Friday, June 7, 2019

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Thursday, May 16, 2019

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Damn. Genetic testing is a wild world! -> 23andMe Informed Me My Husband and I Are Related 

In a way, it doesn’t matter, as long as entire generations are not doing this, and if your kid doesn’t have sickle cell because you didn’t bother to get checked.

But the privacy implications of 23andMe keep popping up and get uglier every time.

What a strange thing knowledge is.

Also, nice word towards the end of article - imprimatur. It means “formal approval”

Friday, May 3, 2019

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

CC Search is out of beta 

CC Search is out of beta with 300M images

This is pretty awesome. I love using Unsplash to find beautiful images for my blogposts on WordPress. I use the Instant Images to do so. Hopefully this new Search tool will have API access that plugins will get built around and we’ll be able to access some amazing photos from around the world!

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Facebook is stealing the next thing from it's underlings - Groups from WhatsApp 

It’s pretty stupid that FB’s ‘bold new vision’ for privacy is all about two things - groups and events. It’s stupid because -

  1. It’s not. It’s really not. Facebook has had years to get Events front and center. It can be the powerhouse in that field. But I can clearly see that terrible video tab. And I can see that Stories are front and center.

  2. Groups. That’s cute. WhatsApp circa 2010 you mean? Groups have existed forever. Relabeling the UI and putting Groups to the center is nice, but it doesn’t solve the problem of privacy or hate speech.

Also, Facebook killed their awesome Groups app years ago. Now they want to bring it back? What happened? All else failed? Bah.

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Why You Should Block Notifications and Close Your Browser – rule 11 reader 

Since the service worker is running in the context of the browser, most anti-virus software packages will give the traffic and processing a pass.

This is scary. As our tools mature, including new ideas about notifications and such, hidden things are being added to the back to get the work done. This is great because it brings technology closer to magic, but it also means that the assumptions we make about technology are mostly wrong.

The article mentions that 12% of people who see the notifications prompt accept it. This is bad. Web browsers should make it more difficult for websites to ask for permission to create service workers. Instead, firefox makes it more likely for a user to click Allow. I always click Deny, because I sure don’t want notifications on desktop from random websites. But I guess most people can easily click Allow. The buck for this stops at the browser’s design team.

I’ve visited tech news sites that have maybe one or two articles of interest, which have asked me for notifications access every time. This should not be normal behavior.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Friday, March 29, 2019

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

A very interesting publisher: Amazon Crossing 

“Amazon Crossing introduces readers to authors from around the world with translations of foreign language books, making award-winning and best-selling books accessible to new readers.”

This is amazing! What’s also interesting is that Amazon has sorted the books into “from countries”, typical categories like “historical fiction”, and you can filter to Kindle Unlimited or Prime Reading. All great ways to get your hands on interesting reading from other countries and perspectives.

This has existed since 2010 and today is the first I’ve seen it! It’s ridiculous that Amazon has all these amazing things going on in the background and some of us don’t even know!

Monday, March 18, 2019

Agreed - Our useless social media 

People are being murdered and our governments are a shambles, and the big players in social media like to pretend that they are apolitical purveyors of totally free speech. Nothing is apolitical, and free speech has become an empty mantra recited by the deplorables to defend shitposting. Thanks to you.

Monday, March 4, 2019

Thursday, February 28, 2019

I made tea 

One of my favorite websites and ideas around writing! “I made tea” is just gorgeous!

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Don’t learn a programming language, solve a problem instead | Medium 

The thing is that the details of how to build something are worthless compared to reasons why you need to build something.

I believe that when you’re learning a new language, the best way to do this is to pick up a real world problem you’re trying to solve, boil it down to the simplest version of the thing (no remote hosting, no paid API access, etc) and just build it as you go about learning the language.

When I learned python, I didn’t learn the ins and outs of python before I built something. I tossed the python language books into the trash and just built something, going along as I did. This is not the ‘right way’ of leaning Computer Science, but most of us aren’t trying to learn computer science, we’re trying to build stuff.

So this is great advice.

Saturday, February 2, 2019

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Monday, January 7, 2019

Friday, December 28, 2018

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Microsoft is building Edge on top of Chromium 

Damn. Now that’s an event! MS tossing their IE code in favor of Chromium is a massive shift in their thinking! Now, does this mean they’ll fix years-old Chromium bugs? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

This is an "#awesometool -> Kill the Newsletter!" 

I just discovered Kill the Newsletter and used it to get an RSS feed of recomendo.com I can’t bear to have more email flooding my inbox than already shows up and I’ve actively avoided newsletters before this point! I can’t believe I’ve never gone looking for something like this before. But all’s well that ends well, I think.

Hopefully Kill the Newsletter will do its thing for a long time to come! :)

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

LabEx 

More free coding courses anyone?

Embr Wave  

It’s easy to laugh at this product as a three hundred dollar sweater. So, yeah, that’s what I’ll do.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Instagram Adpot: #count6 numbers decreasing – CogDogBlog 

I hate twitter and Instagram ads because of their absurd frequency. The second tweet and the second post on the respective networks are ads for me. Same, it seems, for CogDog.

This is an interesting way of studying the algorithm and critiquing it. But I won’t do it because I’ve found ways around seeing these ads and I’m happy with the solutions I’ve found.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Friday, October 19, 2018

Links for @2nipun 

Thread by @morganknutson -

This is an excellent read on the pathos in Google from the point of view of a designer. It’s a twitter thread, so I’ve linked threadviews instead.

There are two services I’ve seen that collect threads on twitter. I wonder which one you’d prefer -

threadreaderapp

or

threader

Now that Workflow has been relabeled as Shortcuts, there are websites popping up that deal with sharing the same -

shortcutsgallery

sharecuts

People are really loving the dot app domains, it seems!

We were having a conversation around offline reading, PDFs, notes, annotations and the such recently. I’ve been looking at Polar for a while now. Worth downloading and using?

Monday, October 15, 2018

Amazon’s recent wage increase shows the drawbacks of a universal $15 minimum 

“Amazon employees could suddenly be making more than nurses”

This is such a BS thing to say. It’s like saying “your company is doing something to prevent global warming, but this other company isn’t, so your company will end up doing more harm than good.”

Amazon can lead by example here. It should.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

How to make Bubble Tea - No Music 

My new favorite YouTube channel - Peaceful Cuisine.

The last thing I truly liked on YouTube/Netflix was Slow TV and it’s amazing train journeys.

This channel is just as therapeutic. The sounds in the No Music versions are all just the chopping, pouring, scooping of the ingredients. It’s amazing!!

Friday, October 12, 2018

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Witchy Comic » Page 289 

This is a beautiful and sad page. This story is so raw and the protagonist is so reluctant to be the hero we all easily make these characters often out to be.

Why it’s hard to read the time on Infograph – Marco.org 

Open this door, Apple.

Could not agree more. From the moment the first watch came out, my brother and I agreed that Apple needs to open the platform to third party watch faces. NOT giving us this option is just negligence on Apple’s part and a clear disrespect for both consumer choice and developer capabilities.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Friday, September 21, 2018

FreshRSS 

This is the first I’ve seen this feed reader, I think. Reeder supports this using the Fever API. It’s both awesome and daunting that so many feed readers out there support the Fever API when Fever is both dead, and had a rather cumbersome API to begin with (it would download the entire block of RSS feed items in one set).

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Press This « WordPress Codex 

When I use Press This sometimes I get a “NOT FOUND” page. I just change the address from u=http%3A%2F%2F to u= and it works fine. I do notice I have to copy and paste the new address in a new tab in firefox when doing this.

Press This « WordPress Codex

Testing this with a bunch of different solutions. Might work.

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