The science behind honey’s eternal shelf life - Natasha Geiling/Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/

Free is evil: tech’s original sin - Jesse Hercules https://medium.com/@jesse.hercules/free-is-evil-d2be55b028d4

Vue v3.0.0 'One Piece' is released https://github.com/vuejs/vue-next/releases/tag/v3.0.0

Google Drive will start to delete trashed files after 30 days starting on Oct. 13 - Chaim GartenBerg/The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/17/21441226/google-drive-delete-trash-empty-files-documents-30-days-date

COBOL: Built to last - Mar Hicks/Logic Magazine https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/

Outschool, which started to provide online classes to homeschoolers, is booming during COVID - TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/18/outschool-newly-profitable-raises-a-45m-series-b-for-virtual-small-group-classes/

A sensory deprivation flotation tank almost drowned me - Saffron Huang (tl;dr DON'T go in a sensory deprivation tank) https://saffronhuang.com/post/a-sensory-deprivation-flotation-tank-almost-drowned-me/

Z80 Number Cruncher http://www.andreadrian.de/oldcpu/Z80_number_cruncher.html

Telling people to delete Facebook won’t fix the internet: The Social Dilemma is a clever but simplistic drama-documentary - Adi Robertson/The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/4/21419993/the-social-dilemma-jeff-orlowski-netflix-movie-review-social-media-algorithms

CD players are back from the dead and now work with Airpods - Andrew Liszewski/Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/cd-players-are-back-from-the-dead-and-now-work-with-air-1845091060

On Mullenweg and the Jamstack - Regression or Future? - Matt Billmann/Netlify https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/09/15/on-mullenweg-and-the-jamstack-regression-or-future/

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth makes peace with Ubuntu Linux community - Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols/ZDNet https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonical-ceo-mark-shuttleworth-makes-peace-with-ubuntu-linux-community/

999 real fans - Grant Dever https://www.grantdever.com/999-real-fans/

By using my local blogPoster terminal program to write microblog posts for my own site, Twitter and Mastodon, I can create and publish without having to be on the sites at all. I can look at Twitter or Mastodon (and interact if I choose) when I'm ready. http://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster

Tutanota email has been suffering from DDos and DNS attacks for weeks now. The downtime isn't a total deal-breaker. Yet. Hopefully they will figure out a better defense. I like the service. I like the price even better.

I had some Debian Stable with GNOME issues. First, the Chromium browser occasionally dies and won't restart. Second, the Nautilus file manager stops allowing files to be moved. Fix for both is to log out and log back in. That it's happening at all is disturbing.

What's new in Thunderbird 78? tl;dr: dark mode, account setup updates, redesigned composed window, end-to-end encryption support, integrated calendar and tasks https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/78.0/whatsnew/

We all got flu shots at the pediatrician's office, where they're doing it for the whole family. No lollipops.

How a job at Yale in the 1960s set Susan Eggers on a groundbreaking path in computer science | Lisa Qian/Yale Economic Growth Center https://egc.yale.edu/how-job-yale-1960s-set-susan-eggers-groundbreaking-path-computer-science

Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market. Senators don't buy it - Shannon Bond/NPR https://www.npr.org/2020/09/15/913328975/google-says-it-doesnt-monopolize-digital-ad-market-senators-don-t-buy-it

I've said a lot of things about @GetSpectrum, but right now the broadband service is ROCK solid, even with 3 work/school-from-homers hitting it simultaneously. Price has been stable and decent, too.

Keeping Time at NIST - Mark Esser/NIST https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/keeping-time-nist

YouTube starts rolling out its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts - Julia Alexander/The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/14/21436158/youtube-starts-tiktok-competitor-short-form-video-instagram-reels-beta-test

Create a personal website using your LinkedIn account (this is a third-party service that appears to be "free") https://linkedcv.site/

Scientists find a possible sign of life on Venus - Marina Koren/The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/09/venus-life-phosphine-microbes/616342/

UK government under pressure to intervene in Arm sale to Nvidia - The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/14/arm-co-founder-deals-like-nvidia-sale-may-undermine-uks-tech-vision

Why are two million people still getting Netflix DVDs by post? - Amit Katwala/WIRED UK https://www.wired.co.uk/article/netflix-dvds

Altair 8800 Clone https://altairclone.com/

How do computers generate random numbers? - Aryaman Sharda/Digital Bunker https://digitalbunker.dev/2020/09/08/how-do-computers-generate-random-numbers/

Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years - BBC News https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54146718

Ask HN: What do you think about 'The Social Dilemma' on Netflix? - Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533

The mastodon-api gem throws an error in Ruby 2.7, but it still works.

18 Free Hosting Providers for Your Static Website in 2020 · Dev & Gear https://devandgear.com/posts/18-free-hosting-providers-for-your-static-website-in-2020/

Now I'm having a Mastodon issue with Ruby 2.7. I'll have to run some tests.

How many ways and how many times can I misspell 'mastodon'? Many times, it turns out.

When something breaks in an app, paranoia sets in

I had one more URI.open change to make in blogPoster, this time in the "ping your blog" portion of the code. https://nokogiri.org/tutorials/parsing_an_html_xml_document.html

Testing URI.open changes in Ruby

I fixed the blogPoster code where Nokogiri uses URI.open to pull a web page's title. I only discovered the problem in Ruby 2.7, which is what Ubuntu 20.04 is running. I have Ruby 2.6 on my Windows laptop and 2.5 in Debian Stable. https://nokogiri.org/tutorials/parsing_an_html_xml_document.html

I am trying to untangle issues with Ruby 2.7 and the Nokogiri gem https://nokogiri.org/tutorials/parsing_an_html_xml_document.html

Zoom towns and the new housing market for the 2 Americas - Planet Money/NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/09/08/909680016/zoom-towns-and-the-new-housing-market-for-the-2-americas

If you want to use Racketlang in the terminal to code in "Legacy" Scheme for SICP, this is how you get a REPL:

$ racket -I r5rs

Mike Tyson: 'Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth' https://indygrit.community/blog/2019/2/9/everybody-has-a-plan-until-they-get-punched-in-the-mouth

SICP Distilled: An idiosyncratic tour of SICP in Clojure http://www.sicpdistilled.com/

R U OK? A conversation could change a life https://www.ruok.org.au/

Time.gov from the National Institute of Standards and Technology is still a thing (and better — and less Java-y — than I remember. https://www.time.gov/

Antonio Lauro's "Valse Venezolano: Maria Luisa" played by Saro Babikian on a 2020 Stephen Hill - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNb9-kgQNuM

Starbucks is borrowing money from you — and you're paying them 10% interest to do it http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/08/starbucks-monetary-superpower.html

I did a classical guitar string review on Augustine Gold and Red sets. Nothing too exciting. The strings are nice. https://github.com/passthejoe/classical-strings

I found a 701-page doctoral dissertation on classical guitar pioneer Emilio Pujol. From 2010. In Spanish. https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/5202

I'm reading a "real" book, even though it's an ebook, and that book is "The Fellowship of the Ring," aka "The Lord of the Rings" Part 1.

Fernando Sor on the Internet Archive https://archive.org/search.php?query=fernando%20sor&and[]=mediatype%3A%22texts%22

Francisco Tárrega on the Internet Archive https://archive.org/search.php?query=francisco%20tarrega

'24 Studies for the Guitar, Op. 100' by Mauro Giuliani - Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/imslp-studies-for-the-guitar-op100-giuliani-mauro

'How You Can Keep Fit' by Rudolph Valentino - Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/HowYouCanKeepFitByRudolphValentino/page/n1/mode/2up

You know what gets better all the time? Fedora Workstation. I'm getting the @fedora bug and might use it for my next build. @Debian has been great, but I miss the Fedora community. And the new bits. https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/

News pro tip: If your video isn't really a video but is instead still images and small clips with words from a poorly written story layered over them, accompanied by horrible music, that's not a video and should instead be a news story with words and pictures.

Pro tip for news sites: If your link doesn't say 'podcast' and it's for a podcast, I'm not happy. Also, podcasts are meant to be accessed via feeds. And I only listen in the car. And now I'm not driving.

Buttondown: a small, elegant tool for producing newsletters https://buttondown.email/

7 versatile Vim commands that are easy to memorize (I knew maybe half of these) https://initialcommit.com/blog/7-versatile-vim-commands