h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

The #HalfLife 25th anniversary update is awesome!
- HL: Uplink included
- HL: Further Data content
- new MP Maps
- restored beta models
- Steam Networking/rich presence support
- native Linux support (+steam deck verified)
- original menu
- bugfixes and modernisation

And there is a 1h documentary about the development made by the team behind noclip.
https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25

Latest Covid situation in UK is out now on my substack

https://open.substack.com/pub/christinapagel/p/latest-covid-situation-17-november?r=8zv6v&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

TLDR: admissions falling, vaccine uptake plateauing, lots of cold virus around, no flu yet.

Signal is a nonprofit. But what does this mean in practice? Today we do something most tech co’s avoid: talk money. What does it cost for Signal to play in a lane dominated by billion $ corporations, while rejecting the surveillance business model?

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

#Wireshark 4.2.0 has been released. Enjoy.

https://www.wireshark.org/docs/relnotes/wireshark-4.2.0.html

For the first time in AGES I actually had time to do some proper transport journalism again. Which was lovely.

Here's me over on @lonrec talking about ORR data, passenger numbers UK-wide, and what it all says about the value of investing in rail. #transport #london #rail

https://www.londonreconnections.com/2023/the-state-of-rail-breaking-down-the-numbers/

This "texture healing" technique is really impressive. It uses OpenType’s contextual alternate glyphs, usually seen in stylistic embellishments such as swash caps or ligatures. With Monaspace, they dynamically adjust the widths of characters in a MONOSPACED face, while still respecting the monospace grid. It's pretty wild. The website has a neat interactive step-by-step visualization on how it works. Also, comes in 5 faces!
https://monaspace.githubnext.com

via @idan & @rileycran
#Typography #FontDesign

Starting the week like

Working on another sticker for #37c3 - found this image a while ago, but only as a lowres jpg, so I re-did it as a vector graphic.

#infosec #devops #sticker
We do not test on animals, we test in production.

"In Memoriam of Python 2

Today, on the Day of the Dead 2023, we at the Internet Archive honor the death of Python 2. Having mostly emerged from one of the greatest software upgrade SNAFU’s in history—the migration from Python 2 to Python 3—we now shed a tear for that old version that served us so well."

https://blog.archive.org/2023/11/02/in-memoriam-of-python-2/

Enjoy, sickos

New legislative articles, introduced in recent closed-door meetings and not yet public, envision that all web browsers distributed in Europe will be required to trust the certificate authorities and cryptographic keys selected by EU governments

https://last-chance-for-eidas.org/

#EIDAS #eidas2

Middle-of-the-night silly idea:

If Unicode had dedicated code points for hexadecimal digits, separate from the ASCII digits and letters, you could make a font in which the hex digits had width greater than the decimal ones by a factor of log(16)/log(10).

Then you could write the hex and decimal versions of a number side by side and they'd take up about the same amount of space. You could judge by eye how many digits of one base it took to match the precision of a number specified in another!

Like Microsoft, Google really needs to get a handle on criminals paying them to spread malware disguised as legit software. These paid results are so dangerous because they show up before any organic search results. e.g., woe to those who recently searched for KeePass.

Google-hosted malvertising leads to fake Keepass site that looks genuine

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/google-hosted-malvertising-leads-to-fake-keepass-site-that-looks-genuine/

It's gonna be wild when discord finally runs out of VC money and 10 years of conversation history and random file uploads are lost forever.