Mike Babb @mikebabb@mastodon.technology

At the weekend I listened to a podcast about GitHub's arctic code vault - such a cool idea! And it turns out I have code in it through my Nextcloud contributions 🏔

https://changelog.com/podcast/411
https://archiveprogram.github.com/

I like @Fairphone's approach to smartphones - modular, user-repairable phones you can get replacement parts and upgraded components for instead of replacing the whole thing. Much less waste and an ethical supply chain! I'll check out what they're offering next time I'm due an upgrade 📱

https://www.fairphone.com/it/2020/08/27/introducing-fairphone-3-plus/

New blog post: Automatic Dark Mode with CSS Variables https://mikebabb.com/blog/automatic-dark-mode-with-css-variables/ ✍️

Firefox for Android has gotten its big new release following a complete rebuild, with the GeckoView rendering engine and browser extension support. I've been using the beta for a while and it's a lot faster than old Firefox ⚡

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-firefox-for-android-experience/

Dan Abramov has started a concise and entertaining glossary of JavaScript terms - https://whatthefork.is. A good addition to your RSS feed

Web developers, what's your build tool of choice these days? Might update my ageing Gulp 3 setup soon. I compile Sass, inject an SVG spritesheet, and run the standard CSS minification etc. No JavaScript in use on the site.

If there's a better way than Gulp for running these tasks I'm open to changing it. I've used webpack a lot but it feels like overkill for this. NPM scripts maybe?

Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 was quite straightforward, and the new release is great. I scribbled a few thoughts on it here: https://mikebabb.com/blog/ubuntu-20.04/

A brilliant comic explaining how smartphone contact-tracing can alert people to potential exposure to Covid-19 without location tracking or other data collection: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ #privacy #COVID19 #technology

Ubuntu 20.04 is now available, and it's looking like a great release! https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/feature-spotting-in-focal-fossa

As many of us make the switch to remote working for the forseeable future, Martin Fowler shares some thoughts on getting the most out of video calls: https://martinfowler.com/articles/effective-video-calls.html

There's some great stuff coming to the JavaScript Internationalisation API in ECMAScript 2020: https://diary.braniecki.net/2020/02/14/js-intl-in-2020/

Intl.RelativeTimeFormat and Intl.ListFormat look particularly useful 👏

I recently started using Joplin for note-taking and it's so good I reckon you should use it too. I wrote a few quick words about it: https://mikebabb.com/blog/work-and-life-management-with-joplin/ #opensource

If I "no longer wish to unsubscribe"? Am I likely to have changed my mind about unsubscribing between clicking the link in your email and this page loading, Admiral? Or are you being intentionally misleading to keep people on your mailing list? Not exactly in the spirit of GDPR.

I am seriously impressed with Netlify! Took very little time to set up, and now my personal site is built and deployed across a CDN with a push to my git repo. Great documentation, too. Thoroughly recommended 👏 https://www.netlify.com

Dan Abramov recommends rethinking the pursuit of “clean code” above all other concerns in this thoughtful post: https://overreacted.io/goodbye-clean-code/