Weekly Thing #232 / Fiber, Decker, Privacy
I’m Jamie Thingelstad, and this is my Weekly Thing. Did you know that you can also get this via your favorite feed reader using the RSS feed? Hooray for web standards!
I’m feeling bullet pointy…
- Got done with COVID, testing negative on Sunday and on Tuesday. I have a hall pass for the next 4 months or so. Nobody else in the family got it.
- We had shockingly few visitors on Halloween. I have no idea what that was about, but I feel a need to start a marketing campaign for our block to drive more activity next year!
- I won two more Noun Name Service raffles! 💯
- Final project of our move got done this week. Family room home theater done!
Hope you have a great weekend! Winter is coming… 😊
“Throughout the centuries,
there were men who took first steps
down new roads
armed with nothing
but their own vision.”
— Ayn Rand
Weekly Thing on Reddit?
Are you into Reddit? I’ve been giving it another go lately. I’ve long thought that it would be really cool to have a place for Weekly Thing readers to comment. I even once played around with using Discord for that but it never felt right. Reddit however could be a great fit.
Check out r/WeeklyThing!
Each new issue will be shared. I’m not sure exactly where this will go, but basic Reddit features are ready to role. If Reddit is your thing, give it a try and feel free to start a thread or comment on an issue! 👍
Minnehaha Creek completely dry with the record drought this year.
Nov 3, 2022 at 4:54 PM
Minneapolis, MN
Notable
iPhone 14 Pro Camera Review: A Small Step, A Huge Leap — Lux
Detailed analysis of the newest iPhone camera module. I keep wondering when Apple is going to hit a wall here but they seem to be able to get more and more out of this very small package.
12 Things Self-Confident People Do that Insecure People Avoid - Leadership Freak
I love both of these lists so much. I think this would be worth revisiting on a regular basis. Two of the “build self-confidence” items really resonated: “Finish something”, “Do something you’re putting off”. 💯
Jony Ive on Life After Apple - WSJ
I don’t know if you could find a designer that has impacted more people, in a more profound way, than Jony Ive. His fingerprint is all over Apple products, and mimicked by their competitors.
Wiring my home with Fiber - Stefan Schüller
I’ve never done networking with fiber, so I found this article an interesting dive into the tools and techniques you need to put a fiber network in. A lot of complicated bits, and specialized equipment, that I’ve never had any experience with.
The Infinite Conversation
This is really wild.
An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon.
Start this up on a browser and just let it run in the background while you do other things. Where are we going with all this tech? 🤷♂️
Introducing YNAB Together for Your Shared Financial Journey
We’ve been using YNAB for years to do our personal finances and I think it works great. It works fine for Tammy and I to share a single account, but they’ve now rolled out support for multiple users to work together. Importantly they hit on something that I have wished they would do for a while, creating a way to pull your kids into a small part of the overall budget. This looks like a great step into collaborative financials, and having kids get introductions to managing their own budgets.
Michael Tsai - Blog - IAP for NFTs
Apple updates their guidelines that NFTs are fine, but you cannot use them to bypass In-app Purchases. So, no buying an NFT to get a feature unlocked in a product.
iA Presenter
iA is renowned for making beautifully designed and elegant applications. I’ve used iA Writer in the past, although Drafts ultimately took over that need for me. This new approach at presenting is really different. At first I thought it was just another Markdown to slides tool, but it is much more. This is a tool that thinks through the entire act of creating a presentation, and provides a way to do it that will likely result in a superior result. Sadly, most places you have to do PowerPoint with others, but I’m going to look for an opportunity to use this soon. 🪄
What Moneyball Has Done to American Culture - The Atlantic
The sentiment of this article resonates with me.
Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?
Must we perfect everything to absolute efficiency? And if in doing so, do we destroy it? 🤔
Decker
This probably resonates more with me because I did a number of fairly robust projects in HyperCard when I was in High School. My final project for Humanities was in HyperCard. Decker is visually similar to HyperCard, but is built entirely in the browser and uses Lua for scripting. The choice to use very primitive visuals is a definite nod back to HyperCard.
Get Blogging!
Want to start a blog? This is a great overview to introduce you to the various services and get started in no time.
Welcome to hell, Elon - The Verge
Patel outlines the host of challenges facing Twitter and Musk as its new owner. I haven’t commented on this that much, because really it seems like everyone is talking about it.
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so…
This is a fun dive into how Unix handles time.
the 1st Edition UNIX measured time at those 60 Hz using a 32-bit integer, thus only being capable of counting 2^32 / 60 ticks/second * 60 s/m * 60 m/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/y = 2.3 years, as noted in the original manual. Some time in 1971, the time measurement was redefined to count seconds, now capable of representing 136 years of time, and the Unix epoch date was – contrary to the common misconception that it represents the birthdate of Unix – somewhat arbitrarily picked to be 1970.
Reading this will give you a good understanding of the 2038 problem that Unix has to avoid. From Wikipedia…
The minimum representable date is Friday 1901-12-13, and the maximum representable date is Tuesday 2038-01-19. One second after 03:14:07 UTC 2038-01-19 this representation will overflow in what is known as the year 2038 problem.
2038 is Unix turn for Y2K.
As this article highlights, there are also a ton of other challenges with time. Such a simple concept, but super hard for computers to deal with.
Privacy Gateway: a privacy preserving proxy built on Internet standards
Cloudflare continues to impress with their work on very foundational capabilities, now with a Privacy solution.
The main innovation in the Oblivious HTTP standard – beyond a basic proxy service – is that these messages are encrypted to the application’s server, such that Privacy Gateway learns nothing of the application data beyond the source and destination of each message.
I don’t know enough about networks like Tor, but there seem to be some similar concepts here.
Journal
What must be the worst holidays for dogs: Independence Day and loud fireworks, Halloween and frequent doorbell ringing.
Happy Halloween! Thingelstad pumpkins for 2022!
🎃.⌐◨-◨
We made another 90 Wicky Thing candles today for a total of 180 ready for the Things 4 Good Fall Fundraiser!
I decided to give Reddit another try. In 2015 I deleted my account. Reddit hasn’t clicked with me, but I want to give it another go. I created a r/WeeklyThing community, which I think could be interesting there. I’ve found r/candlemaking fun. 🙂
Making Wicky Thing Candles with the Digiboil is way faster and just easier. We made twice the candles in much less time versus multiple double boilers.
It is also a win that we can make them inside. Last years cooled outside and that can be too fast and cause tunneling.
We are doing our very first round of Wicky Thing Candles with the Digiboil. This thing can take a lot of wax! This is going to make candle production much faster.
Sign a Message to Verify an Ethereum Address
Cats Will Eat You posed a question on Twitter that I found interesting:
What’s the easiest/free way to validate someone owns a wallet address?
Easiest way to do this that I know is to have the person sign a message with the address and send it to you. I used MyCrypto Sign Message to connect to my wallet and sign a message. This gives a signature:
{
"address": "0x2BdA946a7740b1dDB0fd5C226819170c4DD15720",
"msg": "This message is from thingelstad.eth!",
"sig": "0x0827e88dce80cc03769aa34005f1d693be0247aecd433b49d6fa068df9965bde20047da38ac4aa0e51b6b914fd39b225843fa938817a0ced0a04b47a55b8b99e1c",
"version": "2"
}
Take that message and use the Verify Message tool and confirm that it was signed by that wallet. 🪄
Since upgrading to macOS Ventura I can no longer launch Safari using LaunchBar. I’m constantly launching the wrong thing. I don’t get why LaunchBar wont index Safari. Works same as always for every other app. 😬
Want a coupon code to buy something online? You have to have an account. Login and put the item in your cart, then leave the website. Abandon the cart. Many sites will email you a coupon code within 24 hours. 🪄
The Duplicates and Merging feature in the latest version of Photos 8.0 is really nice. I’ve wanted a utility to do this for years and so far it works exactly how I would want it to.
Briefly
I’ve been impressed by the vision that Stripe is pursuing for a long time. It seems they also overshot their growth. → Stripe to lay off 14% of staff as CEO says he made ‘two very consequential mistakes’ - MarketWatch
Well done CSS framework specifically for charts. → Charts.css
What a gorgeous watch. 🤩 → New Rolex Deepsea Challenge Touts Titanium Case, Ultra-Deep Bona Fides - Worn & Wound
Cool CSS work to bring the various effects of Pokemon cards to digital versions. → Pokémon Cards CSS Holographic Effect
🤣🤣🤣 Playing on Musk’s request of Twitter engineers to print out code, presumably to see if they are any good. → Elon Code Review - Print it out and Elon Musk will check it
Touching personal account of Nataliia Kuchma and her daughter living in Minneapolis as a refugee of the war in Ukraine. 🇺🇦 → Ukrainian mom keeps daughter safe in Minneapolis as husband fights Russians at home
Probably only interesting to Twin Cities folks. We are big fans of Del Prado’s restaurants, particularly Martina which is a favorite of ours. → Daniel Del Prado’s Growing Culinary Empire | Twin Cities Business
Fortune
Here is your fortune…
Keep it short for pithy sake.
Thank you for subscribing to the Weekly Thing!
Recent Issues
- Weekly Thing #231 / UNIX Pipe, Slow Roads, Personal Brand
- Weekly Thing #230 / Calendar, Fractal, Reminiscing
- Weekly Thing #229 / Time, Zolatron, Maigret
- Weekly Thing #228 / Technical, Adversarial, Overcomplicating
- Weekly Thing #227 / Attention, Minnedemo, Learning
About
I once created a fun travel game about identifying mathematical relationships in the numbers that appear on road signs, called Road Sign Math! I launched a website to share the signs and had 30 people submit over 250 road signs from every continent in the world!
Website LinkedIn Reddit Twitter Telegram Strava
This work by Jamie Thingelstad is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
My opinions are my own and not those of any affiliates. The content is non-malicious and ad-free, posted at my discretion. Source attribution is omitted due to potential errors. Your privacy is respected; no tracking is in place.