Most of us know “hackers” from the media—either the news media, television shows like Mr. Robot, or movies like Swordfish. But the fast and easy way of hacking presented in the media actually does a disservice to how incredibly clever these hacks really are.

Less-complex techniques—like guessing or brute-forcing passwords—still work super-well. And you’ve always got social engineering hacks, like just asking someone for their credentials in an official-sounding way. But real, technical... [More]

The Strava “your year in review” is back in 2021.[1]

Strava Year In Review 2021

I just wanted to point out a couple of things:

1. This overview is only available on the mobile app. Desktop users are out of luck.
2. The overview and statistics is only available in animated form. You can’t stop the animation nor can you browse the pages in a normal fashion. The presentation is utterly and completely accessibility-unfriendly. You can only screenshot a page as it slides by.
3. Although the version from 2020 suffered from the same... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in.

This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

Bethlehem, NC... [More]

I’m in the market for a mobile plan, so my wife forwarded me a link to this page at UPC:

Dein Persönliches Angebot

I’ve taken the liberty of adding some notes to the screenshot, but I’ll also list them here:

• They write that this offer is for me, personally, but there is no identifying information in the URL or cookies. This page looks the same in a private window. Stop lying to me, UPC. This offer is for literally anyone who stumbles across this page.[1]
• I was kind of shocked to see that WhatsApp is given preferential... [More]

I just finished reading through the State of CSS 2021. It’s a well-presented[1] summary of a developer survey about CSS.

I liked the following sections:

Features

the sub-sections have a pretty fine-grained listing of CSS features, usage, caniuse and MDN links, if you’re interested in finding out what you might be missing…or want to be smug about all of the CSS features you know about and use.

Technologies

The rankings in the sub-sections are broken down by “Satisfaction”, “Interest”, “Usage”,... [More]

Every time I want to adjust my ski bindings, I (A) remember how easy it was to adjust them last time and (B) forget how it worked.

It is very easy to adjust the binding for boot length.

1. Get a flathead screwdriver
2. Place the screwdriver under the thick metal tab (found below the large flathead screw)
3. Lever the screwdriver up to lift the tab
4. Slide the binding assembly backward or forward to suit the boot size[1]
5. Make sure that the assembly clicks back into place

Setting Salomon S9 12 TI ski bindings − insert screwdriver

Setting Salomon S9 12 TI ski bindings − lift screwdriver

Click either of the images to... [More]

After 16 years hosted at Encodo Systems, earthli has moved from an Ubuntu VM to Web Hosting at HostFactory.

The move went very smoothly, although there are always a bunch of things to remember, especially when you haven’t changed servers for a long time—and especially when changing from a dedicated VM/server to shared web hosting. Thankfully, web hosting is a great fit for earthli because a dedicated server is quite expensive, starting at about CHF35.-/month. I took a look at cloud-based... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

In combatting the pandemic efficiently and successfully, Switzerland is in a pretty bad place right now. It’s not nearly as bad as Austria or Germany (or a bunch of Eastern Europe, for that matter), but it’s not too far behind.

There aren’t too many reasons to believe that things will go any better in Switzerland than it’s gone in those countries—with their overflowing hospitals and people dying due to emergency-triage policies.

That’s the thing about playing musical chairs for real: when... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

I’ve used Google Meet twice in the last month. In both conversations, I exited the meeting room completely inadvertently and was forced to scramble back, profusely apologizing for my lack of technical proficiency.

It all starts with the Google Meet page losing focus, then “detaching” itself from the main window. This seems like a “feature” that prevents the user from switching tabs away from an open meeting. It’s bossy and intrusive.

The first time this happened, I ended up looking at a large... [More]

The Edit by Mr. FishCOP26 has come and gone and many people, if not most of them, didn’t even notice. It was the 26th meeting of world leaders to discuss which measures they can all agree to put into place in order to address climate change.

A few of the other summits are famous by their city names: Kyoto in 1992, where the U.S.—by far the biggest polluter at the time—refused to ratify it; Copenhagen in 2009, where the world’s worst per-capita polluter Canada torpedoed everything so that they wouldn’t have to... [More]

The DACH region ([D]eutschland, [A]ustria, S[CH]weiz) is looking down the barrel of its worst COVID wave yet. We are a good 20 months into the pandemic and nearly a year after the general availability of a highly effective vaccine. To be fair, most people under 65 were not able to get the vaccine until May or June (in Switzerland, at least). However, it’s been 5 months since then.

Stuck in the lifeboat

That’s more than enough time for a civilized and well-educated public to do the right thing... [More]

It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to start biking indoors. 👎

That means the TacX comes out of the basement and I am, once again[1], confronted with the awfulness that is TacX Desktop. I fired it up and was confronted with all of the same bugs and UX missteps that I’d noted a year ago. It’s like the app hadn’t been updated at all.

I got suspicious because I have a friend who uses his TacX regularly and he wouldn’t put up with this crap…so what is he using? I searched the App Store... [More]

After 16 years working at Encodo Systems AG, I’m currently between jobs. I’ve been asked a few times, “what do you really want to do?”, to which I usually answer, “what don’t I want to do?”

There are a lot of things I’d like to do that I think would be useful, but for which I’m currently unqualified, or only non-officially qualified. I’m a fast learner, but sometimes that’s not enough. You have to be able to hit the ground running. There’s other stuff for which I’m eminently qualified and for... [More]

I actually heard this quote initially as “Kill one man, and you’re a murderer; kill them all, and. you. are. a. god.”, delivered from the maw of “featuring ludacris”, Jay Balzarian’s dog on the TV Show Big Mouth. It was in S05E08, which was a Christmas show and the dog was playing a John Wick character and had just finished eliminating an entire Russian gang, triumphing at the... [More]

So I bought an M1 MacBook Pro (teacher discount FTW!) at the beginning of October and I’m very happy with it. It’s last year’s model, not the fancy new stuff, but it’s still worlds better than any laptop I’ve ever used. Here are the things I like about it so far.

• The battery 🔋lifetime is extraordinary
• It’s very quiet 🤫
• The keyboard ⌨️ is very nice
• The touchpad is, as always, fantastic
• The Touch-Bar is quite useful
• The sound quality on the speakers 🔊 is very, very good... [More]

The article «Dummheit hat Hochkonjunktur»: Interview mit Psychiaterin Heidi Kastner by Nadja Pastega (Der Bund)[1] discusses the term “Dumm” (dumb, as in stupid). It’s always been a bit difficult to nail down what it means to be “dumb”, once you start to think about it. You can have smart people who act dumb. You can have smart people with no experience, so they’re intelligent, but not wise.

Then there’s the difference between “book smart” and “street smart”—they’re both useful in certain situations. If you don’t have... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science &... [More]

I’ve been using CSS Grids for a while now. I’ve found many instances where I had used flexbox, where grids turn out to be much more appropriate. That is, the grid layout algorithm lets me specify what I want without fiddling about with flex-base and flex-grow, etc. Flexbox definitely has its place, but I think we all ended up abusing it a bit in our rush to leave tables-for-layout behind.

But that’s all in the past because now we have CSS grids available everywhere and all is well with the... [More]

I keep finding people who suggest that the vaccine is “potentially sacrificing millions of citizens like so many experimental fruit flies.” That is one of the more reasonable formulations, as the author of the article Medicine Wants to Kill You by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) has included the word “potentially” to hedge his bets against the fact that many of us have not (yet!) fallen over with an acute case of death brought on by what they deem an untested—or under-tested—vaccine.[1]

They also seem to believe—and almost... [More]

The video I’m not sure how much longer I can wait! by Kevin Powell is an excellent introduction to sub-grids in CSS. But I was more interested in the fact that he told his viewers that,

“you can use numbers in classes, but if you have a class or id that starts with a number, it’s invalid. […] It’s one of those weird things in CSS that sometimes trips people up.”

I immediately thought to myself, “it’s not weird. Every programming language is like that.”

Then, I thought, “I bet this guy only knows CSS, so he... [More]

A friend recently sent me this meme to note that they’d missed it when it was still relevant. That got me thinking, naturally.

What word should we use to describe Rush? “Genius” is not inappropriate, is it? I mean, he didn’t just carve out a niche; he carved out an empire. He knew what some people wanted to hear and he figured out how to get more and more people to want to hear it. He knew how to sell it. It seems like his radio persona matched his private persona[1], so it’s not even clear... [More]

The comic Explaining Capitalism to Aliens by Corey Mohler shows a top-hatted capitalist explaining our economy to two, much-taller, blue aliens with tentacles for arms and two extra tentacles extending from their ribcages. Their physiognomy isn’t relevant to the story, but that’s what they look like.

“Alien: “Explain to us: how do you decide how to allocate resources, and who does what work, on Earth?”

“Human: “So you see, on Earth we have a free market, so resources are efficiently allocated to meet the... [More]”