Technical FAQ – aleph (docs.alephdata.org)

Can I run Aleph without using Docker?
Can Britain leave the European Union? Yes, it’s possible; but complicated and will probably not make your life better in the way that you’re expecting.

From the documentation of Aleph – Which is a great tool to get an overview over a big set of documents.

Microsimulation of Traffic Flow: Onramp (traffic-simulation.de)

HTML5 implementation of a Traffic simulation – Okay I might have spent a few minutes on this site last week.

Taking FOSDEM online via Matrix (matrix.org)

Firstly, FOSDEM will have its own dedicated Matrix server at fosdem.org (hosted by EMS along with a tonne of Jitsi’s) acting as the social backbone for the event. Matrix is particularly well suited for this, because:

• We’re an open standard comms protocol with an open network run under a non-profit foundation with loads of open source implementations (including the reference ones): folks can jump on board and participate via their own servers, clients, bridges, bots etc.
• We provide official bridges through to IRC and XMPP (and most other chat systems), giving as much openness and choice as possible – if folks want to participate via Freenode and XMPP they can!
• We’re built with large virtual communities in mind (e.g. Mozilla, KDE, Matrix itself) – for instance, we’ve worked a lot on moderation recently.
• We’ve spent a lot of time improving widgets recently: these give the ability to embed arbitrary webapps into chatrooms – letting you add livestreams, video conferences, schedules, Q&A dashboards etc, augmenting a plain old chatroom into a much richer virtual experience that can hopefully capture the semantics and requirements of an event like FOSDEM.

Looking forward to FOSDEM and how they do it!

hexops/dockerfile: Dockerfile best-practices for writing production-worthy Docker images. (github.com)

Writing production-worthy Dockerfiles is, unfortunately, not as simple as you would imagine

A lot of very good pointers on writing good docker container files.

How to overcome Phone Addiction [Solutions + Research] (cognitiontoday.com)

Let’s first understand what is phone addiction and what counts as excessive phone use. Phone addiction or compulsive phone use goes along-side internet addiction and social media addiction. Psychologists also call it “problematic phone use.” For this post, we will consider them together. Cell-phones are habit-forming – once you go down that rabbit hole, you use more and more.

Very good article with a few mechanisms that can help overcome phone overuse which feels like it gotten a bit a problem for me personally last year.

Protect domains that don’t send email – GOV.UK (gov.uk)

Make sure that domains that do not send email cannot be used for spoofing.

Wonderful guide on how to setup domains that aren’t used. And I’m sure a lot of people have a few of them.

Release Pinecil | Many Bug Fixes | Polish | New Repo Name · Ralim/IronOS (github.com)

New repository name of IronOS from TS100 as this has clearly grown larger than just the TS100

TS100 is now IronOS 🎉 looking forward to the new releases. Which reminds me that I need to update the Firmware of my soldering-iron.

My year in data (samplesize.one)

I wanted to see what happens with my time. I knew I was spending quite a lot of it on social media, but I wasn’t sure how much exactly. I also knew I was working quite a lot and wanted to quantify exactly how much (spoiler alert: not that much). I hoped that keeping track of what I do would help me to identify chunks of time that were being wasted and to turn them into quality time.

❤ was thinking about something like that for a while now. I love the simplicity of building it in just a spreadsheet.

Themed days, Timeboxing and why you should use them. (jamalx31.com)

Before I began using timeboxing, I learned about another technique called Themed days. I decided to combine both to maximize productivity. Themed days are strategically planned days in your calendar, which are entirely dedicated to one single thing or tasks from the same category. While timeboxing is to allocate a certain amount of time to a task in advance and then complete it within that time frame. The idea behind these two techniques is to eliminate context switching or minimize it.

A good approach – I’m currently trying to accomplish something similar. Blocking out meeting-free time to get a bit a better grip on my workweek.

How 30 Lines of Code Blew Up a 27-Ton Generator (wired.com)

At 11:33 am and 23 seconds, the protective relay observed that the generator was perfectly synced. But then its corrupted brain did the opposite of what it was meant to do: It opened a circuit breaker to disconnect the machine.

When the generator was detached from the larger circuit of Idaho National Laboratory’s electrical grid and relieved of the burden of sharing its energy with that vast system, it instantly began to accelerate, spinning faster, like a pack of horses that had been let loose from its carriage. As soon as the protective relay observed that the generator’s rotation had sped up to be fully out of sync with the rest of the grid, its maliciously flipped logic immediately reconnected it to the grid’s machinery.

The moment the diesel generator was again linked to the larger system, it was hit with the wrenching force of every other rotating generator on the grid. All of that equipment pulled the relatively small mass of the diesel generator’s own spinning components back to its original, slower speed to match its neighbors’ frequencies.

Includes a video which is watch worthy!