Neat but still quite challenging to make work.
TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.
And still, the images from the annual hair freezing contest at Takhini Hot Pools, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada do not cease to amuse me.
Fun with IP address parsing.
Fun fact, the textual representation of IPv4 was never standardized in any document before IPv6 needed a grammar for its weirdo “trailing dotted quad” notation. So, it’s a de-facto standard that boils down to mostly “what did 4.2BSD understand?”, and “what did other OSes keep when they copied 4.2BSD?”
Relevant: http://1482903631.
How We Saved .ORG.
The story of the attempted .ORG sale is really the story of the power and resilience of the nonprofit sector. Every time Ethos and PIR tried to quell the backlash with empty promises, the sector responded even more loudly, gaining the voices of government officials, members of Congress, two UN Special Rapporteurs, and U.S. state charities regulators. As I said to that crowd of activists in front of ICANN’s offices, I’ve worked in the nonprofit sector for most of my adult life, and I’ve never seen the sector respond this unanimously to anything.
I may present to you Lolium (German: Lolch), the favorite plant for Internet ridicule.
(…) a genus of tufted grasses in the bluegrass subfamily of the grass family.
Suzanne Treister: Amiga Videogame Stills.
In the late 1980s I was making paintings about computer games. In January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots.
Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine.
The BNT162b mRNA vaccine has this digital code at its heart. It is 4284 characters long, so it would fit in a bunch of tweets. At the very beginning of the vaccine production process, someone uploaded this code to a DNA printer (yes), which then converted the bytes on disk to actual DNA molecules.
On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring.
(…) philosophers often don’t do a good job of discussing utilitarianism. They traffic in astounding thought-experiments – is it right to harmlessly kill your newborn infant if it’s screaming a bit too much? Should you take drugs that make you a better, more caring parent? – that can produce shocking answers. Some critics of utilitarianism take these outlandish ideas as a victory: any ethical theory that countenances infanticide must be wrong. But ‘gotcha’ answers to ethical enquiries about how to raise, or not raise, kids are a triumph of a philosophical style that prioritises aggravation over moral substance. Those who offer them are not engaged in good-faith philosophical debate. They’re engaged in what I call ‘moral shit-stirring’.
Fraidycat – follow from afar.
Feeds (RSS, Atom or JSON Feed). This is how Fraidycat reads blogs, Tumblr, Medium, Mastodon, micro.blog, Wikipedia, Kickstarter or Stack Overflow. If only every network used RSS!
How Claude Shannon Invented the Future.
(…) Shannon’s theorems imply that it is optimal to first digitize the sound wave into bits, and then map those bits into the electromagnetic wave.
Relevant: The Bitplayer.