November 4, 2017

Weekly Thing for November 4, 2017

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** Weekly Thing

** by Jamie Thingelstad

November 4, 2017

I hope you all had a great Halloween! 🎃 We had the coldest one in over ten years and not surprisingly for the first time in years we still had candy 🍫 left at the end of the night. Mazie and her friends filled a pillowcase each with treats. Tyler and I went out until we couldn’t feel our fingers and toes anymore. One of my favorites in our neighborhood is the Mixed-Up-Holiday house (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/mixed-up-holiday.html) that puts out decorations for several holidays, except Halloween. It’s very funny and in addition to the candy for the kids they have beer-to-go 🍺 for the parents!

** Photog 📷

One block over from our house the neighborhood celebrates Halloween 🎃 with gusto! This skeleton hanging from a tree was an awesome highlight! 👻

Oct 31, 2017 at 7:00 PM Minneapolis MN

** Links 📌

** Signal >> Blog >> Standalone Signal Desktop (https://signal.org/blog/standalone-signal-desktop/)

💬 Nice to see Signal bringing encrypted messaging 🔐 as a native application! 👏

** André Staltz - The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how (https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html)

💬 The origin story of the Internet is all around decentralization. In practice, it has resulted in more consolidation of activity than perhaps any other medium in history. Why?

** iPhone X: Tomorrow’s iPhone today - Six Colors (https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/10/iphone-x-tomorrows-iphone-today/)

💬 Jason Snell writes about his experience with the iPhone X and the beginning of the next era of the iPhone. > The iPhone X is as close as Apple has come yet to the ultimate form of a smartphone: a glass slab made entirely of touchscreen.

** The history of MarketWatch: How a sports data startup became a half-billion-dollar financial news site - Outside the Box - MarketWatch (https://www.marketwatch.com/(S(rnrsydaynixa5x55oiibxm45))/story/the-history-of-marketwatch-how-a-sports-data-startup-became-a-half-billion-dollar-financial-news-site-2017-10-30)

💬 On the 20th anniversary of the launch of MarketWatch Larry Kramer wrote an article to revisit the origin of the site. Nice walk down memory lane!

** GraphQL at massive scale: GraphQL as the glue in a microservice architecture (https://about.sourcegraph.com/graphql/graphql-at-massive-scale-graphql-as-the-glue-in-a-microservice-architecture/)

💬 Interesting article on IBM’s adoption of GraphQL at large scale. > He got excited about the potential of GraphQL very quickly, but received pushback from others initially. This is the story of how he shepherded adoption of GraphQL at IBM to the point where, today, it is deployed at massive scale.

** Super Mario Run’s 200 million downloads didn’t result in ‘acceptable profit’ for Nintendo - The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/31/16580976/super-mario-run-nintendo-downloads-profit)

💬 There is something wrong when 200 million installs of your application do not result in sufficient profit. 🤷‍♂️

** Full-Size vs. Fun-Size Candy Bars: A Halloween Assessment - The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/big-candy-bars-have-no-place-on-halloween/544511/)

💬 I’ve always thought it was cool to be the house that gave out the full size candy bars 🍫 but maybe not!

** Slides – Create and share presentations online (https://slides.com/)

💬 This is cool – a nice usable web interface along with collaboration powered by reveal.js (https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js) .

** Perl is the most hated programming language / Boing Boing (https://boingboing.net/2017/10/31/perl-is-the-most-hated-program.html)

💬 Wow, I’ve sort of intuitively known this but it’s pretty amazing to see with data. Sorry Larry Wall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall) !

** Frappe Charts (https://frappe.github.io/charts/)

💬 Yet another charting library. 📊 I should collect these like trading cards. Maybe we could have a deck of playing cards where every one of the cards is a different Javascript charting library? 😁 In all seriousness, this one looks nice and seems simple. 👍

** Seeing Myself in #MNTech – Jenna – Medium (https://medium.com/@jennapederson/seeing-myself-in-mntech-7ff7520f8874)

💬 Love this perspective and highlight from my fellow minnestar (https://minnestar.org) board member Jenna Pederson (http://jennapederson.com) . For me this is the highlight: > We did not sit back and wait for more women, people of color, or those from underrepresented groups to come to us. We. Went. To. Them. We actively spent time focusing on our presenter line up. The first step for technology communities is to realize we have a problem. The next step is to do something about it, and I really like the pragmatic and thoughtful approach that Jenna, and others through her encouragement, have taken. This is how real change will happen, over time. 👏

** Vim After 15 Years | Ian Langworth’s Things of Variable Interest (https://statico.github.io/vim3.html)

💬 This shows the amazing power that advanced editors put in the hands of their users. Even if you don’t use vim or text editors this is a fun article to skim to get a sense of what technologists do with their tooling. I’m a vim user when I’m on a terminal, but I’m on a tricycle compared to this setup. When I want to do real work I jump into Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com) .

** How leading American newspapers got people to pay for news - Funnel vision (https://www.economist.com/news/business/21730683-first-three-part-series-future-journalism-how-leading-american-newspapers-got)

💬 Whoa, nice call out in The Economist (https://www.economist.com) to my friend Jim Bernard (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardjim/) and the work his team has been doing at Star Tribune (http://www.startribune.com) ! 👏 > That gives the Star Tribune’s funnel mathematician a product to sell. Patrick Johnston, a digital executive poached from Target, the retail store, and his boss Jim Bernard, a former executive at Marketwatch, a business-news website, explain how a local newspaper’s funnel vision is different. They are, like the big papers, interested in the visitors who they call “intenders”, people whose browsing behaviour suggests they may be ready to subscribe.

** Seashells (https://seashells.io/)

💬 Huh, this is sort of whacky and geeky-cool. > Seashells lets you pipe output from command-line programs to the web in real-time, even without installing any new software on your machine. I’ve used netcat a couple of times for some weird use cases, but turning that into something that you can use easily via the web seems interesting. I have no idea what I’d use it for though. 🤷‍♂️

** 1Password 7 now Available for iOS —Tools and Toys (http://toolsandtoys.net/1password-7-ios/)

💬 I store all my “secrets” in 1Password – passwords, banking info, software license keys and anything else that is “secret”. Our whole family does via 1Password for Families (https://1password.com/families/) . I’m happy to see how AgileBits (https://agilebits.com) continues to innovate and improve this product.

** sonar, a linting tool for the web (https://sonarwhal.com/)

💬 Interesting tool and service to review a variety of configuration and coding issues in a website. Ran it against my site and it offered a number of suggestions I didn’t even know about.

** Why is the DOS path character “"? – Larry Osterman’s WebLog (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/06/24/why-is-the-dos-path-character/)

💬 I get a huge kick out of stuff like this. The best part is at the end! The DOS developers were so used to using “/” on their workstations that they built support into DOS to allow either “/” or “", which I have seen. However, I had no idea early versions allows the switch character to be set to “-“!

** iOS 11.2 Bringing (some of) SiriKit to HomePod — 512 Pixels (https://512pixels.net/2017/10/ios-11-2-bringing-some-of-sirikit-to-homepod/)

💬 This is interesting news to me. My biggest gap in capability with devices like the Echo are the fact that they don’t identify the different people in the house (which can be done based on voice signature, like Siri does today) and it has no access to iCloud and the Apple ecosystem. If HomePod recognizes the speaker by voice and then can access that persons iCloud information that would be amazing.

** Apple’s iPhone X: The First Field Report | WIRED (https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-x-first-impression/)

💬 Levy’s review of the iPhone X affirms my decision to pause. The number one thing I’m skeptical about is the overall speed and performance of FaceID. I love how quick and nearly “without thought” TouchID is. I’m sure FaceID will get there, but he highlights that it takes a moment and sometimes doesn’t get it right. Similar to 1st generation TouchID. Getting rid of the home button entirely doesn’t worry me at all.

** Miniflux - Minimalist RSS Reader (https://miniflux.net/)

💬 Another self-hosted RSS reader. This one is focused on a fast, mobile friendly interface. It’s great to see solid options for the RSS world continuing to be built.

** Hyper - JS/HTML/CSS Terminal (https://hyper.is/)

💬 I really don’t get the idea of rewriting all the native applications we’ve had forever using web techniques. I know this invaded the editor world a while back, and now we have hyper. I installed it and it works better than I would have expected.

** Apollo Client 2.0 – Apollo GraphQL (https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/apollo-client-2-0-5c8d0affcec7)

💬 New version of the Apollo Client (https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-client) to use GraphQL (http://graphql.org) in your Javascript applications.

** The New York Times is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service (https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york-times-as-a-tor-onion-service-e0d0b67b7482)

💬 This is great! 👏 Hats off to the New York Times for creating a truly private way to access their content over to the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org) .

** DNS records lookup ~ dnsrecords.io (https://dnsrecords.io/)

💬 Nice interface for navigating DNS data. Very easy to use and it collects relevant DNS information not just the one request. If you request a CNAME it gets that record and keeps going. Easier but less powerful than something like dig.

** TwilioQuest, the Fastest Way to Learn Twilio (https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/10/twilioquest-fastest-way-to-learn-twilio.html)

💬 Designing a game to help people learn your SaaS platforms API and capabilities seems like a pretty brilliant idea.

** profiling: An interactive continuous Python profiler. (https://github.com/what-studio/profiling)

💬 Very easy to use profiler to understand what is happening in your Python code. Can also do live profiling of long running processes. Very cool.

** Promotion 🎁

https://www.wikitribune.com

WikiTribune (https://www.wikitribune.com) is a news platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together. WikiTribune just got funded and I became a backer. I’ve been impressed with Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org) and am excited about Jimmy Wales (http://jimmywales.com) and team focusing on the news ecosystem. I am very curious to see how they realize these objectives. I’ve previously thought about how news can be reinvented. I focused more on the open source model instead of wiki, but either way I feel like a fundamental rethink is possible! Let’s see how they tackle this. Become a supporter today! (https://www.wikitribune.com/become-supporter/)

** Featured App 📱

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carcassonne/id375295479?mt=8&uo=4&at=1001lxyE&ct=thingelstad_com

** Carcassonne (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carcassonne/id375295479?mt=8&uo=4&at=1001lxyE&ct=thingelstad_com)

** by TheCodingMonkeys

Famous boardgame and great iOS experience, with expansions as in-app purchases.

This is a fabulous iOS interpretation of the famous board game. Happily it doesn’t fall victim of the desire to add silly effects and stays true to the game. Having the computer do the complicated score keeping for you is a great add as well. Multiplayer support works great too. If you have this game, you can friend me with this special link (http://carcassonne:///f/19be897d13137244) .

$9.99 4.5/5 stars

** Microblog updates 🎈

• give a person a find/replace and you power them once; teach a person regular expressions and you give them superpowers ⚡️ (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/11/02/give-a-person.html)
• Got my very first communication ever regarding my Tesla Model 3 reservation. (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/11/01/got-my-very.html)
• Scenes from tonights #TeamSPS game night! I ran the Super Mario Kart tournament! Very competitive! 🏎🏆👍🏻 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/11/01/scenes-from-tonights.html)
• Coldest Halloween 🎃 in 15 years definitely impacted turnout. ❄️ First year we didn’t run out of candy in a long time. 🍫 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/coldest-halloween-in.html)
• Candy exchange in progress! 🍫🎃 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/candy-exchange-in.html)
• Mixed Up Holiday House is a favorite Halloween 🎃 stop! All holidays except Halloween! Plus 🍺 for the parents! (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/mixed-up-holiday.html)
• Love this Halloween decoration hanging from a tree in the neighborhood! 🎃💀 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/love-this-halloween.html)
• US Internet put the conduit from our boulevard to the house. Only a couple more weeks to gig! (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/us-internet-put.html)
• Happy Halloween! 🎃 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/31/happy-halloween.html)
• Ready for tomorrow! (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/30/ready-for-tomorrow.html)
• Moving 15 years of blog content to Jekyll and Markdown files is surprisingly difficult. My blog first ran on .Text, then WordPress, then Squarespace. Each step along the way was a full migration. No content lost. Now I’m in Jekyll and trying to get links working and validated in posts. And the media files, oh what a mess. 😫 Progress is made but it is slow and even with extensive scripting skills there is still much to do manually. It feels like I’ll be in a good spot when done, but it’s a lot more than I planned. (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/29/managing-years-of.html)
• Watched Dope tonight. Really good movie. 🎬 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/28/watched-dopehttpmimdbcomtitlett-tonight.html)
• New Glarus Belgain Red - one of my favorite beers! 🍺🍒 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/28/new-glarus-belgain.html)
• Pretending I’m a rancher and burning brush. (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/28/pretending-im-a.html)
• Restrung a guitar 🎸 for first time. Now if I could do anything else with it. 😂 (http://micro.thingelstad.com/2017/10/28/restrung-a-guitar.html)

** The end 🎬

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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.