2019 May Assorted Links

May 26, 2019

Photo taken in December 2018 at Greenfield Village’s Weaving Shop in Dearborn, Michigan with a Pixel.

It’s been a bit since the last assorted links. These are good for me (to keep track of my scouring), taking a break wasn’t a great idea.

Culture #

• Danheim released a couple new albums and I’ve been playing them constantly.
• Found an artist named Chronotope Project which has a series of fantastic albums.
• Out of the Deep, where famous Oktavists are welcomed to Princeton to put on an event. Listen to Glen Miller rock an “A Rumble”.
• Glen Miller recorded with Illumni Men’s Chorale for Music of Russia which has a lot of really impressive vocal tracks and decent engineering.
• timelapse of the Future: A journey to the End of Time, another wonderful production by Melodysheep.
• David Ramsay Hay and “pythagorean aesthetics”, in which they examine how tones correspond to geometric shapes. Extremely interesting depictions of shapes and sounds given Hay’s transcription methodology.
• Moxie Marlinspike made a sort of documentary about sailing a while back that I’d just recently found. Check out Signal.
• Orbit by Seán Doran.
• Towards a Taxonomy of Cliches in Space Opera, written by Charlie Stross so you know it will be good. There was also a post by Stross about the loss of his father which was quite a wonderful read.
• stumbled onto Serjan Burlak who has some crazy work in Houdini. Has an interesting documented journey here.
• Why are people modding Thomas the tank engine into video games?, and if you like that, then you should immerse yourself in Touch the Skyrim.
• Advanced Map Shading.
• If you’re into the art of Jakub Rozalski then you can actually play Iron Harvest now.
• The Worst Way to Start a City chronicles the land rush of 1889 and the “worst way” in which Oklahoma City was created.
• With the ending of Game of Thrones being a bit lackluster I’d started thinking of book-reading being a way to remedy my irritation with the series. Martin talks during interviews about inspiration for certain concepts, in this one he covers the “lord of light” religion and mentions the Albigensian Crusade which is quite an interesting read. I think many would look at the Cathars rejection of the Catholic Priesthood (given current day affairs) as reasonable, which was a good reason for the Catholic Church to wipe them out. It appears that the origination of the word “genocide” took form within context of this event.
• Måns Beckman of spatialillusions has this insane unit symbol generator that allows you to create map markers based on several different standards, notably the NATO Joint Military Symbology. There are an insane amount of permutations you can make.
• Steven Wolfram details his Personal Infrastructure. It’s informative and delightful (especially the pictures and videos of him using some of the goofier stuff, and the fact that chocolate is listed in his “kit”). Some of the things are actually quite low tech (like a slot at the top of each drawer) and boarding-glasses.
• Article about the Jacquard loom, which used 24,000 Jacquard cards each with over 1000 hole positions to create a woven image in eight hours. Jacquard hand loom led to the birth of the information age, with giants like Babbage drawing inspiration from this work to do computation. Detroit’s Greenfield Village has one of the few operating Jacquard looms in North America.
• Let Us Calculate!, examinations of “combinatorial art” (Llull, Leibniz).
• The Man Who Saved The El Primero (And Possibly Zenith), the story of Charles Vermot, who alone saved the El Primero movement.
• an article about Jean Giraud aka Moebius and his contributions to science fiction. Reminded me of Felix Colgrave.
• Tactical Chat: How the U.S. Military uses IRC to Wage War.
• detailed examination of how flight radar works with a list of hardware/software to get started sampling yourself.
• China Built the World’s Largest Telescope. Then Came the Tourists, a weird examination of a sort of “space city” around the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in the Chinese mountains.
• Why I hate the weekends, interesting look at what we try to push into our weekends due to how we plan out our week.
• Amazingly Beautiful LaTeX project to reproduce the Bible de Genève 1564.
• The song by Tristam and the editing by Dota Watafak came together too wonderfully to fail a mention.

Technology #

• BPF comes to firewalls explains some history of changes in the Linux kernel packet filtering systems, introduces this new scheme. Another article on BPF, eBPF, XDP…. This stuff gets really interesting when you find out about SmartNICs/Intelligent Server Adapters, where hardware will be reconfigured based on software instantiation.
• Matrix.org had a security incident. There was a couple things that are sort of obvious (Internet exposed jenkins, out of date instance), but some other things like ssh agent forwarding being harmful might be worth reading.
• Along those same lines, it seems like rsync over ssh should be the default based on the most recent notes in OpenSSH 8.0: “The scp protocol is outdated, inflexible and not readily fixed”.
• We’ve been using overleaf/sharelatex a good deal lately an have been looking for a potential alternative. CoCalc looks quite interesting, but the architecture looks quite complex.
• A nice write up on some LaTeX history.
• An article popped up recently on open source collaborative text editors. An interesting mentions is substance texture.
• In a search for replacing keep I’ve found paperwork, turtl, and crypt.ee, but nothing really seems to be ready yet.
• The Route of a Text Message, a delightful post in an awesome series called “full-stack-dev”.
• Building a NAS, good comprehensive write up on building a home NAS, especially good coverage of some custom hardware hacks to ensure quiet cooling. A surprisingly comprehensive examination of ZFS overhead as well.
• Using modern technology to build a dial up server.
• Simply written article about PKI.
• soundcloud-fuse-mpd, well written article on getting mpd to play from soundcloud.
• James Bruton has been running this openDog project which has a fantastic video build series.
• Acoustic metamaterial that can be 3D printed.
• A closer look at the double ratchet which is used in OMEMO.
• A good post examining how to handle ZFS recordsize. There is another good post by the same author about the ZIL/SLOG.
• Extremely beautiful 3D printed homelab NAS chassis, more of the original work on 3Dwebe’s patreon page and a write up about it here.
• Tympan is building an open source hearing aid. Has a really well written blog series.
• there appear to now be multiple contextual “Awesome Lists”, one I frequent is Awesome-Selfhosted, but recently found Awesome-Design-Tools.
• There is a good set of videos by Network Direction on Network Fundamentals.
• piping curl to the shell is bad, everyone should know that, here’s an interesting writeup that elaborates further.
• Debian now supports Secure Boot.
• a detailed writeup of three.js fundamentals.
• In looking around for doing my own PKI stuff I’d stumbled across pomerium which looks like an interesting project.
• Not the same projects, but documentize and bookstack both look interesting.
• Looking to transition from gmail, which is a bit of a nightmare of a project, found this list of mailservers with standards ratings.
• It’s possible to multiplex http and ssh on the same port with nginx, as long as you’re expecting SNI you can do even more with ssl_preread. Previously I’d looked at sslh when I wanted to do this stuff.

Analysis #

• a discussion of “mic-drop” moments in mathematics. Which led me to find the absolutely delightful article and video of Andrew Wiles talking about what it feels like to do mathematics. This also gets into something I’d posted about before where the best known lower bound for the minimal length of superpermutations was originally posted anonymously on 4chan.
• Seeing Theory is an amazing visual introduction to probability and statistics.

Travel #

• The Elbphilharmonie Hall surely is a spectacle to set foot within.
• There are some prolific rock formations known as the Duncansby Stacks in the Northmost section of Scotland. A wonderful photo by Max Taylor Grant
• Gladstone’s Library in Wales is breathtaking.
• Cochem has a picturesque castle over the city on the Rhine. It’s suggested to take the train from Cologne or Bonn to Mainz, particularly the direct connection with the intercity train via Koblenz instead of the express train. The track at times runs along the Rhine displaying some of the finest medieval castles Germany has to offer and the Lorelei, a mythological slate rock and rock bank in the river.
• The Sacra di San Michele is insane.