Linkdump July 2024

Photo by Element5 Digital: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-book-from-shelf-1370298/

The last Linkdump was in January 2024? How time flies..

https://www.simplermachines.com/why-you-need-a-wtf-notebook/: A nice method to collect things were you think "WTF?" when being in a new team/at a new customer. Just collect first, learn, list, take notes. Then after sometime start crossing points off the list for various reasons and work on the "real WTF ones".

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/: A text about what is wrong about everything around the Brave Browser.

https://privacytests.org/: A side run by a Brave employee listing/comparing the various browser privacy features.

https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser: A fork of Firefox for Android giving you more options. Most notably: about:config support!

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3: Yep, google really pushes on with it's Manifest v3 which will considerably limit the technical capabilities of AdBlocking addons in Chrome. The main reason why I switched back to Firefox.

https://github.com/ratatui-org/ratatui: "Ratatui is a crate for cooking up terminal user interfaces in Rust. It is a lightweight library that provides a set of widgets and utilities to build complex Rust TUIs. Ratatui was forked from the tui-rs crate in 2023 in order to continue its development." Just bookmarked that one in case I need it in the future.

https://anytype.io/: The Everything App. Haven't used it, but someone said he is looking forward to replacing Microsoft Teams with that App in his company.

https://jamesg.blog/advent-of-technical-writing/: Lots and lots of articles from a technical writer who shares what he has learned of the years.
From the same author there is also a book "Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook" available as PDF from his site: https://jamesg.blog/book.pdf

https://www.netways.de/blog/2024/01/19/check-system-basics/: One Icinga CheckPlugin to rule them all! This plugin bundles the checks for Memory, Filesystem, PSI, Load, Sensors, Netdev

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/accounting/psi.html: Documentation for the Pressure Stall Information (PSI) interface. If enabled in your kernel, reachable via /proc/pressure/. Apparently I didn't know about this and just learned of this throught the Netways check_system_basics plugin.

https://docs.cwtch.im/docs/intro/: "Cwtch (/kʊtʃ/ - a Welsh word roughly translating to “a hug that creates a safe place”) is a decentralized, privacy-preserving, metadata resistant messaging app." I don't use it yet, but bookmarked it to see how the project develops. I would really love to uninstall Whatsapp and Telegram from my mobile...

https://bios-pw.org/: Forget your BIOS password? This generator will tell you the Master password of your BIOS if your provide the manufacturer and shown hash.

https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html: Ever wanted to explore Jheronimus Bosch's painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights"? Now you can in detail with audio explanations. Really impressive.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/: An article about Googles shift from better search results to more revenue and user engagement and how that came to be.

https://medium.com/@maciej.pocwierz/how-an-empty-s3-bucket-can-make-your-aws-bill-explode-934a383cb8b1: Imagine your S3 bucket gets hit with 100.000 of requests each hour, as your bucket name is listed as default config in some OpenSource tool. Imagine then that the tool actually makes requests to your S3 bucket.
Now imagine the surprised face of the person from that text, when he found out he has to pay for all the denied traffic which resulted in HTTP-4xx errors.
Hot takeaway from this: 1. Include some random chars into your bucket name. 2. If your are evil, you can increase the bill for every S3 bucket..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQoqlBog7UI: Cooking content! I'd searched for a new anti-sticking cooking pan and came around Hexclad. However as they claim to have develop a new anti-sticking material - not using polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) or in short: Teflon - I was sceptical. After all there is a reason why Teflon is used since decades. Turns out:The pans work, but only for 2 years. Heavily depending on usage. After 2 years you will have to send your pan in and get a free replacement because of the lifetime guarantee. Ok, good customerservice on one hand, but terrible for the environment on the other hand. Also.. I don't consider pans with a lifespan of just 2 years just to be of high quality.. And I found many Youtubers who made videos such as this one. Therefore this isn't a single incident, no, it's a flow in the material/product itself. There is also a nice text from someone (which I forgot to bookmark..) who wrote about how these pans were used in a series of Gordon Ramsay's "Hells Kitchen" and there the pans really showed that the new material is not that durable after all. There was a nice scene were one could see how Gordon Ramsay quarrels with himself as a dish couldn't be prepared properly because evidently the pan lost its anti-sticking capability in some region of the surface. Yep.. I bought a Teflon pan. 😅

https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/: "Client-side comments with Mastodon on a static Jekyll website" Jan Wildeboer did that and I found the implementation interesting.

https://slate.com/technology/2024/05/deviantart-what-happened-ai-decline-lawsuit-stability.html: DeviantArt was one of the many sites of the relatively early Internet which got a lot of attention. Providing a community for artists to share their pictures. Over the years DeviantArt took a big hit. Instagram, Facebook.. Many sites gnawed at their userbase. In the last years they made a small revival. Adding long sought-after features, etc.
And now they throw everything in the trash bin by jumping right onto the AI hypetrain and not doing much to combat the growing army of bots using the original art of it's users to create hundreds of fake profiles with AI generated art, then circle-boosting themself - all to make the original artist vanish in the search results.
Seems like that was it for DeviantArt if they don't do anything against it. After all.. Which artist would join such a site?
(But to be fair: That problem exists everywhere, Youtube, Tiktok, etc.)

https://mpv.io/: An OpenSource video player for the command-line.

https://www.udm14.com/: You want a Google search result free of AI generated content? Add the search parameter "&udm=14". Which is now lovingly called "the disenshittification Konami code".

https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/: A text about the "disenshittification Konami code".

https://endoflife.date/: A nice website listing all of those EOL dates for software. Handy!

https://12factor.net/: This one was listed in a job-ad as a "nice to have/know" point. As "The Twelve-Factor App" didn't rign a bell, I searched for it and found the website. Basically 12 design principles about how to structure your build environment, design your software architecture and other processes.
And yes, I know some projects who would be benefit from following these.