h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Whenever I talk to people about abusive big tech, people ask me why I *do* trust
Apple (more than the others); this is why.

Rather than backdoor their security, they'd rather just disable it completely for people in countries that don't allow it. IMO, that's the right decision on their part, though utterly stupid on the part of our government, as ever.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo

Added initial support for showing Osmose power validation issues. These are only visible at zoom level 11 and above, and clicking them is currently a bit tricky due to a Maplibre bug.

https://openinframap.org/#11.8/50.27097/1.9417/E,L,P

You can donate directly to the Ukrainian Army here. I do: https://savelife.in.ua/en/

I’ve updated my historical (1751 to 2025) UK price conversion calculator with 2024’s inflation rate. Prices have doubled since 2006 and tripled since 1991: https://iamkate.com/data/uk-inflation/

An Anti-Tag Cloud shows you the most common English words that never appear in a text, visualizing the "negative space" of a literary work. https://www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/

Companies House will have new identification procedures starting in March 2025 - this will make it much harder for criminals to establish companies using fake names. https://changestoukcompanylaw.campaign.gov.uk/identity-verification/

bastard
beef curtains
bellend
clunge
cunt
dickhead
fuck
minge
motherfucker
prick
punani
pussy
shit
twat
bukkake
cocksucker
nonce
rapey
skank
slag
slut
wanker
whore
fenian
kufaar
kafir
kike
yid
batty boy
bum boy
faggot
fudge-packer
gender bender
homo
lesbo
lezza
muff diver
retard
spastic
spakka
spaz
window licker
gippo
gyppo
golliwog
nigger
nigaa
nig-nog
paki
raghead
sambo
wog
blow Job
clit
wank

Donald Shoup will be missed. He made visible a huge tax that we pay on everybody, a tax which subsidizes pollution, injury and deaths. The data he collected and examined lights the way to reform, and he was generous in helping start a movement.

https://parkingreform.org/donald-shoup/

“Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads” - a very interesting hands-on blog post about contemporary location data flows and sales https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/

TIL

"The globally unique identifier (GUID) for the BIOS boot partition in the GPT scheme is 21686148-6449-6E6F-744E-65656445464916 (which, when written to a GPT in the required little endian fields, forms the ASCII string “Hah!IdontNeedEFI”)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_boot_partition#Overview

Genuary 2025, day 31: Pixel sorting.

#genuary #genuary2025 #genuary31

“We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms… grew on trees and we just picked them..”
https://hcommons.social/@ryancordell/113892573732579576

UK folks who want to have a direct impact on the quality of life in your community: Citizens Advice is hiring for a senior data engineer, 70k hybrid, UK locations

https://www.jobtrain.co.uk/citizensadvice/Home/Job

[$] The state of Vim

The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At [...]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1002342/ #LWN

A positive outlook for global food production: The world is on track to produce more wheat, rice, and soybean than ever before. Yields of staple crops, including corn, are holding steady. Total coffee production is up. And more. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/food-production-2024

Did you know we make XML dumps of all our wikis' data publicly available[0], including some which go back to 2001 (the UseModWiki era!)[1]

---

[0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps

[1] - https://dumps.wikimedia.org/archive/

VLC in WebAssembly

https://videolabs.io/communication/vlcjs-demo/vlc.html