johnke.meBruce Perens, speaking at the State of Open Con in London earlier this year:
Open source had taken over the business software world, he said, at least for a particular set of applications. But in many areas, and certainly outside of the business world, it is not nearly as successful.
Moreover, he said, “We have a great corporate welfare programme. Our users are the richest companies in the world. Indeed, we’ve enabled companies like Google to be created.”
A really great, in-depth article about the physics of the main character’s jump in Psychonauts 2. I love the idea of using a MIDI controller to quickly and visually tune parameters.
This is a great list of some principles that would make the internet more pleasant for everyone. This one, in particular, stood out as one I think about a lot:
You aren’t obligated to reply or participate in any discussion. Don’t feel bad about not engaging if it doesn’t serve you. Arguing on the internet is rarely healthy, dialogue and discussion certainly can be.
Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence. 100%.
TIL Nimona (one of my daughter’s favourite movies from last year) started life as a sketch on Tumblr.
This is currently on hard rotation in my house.
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I’m a real sucker for a good /uses page. Because they’re real people taking their time to document the things they’re passionate about, hey can be a great way of discovering new tools that you might not have come across before.
Anyway, after weeks of procrastination, I’ve added my own /uses page. I hope someone will find something useful on it.
If Cory Doctorow can fall victim to a phishing scam, what hope do the rest of us have?
Coincidentally, someone on the Irish Tech Community slack reported that they were the victim of an attempt where their “bank” read out the first 8 digits of their virtual card and was asking them to read out the last 8. Turns out that you can basically construct the first 8 digits of any card if you know the card type, the issuer and the issuing country.
Let’s be careful out there.
Anecdata!
We were in Harvey Norman yesterday buying a new fridge. Have you ever been fridge-shopping with two small children? Hoooly shit is it hard work. After myself and my wife finally managed to snag 10 seconds of peace and quiet to discuss the options to ourselves, I took the kids off to distract them with the demo-mode TVs while my wife talked to a salesperson.
While the kids were hypnotised by the crisp images of crystal glasses melting like ice, I used the opportunity to ask a salesperson if they happened to have any 4K Blu-Ray players because I’m doubling down on physical media. “I’ll have to check the system” he says. So we walk across the shop to their DOS-based(!) inventory system. Along the way we pass an entire row of record players. About 20 of them. Everything from cheapo all-in-ones to top-of-the-range Pro-ject ones. They were even selling a few vinyl records. “No, we don’t have any 4K Blu-Ray players,” says the salesman, “we could order one in if you’d like?”
Apparently in 2024, a 150-year-old technology is better catered for in a shop like Harvey Norman than a 20-year old one.
(Incidentally, DID Electrical, Curry’s and Power City also did not have any Blu-Ray players for sale, but they did have DVD players for sale.)
See also:
This is probably old news, but TIL you can install your own fonts on your Kindle.
I’m a reluctant Visual Studio Code user. It’s got a lot of great design ideas but it’s so slowwwwww and I miss the speed of something like Sublime Text. Zed (from the makers of Atom) is an editor that prioritises speed but copies a lot from vscode. It’s just missing vscode’s massive extensibility, but now it’s been open sourced maybe that will change? One worth keeping an eye on.