Timo Tijhof @krinkle@mastodon.technology

I miss the bygone era of very internety things, geocities-style scavenger hunts, easter eggs. So, I made thing. Hope you like it!

https://treasure21.timotijhof.net/

#scavengerhunt #easteregg #eastereggs #textadventure #treasurehunt #nostalgia #geocities #geek

Archive.org captures in real-time new posts from self-hosted WordPress blogs, plus anything they link to, and does something similar for new citations on Wikipedia articles.

I wrote down how this works, and how it all ties together.
(The rabbit hole got me on this one, I'll say! 😅)

https://timotijhof.net/posts/2022/internet-archive-crawling/

#wordpress #SSE #XMPP #PHP #InternetArchive #WaybackMachine #wikimedia

"How to Build a Low-tech Website?"
by Kris De Decker.

In a nut shell:

* Solar PV panel.
* Low-power Linux box (Olimex A20, like a Rasberry Pi but reportedly more fast, more compat with regular Linux, fully open-source at hardware level, yet need less energy).
* Nginx webserver for TLS and H2.
* Statically deployed from a CMS.

Original article: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website/

Follow-up 2020 article:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html

More about the hardware:
* https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#server
* https://olimex.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/olinuxino-and-raspberry-pi-compare/

Oh, and apparently we've been doing this since 1901, with successful submarine trials (domestically) going back to the 1840s. I had no idea it went back that far!

They've had some upgrades, of course. At the time, they were telegraphy cables. Later telephone. And now, we're on multi-terrabits-per-second optical fibers.

The map looks surprisingly similar. Makes me think there are probably highly-specific terrain considerations that lend itself to these routes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#British_dominance_of_early_cable

How to approach unit testing, by Aleksey Kladov:

* Work hard on making adding new tests trivial.
* Test features, not code.
* Good code is easy to delete.
* The "neural network" test.
* [..]

I don't agree with each point, but I like the thought process here and how to think through these. Draw your own conclusions :-) Helped polish some of my own ideas.

https://matklad.github.io//2021/05/31/how-to-test.html

#phpunit #qunit #tdd

"Things You Can And Can’t Do", by Jim Nielsen.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/things-you-can-and-cant-do/

In a few words, this captures a wider philosophy and mentality:

"""
you can’t make a user’s network faster [...]
"""

Today in native-app-"invents"-stuff-that-just-works-on-the-web:

YouTube introduces page zoom in mobile app. You know, the thing you've had for 35 years on the web and can do with any site, incl youtube.com in any mobile browser.

Can't wait for the day Google blesses the world with the ability to select text in titles and descriptions, so that people can eg research online about what they watch. "Nah, don't be silly. Better just keep them peoples engaged in your app." #youtube

The new macOS interface is worse in every way. Jeff Johnson:

"""
I feel that the time is overdue for us to look critically at the [macOS] Ventura Share menu, because some of the design changes to the Share menu are as misguided and bad as those to System Settings.
"""

Yep. Another example of narrow-minded consistency taken to an extreme without considering the human. Our job is to solve the damn problem.

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/VenturaShare.html

#design #UX #apple #macOS #humaninterfaceguidelines