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Think globally, microblog locally
Fri, 30 Mar 2018

Improving handwriting with Spencerian penmanship - Page Flutter https://pageflutter.com/spencerian-penmanship/

Thu, 29 Mar 2018

State of Clojure survey 2018 analysis – Daniel Compton https://danielcompton.net/2018/03/28/clojure-survey-2018

Uber is Ripping Off Frequent Riders and Here's How to Avoid It https://therideshareguy.com/uber-is-ripping-off-frequent-riders-and-heres-how-to-avoid-it/

Will we ever reach 'peak storage'? https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/27/17168088/cheap-storage-warehouse-self-storage-real-estate

I am experimenting with multiple desktops in Windows 10 https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-use-multiple-desktops-in-windows-10/

Tue, 27 Mar 2018

Facebook Container Extension: Take control of how you’re being tracked - Mozilla https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/

How I erased 5000+ Facebook comments and likes - Jaruzel http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/How-I-Erased-5000-Facebook-Comments-and-Likes

Sun, 25 Mar 2018

What is the Fediverse? https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/

Fri, 23 Mar 2018

Donald Trump is radically transforming his White House. He's been president for 1 year - CNNPolitics https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/23/politics/trump-cohn-bolton-tillerson-mcmaster/index.html

Web sites are more secure when they allow users to paste passwords - National Cyber Security Centre (UK) https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/let-them-paste-passwords

Thu, 22 Mar 2018

Cutting ‘Old Heads’: Age discrimination at IBM - ProPublica https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/

Tue, 20 Mar 2018

Polo is a new, advanced file manager for Linux that is written in Vala. It is available in COPR for Fedora https://fedoramagazine.org/4-cool-copr-february-2018. Here is the project site: https://teejee2008.github.io/polo/

How to add fonts to Fedora - Fedora Magazine https://fedoramagazine.org/add-fonts-fedora/

There is now a Fedora Podcast https://x3mboy.fedorapeople.org/podcast/

9 influential JavaScript developers you should follow - JavaScript Report https://javascriptreport.com/9-influential-javascript-developers-you-should-follow/

The ultimate guide to JavaScript frameworks - JavaScript Report https://javascriptreport.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-javascript-frameworks/

Uber self-driving car that killed pedestrian was operated by felon https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/20/operator-self-driving-uber-vehicle-killed-pedestrian-felon/441051002/

There is a lot of good content in @_jsreport (aka JavaScript Report) https://javascriptreport.com/

I was introduced to @axios (subscribe to newsletters at http://signup.axios.com) by @inafried. The newsletters are an excellent way to keep up with things Trumpish and otherwise, even if the sponsors of those emails aren't exactly beloved by all (Koch Industries, pharmaceutical giants ... others that have a huge stake in steering public debate)

Mon, 19 Mar 2018

How and why mkdev moved to Vue.js https://mkdev.me/en/posts/how-and-why-mkdev-moved-to-vue-js

Gitlab: Why we chose Vue.js https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/20/why-we-chose-vue/

Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place - human connection. – John Biggs https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/deletefacebook/

Self-driving Uber car hits, kills pedestrian in Arizona - WCPO https://www.wcpo.com/news/arizona-police-investigating-self-driving-uber-car-involved-in-crash-overnight

Great playing by Paul Desmond, Jim Hall, Connie Kay and many others on "Feeling Blue" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZaUByp-AX4

Apple is secretly developing its own screens for the first time - Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-19/apple-is-said-to-develop-displays-to-replace-samsung-screens

Fri, 16 Mar 2018

A fork on Github is no fork (mainly when you fork something from a private repo and that repo's owner doesn't keep paying, your repo will also be inaccessible) https://www.niels-ole.com/ownership/2018/03/16/github-forks.html

Thu, 15 Mar 2018

An overview of desktop Ruby GUI development in 2018 - Saverio Miroddi https://saveriomiroddi.github.io/An-overview-of-ruby-gui-development-in-2018/

Wed, 14 Mar 2018

Why is SQLite coded in C? (tl;dr: performance, compatibility, low-dependency, stability) https://sqlite.org/whyc.html

Tue, 13 Mar 2018

My free year of 25GB @dropbox and 100GB of @microsoft @onedrive are both ending. @dropbox promised me a "discount": the same /year that everybody pays. @google wants for a TB, but they will give 100GB for . @office365 gives 5TB for . Everybody wants .

Mon, 12 Mar 2018

Thread Reader helps you unroll a full Twitter thread on a dedicated, beautifully designed page to allow an easy read of the whole story https://threadreaderapp.com/

Urn: A Lisp implementation for Lua http://urn-lang.com/

John Coltrane made some mysterious pitch diagrams, and Lucas Gonze, with inspiration from Yusef Lateef, made some of his own https://medium.com/@lucas_gonze/coltrane-pitch-diagrams-e25b7d9f5093

Blogs that use Frog, a static-site generator written in @racketlang http://stevenrosenberg.net/racket/2018/03/blogs-that-use-frog.html

Which rsync should I use for Windows? https://manjaro.site/rsync-windows/

Sat, 10 Mar 2018

California lawmaker's bid for year-round Daylight Saving Time gain momentum http://www.montereyherald.com/government-and-politics/20180310/state-bids-for-year-round-daylight-saving-time-gain-momentum

Premium Twitter feeds are for suckers - The Outline (I did not know this was even a thing) https://theoutline.com/post/3597/premo-premium-twitter-feeds?zd=2&zi=f5jnmlh4

What’s it like to ride in a self-driving car? – The Economist https://medium.economist.com/whats-it-like-to-ride-in-a-self-driving-car-24015c69cc48

Your brain needs to forget in order to grow - Ferris Jabr http://nautil.us/issue/58/self/this-is-where-your-childhood-memories-went-rp

Why I turned down an interview with Google – Jackson Kelley https://sjkelleyjrblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/10/why-i-turned-down-an-interview-with-google/

Your data is crucial to a robotic age. Shouldn't you be paid for it? - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/business/economy/user-data-pay.html

Google doesn’t necessarily need innovation – Steve Yegge https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/google-doesnt-necessarily-need-innovation-95cea96d0eeb

Why I left Google to join Grab – Steve Yegge https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84

I finally gave in and started an account on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/news

A new era of batteries spells trouble for gas in America - Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/a-new-era-of-batteries-spells-trouble-for-natural-gas-in-america

Thu, 08 Mar 2018

Debian GNU/Linux Now Available for WSL In The Windows Store - Bleeping Computer https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/linux/debian-gnu-linux-now-available-for-wsl-in-the-windows-store/

I have been using Ubuntu on the WSL for a long time now. I don't even have the "current" version (on the Windows side; the Ubuntu system itself is up-to-date 16.04). I'm not sure if I will swap Ubuntu for Debian at this point because Ubuntu is working, and with a console-only system the differences are not as noticeable.

Debian GNU/Linux for WSL now available in the Windows Store – Microsoft: I didn't think that Debian would "beat" Fedora to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but it did. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/03/06/debian-gnulinux-for-wsl-now-available-in-the-windows-store/

For two months, I got my news from print newspapers. Here's what I learned. - The New York Times: Of all the links I posted this week, read this one. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/7/17092334/amazon-alexa-devices-strange-laughter

Florida lawmakers vote to stay in Daylight Saving Time all year long - CNN https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/us/florida-year-round-daylight-saving-time-trnd/index.html

Thomas Guide maps: The rise and fall of Los Angeles' directional holy grail - AirTalk, 89.3 KPCC (FYI to non-Angelenos and Generation Z -- we ALL used to have a copy of this hefty map book in our cars) http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2018/03/07/62065/thomas-guide-maps-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-los-ang/

The NYT writes an obit for Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who wrote the first computer program https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-ada-lovelace.html

JavaFX will be removed from the Java JDK - InfoWorld https://www.infoworld.com/article/3261066/java/javafx-will-be-removed-from-the-java-jdk.html

The future of JavaFX and other Java client roadmap updates - Oracle Java Platform Group, Product Management Blog https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/the-future-of-javafx-and-other-java-client-roadmap-updates

Wed, 07 Mar 2018

I'm going through The Racket Guide @racketlang https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/index.html

Is loneliness a health epidemic? - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/opinion/sunday/loneliness-health.html

People don't actually know themselves very well, according to science - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/you-dont-know-yourself-as-well-as-you-think-you-do/554612/

Why being a loner may be good for your health - BBC http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180228-there-are-benefits-to-being-antisocial-or-a-loner

Tue, 06 Mar 2018

I wanted to buy this domain, but I just learned that it costs $19,888: http://racketeer.com/. This one is a relative bargain at $3295: http://theracketeer.com. Maybe I'll get a .io ... or go for something completely different.

I am playing with http://racket-lang.org, and I don't know how deep I will want to go with it.

The DrRacket IDE is refreshingly simple, and already I've been able to figure out how to scrape a web page and grab elements with a regex. Getting the development environment set up is world's easier than with Clojure (though I've been dabbling in Zach Oakes Nightcode https://sekao.net/nightcode to get a feel for that language).

Pros for Racket include that its team cares about desktop GUIs, the documentation is excellent, and there's a great static-blog compiler called Frog https://github.com/greghendershott/frog. Cons: Not a lot of people are using Racket for non-academic purposes. But the lack of a Ruby Nokogiri-like library made me learn a new regex pattern that I'm probably going to use in my Ruby app BlogPoster to eliminate Nokogiri as a dependency. (Related side note: the Ruby Twitter Gem is a HUGE dependency that I probably should be more focused on ditching, and if I implemented this app in Racket, I'd have to do without it. In Clojure, I could probably lean on a native library, or use something from Java.)

I have not been excited about Twitter recently. My BlogPoster script allows me to create entries and NOT post them to Twitter, and I may do that a bit this week. Whether they're on Twitter or not, my social updates are at http://stevenrosenberg.net/updates/.