.theengineer.co.uk #

2019/11/27 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 venturebeat.com #

2019/11/26 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 www.theverge.com #

  • Paywalls and the greater digital divide - Knight poll asks 'Who should pay for news?' www.zdnet.com #

  • Firefox-maker Mozilla details internet security and privacy projects www.zdnet.com #

  • Virgin Galactic’s real goal may be point-to-point travel around Earth arstechnica.com #

2019/11/25 #

Today’s links:

  • Europe Soup Map - 277 European Soups - A lot of soups and your probably going to want some soup after spending a few minutes on this website www.tasteatlas.com #

2019/11/24 #

Today’s links:

  • CNAME Cloaking, the dangerous disguise of third-party trackers medium.com #

  • 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 www.diagram.codes #

  • 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 savedotorg.org #

  • Elon Musk announces there have been 146,000 reservations so far for Cybertruck since the launch announcement, also it's bulletproof www.slashgear.com #

2019/11/23 #

Today’s links:

  • Announcing core Node.js support for ECMAScript modules - I'm not sure whether to get interesting in this or start moving to higher ground, could be interesting but also feels like there is the potential for things to get messy medium.com #

2019/11/22 #

Today’s links:

  • 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? matthewstrom.com #

  • Build your own React - This looks interesting, something to read later if I get immersed in any react projects pomb.us #

  • FAB - Frontend Application Bundles - Docker containerization type paradigm for front end web applications, oh boy, just say HTML/CSS/Javascript fab.dev #

  • Meet the Cybertruck, Tesla's Ford-Fighting Pickup - I don't know much about electric cars, but I want to see these driving around www.wired.com #

2019/11/21 #

Today’s links:

  • Google updates their policy on political ads in response to the general concern about online platforms being used to mislead elections www.blog.google #

  • 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 developers.facebook.com #

  • The Firefox UI is now built with Web Components - Seems like this is a pretty big achievement briangrinstead.com #

  • Losing the News - The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions pen.org #

  • How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE kottke.org #

  • A massive scandal - how Assange, his doctors, lawyers and visitors were all spied on for the U.S. www.repubblica.it #

2019/11/20 #

Today’s links:

  • Your Daily Podcasts Playlist Makes Finding Your Next Favorite Show Easier Than Ever newsroom.spotify.com #

  • Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival' www.bbc.com #

  • Astronomers Detect Water Vapor Around Jupiter's Moon Europa www.wired.com #

  • Some interesting news from JQuery - They have migrated the code base from AMD to ES modules github.com #

  • 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 blog.acolyer.org #

  • Elon Musk’s Starlink Satellites Are Already Causing a Headache for Astronomers gizmodo.com #

  • 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 dev.to #

2019/11/19 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 blog.mindlessness.life #

2019/11/17 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 www.nytimes.com #

  • 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 www.wired.co.uk #

2019/11/16 #

Today’s links:

  • Twitter releases the first iteration of it's political ads ban www.vox.com #

  • Supreme Court to consider Oracle's copyright clash with Google www.zdnet.com #

  • Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales launches Twitter and Facebook rival www.ft.com #

2019/11/15 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 www.cnbc.com #

  • 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 github.com #

  • NodeBB - Forum software powered by Node.js and built on either a Redis or MongoDB database github.com #

  • Handling Errors in Express - Some useful tips here, quite focussed on async/await but also general stuff about creating errors in express zellwk.com #

2019/11/12 #

Today’s links:

  • GitHub: Over 80% of repository contributions come from outside the U.S. venturebeat.com #

  • Google Chrome is experimenting with labelling websites according to how fast they load using colored progress bars, badges and loading messages blog.chromium.org #

  • SpaceX adds five dozen more Starlink satellites to burgeoning constellation arstechnica.com #

  • Founder's Guide to Building a Developer Tools Business manifold.co #

2019/11/11 #

Today’s links:

  • Bats-core - Bash Automated Testing System (2018) github.com #

  • 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’ www.bpkg.sh #

  • A New Open Source Library & Pattern for Sharing Bash - Lots of bash related things in my feeds today www.conjur.org #

  • 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 thecorrespondent.com #

2019/11/10 #

Today’s links:

  • mongodb-cron - This package offers a simple API for scheduling tasks and running recurring jobs on MongoDB collections github.com #

2019/11/09 #

Today’s links:

  • Instagram Will Test Hiding 'Likes' in the US Starting Next Week www.wired.com #

  • Twitter in India - Why was rival Mastodon trending? www.bbc.com #

  • The WSJ has this article that visually describes how Google's add business works, reminds me of those scenes from The Big Short that describe the subprime mortgage crisis, really hope we don't all end up as AAA garbage Jenga bricks www.wsj.com #

2019/11/08 #

Today’s links:

  • A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day www.theverge.com #

  • 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 www.theverge.com #

  • 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 www.socialmediatoday.com #

2019/11/07 #

Today’s links:

  • Ex-Twitter employees accused of spying for Saudi Arabia www.bbc.com #

  • 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 apnews.com #

  • 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 www.theverge.com #

  • 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 yunchi.dev #

2019/11/06 #

Today’s links:

  • Henry Kissinger Warns That AI Will Fundamentally Alter Human Consciousness gizmodo.com #

  • 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 ngrok.com #

  • 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 github.com #

  • Expose local servers to the internet - Pretty useful web tool for developing webhooks serveo.net #

  • localtunnel exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing - similar functionality to the previous link www.npmjs.com #

  • 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 github.blog #

2019/11/05 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 newsroom.fb.com #

  • Introducing the new Microsoft Edge and Bing - Release date for he new chromium based Edge browser is set for January blogs.windows.com #

  • 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 winaero.com #

  • 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" www.zdnet.com #

  • GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta in 30 countries github.blog #

  • 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 dev.to #

  • Using MongoDB as a realtime database with change streams hackernoon.com #

2019/11/04 #

Today’s links:

  • LocalStack - A fully functional local AWS cloud stack github.com #

  • Microsoft's New Edge Browser Logo - My first thought was “Blue Firefox” gizmodo.com #

  • The Internet Archive Is Making Wikipedia More Reliable - They are adding links to digital copies of books that are used in Wikipedia citations www.wired.com #

2019/11/03 #

Today’s links:

  • Comets from other star systems might be very common, apparently there might be around 12 of them passing through our solar system at any one time science.sciencemag.org #

2019/11/01 #

Today’s links:

  • 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 www.theverge.com #

  • htop explained - Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux peteris.rocks #

  • 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? learnk8s.io #

  • Tech workers get extra geeky and ghoulish as Halloween takes over Seattle-area offices www.geekwire.com #

  • European Gaia-X Cloud Project Draws Backlash From U.S. Tech Giants www.wsj.com #

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