Links

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.