Month: March 2019

StackOverflow has started their April fools joke for this year. They made the site look like something from the early 2000s with gifs and such.

Its interesting that Tor nodes are operating at a loss while VPN companies are raking in the cash.

For all practical purposes the Tor network is basically just a decentralized VPN service. Perhaps Tor could offer a paid fast lane (or introduce some way to automatically donate to nodes as you use them) to incentivize nodes to join.

I also think Tor could gain quite a few more users by marketing to folks who are just trying to access websites blocked on their work/school WiFi.

TIL that GNU Grep is about 30x faster than BSD Grep.

I think buying a personal domain name is a worthwhile investment for anyone. There is just so much you can do with them for only $10/year.

You can:

• Create a portable email address that can easily switch between email providers
• Host a web page that you fully control
• Put web services like Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jabber, etc on it
• Much more

Well looks like the European copyright reform passed. It seems to me that this is only going to limit the EU’s ability to compete with the rest of the world (specifically the United States and China) in the information technology sector.

Something that I’d really like is to have a “hub” for all the various online media services I use. For example, I could connect my Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc. to it and see everything in one interface.

Right now AFAIK the only way to do this is using something like Plex which requires you to purchases all the files yourself.

NextDock 2 is a cool project being crowdfunded right now. Basically it is a laptop with no onboard CPU, memory, or disk but it can be connected to any device that offers HDMI out to be used as a monitor (Android Phone, Raspberry Pi, Chromecast, etc.).

If you’ve ever wanted a portable monitor with built in keyboard and a huge battery then you might wanna check this out.

I have to say that I am seriously impressed with the F-Droid Repomaker utility. It’s well-designed and easy to use.

I recently found out about “Participatory budgeting” which is a democratic way of creating a national budget. Basically, each year when you pay your tax bill you decide how much money you personally will allocate to various government programs. For example, if you pay $100 in taxes you could choose to spend $15 on Military, $30 on Social Security, $20 paying down the national debt, etc.

I wonder if it would be too harsh to require users to not use passwords seen on the Have I Been Pwned password database. I’m sure it would be pretty effective at making people add a few extra numbers to the end of their password.