Writings

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.

Two days ago I shared that I was able to engrave my name in the Alumni Avenue. I now share some pictures from the graduation ceremony that took place on Monday. During the ceremony, each supervisor makes a little speech about each student. Even though I knew that was a costume here in The Netherlands, I was still surprised by it. I’m now sharing the pictures and video with you. They are, after all, public. I am really glad this chapter is concluded and I’m looking forward for the future.

Note: photos and video are copyrighted by TU/e. Photos are originally on Flickr, and video is originally on YouTube.

My university has this thing called “Alumni Avenue”. It’s one of the air bridges between buildings, but this one is special. On this one, old masters students can engrave their names in the glass. On Monday, it was my turn, right before the graduation ceremony.

It was quite an intriguing experience: I’ve never engraved anything in glass, so it took quite some time to make sure it was clear and visible 😅 There’s some pictures from the graduation, which I will post once I have access to them!

In the spirit of what has been happening to Twitter, Max added a verified checkmark to his personal website. Then, Jim followed with the idea. Since I also found the idea quite funny, now I also got myself a verified checkmark 😂. And it costs less than having one on Twitter!

For years, the blue checkmark in many social media have been used to show status, even though the original goal, as far as I understand, was for authenticity. Unfortunately, common users, or as some media platforms put it, “non-notable people”, were never able to be verified.

My website is owned by me, I pay for it. It is authentic and I can guarantee that the person behind it is myself. That could be an argument to put this badge up there. However, I’m just going with it because it is funny.

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.