World Water Day (26).
Hugo Rasmussen (78).
Just like last year /koldfront.dk/archive/20 ... - I still ♥ Free Software.
Serverless means no server to hack into? #computers
From the technical details page on instant.page:
"instant.page’s script is hosted serverless with Cloudflare Workers so that there’s no server to hack into."
When I read something like that, I turn into that guy from that XKCD-strip.
I get this overwhelming urge to oldsplain (yes, that's a word) to this whippersnapper that even though it apparently is called "serverless", there still is a machine somewhere, doing something. And that can, of course, theoretically, be hacked.
Maybe someone can youthsplain (also a word) this to me. Thanks in advance, xoxo, YOLO.
Hello World by Hannah Fry
I managed to finish a book!
For quite a while I have been buying [real, paper] books once in a while, reading ¼, ½ or something, and then I've kind of left the book.
This also happened to Hannah Fry's "Hello World", which is about algorithms and how they are used/abused in our current world. But today I read the last two chapters!
It is not a technical book, but it does bring up a bunch of examples of bias in the use of various systems and algorithms today, that aren't immediately obvious, and I think it is worth reading for those.
It would have been fun with a little more detail in how these things work, but I guess that would have limited the audience.
Nostalgia + hardware story telling #amiga #computers #free software #hardware
I don't know why, but this mix of nostalgia and hardware story telling is really compelling: Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer, by Robert Smith.
It's long, but weirdly soothing to read through, I find.
Feedbase year 3 #emacs #feedbase #gnus
I started Feedbase in 2016. Today I randomly searched through the logs and counted the number of unique IP(v4/v6) addresses that have accessed the NNTP-server.
106, the number was. 2-3 of them are me. The number of regular users is probably around a handful.
That's cool - I primarily built it for myself, and it works great for that purpose.
One thing I specifically made possible was to post follow-ups to articles, to discuss them. I was kind of hoping this would create a little community (or several).
That hasn't materialized. While there are 1.1 million articles from feeds, there are just 95 follow ups, and of those I wrote 93%, <1% are by one other author, and 1 was from a third, a test.
A thing just popped into my mind: so far I've only found two NNTP-clients that natively work well with HTML articles: Gnus and Thunderbird. I've documented a way to make slrn render HTML, but I'm afraid it's not efficient enough to be quite usable, and Pan doesn't render HTML at all, as far as I can tell.
Maybe I should look into rendering HTML into plain text for those readers, serverside?
An obvious problem with this is how the server should tell whether a client understands HTML or not. I'm not sure there is any good way to do that. Hm.
Also, Gnus/Emacs is really flaky when it comes to loading many images. If that was fixed, it would be really nice.
Debian unstable sound gone [fixed] #debian #hardware
Yesterday sound stopped working on my Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd gen running Debian unstable. The mute-light was on and pavucontrol(1) only showed one output; "Dummy".
After looking at the latest packages in /var/cache/apt/archives/, I didn't really get any bright ideas of what could be the cause.
I tried booting some older kernels, to see if that was the problem. Still no sound.
The fact that even older kernels didn't have sound any more made me think of the updating of initramfs's when a kernel package is updated. Maybe something went wrong there?
A quick sudo update-initramfs -k all -c and reboot later, and sound works again. Phew.
JAXA Tie Fighter #space
While looking at The Atlantics photos of the week recently, I noticed that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency apparently has developed Tie Fighter technology.
Very impressive. I hope they use it for good. May the force be with all of us!
The image is kind of fuzzy, and it's just a shadow, so who knows.
Fred Fish cd-rom nostalgia #amiga #computers
A couple of days ago I was helping sorting and cleaning out old electronics from my parents basement.
The one thing I knew I wanted to keep was the Commodore CD-TV that I got in a swap at the end of my "Amiga period".
Along with the machine were 2 cd-roms - one was "The Fred Fish Collection Volume 1.6 February 1993". I had to see if the cd could still be read.
It could! I've put the content of the cd online for fun.
One thing noticed as the filenames were scrolling by was... Perl!
Fred Fish disk 161 has a Perl-interpreter for the Amiga - the date on the file is 1988-10-02, and the binary is a whopping 149 KB.