2020 January Assorted Links

January 3, 2020

Photo taken in October 2019 at The Storr in Isle of Skye, Scotland with a DJI Mavic 2 Pro.

The last half of this year really got away from me in terms of writing things down and actually sharing it. These links are culled from a much larger list accumulated over the last seven months.

Culture #

• Slow TV is a short documentary examining a Nordic cultural phenomena of watching things like train journeys, ferry boat rides, people knitting, etc. This is really an interesting phenomena, almost every other form of entertainment feels faster and faster. There was a good deal of discussion about this in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?.
  • There was apparently a 168 hour long show on reindeer migration.
  • Also an hour long show on Moose migration
  • There is a sub-reddit for slowtv type media.
  • pluto.tv has a slowtv channel
• With the Chernobyl miniseries becoming so popular recently, an article critiquing what the show got right and wrong was a fascinating read.
• The Supercomplication tells a story of flaunting wealth and sophistication through a sort of complexity arms race within pocket watches. More details in the wikipedia article
• The story of one player spending 10 years exploring every corner of Eve Online.
• Justice has create a Space Opera.
• Someone clever once said Women were not allowed Pockets, well written/animated/illustrated article. I’ve been enamored with bags for years and it’s been a heated debate in our household as to what makes sense for women, recently we’d found the Fjallraen Totepack which is much more than a purse and seems to offset the travesty that is womens pockets.
• Amazing work in LaTeX recreating “Fancy Euclid’s Elements”, the author has the source code available. There is also apparently a project to Complete all 13 books in Oliver Byrne’s Style
  • Now we have to learn about who Oliver Byrne is.
  • Now we also have to be aware that we can purchase copies of beutifully re-created academic works.
• Strikingly beautiful article on How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape.
• Worth keeping track of awesome-latex.
• A discussion about an article on “Advertising as a major source of human dissatisfaction”. Is really sad to think that most of the “greatest” minds of our generation being swept up in trying to advance something that makes humanity collectively unhappy.
  • Leads back to The Century of the Self documentary.
• Nikolas Lloyd, more popular as Lindybeige did a video about wargaming and the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU) during World War II. PAXsims has some coverage about a [recreation event])https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2018/07/21/watu-wargame-at-western-approaches-war-museum-september-8/) of a WWII convoy escort wargame.
• The Black Lotus, documentary about the most rare of the power nine set of cards in Magic: The Gathering
• A team of engineers spent years giving new life to old NASA tapes: Trove of newly released NASA audio puts you backstage during Apollo 11. Wonder if Soma FM Mission control will put this to use. There was also the release of the Apollo 11 film this month.
• Colorizing and restoring old images with deep learning, repository is DeOldify, amazing results shown immediately.
• Jeff Hawkins is Finally Ready to Explain His Brain Research, associated Hn discussion. Interesting to see someone generate wealth in one sector with a many year long intent to apply that wealth to another sector that could be generally beneficial to humanity.
• A multi-part series called “Nation” looks to examine other countries that are regionally close to Scotland but have done interesting things culturally or economically:
  • NATION 1 Faroe Islands - the connected nation
  • NATION 2 Iceland - the extreme nation
  • NATION 3 Norway - The Twin Nation
• How People Used to Download Games From the Radio and associated Hn discussion
• noclip has a documentary series on The Witcher, in it they discuss how in Poland games were broadcast via radio.
• In the same line there was a really well written article about how we’re in The Golden Age of Amateur Radio, with associated Hn discussion.
• The LibreRouter is an Open Source Hardware WiFi Router designed from the ground up for Community Networks, some Hn discussion as well.
• Amazing visualization of life duration overlaid on the last several decades.
• Inside Tokyo’s Audiophile Venues.
• Text Rendering Hates you.
• The Birth of Inter chronicles the creation of a typeface that github and mozilla used.
• In line with the type theme, there is an interesting book called practical typography.
• Discussion of variable width fonts.
• Modern text rendering with Linux
• An interesting discussion on Tolkien’s use of race in LOTR, even more in depth discussion here.
• Monica is software for managing relationships.

Technology #

• Herculean effort to use a dataset released by Disney and render it with pbrt is documented in a multi-part series
• The New Illustrated TLS Connection, amazing writeup.
• Self-Encrypting Deception: Weakness in the Encryption of Solid State Drives, discussion on Hn.
• Huge collection of documentation related to hacking on cellular networks and hardware called Awesome Cellular Hacking.
• Well written examination of physical access control media (HID RFID).
• Same author on Building an LTE Access Point with OpenWRT. Caused me to stumble on to interesting devices by GL-iNet. I’m betting we’re like 3 years away from all having devices in our homes like this due to starlink.
• Fantastic site about technology history has a multi-part set of articles on the beginning of arpanet.
• The DebOps project has a collection of ansible roles and playbooks for bootstrapping some services.
• A good question on /r/debian yielded the useful apt-mark showmanual.
• One Program Written in Python, Go, and Rust.
• An update on the AV1 Ecosystem in May and June, exciting times, SoC decoders are showing up.
• The stuff like AV1 and the amazing work by folks like xiph are being leveraged already in production, Japan is already broadcasting in 8k.
• Excellent article on How the Linux Kernel Detects PCI Devices and Pairs Them with Drivers.
• Beautiful GK based ebook reader called Foliate.
• Handwriting/Note-taking software called xournalpp
• A series of articles on Linux Applications Performance are well described and illustrated.
• Examination of the Biggest and Weirdest Commits in the Linux Kernel Git History digs into octopus merges.
• Open Source music editing software called lmms.
• Penrose: Create Diagrams by typing mathematical notation in plain text
• Repairing a ThinkPad with a Corrupt Thunderbolt Firmware Chip gets into the hardware approach to dealing with BIOS errors. Also Nadim is the creator of cryptocat and used to do a podcast sort of series where they talked about hacking history and played chiptunes.
• bookstack looks like a really nice way for people to create documentation.
• An article on how to setup TURN with nextcloud talk.
• Comprehensive article on how to use the backports repository which quite frankly is one of the most valuable parts of running debian as a distribution.
• Two quick guides on prometheus and influx.
• Mindforger “the thinking notebook”, a sort of IDE for taking notes, project here
• The History of Gnome.
• Web based Mission Control Framework released by NASA.
• When looking for a file drop system that isn’t nextcloud I stumbled across goploader and lufi.
• huginn is a stack that allows you to create agents and have them act on your behalf, some cool initial use cases on their readme.
• Tons of dashboard templates by “creative tim”, tons of complete source projects to crib from.
• Good looking client for xmpp called coy.im.
• More hopeful for dino.im as it’s goals seem to be more along the lines of encryption than anonymity connection.
• termtosvg records terminal sessions as svg animations.
• a worklog on building a vacuum tube computer
• A vacuum tube for the 21st century and associated Hn discussion.
• comprehensive write up on P2P communications behind NAT
• An organization called smallstep has some really interesting tools for working with certificates.
• Along those lines dex is an OpenID connect provider.
• matterhorn is a cli interface for mattermost.

Analysis #

• What Makes a (Graphics) Systems Paper Beautiful examines phenomena of the SIGGRAPH community and lays out criteria for the more eclectic “systems” papers.
• Universal Security from Bits and Mips to Pools, Lakes - and Beyond, a short paper that has intuitive security levels at the end with energy equivalences comparing cryptographic strength to boiling volumes of water.
• Visual Information Theory has ton of great graphs for exploring phenomena that are not initially intuitive. The Authors other works are extremely well written and illustrated.
• Follow on to that same author: an incredibly well animated article experimenting with handwriting and neural networks.
• I’ve posted before about an interesting problem solved anonymously on 4chan, recently author Greg Egan has proved a new upper bound on the same problem.
• A pretty comprehensive overview of time series (ARIMA) analysis using python.
• Battle testing data integrity verification with ZFS, Btrfs, and mdadm+dm-integrity.
• Well illustrated and written article on using tensorflow and python to generate music.
• Rooting the subaru starlink platform, comprehensive write up as well as some other interesting projects by the same guy.
• an article in late 2018 about the ecosystem of visualization libraries in python.
• Interesting idea of using machine learning to create audio filtering for noise cancellation when you’re on a call, associated Hn discussion.
• The mlfromscratch resource has several good articles, starting with neural networks explained.

Travel #

• The AV1 ecosystem updates led me to see Capture the North.
• Insane data-center in Norway called Lefdal Mine. Examine their Brochures to see just how insanely large their complex is.
• Glymur Waterfall is the second tallest in Iceland
• Have seen a couple recommendations for using skyscanner as a method for sourcing flights. Looks to be a sort of meta-search system.