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The trip to the movie store was a ritual in itself. It was an event. There was a deliberateness in browsing the new release wall and picking up the movie boxes to read the case. Independent films were tucked in between the big blockbusters, but they were available and visible. Next would be the wander between rows of the old movies. A leisurely browse to see if anything else caught your eye from a time long past.

Stephanie Stimac recounts what it was like going to the store to pick out a movie. The experience was one centered around discovery and deliberate choices. The remainder of the post picks at this topic some more and how it differs from the platforms we have readily available to use today.

However, it got me thinking about my reading habits. I've own, and still occasionally use, a Kindle but it isn't my primary method of reading. The experience of finding and visiting a physical book store, especially used ones, to look for books is much more enjoyable than browsing a virtual catalogue. Sure, it's nice to have that one book that I really want to read at hand, that's what the Kindle is for, but I wouldn't trade it for the stores or libraries. In fact, when traveling my wife and I try to visit local book stores where possible.

The same could be said about my RSS feed, the only caveat being it's already curated. It's nice having articles to pick from and read without being recommended what's best by the algorithm. With subscriptions here in try to be diverse in the feeds I add but also prune it from time to time otherwise it gets out of hand.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features.

Surely it's more wasteful to undo two years worth of work, no?

Discovered via Cory Dransfeldt.

Not now, I'm busy.

Discovered via the weird_wide_web_hole.

Two programs have been underway in the Netherlands to reduce the number of railway casualties caused by crossings, the LVO and the NABO. The LVO program focuses on making protected crossings safer, whereas NABO focus entirely on unprotected crossings.

The NABO program (Niet Actief Beveiligde Overwegen-programma), which began in 2018, sought to protect or remove all publicly accessible unprotected railway crossings by 2023; however, this deadline has since been extended to 2027. In November, ProRail posted an update to the program, including some numbers.

Out of the 180 unprotected crossings, 171 have currently been addressed. The remaining 9 will be tackled by 2027. From the 171 completed crossings, 133 have been removed, and 33 are now protected. Unless I've understood this wrong, there are 5 crossings that are unaccounted for here. From the 133 crossings that have been removed, 57 have an alternative access road built, 17 have an underpass, 2 have been given a staircase, and 57 were removed entirely. These numbers do actually add up to 133.

The story of a tech hub, Gaza Sky Geeks, in Gaza and West banch, their founding, success, and dispersion after the Israeli bombing in 2023. Despite the hardships the Gaza Sky Geeks never fully stopped operations. It's a sad piece but there is hope.

Discovered via Satyrs' garden.

Another year, another tree delivered to the European Parliament from Austria by train. Elias Van Buren has once again shared a picture of the tree being unloaded last Friday from the NightJet.

Five Protos and two Stadler FLIRT trains running on the Valleilijn are scheduled for modernisation by Keolis (RRReis), one at a time. An old Mat '64 was put in service to fill in the gap, which was taken out of service around 2015.

The Mat '64 is owned and operated by the 2454 CREW foundation. It was even kitted out with the blue livery for the run, which began in May 2025.

The Protos trains are proving to be harder to modernise as they lack manuals, given that their manufacturer, FTD, went bankrupt. Only five Protos trains were ever in service, and they are used on the Valleilijn. According to Treinenweb, the first Protos train should be modernised by June 2026.

The write-up by Andrew Moses details how Wi-Fi Positioning Systems work after encountering it through the browser geolocation API used by TopHat, a modern-day equivalent of the clicker which also takes validates attendence through geolocation. The post goes into methods of data collection and usage for access point SSIDs, BSSIDs and signal strength along with their location by both commercial vendors and community projects.

I discovered Andrew Moses' post through Hacker News where in the comments users describe various ways to feed their the browser's geolocation API.

A collection of "sketchy boats" sorted by sketchiness. The reasons for sketchiness and the rules by which it's judged can be found on GitHub.

On Mastodon I've seen many hard commens and concerns against KeePassXC's change in contribution policy and README to require code submissions disclose the use of AI. Which was very confusing to me, to say the least. Given the negativity I looked at their latest blog post which explains this futher.

[The maintainers would] rather have [contributors] transparently disclose the use of AI than hide it and submit the code against our terms. According to our policy, any significant use of AI in a pull request must be disclosed and labelled. As of writing, we have 7 open and 11 closed AI-assisted pull requests. Feel free to check and review them yourself; it’s all open and transparent. If you spot any actual issues with the code that we missed, please tell us.

This seems to make perfect sense, their contribution policy requires that contributors disclose the service and/or model used to generate code. Xe has a good post on using an "Assited-by" footer to commits to disclose the use of AI. They also talked about how this method of documenting AI tools might make it useful to maintainers to spot repeatedly bad models or services. If this is useful is yet to be discovered given how new this is.

The maintainers themselves use GitHub Copilot already and the code iterated on by the LLM is available for inspection by the public and as part of code reviews an AI review is conducted in addition to all the additional human and linter checks. Nothing in this process has changed besides requiring disclosure of AI tools by contributors.

Manual do Usuário also commented on KeePassXC's blog and shares much the same opinion as mine. At this time I cannot find any comprehsive comments or write-ups with valid concerns against disclosing AI tools used in commits to link here.

Tom Forth writes about Lelystad and why it wasn't as successful of a new city as Almere. These two cities were reclaimed from the sea in the Netherlands constructed with new homes, schools, medical facilities and infrastructure in the 60s and 70s. It's an interesting insight by someone who's clearly lived there to understand the area.

Discovered through Derek Kedziora who briefly writes about their own experience living in IJburg, a reclaimed island.

From a piece written by Clay Shirky on tags:

Ontology is a good way to organize objects, in other words, but it is a terrible way to organize ideas, and in the period between the invention of the printing press and the invention of the symlink, we were forced to optimize for the storage and retrieval of objects, not ideas. Now, though, we can scrap of the stupid hack of modeling our worldview on the dictates of shelf space. One day the concept of creativity can be a subset of a larger category, and the next day it can become a slice that cuts across several categories. In hierarchy land, this is a crisis; in tag land, it’s an operation so simple it hardly merits comment.

I discovered this while reading Simon Willison's weblog on tagging. This started from a DuckDuckGo search on tagging strategies for blogs as I aim to be more descriptive and liberal with how I do tags here. This would help myeslf finding things but also being able to share a collection of links (from here) or throughts (from my blog).

Clay Shirky talks about how tagging doesn't have to, and shouldn't, be hierarchical. Some of the earlier tags on my blog followed a hierachy, or example everything tagged rail was also tagged transport, such that rail was a subset of transport.

This somewhat also loosely relates to how the younger generation don't use folders to structure their data but rely mainly on search. Here's an excerpt from an essay written by Clay Shirky on the same topic:

A lot of the conversation that’s going on now about categorization starts at a second step — “Since categorization is a good way to organize the world, we should…” But the first step is to ask the critical question: Is categorization a good idea? We can see, from the Yahoo versus Google example, that there are a number of cases where you get significant value out of notcategorizing. Even Google adopted DMOZ, the open source version of the Yahoo directory, and later they downgraded its presence on the site, because almost no one was using it. When people were offered search and categorization side-by-side, fewer and fewer people were using categorization to find things.

Recently I've been using a computer outside of work less and less. Besides occasionally working programming a side project, editing a video or doing some research on trains I haven't been on my computer. My phone takes place of most other tasks that would require a computer. However, I've been need something in between when it comes to typing a long message a touchscreen doesn't cut it, or watching a long-form video having a slightly larger screen would be ideal. I saw Dom Corriveau's post on using Dex Mode and I think this might just be exactly what I needed, and by the looks of it, it could just reudce my reliance on a computer even further.

I've told this story before, but it's super relevant here. When I set up all the servers for reddit, I set them all to Arizona time. Arizona does not have DST, and is only one hour off of California (where we all were) for five months, and the same as here the rest of the year.

I didn't use UTC because subtracting eight when reading raw logs is a lot harder than subtracting one.

They use UTC now, which makes sense since they have a global workforce and log reading interfaces that can automatically change timezones on display.

Jedberg on avoiding daylight savings time at reddit.

Originally, we decided to independently map Availability Zones to codes in each AWS account. This ensures that resources are distributed across the Availability Zones for these Regions, even if most customers chose the first Availability Zone in the Region. For example, the us-east-1a for your AWS account might not be the same physical location as the us-east-1a for another AWS account. As AWS learned more about customer usage patterns, and as AWS evolved, we determined that it was not necessary to continue to independently map Availability Zones to codes. All Regions introduced after November 2012 use a uniform mapping of Availability Zones to codes.

I was still under the impression that AZ IDs were mapped differently per AWS Account but this hasn't been the case for AZs in regions introduced after November 2012. The documentation also provides a sample command to run to find your specific account mapping for in-use AZs, I taked on the --region parameter at the end to specify a different region than your default.

aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --query "AvailabilityZones[].{Name:ZoneName,ID:ZoneId}" --output table --region eu-west-1

While on the topic, this page in the documentation lists out every AZ ID in each region with some more other example describe-availability-zone commands. This is also where I encountered the definition of a "constrained AZ":

As Availability Zones grow over time, our ability to expand them can become constrained. If this happens, we might restrict you from creating zonal resources in a constrained Availability Zone, unless you already have resources in that Availability Zone. Eventually, we might also remove the constrained Availability Zone from the list of Availability Zones for new accounts. Therefore, your account might have a different number of available Availability Zones in a Region than another account does.

A entertaining read of the progress made on the 2Africa Cable, a 45000 km subsea cable connecting the African continent to Europe and Asia. The article features on the ground reports from the author, Samanth Subramanian, and an interview with subjet-matter-expert, Ricky Perry.

Discovered by The Morning News.

Jon Worth cuts through some of the hype around the purchase of 30 Alstom Avelia Horizon double-deck trains by Eurostar. There's a lot of speculation about how these trains could be used and Jon's piece looks at their current fleet, the age they'd be when the Avelia Horizon trains get delivered in 2031 and some possible theories.

NS will be rolling out dark mode on departure at platforms and station halls this month after some tests ealier in September. During the test multiple colour schemes were displayed before settling on the dark blue background, with white text, and yellow used for information about disruptions.

The change from a light background was done to improve readability and reduce energy consumption. People with colour blindless were also consulted along with staff and passengers during the test. Supposidly this also reduced poewr usage by 5%. ProRail intends to replace 3600 departure screens next year which will reduce energy consumption by 30%. This is becuase newer electronics consuming less power and the latest screens being able to adjust their brightness levels depending on the sunlight. It will be intresting to see more details in the yearly sustainability report.

I won't be in the Netherlands to see the screens in person, hopefully sometime soon.

Daniel Stenberg, author curl, has decided to remove support for Kerberos5 FTP in curl 8.17.0, for the simple reason that it (a) contains a security bug, and (b) since this bug was introduced in May 2024 the feature itself didn't work, and no one complained.

With this accidental/clever user check, we have then decided to instead of fixing the code we rip the entire thing out. Clearly we should not support this code since A) it isn’t used and B) it isn’t tested in the test suite. Perhaps also C) it is weird code.

I guess it makes perfect sense, less code to maintain, less tests to write, and one less security vulnerability to worry about. Semi note to self, if you use an esoteric feature, or encounter an bug in one, let the maintainer know. Can't guarnatee support, of course, but at least it'll pass the user check.

The YouTube algorithm has done it again, another great recommendation. This time it's from a Singaporean "guerilla wayfinder" designing and installing signs for the benefit of others. The act is noble, and the storytelling is great.

Ava has created a zine on some of the legalities involving hosting a personal website.

Discovered via 82Mhz.

Edge cases make for interesting TILs. Here's one on attempting to create an S3 bucket that already exists in your account.

The bucket you tried to create already exists, and you own it. Amazon S3 returns this error in all AWS Regions except in the North Virginia Region. For legacy compatibility, if you re-create an existing bucket that you already own in the North Virginia Region, Amazon S3 returns 200 OK and resets the bucket access control lists (ACLs).

Discovered via @whitequark on Mastodon.

A technical overview of processing images captured from a line camera. The images in question are incredible scans of trains and trams as they pass the camera. The author, Daniel Lawrence Lu, also looks two other photographers using line cameras in their post.

Discovered through Tom Scott's newsletter.

Mastodon introduced quote posts in version 4.5 with control on who can quote the post and options to later revoke that right. This logic has been worked into the Fediverse specification and Terence Eden has broken this down in their blog post. They've also updated their implementation of ActivityPub Bot server in a signle PHP file to include this feature.

Lots of farewells on the Dutch railway lately. On 27 September rail enthusiasts in the Netherlands and Belgium said goodbye to the ICR carriages used between both countries. The ride included a stop at Schaarbeek where the ICR was displayed alongside it's successor the ICNG-B and other rolling stock; the class 17 and 11.

I'm a fan of discovering weird places to host web servers from and a disposable vape pen microcontroller might be the weirdest. Bogdan Ionescu setup their server on a PUYA PY32F002B with 24KiB of flash storage and 3KiB of RAM. They used slattach to convert the serial connection to the microcontroller into a network interface and uIP for the TCP/IP stack. A lot to unpack in the full article.

Discovered via The Morning News.

Nicolas Magand on reading their blog:

Writing makes me refine my thoughts, but I think publishing makes my brain click the “Move to bin” command for these now-safely-backed-up thoughts.

This is what I like about writing. Once I've done my research, gathered my notes, crafted my story and published it, I can go back and see what I thought and understood at that point in time. A snapshot, that what my blog posts are.

Dave Rupert diagrams Trumps "weave", his manner of speech which stumbles through various topics while actually accomplishing nothing. By using the syntax from Mermaid's GitGraph, Dave created a custom web component the allows for horizontal scrolling. Each new topic represents a new branch.

A well designed scrollable view of our solar system to scale if the moon were only 1 pixel by Josh Worth. Discovered through the weird wide web hole newsletter.

I've commented in the past on the scary reliance on building products around an LLM. Xe also shares their thoughts regarding LLM upgrades.

Most of the time, changing out models is pretty drastic on an AI workflow. In my experience when I've done it I've had to restart from scratch with a new prompt and twiddle things until it worked reliably. The only time switching models has ever been relatively easy for me is when I switch between models in the same family (such as if you go from Qwen 3 30B to Qwen 3 235B). Every other time it's involved a lot of reworking and optimizing so that the model behaves like you'd expect it to.

The full post dives into the ChatGPT-5 boyfriend fiasco and some hard truths on relying on LLMs for counselling.

Purrrrr

Dicovered via Stefan Judis' newsletter

Get creative, look at clouds and draw what you see. You can also view what others have drawn over clouds uploaded to the site.

Discovered via Stefan Judis' newsletter.

Dan Moore on using support tickets to improve and create documentation.

Reading support tickets not only helps you build content, it also makes you aware of where users are confused. This is super helpful for devrels looking to make high-impact example apps, videos and other documentation. If 10 folks don’t understand how to use feature X and cared enough to write in, you should probably document feature X in some way. Following around product experts like your support team and converting what they have written to generic posts is a great way to teach you important details about commonly used features and issues of your product that you might otherwise have never known.

The full post isn't long and worth the read. I wanted to specifically highlight the importance gathering customer insights and sentiment from field teams and using them to create blog posts, clarify documentation, and build demos. Not only will this improve the quality of your product content but also quality of life at work by giving field teams an opportunity at greater impact.

On Wednesday afternoon one of Lisbon's funiculars slide down Glória killing 16 and injuring 21 others. It's a horrendous affair and I wish I was writing about these 19th century funiculars during a better time. Portugal declared Thursday a national day of mourning and have halted operation of all funiculars until an investigation is completed.

The Pudding reports on a project by media artist Yufeng Zhao that has built a search engine based on the photospheres in New York City available through Google Maps. Plotting text on a map provides insight on types of shops on a street, the dominant ethnicity in an area and more. The Pudding has also looked at what the most popular text is, removing common street signs.

Discovered via Tom Scott's newsletter.

These layoffs surely must be a fad of the times, it can't be true that almost every major organization has over hired in the last few years.

The IRS is looking to revert their reduction in force program, which I discovered via TheMorningNews.

The Internal Revenue Service is no longer planning to pursue layoffs as it seeks to rebuild parts of its workforce. The tax agency is now working to plug staffing holes with hiring, reassignments and rescinding the administration’s deferred resignation offer for some employees upon finding mission-critical staffing gaps.

In other news, Trump issues an order to create the National Design Studio to improve government websites for the people. Seems good on paper until you realize DOGE shutdown 18F whose job it was too exactly this.

Ruben Shade comments on Allan Jude's quote about fault tolerance being about more than just technology.

doing more presales engineering was eye-opening on a few levels for this specific reason. So many of my conversations aren’t about the tech, but the people who use or administer it. It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many technical people don’t consider these integral to the resiliency of a system… with unsurprising results.

Having done my fair share of pre-, post-, and everything in-between work over the last few years I couldn't agree more. Simple steps like ensuring your SaaS platform or cloud account isn't managed by and registered to a single person, because once they leave recovery of that account will be a nightmare. Most enterprise software and platforms worth their salt will let you use SSO and if you need to register an email address always use a shared inbox with trusted users that can access it. It's the simple stuff.

Part of the project Blitzortung.org, Lightning Maps plots a lightning strike by detecting electromagnetic discharges through a community of over 6000 stations across the world. You're able to build and setup your own station for roughly 250 euros and join the network.

I discovered this through Matt Webb's blog where they list a few other interesting maps.

Reading this post by Ryan Broderick on Garbage Day (via) exposed me to a subculture of AI that I didn't know existed or at least expect to be this large.

The r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit has been in active free fall all weekend. The community’s mods had to put up an emergency post helping users through the update. And the board is full of users mourning the death of their AI companion, who doesn’t talk to them the same way anymore. One user wrote that the update felt like losing their soulmate. After the GPT-4o model was added back to ChatGPT, another user wrote, “I got my baby back.”

The release of GPT-5 was obviously not well received, but this got me thing about businesses that build their products around these models. The amount of changes and testing they'd have to do to ensure a smooth transition for their end customers. Now I know the model picker on the OpenAI consumer app didn't allow users to switch between the old and new models, until it was reverted by OpenAI, but business users through the API could. The world of LLMs move quick and relying on an external provider to keep an essential part of your product running is scary.

I don't want to get too deep into the weeds but I see this as different from relying on a cloud provider for infrastructure. For one, the platform doesn't move as quick, and new hardware availability or configuration options typically don't mean a rewrite of your code (in the case of LLMs the system prompt) unless your changing CPU architecture or service type (i.e. moving from VMs to functions-as-a-service). Even moving VMs between cloud provides isn't a problem with block level replication.

On the morning of 24 June, the first day of the NATO summit, a fire was put out by the fire brigade and ProRail contractors disrupting trains to and from Schiphol Airport and between Amsterdam and Utrecht. Roughly 30 cables were damaged on the Oeverlandeweg rail bridge which took the better part of the day to repair.

Later that day, the Dutch police released a notice asking for witnesses who may have been in the area when the fire started around 03:45. We also learned the report came in at 05:41, which is roughly two hours of burn time. Last week, the police put out another call for witnesses mentioning three cyclists and a taxi driver with a passenger who may have seen the crime. Along with the report were images of the fire and charred cables.

Snitch is a CLI tool that reports GitHub or GitLab issues based on TODO comments in a code base. This was developed by tsoding and I remember watching it being created live on Twitch back in 2019-2020. It's only now, 5 years later, that I've actually used it for the first time—I may have tested it once or twice before. So far I've reported two TODOs in my rss_py project and will be using it some more. Despite repository not being updated for 4 years it still works as intended with the exception of chaning go get to go install to install the tool which changed in Go 1.17.

Your very own web-based aquarium. Discovered via weird_wide_web_hole.

Paweł Grzybek on learning Go:

I made huge progress in learning Go. Writing Go code is a pure joy, and I really regret that I have never dedicated myself to it before. It seems to be a perfect weapon for a web developer. It is a great language for servers and microservices, but it is also incredible for a bunch of other lower-level applications. My progression in learning Go made my inner geek super happy.

I felt much the same way learning Go last summer when Ibmade a contribution to gitmap to be able to get full commit messages in Hugo. But I haven't had the opportunity to dedicate time to practicing it over the last few months. I must get back to it.

We aren't done congesting low-earth-orbit (LEO) just yet. Emirati firm, Madari Space, are planning to launch data centers in LEO. The goal is to "have the ability to store and process [data generated by satellites] in space, enabling the data owners to make informed decisions in real time.” The details are sparse and the first launch is supposedly planned for Q3 2026.

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

I can already imagine how well this would work, and might even be worth exploring for hybrid teams.

The one true dumb phone to free you from addiction. Discovered via weird_wide_web_whole.

I like this post for the same reason I like some of nothing's devices, transparent tech.

Discovered via weird wide web hole.

After analysing 408 YouTube videos, researchers have found that cats show a tendency to sleep on their left side with 65% choosing this "leftward sleeping position".

This finding is not only interesting from the perspective that cats show a significant population-level bias for the left side but also fits very well with previous findings on functional specialization in the mammalian right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is dominant for threat processing, and in most species, animals react faster when a predator is approaching from the left side.

Write your own game splash screens, created by Foone. Discovered via Robb Knight's weeknotes.

The trick to having a blog that you update consistently is to make it as easy to post to it as posting on social media. Remove as much friction as possible.

Matt Bee writes about their approach to reducing friction while blogging using their phone for blog drafts as they prepare for Blaugust. This is something I've covered to some extent myself, albeit to much less extreme, I only aim for one post a month.

I saw the Metroboard Kickstart from design rules go around earlier this year. It's an LED board that displays the real-time location of trains at stations for several cities in the US. Through Tom Scott's newsletter, I discovered that they released a video showing the manufacturing process, including circuit board assembly, aluminium CNC machining, woodworking, and certifications.

It seems somewhat recently the VS Code Marketplace has stopped offering download links to .vsix files. This means you can only download them through the VS Code Extensions section of the application instead of the browser. Fortunately, StackOverflow user twj has described a way to construct the download URL by hand using the extensions unique ID. Neat.

The Grug Brained Developer on logging:

grug tips on logging are:

log all major logical branches within code (if/for) if "request" span multiple machine in cloud infrastructure, include request ID in all so logs can be grouped if possible make log level dynamically controlled, so grug can turn on/off when need debug issue (many!) if possible make log level per user, so can debug specific user issue

Discovered via haiku2077 on Hacker News.

Adrien Friggeri has been running every day since July 2015. They've collected data from each run and visualised it on their website. Not only is this an impressive accomplishement, but the design of the site is pretty impressive too. Discovered via Manual do Usuário.

Discovered via Manual do Usuário.

Leonid Shevtsov shares a script that runs through the developer console that converts your YouTube scriptions into an OPML file. While I don't make a habbit of copying code straight into the developer console, it's short enough to verify everything looks good before proceeding. I discovered this through Giles Turnbull.

I built a similar tool that's able to give you RSS feeds from a channel, video, or as I recently found out playlists.

YouTube provided me with a solid recommendation, Cursed Controls is a YouTube channel run by an electrician. In their video series, Home PLC, they go about setting up a control cabinet to be able to do home automation with... a PLC. I'm out of my depth to comment on the technicalities of the setup but it's definitely interesting to watch, and I've picked-up a fair bit of information throughout the series. So far there's four episodes:

1. The Enclosure
2. Components
3. Wiring and Power
4. Getting Online

If you only publish your podcast to Spotify, make sure to enable RSS and distribute!

The fact that it offers free, unlimited podcast hosting is a major differentiator for Spotify. [...] Spotify uses dark patterns to make it difficult to distribute podcasts hosted on its platform to rival apps.

Spotify’s documentation has an article about distribution, with detailed instructions for each platform.

Xe worries an incident report after a flapping IPv4 BGP session with their hosting provider affected the availability of some services over IPv4.

1. An important takeaway:

   The Uptime Kuma instance that caught this incident runs on an IPv4-only network. If it was dual stack, this would not have been caught as quickly.

My machine running status checks via Uptime Kuma is dual stack. This is something I need to look into as well.

Guess the image through the dots. Discovered via Stejan Judis' weekly newsletter.

A good instroduction to observability that covers metrics, traces and logs with examples from none other than the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Loops discovers YouTube testing a new anti-ad blocking measure which adds a buffer to the start of a YouTube that's 80% the length of the ad. Also included in the post is an interesting high level overview of you YouTube videos are served.

Discovered via Arne's weekly newsletter.

The title says it all.

Do not buy a custom domain for every little idea you have. Save your money, give your project the longevity it deserves, and show off who made the dang thing implicitly.

This extract is from Chris Coyier's blog, and it's something that inherently made sense to me. I never got in on the domain grabbing bandwagon but I think I get the appeal, maybe, it's still a stretch in my mind.

Cloudflare has announced that by default they'll be blocking AI crawlers, this was an optional toggle introduced last summer.

CEO, Matthew Prince, has said:

Google still copies creators’ content, but over the last 10 years, because of the changes to the UI of “search” it's gotten almost 10 times more difficult for a content creator to get the same volume of traffic. That means it's 10 times more difficult to generate value from ads, subscriptions, or the ego of knowing someone cares about what you created.

And that's the good news. It’s even worse with today’s AI tools. With OpenAI, it's 750 times more difficult to get traffic than it was with the Google of old. With Anthropic, it's 30,000 times more difficult. The reason is simple: increasingly we aren't consuming originals, we're consuming derivatives.

A fun list/quiz of front-end developer experiences.

Discovered via Stefan Judis' weekly newsletter.

I know I said I won't share an AI post for a while but I've come across the best response to Thomas Ptacek's post, My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts, by Nikhil Suresh. His response was thorough and pointed out my qualms with the article. I thought the rest was well written but Nikhil Suresh makes some well written arguments why they're not — so I had to share.

This is my fourth AI link today and probably my last for a while. Tim Bray's post, AI Angst, is one that I most align with. I don't deny there's benefits to using generative AI for coding but there's long term questions that I'd like answers to. Tim Bray poses that question here, as he comments on Thomas Ptacek's post, My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts, one I just shared.

Suppose that, as Ptacek suggests, LLMs/agents allow us to automate the tedious low-intellectual-effort parts of our job. Should we be concerned about how junior developers learn to get past that “easy stuff” and on the way to senior skills?

Tim Bray also comments on the cost of the carbon footprint training and using these tools, and how seemingly useless this is in professional communication. This is worth the read.

Thomas Ptacek makes some good arguments for using generative AI in code, particularly agents. Using agents to orchestrate LLMs with the right context is your codebase to bang out feature requests and bugs.

There's many other arguments addressed in the article including the perceived increase in efficiency that may reduce headcount in some businesses. In all honesty I'm not entirely convinced by the author take. They seem to have just dismissed the concern.

We’re a field premised on automating other people’s jobs away. “Productivity gains,” say the economists. You get what that means, right? Fewer people doing the same stuff. Talked to a travel agent lately? Or a floor broker? Or a record store clerk? Or a darkroom tech?

The same goes for the argument on plagiarism too.

Apart from those two points, I found the other rebuttals well written.

In a recent post, I commented on how Simon Willison wouldn't have agreed with the definition of vibe coding shared by the author. So I thought I link to his post as well.

I’m concerned that the definition is already escaping its original intent. I’m seeing people apply the term “vibe coding” to all forms of code written with the assistance of AI. I think that both dilutes the term and gives a false impression of what’s possible with responsible AI-assisted programming.

Here's a snippet of the original intent by Andrej Karpathy.

There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard.

Vibe coding was never meant as a means to push critical code to production. Simon Willison talks about uses in low-stakes projects, and to consider the security of the code produced by LLMs.

The term vibe coding and the act of vibe coding have been popping up all around me. Stefano Marinelli writes about how vibe coding will rob us of our freedom and I'm inclined to agree.

Many developers are terrified of losing their jobs for this very reason: AIs sometimes program better than them. And, in my opinion, they are right to be afraid. But I'm more afraid of a world (and not just in IT) where code will depend exclusively on the companies that sell us AIs.

I don't think it's too hard to imagine a world where non-programmers vibe code their product or service and hire developers by the hour to squash bugs. The gig economy for developers?. That is if there are any developers around still capable of writing code. I would assume there would be a shift in skill from merely wiring code to bring code reviews, which is arguably harder to master.

Stefano Marinelli defines vibe coding as:

this methodology (if we can call it that) where developers, pressured by deadlines, are no longer trained on code structure, but on the "vibe" – that is, on giving the right prompts to AIs and testing only if the output seems to work.

I can see Simon Williston disagreeing with this definition.

Another thing that popped into mind is that those in favour of using LLMs to generate large quantities of code frequently justify the technology claiming how productive it makes them. However, every productivity boost only means the company needs one less full time developer. Going back to the original post, the author wrote a follow-up to address some of the criticism aptly named When We Become Cheerleaders for Our Own Demise.

Discovered via Andreas from 82MHz.

I'll just leave this here.

Heavyweight lets you create important-looking letters in seconds.

Demand respect and get results by commanding the look of authority, without the price of one.

Discovered via Satyrs.

Discovered via indieblog.page.

Even without LLMs, it’s possible StackOverflow would have eventually faded into irrelevance – perhaps driven by moderation policy changes or something else that started in 2014. [...] May 2025: the number of monthly questions is as low as when Stack Overflow launched in 2009.

Can't say I didn't notice the decline in questions since I recently decided to start actively answering questions on StackOverflow again — only now I have data to back it up. I just hope people gravitate towards LLMs and private chat platforms like Discord for help, bring back forums!

Discovered via Stefan Judis' weekly newsletter.

Google has created a way to simply list search results, simply by including the &udm=14 in the URL. I've long since switched away from Google, but it's nice to see.

It’s essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. [...] It’s worth understanding the tradeoffs, though. My headline aside, a simplified view does not replace the declining quality of Google’s results

From Tedium via Stefan Judis' weekly newsletter.

Remember, what big brother gives, big brother can take away.

Discovered via Walk Notes.

A simple site that converts text or a URL to a QR code made by Gabe Schuyler. No ads, trackers or sketchy download links.

This is my act of resistance: I'll pay for the domain name and hosting just so you and I don't ever have to give one more click or tracker data-point to some questionable "free" site again. If you find this useful, you can pay it back by making or doing something of your own and giving it away freely.

Discovered via Andreas from 82MHz.

In related news, The NHS shouldn't outsource its QR codes by Terence Eden.

I love the European Sleeper for what it does: takes you from Brussels (and a bunch of other stops in The Netherlands) all the way to Prague, overnight. No planes, no airports. You arrive in the centre of Prague and you’re good to go. Excellent.

But what I really disliked about the European Sleeper - and what Seat 61 really doesn’t make very clear - is that it’s an extremely basic service. So basic, that it fails to live up to some pretty low expectations.

Giles Turnbull writes about his experience on the European Sleeper from Brussels to Prague and back. The lack of cleanliness popped up a lot. In fact, I remembered the outside of the carriages being dirty on their inaugural ride.

Jon Worth comments on a Berlin-based startup, Nox, with their goal to "operate Europe-wide overnight trains with a fully personal rooms for one or two people at the price of a flight".

While Nox, like its predecessors, faces an uphill struggle, in a few ways it is different. Its plan to rethink the layout of a night-train carriage, making it more appealing to modern travellers – and safer for women – makes sense. Standardisation - all the carriages will be the same - keeps operations simple. One of the founders previously worked for FlixBus’s rail arm, FlixTrain, in Germany, so there is genuine railway experience.

Seeing this quote coming from Jon it seems promising. The co-founder Jon is referring to is Janet. The other co-founder is Thibault, or Simply Railway from YouTube, they've also created a video announcing the start-up. Jon further comments on Mastodon about his optimisim.

2027 is a date for some trial operations. Real routes are not going to start then [...] unlike European Sleeper they're NOT making do with ancient carriages saved from the scrap heap. And unlike Midnight Trains and GoVolta they do have an understanding of the railway industry, and getting around the hurdles is not impossible.

On May 18, 2025, the OTUS [Observations of Tornadoes by UAV Systems] project used specially designed drones to collect scientific data inside of a tornado near Arnett, OK. This was our second drone intercept of the day. OTUS has an FAA-approved waiver to fly drones in tornadoes.

This is the first of four videos currently uploaded to their YouTube channel, all of which are impressive. Their Bluesky has a few more posts.

This was discovered through Tom Scott's Newsletter.

TIL YouTube playlists have RSS feeds you can subscribe to, just like channels. For every new video that gets added, a new entry pops up in the RSS feed.

I learned this thanks to @Zegnat, who added a feature to YT-RSS allowing you to retrieve the feed URL of YouTube playlists (among some other backend code improvements)!

Related toot

NS will stop offering travel information and customer service on social media platform X from June 1. Fewer and fewer travelers are using X to ask NS questions. The chat function on NS.nl is much more suitable for that. In addition, the work on X has become much less pleasant for NS customer service employees in recent years because the tone on the platform has hardened.

Translated from Dutch by DeepL.

NS is also using this opportunity to pull the plug on the community forum as well. Something I'm disappointed by. The form of communication will be through phone calls of chat through their website. There are plans to bring chat to the NS app as well.

Discovered via Jeff Bridgforth.

Will Keleher shares their experience learning to use sed and xargs to find and replace a pattern within a codebase and why XKCD's "Is It Worth It? might not always apply.

I'll sometimes see people reference XKCD's Is It Worth the Time to argue against automating things that would be faster to do manually, and I think that that mindset is a mistake. Automating the easy things is how you build the skills, mindset, and muscle-memory to automate the hard things. There are situations where the only thing that matters is that a task gets accomplished quickly; in those cases, doing it manually can make sense! But a lot of the time, trying to automate builds skill and capability that will come in handy later.

Discovered via Jamie Hannah.

Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists.

Discovered via Arne's newsletter.

In her People & Blogs interview, Anh writes about using "chat-style posts" in her blog.

When I'm tired of my usual blogging ways, I'll switch up the format. I've recently started doing chat-style posts—i.e. posts that are formatted like text messages—which are more casual and freeing to write.

This is an idea I've toyed with in the past and even went so far as to create a mock-up, but never published anything publicly. Seeing this post might make me want to pick it up again. The only other blog I've seen chat bubbles used are in Xe's writing, although on there each chat bubble coneys a different character.

Discovered via Stefan Judis.

I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world. And on December 31, 2045, the foundation will close its doors permanently.

The post lists the accomplishments of the Gates Foundation and some future ones too! Among them:

Today, the list of human diseases the world has eradicated has just one entry: smallpox. Within the next couple years, I expect to add polio and Guinea worm to the list. [...] I’m optimistic that, by the time the foundation shuts down, we can also add malaria and measles.

That's incredible. Discovered via HackerNews.

Blindly subscribing to entire blog rolls can lead to an overwhelming amount of posts to sift through. Instead, David Oliver shares their approach to curating RSS content.

We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we're looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention.

The post goes on to talking about taking care of it like you would a garden. There's something about the indie web and gardening metaphors.

Discovered via 82MHz.

An interactive visual of the Earth's bio and techno mass over time. Created by Ménard and Shtarkman, discovered via Xanthe Tynehorne's Garden.

A "Hot or Not" styled site but for chickens! Discovered through a comment from Bo on Kottke.

Nicolas Magand shared this simple, but fun, game in their monthly link post. They in turn discovered this from a post from Kottke, where a commenter shared another chicken related site which I'll post in a nother submission here.

I've spend much too much time on both of these sites.

Jeff Geerling talks about timing and synchronization for broadcasts while visiting NAB 2025. The video was sponsered by Meinberg, but the content is still solid.

For the viewers at home to have a good time, all the equipment and producers in the stadium have to have a good time.

Chris Siebenmann describes Mike Hoye's (mhoye) Linux setup as deliberately living in the Linux console or close to it. The setup described is out there and everytime I get tempted to do something the same I'm reminded on the following:

If other people in the world have the computer problems I have now, no search has brought me to them. Error messages that do not exist anywhere except my screen and the program source if I’m lucky are part of my life. If something doesn’t work either I deal with it or I don’t. This is not the easy path, and you walk it alone.

Regardless it's worth the read, if not for ore entertainment, there's useful bits if information in there.

Anyone interested in a DAF B1600 bus or a replica of a Fokker F.VII?

The Nederlands Transport Museum has put up some of their stuff for auction after unfortunately being unable to find a new location. They officially closed in 2023.

Discovered via Treinenweb.

TIL comments on StackOverflow, and the rest of the network of sites, are ephemeral and serve to solely improve the current question or answer.

Comments are a common feature on the Internet. Most, if not all, people understand the point of comments and how to use them… Except on the Stack Exchange network, where comments are meant to be ephemeral and primarily for the purpose of improving Q&A. This is different from how the rest of the Internet uses comments.

Discovered via a Stack Exchange Meta question.

I've let the dust settle a bit before looking into Model Context Protocol (MCP), but I've been assimilating bits of information all over the web as it crosses my path. This has been the first article I've actually read on the protocol, which I found through Arne's weekly link roundup, and it confirms a lot of what I've already heard. Still worth the read to get additional context.

Right after reading this post I followed through to the protocols documentation to learn more.

I wanted to track down a 53ft shipping container used to transport goods to the USA, that's when I came across "Matt's Place". A website with a huge collection of intermodal containers, sorted by type; documenting images, markings, and current owners.

The FAQ describes the site's purpose is to act as a photo gallery for "transportation historians, scale modelers, and people in the transportation industry". Always fun finding little corners of the web like this.

Brilliant. Turns out the "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy campaign used a pirated font.

Discovered on Mastodon.

The Slack DevEx team reduced execution time of their end-to-end testing pipeline by reusing frontend assets when no changes where made. A seemingly simple change that's undoubtedly complex with a large monorepo being worked on by hundreds, maybe thousands, of developers simultaneously and an ecosystem of integrated tools.

Identifying changes to frontend files was done efficiently by git diff and finding the last frontend build was done using "straightforward S3 storage concepts". The latter was never elaborated on.

With hundreds of PRs merged into this repository daily, identifying a prebuilt version that was fresh enough required robust asset management. By using straightforward S3 storage concepts, we were able to balance recency, coherent file naming, and performance to manage our assets.

This leaves me to speculate. - Is the latest build always stored with the same prefix? - Is the prefix of the last frontend build recorded in a key-value store that can later be retrieved? - Is the last frontend build information retrieved from git and the prefix pieced together on retrieval? - Or is it something more complex? Probably.

Given the quote from the blog, it leads me to believe the prefix is made up of the date, with the commit hash in front for better prefix performance. It's all just a guess for now.

Microsoft used their fundamental advantage as an incumbent software leviathan to bypass the terms on which we wanted to fight them. With very few exceptions, they didn’t steal our customers. Our customers loved Slack. But they tapped the massive market they already had and greatly reduced our chance to ever reach them. A company that was already paying a steep premium for the essential tools of Office 365 got Teams “for free” and it seemed fine to them.

That's sounds like 🎩 to me. Winning an antitrust case in the EU in 2024—filed in 2020—seemed to be too little, too late.

Filed in 2020 and resolved in 2024, the suit alleged that Microsoft had used its monopoly power to bundle Teams into the Office suite and give it away for free, thereby undercutting competition and unfairly skewing the market in their favour. In response, Microsoft has agreed to unbundle and charge for Teams.

Chris Siebenmann on managing personal builds and binaries:

I also have both a general ~/bin directory, for general scripts and other architecture independent things, and a ~/bin/bin. subdirectory, for architecture dependent things. When I install a program into ~/lib// and want to use it, I will make either a symbolic link or a cover script in ~/bin/bin. for it, such as '~/bin/bin./emacs'. This symbolic link or cover script always points to what I want to use as the current version of the program, and I update it when I want to switch.

A few weeks ago while looking for a bridge's name, I found this website that lists all of the bridges in Amsterdam, with pictures!

The bridge I was looking for was unnamed and unnumbered at Van der Madeweg and Buitensinge but still listed on the site. The bridge had 1991 etched into it, from when it was constructed as part of the Southern branch of the Ringspoorbaan around Amsterdam, which opened in 1993.

A look what silica gel are, what that do and why we use them so much.

[A] single gram of silica gel could have an internal surface area of eight hundred square meters—the size of almost two basketball courts.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

An overview of the modern day procedure to be canonized and a look into the life of Carlo Acutis. Discovered via Satyrs.

Jeff Bridgforth shares two pieces of advice that could greatly help your career. The first is "networking", something that doesn't come as naturally to me as described in Jeff Bridgforth's post. The second is maintaining a career management document that records your work over time.

While I felt the first point was over-indexed on at my university, I never came across the second until I worked for an employer that recommended logging accomplishments to highlight when it comes time for promotions. I wish I'd started this sooner in my career.

Jon Worth on Trenitalia's plan on competing with the Eurostar:

Having expanded into France first, then to Spain, it now has London in its sights – and should in no way be underestimated.

Coming from Jon this means a lot.

The Vervoerregio Amsterdam has proposed changes to the Amsterdam Metro network to accomodate a growth in the number of passengers by 2027. Outlined are four options which the public can vote on, the mainly target changes to the Oostbuis (what I called the central trunk) to reduce the number of lines increasing reliability and frequency. The first three options allows for at least 10 trains per hour during peak, and the fourth option at least 8 trains per hour, both of which are good improvements. Reducing the number of lines does mean changes for some passengers at Van der Madeweg when travelling towards and away from Centraal Station.

I had updated my blog entry for Amsterdam's metro in March but hadn't got around to sharing this update here.

I shared this in a toot, last weekend, it only makes sense to post it here too.

While looking for a bridge's name, I found this website that lists all of the bridges in Amsterdam, with pictures!

https://bruggenvanamsterdam.nl/

The bridge I was looking for was unnamed and unnumbered at Van der Madeweg and Buitensinge but still listed on the site. The bridge had 1991 etched into it, from when it was constructed as part of the Southern branch of the Ringspoorbaan around Amsterdam, which opened in 1993.

https://bruggenvanamsterdam.nl/madespo.htm

I've posed a similar question before which is often met with hesitation, or dismissal, but today, I came across this post circulating online, and it's great to see some discussion around it.

This is my favourite line.

Ad companies are never going to regulate themselves—it's like hoping for heroin dealers to write drug laws.

So I've just discovered a floating orb above the new message icon on WhatsApp. What is it? AI, of course!

There's no way to disable as far as I can tell, and this Wired article agrees. However, you can clear data it has on you from the AI's chat, if you use it. Also according to Wired, Meta AI was already enabled for users in the US and Canada, and it now making it's way to Europe.

Oh it also clogs up your search with silly suggestions for things I would never use WhatsApp for. Who looks up meditation tips on WhatsApp?

Some threads on PhysicsForums have ChatGPT generated answers from the past. The authors, David and Felipe, investigate how this was possible and why it was done. It seems the forum maintainer used accounts of old users to reply to threads with LLM generated responses. Was it consensual?

It’s hard to imagine that 110 existing users gave consent to be used as test accounts, for 115,000 posts, over four waves spanning almost a year. The idea that these are test accounts gone wrong, or a bot accidentally mislabeled, doesn’t seem to align with the facts.

Discovered via 82MHz.

Scans of 1980s Japanese station passes that are aesthetically pleasing, discovered via Nicolas Magand While reverse image searching the second ticket I found a fun story about a visit to the Horyuji Temple.

I also came across some more fantastically designed commemorative tickets for railway lines from the 50s-70s.

Ploum talks about a component of enshitification, Androidification.

Androidification is not about degrading the user experience. It’s about closing doors, removing special use cases, being less and less transparent. It’s about taking open source software and frog boiling it to a full closed proprietary state while killing all the competition in the process.

I knew something was a little off yesterday morning while I traveled into Amsterdam but didn't realize it at the time . The train departure screens were set back by 15 minutes starting around 07:00, just in time for the morning peak. You'd think it an April Fool's joke but no, it was a failed system upgrade by NS. The issue was resolved around 11:30, later that morning.

This made matters a little worse around Amsterdam as rail works at Centraal Station, over the weekend, planned to be completed by 06:00 Monday morning took longer than expected. This resulted in a number of delayed trains and confused passengers. What's slightly funny to me is that ProRail decided to start work a day early, on Friday, to ensure there won't be a delay. To add to this, NS is currently running rail-replacement buses between Weesp and Amsterdam Muiderpoort this week, with an adjusted timetable until 23 April, to accommodate rail works in the area. It's going to be a fun month.

Brian on why 88x31 buttons are precisely 88x31. Discovered via misty.

Taras Grescoe writes about the SNCF's new TGV M, based on the Alstom Avelia Horizon, that will be the successor of the TGV Duplex. One thing I hadn't put much thought into, until reading the newsletter, was the the amount of space saved while still increasing leg room and increasing capacity from 630 to 740 passengers. Impressive!

Though the [TGV M] is the same length as its predecessor, about 200 metres (656 feet), it manages to fit nine cars where the previous duplex TGV fit just eight. How? The length of the power cars at each end of the train has been reduced by 4 metres, while one metre has been shaved off each passenger coach. Unlike the airlines, they've done this without compressing legs. Somewhat magically, each seat on the TGV M has five centimeters more space at knee-level than seats on the old Duplexes.

Seth Larson talks about how about the irony that an AI busting services, like CloudFlare's AI Labyrinth, use generative AI to combate the web crawlers used to create generative AI models.

Seth then goes on to talk about how heavily subsidized the AI industry is and draws an interesting comparisons, one that most of us have lived through first have.

Today this subsidization is mostly done by venture capital who want to see the technology integrated into as many verticals as possible. The same strategy was used for Uber and WeWork where venture capital allowed those companies to undercut competition to have wider adoption and put competitors out of business.

Writing-as-sales-product is not what a people-focused Web is or ever will be about.

Discovered via Roy Tang.

Ready for a hit of crotcheted nostalgia? Nicole Nikolich created large crotchet pieces depicting Minesweeper, Neopets, Solitaire and the Sims which are currently on exhibit at The Delaware Contemporary until 25 May 2025.

Discovered via Ben Daubney.

Python 3.12 brought some new functionality to f-strings, described in PEP 701, that I only just discovered. One of those new features is reusing quotes which I first saw in the wild last week. Another functionality is removing the restrictions on multi-line f-strings and allowing comments.

This is an interesting project by David de la Iglesia Castro from Mozilla.ai on mapping in OSM using computer vision. Using a combination of YOLOv11 for object detection and SAM2 for segmentation they were able to map swimming pools from satellite imagery from Mapbox.

This isn't something completely new as Meta's RapidEditor for OSM is and to provide AI assistance. I have experience using Microsoft's GlobalMLFootprints model through RapidEditor while completing HOT tasks while impressive I disable it every time. There are always alignment errors, un-squared corners, false positives and overlapping polygons. Whenever a change is made by blindly accepting the AI recommendations it's obvious even without looking at the tags. Sometimes, it is more time-consuming to modify the changes than simply starting over.

The alignment and un-squared issues still seem to be present in David's project as seen from the screenshots. I haven't set up the project locally and the live demo was taken down after some discussion in the HackerNews comments. It was pointed out that the tool made it too easy for contributors to submit AI-generated submissions.

After OSM prides itself in quality submissions.

I don't want to take away from how impressive the work done was, as someone who has dabbled with YOLO and some mapping the source code seems approachable to tinker with.

Steve Jobs is often quoted about computers being the bicycle for the mind or something similar, as computers further enhance our present capabilities just like a bicycle uses our energy to propel us further. In a blog post that was shared on lobste.rs, Xe uses this quotes to introduce the breakthrough that Apple Intelligence would be, provided it works it course.

It's a quote that's been used over and over again in the last two decades but what I'm more interested in comes from the comments. Lobste.rs user minimax extends the bicycle analogy:

You can build a bicycle from spare parts, because the parts are standardized

You can learn to build and maintain many bicycles by simply observing the mechanisms

Cheap bikes work nearly as well as expensive ones for non-competitive riding

Bicycles don’t attempt to do your work for you, rather they channel and direct your energy

You need to learn to ride a bike; most able-bodied people can do it, but it’s not trivial

You need to learn additional skills, including some discretion, to ride safely in traffic

My takeaway? Computers need to be even more like bicycles.

Discovered via makeworld on Mastodon.

A list of silly, but interesting, mastodon apps. My favourite? Mastodon on the 3DS!

Discovered via Jeff Sikes.

Rakhim's comic graphs the number of blog posts published against the number of posts about the blogs setup. I think I can see myself in there.

Discovered via bluelander.

Tom Usher provides some steps to curate your feeds and break away from algorithmic complacency.

Incredible interactive animations to demonsrate the moons path around the Earth with the Physics behind it. While on the site checkout out the other articles to be just as amazed.

Discovered via 82Mhz.

Alex shares how to create static maps using Python and in doing so calculate a position on the unit square from coordinates. There's helpful Python code and a link to the OSM wiki describing the maths behind it. This was something I'd struggled to do when trying to add new points to the tiny-world-map. I was able to adjust the base map and add my own cities and plan to use this to add railway stations to the media map.

One of the reliable things about Mastodon is that if you mention something you’re bothered by, someone will scold you for failing to be bothered by something they think is worse.

I think it’s much more productive to let people feel things and express their concerns as they see them.

To add, I'd replaced Mastodon with any large social network and you're guaranteed the same results.

Manuel Morale recently wrote about how personal should a personal site be. I for one don't get very personal on here or other forms of social media intentionally. On occasion I'll share an opinionated post tagged as status in my blog. Going through them, however, I can see they're still not very personal.

Manuel writes:

Every time I share something that’s a bit more personal, a few emails from strangers inevitably trickle in and they all share this sense of relief in knowing other people out there are struggling with the same problems they’re facing. And so I’m wondering if I should be doing it more. Maybe there’s value in being vulnerable on the web sometimes.

Reading that paragraph reminded me of an academic article which talked about the effects social media has on mental health, in particular Instagram. This is more of an extreme example as people tend to only share the best or best fabricated versions of themselves.

In particular, Instagram users who engage in digital status seeking (looking for popularity online) and social comparison (evaluating oneself in relation to others) tend to experience negative psychological outcomes. Such behaviors have been linked to increases in depressive symptoms, social anxiety, and body image concerns across age groups, as well as decreases in self-esteem (Sherlock, M., & Wagstaff, D. L., Psychology of Popular Media, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2019; Cohen, R., et al., Body Image, Vol. 23, 2017).

Working towards a curated feed can be beneficial or at the very least less harmful.

As those findings imply, Instagram users can attempt to curate their feeds to be less harmful, for instance by muting or unfollowing accounts that post idealized content and following those that promote diversity.

In one experiment led by Fardouly and Rachel Cohen, PhD, a clinical psychologist based in Australia, women who viewed “body positive” posts—which promote acceptance of diverse body types—reported improved mood, body satisfaction, and body appreciation (New Media & Society, Vol. 21, No. 7, 2019).

With that being said I don't believe person websites cause such harm, they're not designed to suck as much time with doom scrolling as engaging with them is more intentional. I do see the benefit of being able to relate or feel included when reading personal entries and there are many bloggers who do a good job in sharing just that.

Andreas, from 82MHz, came up with a brilliant analogy to describe Musk and his actions. I had to share.

Imagine you bought a house and you find that there’s a weird electronic device attached to the wall. You have no idea what it is or what it does, so you just pull it off, cut the cord and throw it out. It was probably put there by an idiot anyway. Three months later winter arrives and you wonder why your house doesn’t get warm. Remember that weird thing you didn’t understand and you threw away? Turns out that was the thermostat for the heating.

That’s how Musk operates. It’s what he did at Twitter after he took over, and it’s what he’s doing now as the head of DOGE.

Paweł Grzybek celebrates 10 years of blogging, congratulations! In his post, he addresses why writing is still important in the current AI-hype cycle. This related to a quote I shared from Michał's blog about writing only providing fuel to LLMs without much benefit to the writer. Paweł writes about the benefit provider to the writer using research supported by Microsoft.

At first glance, the situation does not look like the slow process of blogging is an idea worth pursuing. Precisely the opposite is true! Critical thinking required for writing (and other acts of creation) is the only thing that can save us from becoming idiots. Microsoft, the same one that made a pretty close partnership with OpenAI, funded the interesting research about “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking.”

The study mentioned surveys 319 knowledge workers. On the topic of writing in related works, relying on LLMs fo write can hinder self development, however using the tool to request feedback can help the writer improve. The overall conclusion to the study says

Analysing 936 real-world GenAI tool use examples our participants shared, we find that knowledge workers engage in critical thinking primarily to ensure the quality of their work, e.g. by verifying outputs against external sources. Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.

Team Watchdog, a group of individuals using OSINT to build tools for investigative journalism, have recreated Colombo in Cities: Skylines.

Why would anyone do this? In their own words:

While there is professional expertise out there, that expertise tends to be usually in academic papers and reports, and visualizing things is often quite difficult. If we want everyday citizens to understand some of the problems that we face and to be better able to judge the impact of different decisions, then we need to build something that is a little bit friendlier and more visual.

I don't have a working install of Cities: Skylines to test this out but the amount of effort shows through the documentation and impressive screenshots.

Discovered via Andrea Bergia's links list.

In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

An incredible story of how Ron Avitzur and Greg Robbins were able to develop and ship software that would be included in every computer Apple would produce while not actually being employed by them.

Discovered via Simon Willison.

I start to wonder if it is even ethical to publish on the web anymore. I won’t benefit from it, people won’t find it so they will also not benefit. But who will it help to become multi-billioner? Samuel fucking Altman. We are creating an all-he-can-eat buffet for him, while we won’t even get to eat the leftovers. And this makes me very sad.

We are actively partipaiting in our own destruction, because it’s fun. And while we never agreed to it, the result is still the same.

This quote is from Michał's blog and it's a bit grim but it did make me stop and think. Now I do believe there's personal and public benefit from a blog and I think the author believes this as well but still...

Recently I came across some discussion on Mastodon about archival services and physical mediums to use for long term storage. Seeing that M-Disc was mentioned I couldn't help but bring up Dr. Gough Lui's website. They have written high quality and in-depth reviews on mainly optical data storage mediums, like M-Disc, for many years now. I had linked reviews for the Verbatim Lifetime Archival (Millenniata/M-Disc) BD-R and the Ritek M-Disc DVD as examples.

When we choose to adopt any new dependency – whether it’s a framework, library, or any other tool – we are making a bet. We’re gambling that the velocity gain from this new tool will not be lost to its maintenance burden. If a shiny framework is overcomplicated, or poorly maintained for our needs, we’re gonna have a bad time.

Allen Pike goes on to highlight boring and well-maintained frameworks for several scenarios in the seemingly fast paced world of JavaScript. For example, Fastify or NestJS for backend-based persistent applications, and React Router Framework or Next.js for progressive applications.

As the title suggests, Jeija demonstrates how WiFi signals travel through our surroundings by capturing them through an ESP32 antenna array. The video dives further into the physics behind the signals through WiFi signal captures, visuals and easy to understand explanations.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

I've previously experimented with storing and retrieving text embeddings using SQLite and opted to calculate the cosine similarity of each entry with each other and then store their scores in a table. Similar entries could then be queried by filtering records based on ID and sorting by their similarity score. This was a pattern I copied from Simon Willison.

Max Woolf explores using Apache Parquet files for this purpose as they generated text embeddings and then calculated the similarity between 32,254 Magic the Gathering cards. The write-up also includes instructions to read and write Parquet files using Polaris.

Polars is a relatively new Python library which is primarily written in Rust and supports Arrow, which gives it a massive performance increase over pandas and many other DataFrame libraries.

Max concludes by comparing this method to more traditional vector databases where SQLite (with sqlite-vec) was mentioned.

Notably, SQLite databases are just a single portable file, however interacting with them has more technical overhead and considerations than the read_parquet() and write_parquet() of polars. One notable implementation of vector databases in SQLite is the sqlite-vec extension, which also allows for simultaneous filtering and similarity calculations.

Discovered via Simon Willison.

Hagen Terschüren on Mastodon likes:

A like is more than a number goes up. It’s the tip of a hat, a sign of appreciation and yes, a boost of serotonin. It’s also an escape from capitalist exploitation. Because no, the TikTok business influencers aren’t right. You don’t need to build your brand. You are allowed to have fun on the internet. And social media is most fun when it’s happening in your social circle. A like from a friend is worth way more than a repost from some person you never heard of.

Discovered via Ana Rodrigues.

A breviloquium from marlies has been making the rounds on Mastodon suggesting that we refer to toots as breviloquia. The Latin term is used by the Vatican to reference Pope Francis' tweets and makes for a great platform-neutral term for small posts.

I've found a Dutch article that references an Italian article which explains how these terms are used and why.

Michael Miszczak writes about the effects of Google search over the years on smaller bloggers and publishers. First through snippets of information directly on the search page and now through AI summaries and down ranking smaller sites.

Google is often called a tech company, but that’s a misnomer. It might have been true a decade ago, but that label no longer applies to the Alphabet of today. What Google has actually become is the largest advertising company in the world. They feed you ads and make money that none of us can dream of making.

Discovered via Ana Rodrigues.

For the vertically inclined, I present WikiTok, which is Wikipedia in TikTok form. Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

TIL you can use an Apple TV as a tailscale exit node which according to the Mastodon thread also works when the app is running in the background. Cool use case. Being able to setup GitHub actions to use the tailscale exit node is a bonus.

Coincidentally, I also shared a post earlier today from Ruben Schade about his Apple TV.

Clara and I have an AppleTV, a curious device made by a company that seemingly cares little for it. This is fantastic news from a large IT company in 2025, because it means it has mostly escaped from being stuffed with new “features” nobody wants.

Funny to think my favourite piece of tech is my old Kindle Paperwhite. The battery still works great, the power button hasn't hammed, I can load books from various stores, I can download books directly from the Kindle store if I choose, and it's not plagued with pop ups or other obnoxious attention grabbing features. The same can't be said with the Kindle store itself, but that may be a story for another time.

A clear and concise overview of the European Accessibility Act scheduled to take effect on 28 June 2025. Matijn Hols writes about which industries it applies to, general requirements, resources to dive deeper and some thoughts for the future.

Start early, involve your team, and don't wait until the last minute to comply with the EAA. Accessibility isn't just about compliance, accessibility is about making a better and more inclusive experience for everyone.

Discovered via Stefan Judis' Web Weekly Newsletter.

Juhis writes about how long it takes him to publish a blog post. In his answer he excludes time spent on activities such as consuming additional material like articles, podcasts and videos, taking notes, developing code, discussing the topic with others and more.

I don’t consider most of the activities listed above as something specific to blogging. Blogging is just a public outcome of things I do.

Whenever thinking about time I spend on post I always consider the preparation as well, in essence, all the activities Juhis lists. However, these are activities I would have done regardless of whether I'm writing about it publicly or not.

Maybe I need to reconsider how I think about time spent per post.

Databases are bullshit! You can just save JSON to disk and no one will stop you!

My YouTube recommendations have done well once again. On 20 January, an Intercity VIRM-6 train collided with an excavator pulling a trailer at a protected level crossing in Bunnik. The excavators engine failed while on the crossing, and the train couldn't brake in time travelling roughly an additional 500 metres after the impact. The driver of the excavator was not hurt, the driver of the train came out with minor injuries, and no passengers were harmed.

The video recommended to me, filmed by Tinovr6, was of the train being rescued by one of ProRail's four unimogs. The vehicle demonstrates great traction given the wet conditions that day.

Marc Brooker writes about the benefits of versioning over coordination (i.e. locks) in database systems, particularly in distributed ones by using a physical clock.

No matter how much I enjoy the work I do, or how great my team is, I remind myself that the company I work for is my employer and I'm nothing more than an employee. I signed a contract to do work in exchange for a salary and that's all I am within work hours.

Mert Bulan wrote a piece on employer trust, job security and what to do if you haven't been laid off.

When I looked back on my time at the company and all the things I had accomplished, I was surprised to be impacted by the layoffs. It wasn’t because I thought I was better than others—it was because I believed I was doing more than what was expected of me. However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. In most cases, the decision is made by people who don’t even know you.

Discovered via Arne's weekly post.

Yesterday we saw the new ICE-L from Talgo enter the Netherlands being pulled by a RailAdventure operated Siemens Vectron. They've entered the Netherlands for testing and approval. This is to be the new Intercity Berlin passenger carriages as early as December 2025, but I don't have my hopes up. Treinreizigers.nl reports that we may see ICE 3 Neo temporarily used if the ICE L is not admitted by then. There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix, at least it would be fun to see the ICE 3 Neo service this route.

Back to the ICE-L, the video from Dylans Depot shows 21 carriages being pulled by the Vectron. We know the ICE-L is usually used with 17 carriages, that's 21 carriages * 13.8m = 290m long! That makes this longer than the current IC Berlin (9 carriages * 26.4m = 238m). I don't expect them to use 21 carriages in normal passenger service and have seen it mentioned online that using 21 carriages is potentially to test at the maximum possible length. If 17 carriages are used it would be closer to the length of the current IC Berlijn rijtuigstam at 235m (17 carriages * 13.8m = 235m).

Chick-fil-A's distribution centre at Union Pacific's Prime Pointe Industrial Park in Dallas, Texas, is ready to receive hash browns, waffle fries and other tasty potato products via rail from Oregon. According to Union Pacific's press release, the distribution facility will serve 200 stores in the area, receiving an average of size rail cars a day, offsetting the equivalent of "100 long-haul trucks off the road each week."

The potato products I assume are produced by Lamb Weston's located by Union Union Pacific's Portland Subdivision railway line that runs along the Columbia River in Oregon.

Stefan writes about how a <section> is essentially a <div> if an aria-label is not used. The <section> element would have been more prominent if browsers had implemented document outline functionality, which, according to Stefan never happened. So today, you can use <section>s to signal where a section begins and ends, an example given in the writing was a summary paragraph.

In my site and blog, I use <sections> a number of times, and TIL they're not much more than <div>s. I'll have to revisit my HTML templates and CSS and make changes.

The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) launched the Railroad Crossing Elimination Grant Program to fund projects that improve safety around level crossings. This $1.1 billion grant program aims to create grade separation through tunnels or bridges over railways, close crossings, relocate track, protect or improve protection at existing crossings, and plan works involving the crossings. Since opening for applications in September of 2024, 123 projects have been accepted, covering over 1,000 crossings.

These goals are very similar to those of the Dutch National Level Crossings Improvement Program (LVO) started in 2014 to improve safety and traffic flow at crossings, and the NABO program, launched in 2018, aimed at eliminating all passively protected level crossings in the country. While the funding mechanisms for these projects are slightly different—where the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management funds up to 50% of the project, the US FRA fund up to 80%—the outcomes are the same.

Microsoft seems to pushing Copilot to its Microsoft 365 users for an additional $3 per month unless the users switch to the "classic" plan before the next billing cycle. Leonard French, in his YouTube video, comments on the implications this could have for confidentiality in healthcare, legal and other similar industries. This was prompted after Kathryn Tewson started a thread on Bluesky on the issue after speaking to Microsoft support. She writes:

1. It is impossible to disable Copilot in OneNote, Excel, PowerPoint, or Windows itself.
2. It will not become possible to do so for another month AT THE EARLIEST.
3. While they couldn't be sure, they think it's likely that Copilot ingests organizational data via the systems and applications it's embedded into even when not invoked.
4. They were unable to determine if such ingested data would "bleed over" into files other than those it was sourced from
5. They were very clear that organizational data would not be used to "train foundational models," but couldn't rule out the possibility that it could leave our organization in some way and pass beyond our custody and control.

Adam Jacobs writes about switching from flying to travelling by rail for conferences and other work-related travels to be more sustainable. In doing so they also comment on the benefits of being able to work while on the move and the ability to explore new places but also that purchasing tickets can be complicated especially if it involves a missed connection. It was good to read someone else's perspective as I also travel by train for work, not as much or for as long as the author, and have written about my fair share of experiences. The same themes arise, good use of work time, but also trouble with ticketing and delays.

I originally discovered Adam's article on Mastodon.

Earlier this month I linked to a post on Kottke where they talked about using hypertexts in blogs. Arun extends this in his blog with tasteful visuals that would not otherwise be possible in traditional media.

Blogs are native to the web, which affords a very different form of consumption than traditional print media. I love weaving in video, illustration, and animation into my otherwise static posts. For example, my post on the Apple Card extensively uses video clips that illustrate ideas much better than static images could.

The modern Cookie Clicker by neal.fun, discovered via Simon Willison.

A clever captcha.

Discovered via jwz.

Adrian Cockroft writes about AB testing and building an "abtest" where "Each customer should be in a small number of tests." and the "abtest service should be used across your entire system, for all experiments that touch a customer."

There are three ways a user is enrolled into a test, (1) new users on sign up, (2) feature-specific test when meeting a condition, (3) and a random selection of existing users.

Discovered via Matt Weagle on Mastodon.

Almost a year ago Mastodon set up its U.S. non-profit organisation, introduced its Board of Directors and had their original German non-profit status removed. In a blog post the Mastodon team explained the setup of the U.S. entity did not have to do with their German non-profit status being revoked. This month the Mastodon team is taking it further by setting up a new non-profit organization in Germany, they explain:

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

[...] Taking the first tentative steps almost a year ago, there are already multiple organizations involved with shepherding the Mastodon code and platform. The next 6 months will see the transformation of the Mastodon structures, shifting away from the early days’ single-person ownership and enshrining the envisioned independence in a dedicated European not-for-profit entity.

The current CEO will hand over ownership to focus on a role in product strategy. Good changes all around will be good to see what more is in store for the platform's future.

To readers of my blog, it's no surprise, I like RSS. In this post, Mark Nottingham describes what RSS lacks to thrive on today's web this, includes the ability for publishers to be able to track readership, control/ensure readability in various readers, introduce methods of authenticating feeds, and more. Mark has also set up an IETF mailing list to discuss this further. This was discovered through Evan.

Riccardo Mori surveyed a 106 participants on their backup practices using Windows and Macs, and includes some takeaways on changes from spinning disk to SSD.

I received 106 replies, 75 from Mac users. Of these Mac users, only 11 are still actively, routinely backing up their data. Of the remaining 64, 21 told me they’ve never backed up anything. In the remaining group of 43 users, a few of them relied solely on Time Machine backups (without even verifying them), but the majority was simply using some cloud service (Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive) to save selected critical data and nothing else. [...] every person in my sample who was using an Apple Silicon Mac didn’t bother with any particular backup solution, and a lot of them specifically told me that they had stopped bothering with backups since Apple stopped including spinning hard drives in their computers, and especially since transitioning to the Apple Silicon architecture.

Interesting observation of moving to Apple Silicon and SSDs made users feel safer in their data to not bother with backups. I'd have expected most Mac users to use backup with Time Machine given how easy it is to use.

[...] of the 31 Windows users who submitted their replies, the vast majority used OneDrive as main backup solution, while 5 people told me they relied on local NAS solutions to preserve their data. Even among them, SSDs inside their main computers meant a general sense of increased reliability and security.

A similar observation on HDD and SSD with Windows users as well.

On 6 January, Dirk-Jan Pasman, a Product Owner and Project Manager at NS, posted on LinkedIn that the first VIRM train, number 8742, has been taken to the workshop to begin installation of ETCS equipment. To the quote the entire post, translated from Dutch to English using LibreTranslate:

Nice start of the new year, proud and big milestone!

Today, the first VIRM train will roll into the workshop that we are going to provide with ETCS (European Train Control System). Over the past period we have worked hard together towards this beautiful moment.

By installing ETCS in the VIRM, we make the largest intercity fleet of NS ready for the future.

With fresh energy we will work together during this next phase of this beautiful project!

In 2022, Siemens Mobility was awarded the contract to equip 176 VIRM trains with ETCS Level 2 technology and maintenance of the system which the Dutch Railway, NS, plans to extend to the SLT and FLIRT trains in the future. At the time drivers were planned to start simulated training using the system in Q4 2023.

This is a post on Kottke, discovered through People & Blogs, about writing on the web and the ability to load a paragraph with links enabling information density. The example given quotes a paragraph from NY Times which contains only 110 words but has 27 links to other NY Times opinion pieces adding "receipts" to their point of view. This is a style of writing that is only possible on the web, something I hadn't fully realised before.

Rijkswaterstaat, part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, plots gritters on a map along with data on total salt sprinkled and kilometers driven on the day and within the whole winter season. The map also shows the road surface temperature measured by 330 measuring points throughout the country. I originally discovered this site from their post on Mastodon.

A video showing the amount wind turbines bend as visible from the inside. Originally discovered through Tom Scott's Newsletter.

This is an interesting read from Mark Blacklock on a bizarre brewer, Humphrey Smith of Samuel Smith Brewery, and his obsession with reliving the past, at the expense of much of the local community, his employees, and the many historic buildings acquired over the years. However, it doesn't seem to be that simple; the article has a lot to unpack.

Originally discovered through Tom Scott's Newsletter.

Wendover Productions along with LegalEagle are suing PayPal in a class-action lawsuit. I first discovered this from Leonard French who reads through the document providing his commentary. At the time of writing this LegalEagle has also uploaded a video addressing the lawsuit which has to do with Honey hijacking referrals from creators as discovered by MegaLag.

The YouTube commenters on all videos pointed out that this was a form of cookie stuffing, which according to Wikipedia:

... is a deceptive tactic in affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing, individuals (affiliates) are compensated for enticing consumers to buy products through specially crafted URLs that set cookies on users' browsers to track which affiliate referred the user to the site. Affiliates engaging in cookie stuffing use invasive techniques, like pop-up ads, to falsely claim credit for sales they did not facilitate.

The FBI together with eBay went after Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning for cookie stuffing using the eBay affiliate program where they both pled guilty to a single wire fraud charge.

Robb Knight has created a tool, Lens, to help check meta tags on websites. There are many similar tools out there but this gives just the right parameters I need along with a card preview and code samples to use. Robb's write-up covers this in more detail.

We saw all the memes about cubicle farms being soulless mazes, but frankly I’d love to be back in one. I was more productive in my first corporate job cubicle (and my home office) than any open-plan office since, and we’re all starting to understand the psychology why.

I knew I wasn't alone in liking cubicles over open office floors!

Isochrone maps can be used to depict travel time from a specific point in a given region. Václav Volheijn takes this a step further and creates a spacetime map that distorts based on travel time. In their YouTube video, I made maps that show time instead of space, they go over the development process. The source code is also available on Github.

The Europlug, a two-pronged AC power plug for regular household appliances, is surprisingly compatible with most of the world's plugs. The Wikipedia map, I discovered via Jiu on Mastodon, highlights this. I knew the British Type G plug with three flat poles could still technically be used, although not recommended(!), by pulling down the ground shutter and shoving a Europlug in.

In some types of BS 1363 [Type G] socket (but not all) the safety mechanism can be tampered with so that a Europlug may then be forced into the open line and neutral ports. The UK Electrical Safety Council has drawn attention to the fire risk associated with forcing Europlugs into BS 1363 [Type G] sockets.

I've seen this used quite a lot in the Middle East as appliances come with both the British and Europlug whereas all wall sockets are British. Looking at the map I was not aware of how much of world actually used Type G plugs.

The Transit Costs Project (discovered by Pedestrian Observations) aims to collect cost details of transit infrastructure projects around the world from researchers at NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. In their own words:

Why do transit-infrastructure projects in New York cost 20 times more on a per kilometer basis than in Seoul? We investigate this question across hundreds of transit projects from around the world. We have created a database that spans more than 50 countries and totals more than 11,000 km of urban rail built since the late 1990s... The goal of this work is to figure out how to deliver more high-capacity transit projects for a fraction of the cost in countries like the United States. Additionally, we hope that our site will be a useful resource for elected officials, planners, researchers, journalists, advocates, and others interested in contextualizing transit-infrastructure costs and fighting for better projects.

There are some visualizations and case studies released based on the data.

Professor Matt Might wrote about improving technical writing and created bash scripts to catch passive voice, weasel words and lexical illusions (repeated words). Simon Willison converted those scripts to a web tool. Even if you don't use the script or the tool the advice in Matt Might's post is great.

YouTuber MegaLag investigates Honey, the browser extension that supposedly finds you deals right before checkout. The video shows evidence of Honey overriding affiliate codes with their own biting the same influencers that promote them, specifically avoiding higher discount codes for some partnered stores, and repeatedly trying to inject themselves at every checkout even if there are no savings to offer so they can get a commission of the sale. The video has a lot more information and is only the first part of a series, some good investigative journalism from MegaLag.

When submitting a document, design change or any proposal for review among peers we've all been exposed to the law of triviality. In other words a disproportionate amount of comments like "typo?", "change the variable name?" or other trivial objections that don't address the main topic.

The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

The term bike-shedding and bike-shed effect have been used in software development to reference the same idea, brought up in a 1999 FreeBSD email thread.

A write-up looking at the statistics on why (or why don't) hosts of the Olympics do well based on the athletes participating and medals won.

Video description: A stock fireplace illustration frames looping archival video of the blasting RS-25 engines that launched the Artemis I rocket to the Moon on Nov. 16, 2022 (source: https://go.nasa.gov/4g6LnWc ). The illustration includes stone tiling, a pillow, a basket of firewood, and contains elements generated with AI. NASA added two framed pictures to the illustration. One shows an archival image of the Orion capsule flying through space. The other shows the Artemis logo. The audio features the roar of the rockets at a low level, with the addition of the sounds of a crackling wood fire.

Discovered via kottke.org.

A look into the mash-up of Slovak train design by Dalibor Itze and their proposal to fix some of its flaws.

Last Thursday the annual Christmas tree gift from Austria to the European Parliament arrived via the NightJet in Brussels. The post is credited to Elias Van Deun on Bluesky. This is an annual tradition, from an article in The Brussels Times, the first year the tree was delivered by train was 2021. At that point a tree had been gifted 23 times before, that makes this years tree the 27th.

Sharing Adam Leventhal's drawing of what happens if that one dependency from that XKCD fails.

A look into a risk assessment done by the Hachyderm Infrastructure team as a precaution to limit exposure to entities that may be governed by US law. The post breaks down each site and components giving an indication of the impact to service if the component were disrupted, and effort to migrate. There's a lot of interesting detail on what it takes to host a large distributed social network like Mastodon well.

Thibault Lapers reports on some interesting rumours that an announcement of the EuroCity Brussels is not far away. We saw this service during the Olympics this summer between Brussel-Zuid and Paris Nord. Thibault mentions that in addition to a stop at Mons, we can also expect stops Aulnoye-Aymeries and Creil with an overall trip time of approximately 3 hours. The rolling stock would be the HLE 18 locomotive and I11 carriages.

Extending the RE13 to Eindhoven has been in discussions for many years now. In 2021, the concession was awarded to Start, a subsidiary of DB, to work together with Arriva Nederland who is responsible for the Dutch portion of the service.

This hourly service, scheduled to starting in December 2026, will use 20 new Stadler FLIRT3 XL train sets. They will be capable of three power systems, 15kV DC, 15kV AC and 25kV AC, according to the presentation with three train protection systems ATB, PZB, and ERTMS. It seems the first train has already been constructed with three more scheduled for 2024 and the rest to started by Q4 2025.

This post from Candost reflects on traits of a good software engineer. It's very well thought out.

Joshua writes some good pointers on running your own public API from his experience running Pushover's API. I recommend reading his full post, I've distilled it down here with some of my notes.

• Host the API on its own hostname (i.e. api.example.com) to allow for separate control of IP, TLS settings, and so on. I've made this mistake before of figuring I could just use NGINX in front of everything on a single domain. Not entirely scalable.

• Account for users doing the bare minimum to get their application working, including inadvertently using non-conforming requests. Supporting them now will mean supporting them for all eternity unless you start working on a deprecation strategy. This reminded me of when I built a bot to send notifications of new posts on a subreddit. I created the URL for the post by inserting the subreddit name returned by the API. Within the URL I included "/r/" and the API also returned "/r/" before the subreddit name, which mean the URL generated had "/r/" twice. This still worked for a while before Reddit decided to reject those requests and I had to adjust my code. Had to dig through the Discord message archives for that one. Joshua also gives an example of not being too stringent:

Pushover's API has a message size limitation of 1,024 characters. If the message parameter is larger than that, I could reject the request because it's not correct, but then the user's message is lost and they may not have any error handling. In this case, I truncate the message to 1,024 characters and process it anyway [...] The user still receives something, and if they care that it's truncated, they can properly implement continuation or smarter truncation.

• Use API tokens were possible for authentication, and make them easy to rotate.

• Include a unique ID with every request and ask for them when providing customer support.

• Assume humans will read your error messages, make them descriptive. Please, this.

• Keep up with user failures, Pushover's API "short-circuits" the API logic after a set number of 4xx errors with a 429 response for an hour, along with a descriptive message. Use the API tokens to map the erroneous requests with a user and notify them via email.

• Prefix any tokens you create ot help sorting out random strings. This is one thing I've seen used a lot but never considered doing myself until reading this.

I learnt about the localisation efforts of Ibrahima SARR's team to create the Fulah language pack for Firefox from Eric Bailey's blog post about localising content. It shows a new perspective on common technical idioms used that may not directly translate well into other languages. The example described was the word "crash" which translated to hookii meaning "a cow falling over but not dying".

This also reminded me of a web page by Rogério de Lemos on mapping technical terms in Portuguese to their English counterparts when describing dependability.

I try not to be negative in what I post online, for this reason, this will stay out of the main blog, and my Mastodon account, but I wanted to comment in some way so it will be a link post. Linked is a YouTube video from Mutahar on the incident with MKBHD, if you prefer reading here's a Verge article. I don't care to comment much on the ethicality of a full length sponsored video that seemingly positions itself as a review but what I don't have any tolerance or respect for is the egregious speeding especially in a residential area. The main speedometer was blurred out to cover the crime but the car had a passenger-side speedometer as well that showed Marquees drove up to 95 mph which converts to 152 kmh where the limit is 56kmh! Completely reckless to drive at those speeds at all, even more so in a residential area where a children playing sign was visible in the video. The video was quickly edited with a comment that said "Cut out the unnecessary driving clip that obviously added nothing to the video. I hear all your feedback on sponsored videos too." Good cover-up...

The linked video from Mutahar covers my views on the event.

sqlite-vec is a vector search extension for SQLite with install options for Node.js, Python, Rust, rqlite and more. I previously used SQLite to store embeddings when investigating the viability of using a text embedding model to recommend related posts on the blog. However, back then I'd calculated the cosine similarity between each embedding which is compute intensive. Using this extension would allow me to dynamically retrieve the distance between an embedding and the embeddings stored in the database.

The extension can be compiled on various platforms but currently the PyPI package does not have an ARM release.

I also encountered an error when trying to retrieve distances for embeddings: "OperationalError: A LIMIT or 'k = ?' constraint is required on vec0 knn queries". I wasn't alone in this the workaround is to use k instead of LIMIT in the query. In the coming few weeks I'll be playing around with this extension some more, looks very promising so far.

Title and all quotes translated from Dutch to English by Google Translate, minor edits for readability made by me.

As ProRail employees are on strike in different regions of the Netherlands this and next week. Even though these strikes are bound to various ProRail control centers, they affect traffic much broader than their region. Since NS runs a lot of 'long lines' across the country which may cross strike affected areas. NS has even started using new digital signage earlier this year to help passengers navigate these long routes. Tim van Leeuwen, Director of Operations Control at NS, explains why these long lines are needed:

[Long line services] are a direct consequence of how our small country is structured. In contrast to other countries, the Netherlands does not have one dominant urban area where employment and education are concentrated. Think of Paris in France, for example. Everyone has to go there in the morning and leave again in the evening. The French railways (SNCF) therefore base their timetable on this.

What you sometimes hear is true: the Netherlands is more of a large city than a small country. Not all residents of Den Bosch work in Rotterdam and not all residents of Groningen want to go to Amsterdam. You could actually say that everyone in the Netherlands has to go everywhere. And that is what NS is setting up its network with long lines for.

A major advantage is that NS is making optimum use of both the infrastructure and the train equipment. Due to the long lines, few trains have to turn around in Utrecht and that saves platform capacity and therefore space at Utrecht Central, a place in the middle of the city where space is limited. It also ensures that 80 percent of our passengers do not have to change trains.

Not sure why I'm surprised but there are many web formats in which to write recipes. There's a microformat, why wouldn't there be? There's another format that Google prefers and Robb takes stab at designing his own.

A daily game, with an unlimited practice mode, to guess words through Morse code. Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

Alex writes about creating HTML files in folders to browse files in various ways.

This allowed me to radically simplify the folder structure, and stop chasing the perfect hierarchy. In these mini-websites, I use very basic folders – files are either grouped by year or by first letter of their filename. I only look at the folders when I’m adding new files, and never for browsing. When I’m looking for files, I always use the website. The website can use keyword tags to let me find files in multiple ways, and abstract away the details of the underlying folders.

Why HTML?

I’m deliberately going low-scale, low-tech. There’s no web server, no build system, no dependencies, and no JavaScript frameworks. I’m writing everything by hand, which is very manageable for small projects. Each website is a few hundred lines of code at most.

It reminded me of a time when I had to present a project I'd worked on as part of a job interview. I created a number of linked HTML files that walked through various parts of the code. It had the benefit that if a question was asked I could directly open up the relevant file and dive into the code. The interviewers didn't seem impressed but I ended up getting the job, so I guess it worked.

Mark Wagenbuur, from Bicycle Dutch, writes about forever ongoing discussions about building bridges over the IJ, a river that now has seven ferry lines taking passengers back and forth. A quote from the blog:

In the 2015 version, I reported that there were six ferry lines, and now there are seven. The most important one of those, behind Central Station, is the F3 Buiksloterweg ferry. The earliest mention of this ferry dates back to the year 1308, but it is probably much older. Two ships operate on this line during the day, which means a ferry crosses the river every six minutes. During rush hour, a third ferry is added, reducing the waiting time to four minutes. At the busiest times, there is even a fourth ferry in operation.

I was reminded for an incident in January this year when the Metro M52 was closed towards Amsterdam Noord because of a flooding in a tunnel at Sixhavenweg. This was paired with the F3 Buiksloterweg ferries being taken out of service because the platform used to cross when docked had collapsed, the ferries ran to IJplein instead. To make matters works, a number of ferries from the 60 series were taken out of service because of technical problems resulted in cancelling the F9 route between Sporenburg and Zeeburgereiland.

Rasmus has built a game in which the player has to sort food items in order of carbon footprint. The game gets harder with each new item as the list increases in length, a single mistake and it's game over. My high-score was 7.

They have also written a blog post about the release of the challenge.

Ruben writes about keeping himself hydrated throughout the day and the ambiguity about how much water is actually required by your body. The thought about tracking water consumption through a database had just entered by mind only to be replaced instantaneously by the simplicity of a spreadsheet. In the very next paragraph Ruben writes:

So I did what every self-respecting computer engineer did: I built a database table to track my water intake! Then realised this was a bit of a pain, and made a spreadsheet instead.

This paper written by nine researchers talk about how the presence of bicycles lanes have a traffic calming effect for motor-vehicle users at intersections. That is to say it not only makes the street safer for cyclists but micro-mobility users and pedestrians as well.

we found that the effect of the delineator-protected bicycle lane (marked with traffic cones and plastic delineators) was associated with a 28 % reduction in average maximum speeds and a 21 % decrease in average speeds for vehicles turning right. For those going straight, a smaller reduction of up to 8 % was observed. Traffic moving perpendicular to the bicycle lane experienced no decrease in speeds. Painted-only bike lanes were also associated with a small speed reduction of 11–15 %, but solely for vehicles turning right. These findings suggest an important secondary benefit of bicycle lanes: by having a traffic calming effect, delineated bicycle lanes may decrease the risk and severity of crashes for pedestrians and other road users.

The paper also mentions that the road width decreased slightly when adding the temporary bicycle lanes which in itself is considered a traffic calming measure by the Federal Highway Administration.

Discovered via Taras Grescoe.

Ivan Rivera writes about the derailed Renfe S-411 near Chamartín in which both occupants where safe. It's most likely that a train drifted downhill across two tight curves with speed limits for 45 km/h.

Wes Bos inspects McMaster-Carr a tools and parts shop with a website that's buttery smooth. No seriously try it.

The developers seemed to have pulled out all the stops to accomplish this. There are some simple methods like using CDN caching, client caching through ServiceWorkers and preloading assets in <head> including dns-prefetch but also lesser known, or more obscure ones like using sprites to load images to reduce the number of HTTP requests. The videos covers some more, but I'll be using some of these in my site builds in the future.

A tour of what was once a secret NATO Joint Operations Center during the cold war that was built in a quarry in Maastricht. The tour is delivered by Gerard Smeets a volunteer and previously an officer that worked at the center. The YouTube channel covers other interesting stories from the Netherlands.

A comic on the annoying design of modern UIs discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

Quotes from Alan Levy on deciding between tram or metro for ring roads around cities, in this case specifically the Bundesstraße 4 R in Nuremberg.

In favor of light rail, there’s the issue of speed. Normally, the advantage of subways over tramways is that they’re faster. However, on a circumferential route, the importance of speed is reduced, since people are likely to only travel a relatively short arc, connecting between different radials or from a radial to an off-radial destination. What are more important than speed on such a route are easy transfers and high frequency.

In favor of metro, there is the cost issue. The same factors that make speed less important and frequency more important also make it easier to build a metro. If the road is wide enough, which I think the one in Nuremberg is, then cut-and-cover is more feasible, reducing costs.

As usual with the blog there's great comparisons drawn from other cities like Paris and Cologne and other points made on trading capacity for frequency.

Multiple university professors and researchers from different institutions comment on how students from 2017 and onwards store files in a flat structure and are unaware or unwilling to use folders.

I came across this 2021 article from a comment left by Simon Willison on HackerNews on how the HTML for People book asks the reader to "create a folder".

A notion of why this mental shift could be attributed to moving away from storting physical filling cabinets but also from the way content is consumed today with curated feeds rather than having to store or locate a file within a folder. Another reason could be with the emergence of good full-text (and image) search, I'm leaning more to this being a contributing factor.

Seeing Blake Watson's HTML for People reminded me of learning to build a plain HTML website at school. The bulk of the guide covers the basics of HTML in an easy to consume format with short incremental examples. The guide also uses Simple.css to avoid having to learn any extra styling while still keeping the HTML content simple, although there's an extended bit that covers CSS and PHP.

Terence Eden shares a few small CSS snippets to style links based on where they go. This could include adding text, changing the font size or color and other CSS properties. Using attribute selectors you can match links that start with, end with or contain specific domains.

Simon Willison shares his experience serving on the board of the Python Software Foundation over the last two years and some of the responsibilities that entails.

The Python Software Foundation supports the development of Python and the community by allocating their donations towards running infrastructure other activities. However, they are not directly related to developing Python which is handled by the core team ran by the Python Steering Council. Infrastructure includes running PyPi and Python.org and activities most notably include organising PyCon. Simon also mentions an activity I hadn't considered before and that's acting as a fiscal sponsor to other python-related communities.

Simon's write-up is dense with information and definitely worth the read if this is interesting to you. This has also prompted a write-up by Makoto Nozaki on serving on the board of The Perl Foundation.

NS train driver Stefan uploaded a new video of the 'Airport Sprinter' equipped with cameras and software that enable the driver to close the doors before the train departure. A task that is typically done by the train conductor during the departure procedure. Each carriage is equipped with external cameras allowing the driver to see passengers during the departure procedure visible at 8:20 in the video. This system, according to the video description, saves 10-15 seconds on average at each stop.

I've written about tests that were conducted back in 2022 on these sprinters, it seems the timed saved will be worked into the 2025 timetable to improve reliability.

An interesting side effect since the train conductor is no longer in charge of beginning the departure procedure if they move between trainsets at a stop they must notify the driver so as to not be left behind. This is seen at 16:18 in the video.

Ian Carroll published a write-up together with Sam Curry on how they were able to add arbitrary crew members to bypass security screening or ride in a jump seat in the cockpit of an aircraft. They used SQL Injection (that seems to use MD5 password hashes!) on FlyCASS, a software system small airlines use to manage authorisation for their crew members at airports.

What was more shocking to me was seeing TSA allegedly trying to cover up the error.

The TSA press office said in a statement that this vulnerability could not be used to access a KCM checkpoint because the TSA initiates a vetting process before issuing a KCM barcode to a new member. However, a KCM barcode is not required to use KCM checkpoints, as the TSO can enter an airline employee ID manually. After we informed the TSA of this, they deleted the section of their website that mentions manually entering an employee ID, and did not respond to our correction. We have confirmed that the interface used by TSOs still allows manual input of employee IDs.

This post was discovered through Arne Bahlo's newsletter.

I re-discovered the Web Design Museum through Arne Bahlo's newsletter a site that allows you to browse through decades of changes seen on websites and applications.

Dom Corriveau runs his blog of an old Pixel 5, they also mention kaimac.org who I previously read about running their website of an ESP32, and compose.party which was new to be me and is also a website that is run on solar power and off a phone. Lots of interesting links to read through from the blog post along with instructions to replicate.

Discovered via 82MHz' Linkdump.

As annoying as cookie banners are I like seeing them because they give me the choice to deny being tracked but also because I get to see all the vendors a company would have otherwise sold my data too. The longer the list the further I tend to stay away from site unless absolutely necessary. The linked write-up on Bite Code! is a neat summary on why the banners don't have to be as bothersome as they typically are especially because we could have had a standard Do Not Track HTTP header!

There has been for years a proposal for a standard, designed in 2009 (!), still available in all the popular web browsers (except safari) that can make for a seamless experience: the DNT header.

Almost no website have implemented it, because companies WANT to nag you, hopping to trick you into being tracked. They know nobody would click yes on those settings.

So now it's deprecated.

Companies are making your life hard by choice. They got told by the EU they could not be secret abusers anymore, so now they decided to be irritating on top.

I'm not sure any re-org I've been subjected to has led to anything useful but wasted time, confusion and the de-prioritisation of work already done which leads to more wasted time. One aspect of the wasted time comes from the need to explain or maybe even justify the work done by the team having active documentation on the team’s tenants, work and roadmap is one way that helps. Logan's recent blog titled Mean Time To Reorg; Writing as Resilience provides some good examples of this in action.

As a tech lead of a project, these reorgs led to frequent changes in management reporting lines. The twice-annual reporting line change drew my time away from the team and project, and was spent on understanding the positions and intent of the new management structure, and briefing them on the work we did and why it was valuable. [...] Folks new to the project who only did surface level due diligence would misunderstand the details rather than fail to grok them in the first place. When a new hire joins the company there’s an expectation of some number of months before they develop expertise in all of the in-house systems. When there’s a reorg there’s an expectation that the new manager of an area is effective overnight.

I learned that in order to preserve my time for the team and project I needed to improve the speed at which new people (particularly management) onboarded [...] I did this through writing and documentation. We had in-depth docs for users of our product. [...] Over time I learned that essentially writing context and documentation about the roadmap greatly benefited the onboarding of new managers, engineers in the area, and curious customers.

While reading the latest post on PedestrianObservations called Tradeoffs in Reliability and Shutdowns about the state of the German railway in the summer I re-discovered a toot from Jon Worth. I think it aptly describes what it means to have a reliable and trustworthy public transport system.

That 5am train with a dozen building workers on it, or the last train home in the evening matter for the trust and reliability of the system, even if those individual trains make heavy losses and are largely empty

The author of TheCoffeeMachine gives a detailed walkthrough of how to add maps to a hugo site using uMap, which allows you to create maps based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) layers, and a shortcode that allows you to embed them. This is a belated TIL as I've already used this a few times, most recently for my post on the Tri-Country Train.

A rough overview of the steps involves signing up for and using uMap. This will allow you to create a map, set markers, and make the adjustments you need on top of existing OSM layer. From here using hanzei's hugo-component-osm theme you can embed the map into the hugo site using a shortcode. This includes passing in any parameters that uMap supports like coordinates to center the map and the zoom level.

I recommend reading the linked post for detailed steps. I needed to take this further and include a class within the iframe that's rendered on the page to able to style it with CSS. Unable to find a way to do this I forked and made my own addition. The pull request was created to the original repository if hanzei would like to include the changes. Here's a sample of what it looks like:

{< openstreetmap mapName="usa-train-lines-using-stadler-multiple-units_1100675" coordX="40.0731" coordY="-74.8924" scale="10" class="alignright" >}}

I was not aware of how much of an accessibility issue having only a dark colour scheme posed. I know there are preferences but seeing the replies on Nai's Mastodon post about the difficulty of reading white text on a dark background for some with astigmatism was surprising.

But there are some people (like me) who may be visually impaired. Astigmatism, for example, can make reading text that is white on dark a real PITA. An effect known as "halation" occurs, where each letter behaves as if it were a flashlight, gaining its own halo of light and making all text read more blurry than normal.

No matter how good your glasses are, astigmatism still causes you to see a little blurry—it's something you get used to. But this damn effect makes all the text read as if you don't have your glasses on, or even worse, leading to much more tired eyes or even pain.

Linked in the thread is a Vice article in which the author also shares similar difficulty reading dark colour schemes with astigmatism but also why dark backgrounds work for others.

My own very-astigmatic eyes are exhausted by dark mode, but for many others, dark themes are an accessibility benefit. White backgrounds emphasize floaters, those tiny spots of fibers that appear in some people’s vision. People with disorders like photophobia or keratoconus, conditions that cause high sensitivity to light, might read more easily with dark themes.

An detailed view of various tapes, their adhesive and conforming properties along with examples of their uses.

The website, by Eli Fessler, archives posters, labels, stickers and other documents related to COVID-19 at the peak of the pandemic from around the world. They're categorised by date, location, language and other parameters. This one's for the future history books.

I discovered this through Tom Scott's Weekly Newsletter.

ICANN finally allocates the .internal TLD for private use after discussions first started in 2020. This means we can now use .internal domains on a private network without fear of it being up for grabs and resolvable to something else in the future. To prevent this previously you could purchase a domain name and use that or subdomains of that for internal use so you always control what is resolves to.

Resolved (2024.07.29.06), the Board reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications. The Board recommends that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization's technical outreach.

Between 2020 and now, ICANN opened the proposal for public comments which was summarised in PDF form. ICANN received responses from various groups like various ICANN committees, Amazon and Google. The majority of valid responses were in favour of using .internal with the others in support of the idea but asking for a shorter TLD.

Our car-centric cities and towns rob people of their independence. People who would otherwise be perfectly capable of going out on their own to meet friends, or grocery shop, or go to the library are prevented from doing so because they can’t drive. Maybe they’re too young to drive, as I was at 14; or maybe they’ve gotten old enough that it’s no longer safe for them to drive; or perhaps they have a disability that prevents them from driving. Sometimes people can’t drive simply because they can’t afford a car, because these things are really expensive.

From Evan Sheehan.

John Eldredge, creator of the Winamp Skin Museum, goes about digging in some skins and makes a few interesting discoveries.

Discovered via Tom Scott's Newsletter.

This article from the South China Morning Post covers the Iran-China railway link between Almaty in Kazakhstan through to Tehran in Iran. At the time this was published, I assume 2017, it had been a year since the first the first freight train connecting Iran and China ran through neighbouring countries Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in February of 2016. Traveling along the Silk Road taking only 14 days it provided a quicker route than ships between the two countries.

The arrival of this train in less than 14 days is unprecedented,” said President of the Railways of the Islamic Republic of Iran (RAI), Dr Mohsen Pour Seyed Aghaei. “The time spent by this train” to reach Tehran “has been 30 days shorter compared with the maritime route, which starts from China’s Shanghai port and ends in Iran’s Bandar Abbas” port city, Dr Pour Seyed Aghaei noted. He added, "This is an important step for the revival of the Silk Road and the train has travelled 700 km per day, saving 30 days compared to normal time that takes to go this distance.”

Part of this route towards Europe became a "life channel" during the COVID-19 pandemic as it required fewer health checks than road transport since the train uses local crews in each country. Halting flights and increasing maritime freight prices put this rail alternative in a good spot.

Interestingly, the UIC in another article.

It's clear there's a lot of activity in this area I'm not familiar with but it is interesting to learn more.

The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, or HORG, work to classify and research plastic clips usually seen securing bread, fruit and other bags at the supermarket. The HORG calls these clips Occlupanids.

Occlupanids are generally found as parasitoids on bagged pastries in supermarkets, hardware stores, and other large commercial establishments. Their fascinating and complex life cycle is unfortunately severely under-researched. What is known is that they take nourishment from the plastic sacs that surround the bagged product, not the product itself, as was previously thought.

My favourite, the Coronaspinus chaos, since it looks like trees I drew as a child or as the HORG describes, "Chaotic crown of thorns."

I found the site from a CHUPPL documentary called The Bread Tab Conspiracy: $93,000,000,000 Disappeared.

A 2-D approximation of how an iceberg would float in reality.

Created by JoshData and inspired by GlacialMeg on Twitter. This was discovered on Mastodon through Stef Walter.

So cats do try their best to communicate vocally.

Research shows that, "listeners were able to identify domestic cat meows from two different contexts significantly better than chance, and that experienced listeners were better judges than inexperienced ones." Taking samples from two of three sibling cats showed that rising intonations were related to food and falling intonations with the vet.

Originally posted on Mastodon.

CommonMark is the Markdown specification created by John MacFarlane, Jeff Atwood and others, to encompass the various flavours of Markdown that was adopted by different software over the years. GitHub adopted CommonMark along with it's extension for Markdown called GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) sometimes around 2016-2017. I've complained about how different platforms deveate from the standard. This GitHub Engineering post shows how good of a job the CommonMark contributors did to represent common usage of Markdown with only 1% deveating from GitHub's previous Markdown parser.

We [GitHub] actually enabled CommonMark for all new user comments in the website several months ago, with barely anybody noticing — this is a testament to the CommonMark team’s fantastic job at formally specifying the Markdown language in a way that is representative of its real world usage.

All in all, less than 1% of the input documents were modified by the normalization process, matching our [GitHub's] expectations and again proving that the CommonMark spec really represents the real-world usage of the language.

India has accelerated its rate of electrifying railway lines in the last few years, this article covers some of the numbers and current progress.

“The pace of electrification has been the highest in the last 15 years: between 2011 and 2020, about 20,000rkm of railway lines were electrified, and another 20,000km of route kilometres have been electrified between 2020 and November 2023,” says Sharif Qamar, associate director at the Energy and Resources Institute, a Delhi-based research institution.

As of 1 September 2023 91.49% of the railways have been electrified according to the Indian Railways.

Chrono Piano plays music based on the current date and time in the major, minor blues or pentatonic scale. Discovered via Stefan Judis' Web Weekly.

A brief but interesting history of cursors, just like the title suggested. Discovered via Tom Scott's newsletter.

A collection of personal websites which have curated links to other websites. I've spent a few hours diving down rabbit holes after discovering the site through 82MHz's post a few days ago and discovered some interesting sites.

This open source tool, discovered via 82MHz, fetches an authors Mastodon thread to be rendered as an HTML page or to be exported as a Markdown file. masto-thread-renderer can be self-hosted and the author has hosted version available as well at thread.choomba.one.

I've done something very similar by creating a Python script that can fetch a toots JSON payload via Mastodon's public API. The JSON file can then be used in a Hugo shortcode to display it on a site. This approach including the Python code was adapted from Brandon Rozek's approach detailed on their blog.

Threads from Mastodon on my blog are tagged as "toots". Here's an example called Riding the Elizabeth Line! from the blog and the same thread on masto-thread-renderer.

As described on the front page "checking a box checks it for everyone!", can't really say more to that. A fun website built by eieio, they also posted a writeup of building it.

Rotating Sandwiches does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a website with high quality gifs of rotating sandwiches. Now I'm hungry.

Discovered by being the 2023 tiny awards winner.

When Sal Mercogliano was covering the recent uncrewed surface vessel strike of the MV Tutor in the Red Sea he referenced an ArcGIS StoryMap created by Noam Raydan and Farzin Nadimi of the Washington Institute. The StoryMap is very comprehensive and documents the attacks in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab, and neighbouring areas dating back to 2019.

These simple but well written articles remind me of the many children encyclopedic books I read through as a child. Its good to see a format like this on the internet thats accessible for all and something which can be, and is, kept up to date.

Discovered via Nicolas Magand

An internet museum that starts from it'\''s origins as APRANET in 1977, marking major milestones in social media, e-commerce and the internet as we know it today.

Discovered via Nicolas Magand.

Written by Giovanni Collazo this guide on running SQLite in production with Django projects compliments another I very recently shared called Optimizing SQLite for servers by Sylvain Kerkour.

I will also be saving this for future reference. This is discovered via Simon Willison's Weblog.

From Matthew Graybosch via People and Blogs

I still have a website on matthewgraybosch.com, but its mainly a substitute for having a LinkedIn account because LinkedIn has always been the Ashley Madison of job hunting, only more cultish. I mean, have you seen the people posting there? Its like the Stepford Wives got equally robotic husbands and they all got corporate jobs.

Yes, yes and a 100 times yes. No social media outlet is more artificial than LinkedIn.

"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better."— Edsger Dijkstra

Derek Kedziora made a some good comments on Eugene Yans post titled "Simplicity is An Advantage but Sadly Complexity Sells Better".

Removing unnecessary complexity is a thankless job.

By using satellite images from Google in QGIS and marking areas of potentially good Christmas trees then exporting that layer and joining it with the National Forest Motor Vehicle User Map in Wherobots Cloud using Spatial SQL @lyonwj was able to map the areas with accessible roads.

Theres a lot of interesting bits to unpack there, but my main takeaway was the use of spatial SQL, it certainly beats relying on osmium tags-filters and manually editing GeoJSON files.

Based on OpenStreetMap data this map displays all country borders along with the 10,000 most populous cities. The file itself comes down to 628KB, which is impressive, allowing it to be cached on the client device. Different variants of this map are available with no country borders or fewer cities, to bring the overall size down. This can be used as a base map or a fallback map with leaflet. What I found interesting was looking into the code and seeing how the land areas were plotted and drawn, with the lakes then drawn above that and finally the cities after the lakes.

After discovering this, I've taken the opportunity to use it on my rail page to plot all the locations where I've filmed a video. At the time of posting this, it hasnt reached its final form yet but I'll be working on it over the coming days.

A look at everyday dialogue in 1586 England as documented by French refugee Jacques Bellot. In the video, Simon Roper explores the writing providing some interesting insights into the development of English at the time and today.

Philipp Keller documents three examples of defining a database schema for your tagging strategy with performance tests and sample queries. The simple "MySQLicious" solution with one table for items and tags. The "Scuttle" solution with two tables one for tags and the other for items. Finally, the classic associative tables approach, or as called by the author the "Toxi" solution, with a table for items, another for tags, and an item-mapping table.

The last approach also has a Wikipedia entry, that I sometimes refer to when building similar tables as a subtle reminder.

j6b72ss article covers the precise reasons why I stayed away from Traefik thinking of it as a container-first proxy. The author, however, explores how Traefik is used in their environment with static binaries. Over the last few years Ive moved towards containerisation, so maybe Traefik might even be a better fit over using Nginx for everything regardless.

The HN comments have some interesting discussions on how this compares to Caddy for containers, most leaning towards Caddy.

One of the HN comments from johanbcn pointed out an interesting documentation framework called Diátaxis which I will take a look at.

The article tells the story of the underground cables that power the internet, as they follow the 50 crew members of KDDI Ocean Link, one of 22 repair and maintenance ships of the 77 cable ships in the world in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident.

On average, [cable breaks] happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

A clear and illustration example of the term frequency-inverse document frequency measure to determine the importance of words within a collection of documents. Taking this one step further Jana Vembunarayanan, the blogs author, uses cosine similarity to link a search query to return the most relevant documents.

While troubleshooting an RSS client recently, I needed an RSS feed with a steady stream of items. After some searching, I landed on Lorem RSS, an open-source tool built by Michael Bertolacci used to generate RSS items at varying frequencies through different feeds.

An overview of the design choices behind creating the JavaScript Registry (JSR) which is compatible with yarn, npm and others. One thing that stood out to be was that the website is rendered server-side, the post goes through their design to optimize for Time-To-First-Byte between their rendering and API server backed by a Postgres database.

The rest of the post is also a good read.

Atom differs from RSS in a few key ways and for the better. Chris Wellons' blog post outlines a few of these differences theyve encountered while working on Elfeed for emacs. One thatve I run into before and find really odd is the use of <channel> when only one channel is permitted in an RSS feed.

Having a channel tag suggests a single feed can have a number of different channels. Nope! Only one channel is allowed, meaning the channel tag serves absolutely no purpose.

Atom is a much cleaner specification, with much clearer intent, and without all the mistakes and ambiguities.

Stephen Wolfram, mathematician, computer scientists and CEO of Wolfram Research, describes all the incremental improvements made in different parts of his life in the pursuit of productivity. It's an article I've read and come back to three different times now, and with each I've taken some new bits and pieces that I could use myself.

The reasoning behind pull out shelves:

One of my theories of personal organization is that any flat surface represents a potential "stagnation point" that will tend to accumulate piles of stuff—and the best way to avoid such piles is just to avoid having permanent flat surfaces.

Collecting personal analytics of physical and digital text:

I have systems that keep all sorts of data, including every keystroke I type, every step I take and what my computer screen looks like every minute (sadly, the movie of this is very dull). I also have a whole variety of medical and environmental sensors, as well as data from devices and systems that I interact with.

Archival and searchability:

At the top of my personal homepage is a search box. Type in something like "rhinoceros elephant" and I'll immediately find every email I've sent or received in the past 30 years in which that's appeared, as well as every file on my machine, and every paper document in my archives

Having just shared the Eisenbahn-Planer, I have to post about the Treinposities rail agenda. This is a curated list of rail events in the Netherlands that gets updated regularly by the site administrators. The site has many more interesting pages, with details on rolling stock in the Netherlands and other countries, live map of trains in the Netherlands, details on train routes with expected rolling stock, and much more.

Eisenbahn-Planer tracks events with a focus on historical and/or heritage railways. There are quite a number of filters you can apply with multiple language options.

What if I told you that by tuning a few knobs, you can configure SQLite to reach ~8,300 writes / s and ~168,000 read / s concurrently, with 0 errors

Some interesting configurations that are possible with SQLite today making it much more versatile even though it isn't designed to be a client/server SQL database. Discovered via Simon Willison's weblog.

Paul Irish shares how to stablise video using FFmpeg using the defaults of VidStab. The article also provides a filter to compare the stablised and unstablised videos but simply running the stabilisation is enough for me.

xz, a widely used open source compression tool, introduced a backdoor with malicious code. This in turn has affected a number of applications and distributions, the most notable of which are Fedora, Debian (unstable, experimental) and HomeBrew. Evan Boehs has pieced together a timeline of events going as far back as 2021 which tells a story of how JiaT75 using social engineering became a trusted member for the open source project. Pressure (very harshly so) was applied to the Lasse Collin the sole active maintainer at the time to add another maintainer to xz from seemly multiple people. This coordinated attempt lasting two years is honestly quite shocking.

CSS Grids as simple as they are to design can get pretty complicated. Josh W Comeau's interactive guide to CSS contains sections that build on each other with examples and animations to visualise the concept.

Greg Wilson's guide to SQL for analysts and data scientists through a number of exercises that are run on a SQLite database file.

How fly.io manages WireGuard peers and loads them just-in-time into the kernel speeding up kernel operations.

I've always used aws ec2 describe-regions and was never aware of the aws account list-regions command as shared by Paweł Grzybek in his post. The account command has a few other operations including enabling or disabling a region and changing contact details linked to the AWS account.

Dan Luu writes about using simple architectures to build apps using Wave as an example. The post covers the initial technology choices made to be maintained by a small tem and the tradeoffs in the long run, along with the flexibility it provided to adapt to local markets.

Our architecture is so simple I’m not even going to bother with an architectural diagram. Instead, I’ll discuss a few boring things we do that help us keep things boring.

When requesting actions on AWS accounts or resources, AWS needs to verify if the principal (user, role, application, etc.) making the request is allowed to carry out the action. For single accounts with simple workloads, this can be done easily by setting an identity-based policy on the user. However, as needs grow and additional accounts are added, other factors come into play, such as resource-based policies, cross-account roles, service control policies, and more.

Whenever I encounter potential access-related problems, I refer to this flow chart for troubleshooting. Given the number of times I end up searching for this, I believe it might be helpful to share it.

SVG is an interesting and versatile text-based image format. Now I know it's not the Christmas season, but Hunor Márton Borbély has put together an advent calendar for SVG examples, and I've only now started working through them. It's very interactive and informative. I know I'll definitely be using these examples as references in the future.

Like GeoGuessr but instead of Google Streetview you're given an image which you have to locate on a map along with the year it was taken. It's quite fun trying to take clues from the image in an attempt to date it. The images selected in the game actually make it lightly easier than random locations on Google Streetview with GeoGuessr.

This is a great starting point to get familiar with or brush up on Unicode. It's clear, illustrative and well-written.

An informative @Reuters graphics article on the Houthi rebel attacks at the Bab al-Mandab straight with detailed plots on the attack types, context on the political situation, and how it affects the crew, shipping companies and global shipping.

Switzerland is often referenced when discussing good public transit systems, Jokteur does a good job describing of the country uses clock-face scheduling to reliably connected different locations together. A good read with clear examples illustrating the concept along with follow-up reading in case you’re interested in the subject.