h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

"Our Digital History Is at Risk" by me in Time Magazine

Free societies need access to history, unaltered by changing corporate or political interests.

This is the role that libraries have played and need to keep playing.

http://blog.archive.org/2023/02/07/our-digital-history-is-at-risk/

I appreciate that people with good/unlimited internet connections don't often care about the size of websites. But it does matter for both the environment and those on limited data plans e.g. my phone has 250MB/month and then have to pay 1p/MB above that.

I monitor UK local authority homepage sizes and, for each, list their biggest resources and give tips on what they could do https://open-innovations.github.io/council-website-emissions/ Usually it is massive images that they could easily optimise.

⚠️ Update: Internet connectivity has fallen further in southern #Turkey and particularly in #Osmaniye as authorities implement emergency power shutdowns to support the rescue effort; levels collapsed in the region earlier today after a series of deadly earthquakes ⚡📉

Did some deeper digging into the Teletex protocol stack. So we have X.21 physical interface at synchronous 2400 bps with HDLC/X.75SLP as link layer and then T.62 as session and document layer. Interestingly, T.62 was also reused for G4 (ISDN) fax. Rather complex state machines, nothing you can implement in an afternoon. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletex https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/Teletex

What's inside the famous 8086 processor from 1978? I opened up a chip, took microscope photos, and I'm reverse-engineering it. One of the 8086's instructions is HLT, which halts the processohttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnalrlNXEBoU1I_?format=jpg&name=4096x4096r. Seems simple, but there's a lot of circuitry to make the halt instruction work... 🧵

#Accessibility is cool.
I had wondered about the change, but never checked.
Excellent work by @FinancialTimes

#DigitalComms #Communications #Screenreader #Screenreaders #TextToVoice

Sunak apologised for taking off a seatbelt for 30 seconds. Zahawi won’t apologise for failing to pay £3.7m of tax, lying about it, threatening to sue people who write about it, and then secretly admitting it all to HMRC and paying up behind our backs https://taxpolicy.org.uk/zahawi_story

This is pretty near:

Detect breaches with Canary credit cards!

TL;DR;

Today we’re releasing a new Canarytoken type: actual credit cards!

1. Head over to canarytokens.org;
2. We give you a valid credit card (number, expiration, and CVC);
3. If anyone ever attempts to use that card you’ll be notified.

https://blog.thinkst.com/2023/01/swipe-right-on-our-new-credit-card-tokens.html

Something new I learned today: Atkinson Hyperlegible Font is a font designed with low vision readers in mind.

Can be downloaded off of Google Fonts or directly from the Braille Institute: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

[ #FediArt #MastoArt #typography ]