links & ramblings

• 🌍 Discworld Reading Order Sep 12, 2023

  I found this picture on Reddit some years ago, and it had been living in my photo library ever since. Here’s the origin, a Discworld fan site!

  The guide was created by Krzysztof Kietzman. Thanks!

• 🌍 AsyncIO - charles leifer Jun 15, 2023

  I agree with this blog post on Python’s asyncio. It adds a lot of complexity, and is ultimately a kludge to work around Python’s inability to do proper concurrency.

  When developing non-trivial Python applications, I often hit a point where it is quicker and easier to just rewrite it in Go instead of losing time fighting with asyncio. I like Python for its large ecosystem and quick iteration capabilities, but asyncio adds too much mental overhead to be valuable for me.

  (from lobste.rs)

• 🌍 Random Access Memories: 10th Anniversary Edition May 19, 2023

  Wow, I somehow missed this: Daft Punk released a 10th Anniversary edition of their latest album, Random Access Memories (has it been 10 years already?!).

  This release includes 9 new tracks, totaling more than 30 minutes.

  (from kottke.org)

• 🌍 The early days of Linux May 5, 2023

  Nice retrospective from a friend’s of Linus Torvalds (Lars Wirzenius) on how Linux started. I remember digging into the history of Linux several years ago, but I still learned new things in this article.

  It’s very nicely written, full of small fun tidbits and anecdotes. I should really subscribe to LWN.

• 🌍 Windows on btrfs Apr 30, 2023

  This blogger created an unholy abomination using the btrfs driver for Windows and an open-source bootlader for Windows 10: dual-booting Windows and Archlinux from the same filesystem. The “Windows” and “usr” directories both live at the root of the drive.

• 🌍 50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World Mar 16, 2023

  Very interesting retrospective on the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer. It is fascinating to see so much good ideas were first invented at a printer manufacturer’s research lab.

  I knew the mouse was invented there, but seeing they also came up with modern WYSIWYG word processing, Smalltalk, and the desktop metaphor, is crazy cool. Here’s a web-based Xerox Alto emulator, based on the cheekily-named ContrAlto.

• 🌍 @TwitterDev - Starting Feb 9, no more free access to the Twitter API Feb 3, 2023

  Just like that, Twitter is announcing the end of their free API. It had already been severely limited in the past years, now requiring a verified phone number and a manual verification by a Twitter employee.

  I’m not on Twitter anymore, but following the evolution from afar is like watching a car crash in slow motion: inevitable, terrible, but for some reason you can’t look away. I hope the funny bots will be able to move to Mastodon, and that amateur data analysts will find a way to scrape the data anyway.

• 🌍 NewsBoat binaries for Debian Dec 29, 2022

  I’m using Newsboat to read RSS feeds on my netbook. Unfortunately, the version in the Debian “stable” repository doesn’t yet support FreshRSS, albeit the latest release does. I have built the last two versions, and will try to follow up when new ones come out (once every 6 months).

  These builds were made on Debian 11 (Bullseye). Enjoy 😊

• 📝 Mastodon RSS feeds Dec 21, 2022

  Cool tip I found online: you can access a Mastodon account’s RSS feed by appending “.rss” at the end of its profile URL. For example, to follow @Gargron@mastodon.social, you would add https://mastodon.social/@Gargron.rss to your RSS feed.

  This is great, because it means I don’t have to create a Mastodon account to follow what people are saying on there 😊.

• 🌍 Apple to Allow Outside App Stores in Overhaul Spurred by EU Laws Dec 16, 2022

  News from Bloomberg tell us that Apple is working on allowing “third-party” App Stores to the iOS ecosystem (i.e. sideloading). In my opinion, that’s a huge customer win, but I’m waiting to see what actually comes out of this: Apple’s “right-to-repair” program had me really excited, but it turned out to be pretty much useless, costing almost the same as taking your iDevice to an Apple Store, with the added risk of breaking it even more.