Linkblog - 11.11.2013 - 29.6.2014

What I considered worth reading over the course of the week and did not want to link separately, collected here and uncommented.

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

End-to-End: Google will mit Javascript verschlüsseln - Golem.de. You can think what you want about Google, but there are still technicians with brains there who sometimes build something cool. Of course, we'll have to see how well the whole thing is implemented, but if someone like Google offers PGP integration for Gmail, that could finally be the impetus for the topic to gain further traction. The biggest problem with PGP and similar things is still the availability of communication partners who can actually do something with the corresponding technology.

Getting started in legacy- Legacy on a Budget - Legacy Type 1.5. Bookmarked because Legacy might become interesting someday. Affinity is particularly appealing to me.

Micro Python - Python for microcontrollers. Oh man, so many boards to try out, so little time. Sounds really nice, a Python implementation specifically designed for embedded systems with AOT compilation and such low hardware requirements is quite an exciting thing.

High Fidelity. The interesting part: 3D world with distributed network, low latency as a goal and voxel-based models and physics simulation. Good: Phillip Rosedale on board, who has already built a quite well-functioning 3D world with Second Life. Bad: Phillip Rosedale on board, who has already messed up the spread of a well-functioning 3D world with Second Life. Hmm. I think this is a case for "let's see".

JetDrive™ 500/520/720-Welcome to the Transcend Website. Well noted - my Air could probably use some more storage. And replacing the SSD doesn't seem that difficult,

Warhammer Diskwars Deutsch. Set aside for now. Because, because I want it. Simply because the idea is fun - a miniature game, but with significantly less setup effort and no miniatures to assemble and paint (which would completely fall by the wayside for me anyway).

Here are some interesting reads from this week that I didn't want to link to separately, collected and uncommented:

EU-Chefposten: Parliament wants Juncker, Cameron does not | tagesschau.de. Why do the EU states still let themselves be fooled by the island kingdom? Are we the EU or are we just an appendix of the British? Juncker is certainly not my dream candidate, but if the heads of government let themselves be fooled by the British again and propose another candidate, they might as well skip the next elections.

Generalbundesanwalt: Kein Ermittlungsverfahren in Deutschland zur NSA-Überwachung - Golem.de. Doesn't this come dangerously close to obstruction of justice?

Here are some articles I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

click - Just stumbled upon this, this finally looks like a real time saver - many other libraries for command line integration were so cumbersome that I couldn't see many advantages over the standard library provided stuff. But this already seems quite compact.

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

Photos from four days of short vacation in Leiden. Yes, just vacation photos. Hey, I'm just a snapper, you can't expect more. Just click on the link and scroll through, or click on a photo for a large view. And yes, I revived Koken. At the moment it seems to be working quite well.

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

Tails - About Tails. Hmm, maybe set up a USB stick with the system, for on the go and as needed.

What I consider worth reading over the course of the week and did not want to link separately, collected here and uncommented. (Yes, it's a bit thin here, most of it ends up on Google+ these days)

.NET Compiler Platform "Roslyn" - Documentation. C# and VB.Net Compiler. Directly from Microsoft. In C#. And Basic. Under Apache 2.0 License. So honestly? I think it's great.

2.0 Series — IPython 2.0.0 documentation. Very cool. This is slowly getting closer to the surface of Mathematica. Unfortunately, the strong focus on the browser - I can understand why, but I'm not really enthusiastic about it. I would prefer it to be a more integrated solution in the normal GUI. HTML as a rendering engine is fine, but the browser as a user interface is still quite clunky compared to an optimized native environment. But still, really cool what's happening here.

reclaim hugo | Collected stuff from social networks - since the Reclaim Social project has now delivered the WordPress plugin in a first version, I have finally set up a site where I now collect my G+, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Github and YouTube activities. It already looks quite neat. By the way, I am using the Shprink One theme, which works very well with the formats and has a few nice features. And it is especially clean. And it works with different screen sizes, including mobile. Let's see how this thing behaves in continuous operation.

TheKolWiki. Of course there's a Wiki for KoL. You are in a maze of twisty little pages, all alike and all insane.

The Kingdom of Loathing. Muahahahaa. Ahem. There's nothing that doesn't exist on the internet. And some things are very, very strange. And very, very old. And not only did I miss this very strange MMORPG (haha, no, seriously!) for ages, I also missed the Kickstarter for their CCG. And it all fits the color scheme of my blog.

British intelligence service: #GCHQ #stasi #harassment - Golem.de. Some Stasi employees will probably quietly cry while reading about what the NSA and GCHQ and their friends are up to. Out of envy. It's absurd what undemocratic and partly almost fascist activities the affected intelligence services are pursuing. Where do "Western" democracies actually get their legitimacy in moral discussions with the "Axis of Evil"? It's only good that in Germany, due to our funny hobby intelligence services, we probably belong to the "Axis of the Stupid." Is the NPD or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution now suing the Federal President for defamation before the Federal Constitutional Court?

OpenBuilds OX CNC Machine | OpenBuilds. Cool - the next step after 3D printers, now the CNC machine for DIY and sharing.

Microsoft opens .NET source code. Ok, it would have been even better if it had been an open source license right away (and with GPL they could have even protected themselves), but hey, this variant is not uncool either - co-licensing of patents for the reference sources is already a good move. And Mono has gained a bit more security.

Cool idea: Decks for every Ravnica Guild. And each deck led by the Guild Leader. Probably not the best decks for the respective guild, but with many on-flavor cards.

Welcome to RISC OS Pi in Documentation. Ok, quite cute - RISC OS now as a system for the Raspberry Pi. On the other hand, it probably has better performance than the old Acorn machines had back then.

The Julia Language. Had I already mentioned that? Doesn't matter, it's worth repeating, especially since there's now also a small compact IDE for Julia.

Here's what I found worth reading over the course of the week and didn't want to link separately, collected and uncommented.

Here's what I found worth reading this week, collected and uncommented:

kachayev/fn.py · GitHub. Various small tools to program more functionally in Python. Interesting for me mainly the persistent data structures, I have come to appreciate these with Clojure.

OpenCamera. Blogged about it because a) it's cool and b) it might interest me to build. 3D printer is coming eventually and Arduino is already here and photography is just so much on my line.

Will You Fight the Hand that Feeds? : Daily MTG : Magic: The Gathering. Hmm, God of Ramp. That sounds like a nice card in a Blinking Rhino (Roon) deck. Specifically because you can downgrade the Goddess back to an enchantment by blinking creatures if someone comes with creature removal. And since she is legendary, she could also fit wonderfully in Captain Sisay - I still have a Full-Art Alter from her that also calls for its own deck ...

Mogis, God of Slaughter by Jarvis Yu. I don't care about Standard - I want him as a finally usable BR General in EDH. So evil. T4 indestructible Enchantment that makes opponents sacrifice their creatures. Oh so evil. Could definitely replace Purphoros as my favorite EDH god.

Port 32764: Cisco confirms backdoor in routers. Ok, they confirm the existence - but where is the explanation, where it comes from? Why is it there and why hasn't Cisco removed it long ago? Does anyone seriously want to tell me that Cisco would never run a port scan on their own routers?

Google will Hausgeräte-Markt erobern. "Hey Google, is my home on fire?"

TeleHash / JSON + UDP + DHT = Freedom. Discovered via git-annex: a distributed messaging technique with interesting properties. Strongly P2P-oriented, strongly focused on encryption, and designed from the outset as middleware rather than primarily as a human-to-human protocol like XMPP. Definitely worth watching what comes out of this.

Self Mallard 4.5.0 released | Self. It's still alive. It's still one of the coolest systems to emerge from Smalltalk - very exotic, very different. From some aspects, systems can still learn today - the implementation of prototypical inheritance in the graphical development environment is really cool and still looks modern even today. The GUI framework itself has already found its way into Squeak some time ago, but outside the Squeak+Self world, hardly anyone knows it. Which is a shame. And the compiler is still one of the better ones in the field of bytecode languages. Especially when you compare how JavaScript presents itself today and what Self has been able to do for ages, you can get quite sad.

Ori File System. Hmm - not a real server, implemented as a real file system, sounds good. However, not available for Windows and therefore only conditionally suitable for my device mix. Might still be worth a look.

Commie Box Magic is another variant with a central library. The rules are further expanded and, in my opinion, more complex than in the Stack. I would probably prefer it. Especially because the simpler mana fixing in the Stack makes gold cards playable - you have the right mana ready in a few rounds, even if you currently don't have any of the colors of the gold card.

The Stack and Back : Daily MTG : Magic: The Gathering - hmm, the format sounds very interesting to do something meaningful with the large card collection. Could also be very fun as a Pauper variant, or in a version with a correspondingly weighted mix by rarity. The deck building is eliminated, which makes it easier to get people involved who are new to MTG - you can simply play what is written on the cards. There is no mana screw, because you can simply take a suitable land card in the draw. The game should become much more reactive as a result - few opportunities to pre-plan, since even if you know the stack, you don't know which card someone else might get. And the advantage: deck imbalance is purely a function of chance. Magic becomes even more similar to a board game. I think this is a project for my collection.

Un peu de math...: Installing and using Sage just got even easier.. - and that's it, just a git pull and a make. Ok, and large amounts of coffee while waiting for the build. Way cool. If you don't know Sage: a mathematics package with similar complexity and focus as Mathematica, which is entirely based on open source projects that are all integrated with Python as the "glue" language.

Hands on Sailfish OS: Intelligent building kit for tinkering and porting - Golem.de. Hmm - not really as open as one might have hoped, but more open than one might have feared. Sounds like a good hacking basis for tinkering projects anyway. Especially the combination of a "real" Linux and an Android environment for apps is pretty cool because it avoids technical isolation.

WordPress › WordPress 3.8 “Parker”. It's been a while since an update that actually appeals to me visually - and I like the new default theme so much that I'm seriously considering switching from my current one (which is still based on 2010, with minor adjustments). I found the 2011/2012/2013 themes rather meh. Especially 2013 was just plain irritating with its color scheme. 2014 will need a few patches, but that mainly refers to the design of gallery posts and asides - although I could almost live with the asides, maybe just tuck them into a sidebar or something. Hmm, let's see if I'll go through with it - the advantage would be that I could get rid of a lot of my own tinkered code and thus have less work with potential new versions that would require adjustments (although my adjustments have proven surprisingly stable, so far I haven't had to touch anything). What I do find really strange, though: the "Press This" bookmarklet has been almost unchanged in design for ages. Could also use some sprucing up!

Plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom | Adobe Labs. I should check this out, there are a few situations where this would probably be very helpful (e.g. with Sony and Leica lenses).

Bublcam: 360º Camera Technology for Everyone by Bubl Technology Inc. — Kickstarter. This is quite a funny Kickstarter - and the prototype looks quite decent. Ok, it's basically "just" an action cam, and not even really action - throwing is probably not a good idea - but it's still cool.