July!

• Home automation with Raspberry Pi, Node and React Few months ago I bought Raspberry PI 3 and around all the IoT hype, I started automating my home
• Saved by Alice In Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court ruled that an abstract idea does not become eligible for a patent simply by being implemented on a generic computer.
• Ant power: Take a ride on a bus that runs on formic acid “We’ve created the world’s first bus that runs on formic acid, which is a much cheaper solution than hydrogen, yet it delivers the same environmental benefits,”
• Better Software Design with Clean Architecture The key rule behind Clean Architecture is: The Dependency Rule. The gist of this is simply that dependencies are encapsulated in each “ring” of the architecture model and these dependencies can only point inward.

That’s all folks!.

 

Links 20th Jan…

Computer stuff:

• The Line Of Death In web browsers, the browser itself usually fully controls the top of the window, while pixels under the top are under control of the site. I’ve recently heard this called the line of death.
• Phone numbers are no proper verification stop using phone numbers as authentication. They are not secure, people don’t own them, they cant be easily replaced
• Cartography comparison: Google Maps & Apple Maps  Both maps also prioritize different kinds of places: Google Maps heavily prioritizes transit, while Apple prioritizes landmarks.

Other Stuff:

• If you don’t finish then you’re just busy, not productive If you’re always starting interesting projects and not finishing, then no matter how hard you work, you’re just busy, not productive.
• Stop Paying Executives for Performance contingent pay only works for routine tasks; for creative tasks, a results focus is ineffective at best, and can in some circumstances actually impede performance
• The Risk of Discovery because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take.
• What’s a fire, and why does it – what’s the word – burn? Fire is a sustained chain reaction involving combustion
• Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God and nearly lose their faces to flesh-eating parasite “The parasite migrates to the mucous membranes of your mouth and your nose and basically eats them away,”

Oct 05 Interesting Links…

Computer Stuff…

• Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack? , the source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released.
• Introducing the Open Images Dataset , we introduce Open Images, a dataset consisting of ~9 million URLs to images that have been annotated with labels spanning over 6000 categories.
• The Moral Economy of Tech Companies that perform surveillance are attempting the same mental trick. They assert that we freely share our data in return for valuable services. But opting out of surveillance capitalism is like opting out of electricity, or cooked foods—you are free to do it in theory. In practice, it will upend your life.

 

Other Stuff..

• Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers’ phones and laptops 60 percent of the world’s cobalt originates in Congo… The Post traced this cobalt pipeline and, for the first time, showed how cobalt mined in these harsh conditions ends up in popular consumer products. Artisanal cobalt is usually cheaper than product from industrial mines. Companies do not have to pay miners’ salaries or fund the operations of a large-scale mine.
• Examples of How City Services Privatization Leads to Inequality Are Piling Up  Dillon Beach, California, residents pay four to six times more for their water than residents of neighboring towns. the transit system of Nassau County, New York, privatized in 2012, the company reduced service on 30 routes, and eliminated several lines all together. A year later, fares increased.
• If you want to follow your dreams, you have to say no to all the alternatives  Monomaniacal focus on a single goal is perhaps the ultimate success stratagem. It’s a pattern found in everyone from Edison to Einstein. When you’re able to focus on a single goal, constantly, your achievements reach their theoretical limit
• The Fascinating Company That Tears Cars Apart To Find Out Exactly How They’re Built

 

19th Sep….

Computer links:

• The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security  Where do anti-good ideas come from? They come from misguided attempts to do the impossible – which is another way of saying “trying to ignore reality.”
• The Router rumble: Ars DIY build faces better tests, tougher competition The Ars home-brew router special has been coaxed out of retirement to test its speeds against an entirely new lineup of gear. This time, we’re even offering power consumption figures as well.

Other Links:

• Why Banks Are BASE Not ACID – Availability Is Revenue   BASE (Basically Available, Soft State, Eventually Consistent), ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability). Availability correlates with revenue and consistency generally does not.
• How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition.The problem with focusing relentlessly on understanding is that math and science students can often grasp essentials of an important idea, but this understanding can quickly slip away without consolidation through practice and repetition…. practiced use to truly internalize concepts.
• Self-Publish, don’t write for a Publisher the tools and technology are to a point where there is little redeeming value to writing for a publisher. The hardest part of writing a book is… writing the book. And a publisher can’t do much to help with that.

 

15th Jul links and stuff

Computer stuff:

• Integer percentages as electoral falsification fingerprints to help catch theses election thieves.
• Quick Modern Object Pascal for Programmers for anyone interested in Pascal Language
• Google collects metadata from Android phones (borncity.com)
• Secure Alternatives to Android for the paranoid.

Other Stuff:

• Automated to Death As software pilots more of our vehicles, humans can pay the ultimate price. ..investigate the causes and consequences of the automation paradox.
• E-Mail from Bill Sitting at my computer one day, I realized that I could try to communicate with Bill Gates, the chairman and co-founder of the software giant Microsoft, on the information highway

That’s it for now. 🙂

 

Jun 22nd links and stuff…

Computer Stuff:

• UTF-8 Everywhere Manifesto Our goal is to promote usage and support of the UTF-8 encoding and to convince that it should be the default choice of encoding for storing text strings in memory or on disk, for communication and all other uses

Other Links:

• Unsplash: Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.
• How Frankenstein’s Monster Became Human  …At the same time Frankenstein exerts an emotional pull as powerful as the one for which Mary Shelley claimed in her preface to have strived: “to speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.”
• Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.

 

 

Jun 08 Links…

Computer Links:

• Image Processing with scikit-image scikit-image holds a wide library of image processing algorithms: filters, transforms, point detection. Frankly, it’s wonderful that an open source package like this exists
• What is the difference between deep learning and usual machine learning?  Deep learning is essentially a set of techniques that help us to parameterize deep neural network structures, neural networks with many, many layers and parameters

Other Links:

• Why Britain banned mobile apps How did the UK reach an increasingly mobile population? Responsive websites, he replies. “For government services that we were providing, the web is a far far better way… and still works on mobile.”
• Being privacy-aware in 2016 …there are some ways you can protect your privacy while browsing the Internet or visiting a new country. This is not an exhaustive list…

 

 

Jun 07 Links

Other stuff:

• Norway reportedly agrees on banning new sales of gas-powered cars by 2025 The four main political parties, both from the right and the left, have agreed on a new energy policy that will include a ban on new gasoline-powered car sales as soon as 2025. Norway is currently one of the world’s largest Oil exporters
• Alan Kay’s Reading List The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students
• The Neuroscience of Op Art Artists, like neuroscientists, are masters of visual systems. Through experimentation and observation, artists have developed innovative methods for fooling the eye
• Universal cancer vaccine on horizon after genetic breakthrough The potential new therapy involves injecting tiny particles of genetic code into the body which travel to the immune cells and teach them to recognise specific cancers

Computer stuff:

• The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass The reality is that even though most programmers today don’t need to know advanced mathematics to be good software developers, math is still a fundamental pillar of both computer science and software development.
• HTTP cookies, or how not to design protocols  …; there is simply no accurate, official account of cookie behavior in modern browsers; the two relevant RFCs, often cited by people arguing on the Internet, are completely out of touch with reality
• 5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of
• 5 More Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of
• React Is A Terrible Idea For new applications, please, for the love of all things open, use Web components instead.

 

May 6th Links…

Computing links:

• Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory Said to be one of the most important men of the Information Age. “..American mathematician and electrical engineer whose groundbreaking work laid out the theoretical foundation for modern digital communications”.
• Rise of the Robots: Review and Reflection Book review of Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots. The book considers the impact of the growth of information technology (IT) on the human labor market, and how the trend towards greater automation could eventually eliminate a substantial number of jobs. The result could be a radical, and disruptive, reshaping of the global economy.

Other Links:

• The mathematically proven winning strategy for 14 of the most popular games Chess, Monopoly, Pacman e.t.c.
• Invention: Rolling fluid turbine by Miroslav Sedláček (Czech Republic) “The novel hydropower turbine unlocks potential for electricity generation from waterways with low velocity such as brooks and small streams, thereby opening up a wide range of previously unexplored sources of sustainable energy”.
• When Bitcoin Grows Up by John Lanchester Whats is BitCoin? What is Money? And why BlockChain might be more important than bitcoin.

 

April 28 Posts of interest

Links of interest:

• Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind
• Creating a Latticework of Mental Models the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form –  Charlie Munger
• Solving the cash problems from self-funding rapid growth “If you grow too fast it can kill the business.”

ICT related:

• ICT System Design Cheatsheet Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs
• GSL/4.1 – a Universal Code Generator GSL/4.1 is a code construction tool. It will generate code in all languages and for all purposes. If this sounds too good to be true, welcome to 1996, when we invented these techniques
• My Biggest Regret As A Programmer But I can still feel the regret of not seeking the challenge of just leadership. In some ways programming was the easy choice… I regret not taking that choice and seeing where it would have led me, yet I would have missed all the fun of writing code and the soul-draining jobs that often come with it where you can’t really fix anything.
• Gears of war: When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves
• History: Creating Magnetic Disk Storage at IBM Events leading to the creation of the first magnetic disk storage product…
• It’s Impossible to Validate an Email Address