Bookmarks

This quite describes my thoughts exactly. I’ve had a “notes”, a “micro”, a whatever-you-want-to-call-microblogging-section, before. But I’ve come to peace with no longer having it and using Mastodon instead. It works for what I want, which is similar to the feelings described in the post.

The author of this post had published two videos on Twitter where he showed an old Windows 3.1 and a new Windows 11 machines opening the same apps (command line, explorer, notepad). In this videos, Windows 3.1 was the fastest, which leads us to think: has any progress been made? In this article, the author goes in more detail about what happened and why it happens. I do agree with the conclusion that the lack of focus and prioritisation on performance is likely the main reason why our OSes and applications have a lot of latency nowadays.

The author goes over the file format they use for tracking their own habits, or anything else in their life that they want. This can potentially be a good thing to do, and with a parser, some analysis can potentially be made out of the logging.

There are quite a few built-in command line tools in macos that I had no idea about and that can definitely be useful. Quite surprised on the document converter (textutil) and image manipulation (sips).

It seems that Apple Weather doesn’t use the same scale for air quality in all countries. While I’ve been seeing air qualified as bad day after day, the Germans, for example, see it as good air quality. I don’t think this helps us, as people, and citizens of our countries. Apple should either let us choose which scale we want to see, or be clear about this behaviour.

This is quite an interesting article. The author goes over the process of reverse-engineering the contents encoded in the Aztec code of the UK mobile rail tickets, which, of course, does not follow the European standard. In addition, eta also published a tool where you can scan your UK tickets and see their contents. Now it would be very interesting to read something similar with the European standard and, of course, a similar tool. Maybe that’s an idea for a post.

Very good resource, especially for new students of Computer Science. The lecturers go over many topics that were never brought up during any of my classes, which could’ve been pretty useful. Of course, some of us end up learning it by trying and searching, but it’d definitely be very great to have had something like this.

Haven’t used Windows in quite some time, but I like to keep following the news as it was the OS that accompanied my childhood, most specifically Windows XP and Windows 7. Somehow I managed to skip Windows Vista, apart from some few interactions in someone else’s computer. Then, Windows 8 came and Windows 10 and I ended up moving to macos for some other reasons and so far, haven’t gone back. I always enjoyed Window UI, at least to some extend.

This article shows UI elements present in Windows 11 that date to older versions of Windows. I expected to see things that dated back to Windows XP. However, I was surprised to see that you can still find UI elements from Windows 3.1 on Windows 11!

Tom describes his experiences on implementing part of the ActivityPub specification on top of his Jekyll-based static website. It is indeed quite interesting to me to see how he achieved it, mostly through “serverless” lambdas and whatnot. He notices, very well, that ActivityPub can be quite messy and is very active when compared to other technologies, such as RSS.

Similarly, most dynamic functionalities of my website could be implemented on top of a static website (as they once were). However, I’m not following that route now. Who knows if in the future I won’t switch back. An interesting… continuous… food for thought.

A nice read on how Domain Specific Languages might be the future of programming.

Similarly to his last article, Jim dives into the concept of website fidelity, which is a way of reducing the amount of resources a website consumes by lowering its fidelity to the original visuals and features. I quite like this idea.

Website owners aren’t necessarily incentivized to start stripping stuff out of their websites in order to support lower fidelities (including a fidelity of zero JavaScript). What you need is like an agent: somebody who works on your behalf as a user and can do for you what site owners won’t — a user agent if you will 🥁.

Note that “fidelity” in this case is not solely a control over the appearance and functionality of the website, but the actual content of the site itself. For example, at full fidelity on a news site you might have an image, title, byline, and short description for each article whereas at low fidelity you might only have the title for each.

I want to stress this point: I see the promise of website “fidelity” not just as a preference for less JavaScript and CSS but content itself. Providing users this kind of control would require website owners be involved, as I’m not sure you could do that well solely as a browser feature or extension.

In the beginning of the week, I tested positive for Covid-19. Even though the symptoms were smilingly gone, yesterday and the day before I noticed my sense of smell was quite odd. I could still smell some things, but not all. In addition, breathing in general had an odd smell. This article was a nice read and explains well how Covid-19 can change our sense of smell.

What’s more likely, she said, is that SARS-CoV-2 injures sustentacular supporting cells, which are like helper cells for the main neurons that pick up on chemicals in the air and send signals to the brain. They help maintain a healthy ecosystem in which the neurons can thrive, and they help guide the neurons to grow and make the right connections.

SARS-CoV-2 latches onto specific receptors to infect a cell, but olfactory neurons don’t have that receptor. The support cells, however, do. “Our body’s natural immune response is to bring inflammatory molecules to that site to try to kill the invader,” Patel said.

But that response can overwhelm the structural integrity of the support cells, and they end up as collateral damage. Without the proper support, olfactory neurons can’t successfully relay chemical signals to the brain, effectively silencing smell.

Fortunately, it seems I can smell things well again today, so that’s great. Besides, my self-tests are getting fainter and fainter by the day. It’s a bit annoying I came to Lisbon and had to miss all company activities. I met some friends and family instead, which was also great. I’ll be here until Tuesday.

At some point in my life I realized I didn’t remember most of the books/papers/posts/videos I had consumed few years before.

Sadly, this is a very common problem. We spend our days consuming media for immediate-pleasure. And usually we have thoughts about what we just consumed, but we don’t note them down, or preserve them.

This is a very nice piece on how to build a website in different layers of fidelity instead of layers of technology. Instead of building a progressive app with progressive enhancement, we should simply use different fidelity levels to the original website. Quite magical and I think that’d work very well.

Jim shows how he uses the Well-Known links resource to show the links he has to other websites. For example, going to /.well-known/links?domain=example.com shows all the pages in his website that link to example.com.