Links week 48/2024

Selected bookmarks since week 1/2024. It's nearly more than a year since i posted the last link-dump here. So.. probably I'm starting to post much smaller link-dumps in the notes section (microblog) of this website from now on. We'll see..

Space, Astronomy, Atmospheric sciences, Physics

• Probability Estimates of a 21st Century AMOC Collapse - "Based on the reanalysis products, we next determine probability density functions of the AMOC collapse time. The collapse time is estimated between 2037-2064 (10-90% CI) with a mean of 2050 and the probability of an AMOC collapse before the year 2050 is estimated to be 59±17%." - E. J. V. Smolders, R. M. van Westen, H. A. Dijkstra

• Roll Your Own All-Sky, Raspberry Pi Camera - "capture mesmerizing time-lapse images of the heavens" - 06/2023, D. Schneider, IEEE Spectrum

• Astronomy Picture of the Day - "Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer." - nasa.gov

• Kardashev scale - "[..] is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using." - Wikipedia EN

• Unplanned Exposure During Diving in the Spent Fuel Pool - "August 31st 2010, during RFO26 [..] When a diver left the spent fuel pool, his electronic dosimeter was alarming. The display showed 40,1 mSv."- 2011, A. Ritter

Information Technology & Programming

• Grumpy Website - "Grumpy Website is a world-leading media conglomerate of renowned experts in UIs, UX and TVs. We’ve been reporting on infinite scrolls, cookie banners and unnecessary modal dialogs since 2017."

• A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code) - "This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors." - 01/2024, B. Hubert

('It is not just you, we are not merely suffering from nostalgia: software really is very weird today.' berthub.eu)

• Ditherpunk — The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering - 01/2021, Surma

• What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Game Networking - 02/2010, G. Fiedler

• SSH-Snake: Automatic traversal of networks using SSH private keys - "The original goal of this project was quite simple: I wanted to create visual representations of systems that I was hacking using compromised SSH private keys. I was jumping between servers with SSH keys like it was a Super Mario game, and I wanted to automate the process of searching for new keys on each server and trying those keys to connect to new systems." - 01/2024, J. Rogers

• In defense of my technophobia - "Being a programmer, I was surprised the first few times I was told by close friends / family I’m the most technophobic person they knew. But, after examining the evidence and introspecting a bit, I have to agree - I really am (to some extent) a technophobe." - 10/2024, D. Anderson

• Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy - "Fawkes has been tested extensively and proven effective in a variety of environments and is 100% effective against state-of-the-art facial recognition models (Microsoft Azure Face API, Amazon Rekognition, and Face++)." - cs.uchicago.edu

• You don't need a terminal emulator - "You know, it’s funny, because people have opinions on why you don’t need a terminal on entirely different ends of a spectrum. It’s like that IQ chart meme.." - 10/2023, A. Listopadov

  • emas-eat - "Emulate A Terminal, in a region, in a buffer and in Eshell"

• Emacs fulfills the UNIX Philosophy - "Unpopular opinion: actually, Emacs does fulfill the tenets of the UNIX philosophy. In this 6-part series, I'd like to define what the UNIX philosophy is, and whether Emacs fulfills this philosophy." - 08/2022, R. Honary

• THELOUNGE - "Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client"

• Wen schützen eigentlich Jugendschutzprogramme? - "Eine Geschichte darüber, warum wir 20 Jahre alte Software, die auf einer damals schon schlechten Idee beruht, auch noch heute als Stand der Technik bezeichnen müssen. Und das, obwohl die Webseite des Anbieters so unsicher ist, dass sie ganz nebenbei Schadsoftware verbreitet — also die Eltern gefährdet, statt die Jugend zu schützen." - 01/2024, L. Wittmann, medium.com

• Reading QR codes without a computer! - "Did you ever wonder how QR codes work? You've come to the right place!" - 2023, Piko, blinry

• Janet Language - "Janet is a functional and imperative programming language. It runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, BSDs, and should run on other systems with some porting. The entire language (core library, interpreter, compiler, assembler, PEG) is less than 1MB. You can also add Janet scripting to an application by embedding a single C source file and a single header. " - janet-lang.org

• The story of getting SSH port 22 - "The default SSH port is 22. It is not a coincidence. This is a story of how it got that port." - 04/2017, T. Ylonen

• Shell scripting with Elixir - "When simple bash scripts start to become unwieldy, you may consider reaching out for something “higher” level, like Perl, Ruby or Python. I’m reaching out for Elixir." - 02/2024, arathunku

• Using Open Source Internet Routing Tools to Monitor a Sanctioned Russian Bank - 03/2024, L. Williams, bellingcat.com

• JavaScript Xeyes - "Xeyes is a small program that shows a pair of eyes whose pupils move to follow the location of the cursor about the screen. It was originally written for the NeXT operating system and was then ported to X-Windows where it became a standard graphics demo program." - A. R. Collins

• Reverse DNS From IPv4 Space - A map - A. Milovidov

• Notepad Next - "A cross-platform, reimplementation of Notepad++."

• Building the Micro Mirror Free Software CDN - "As should surprise no one, based on my past projects of running my own autonomous system, building my own Internet Exchange Point, and building a global anycast DNS service, I kind of enjoy building Internet infrastructure to make other people’s experience online better. So that happened again, and like usual, this project got well out of hand." - 05/2023, K. Finnegan

• Sysadmin friendly high speed ethernet switching - "I’ve been on the lookout for a ethernet switch that I don’t hate, the problem with a lot of higher speed (10G and above) ethernet switches is that they are quite expensive new and if you buy the used then they rarely have many years left ( or none at all ) of software patches." - 04/2024, B. C. Cox

  • Debian on Mellanox SN2700 (32x100G) - 11/2023, ipng.ch

• Sxmo: Simple X Mobile - "Sxmo is a minimalist environment for Linux mobile devices" - sxmo.org

• It’s always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time. - "It's not the 1980s anymore, thankfully. [..] The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps that the whole concept is outmoded." - 05/2024, M. Brooker

• An oral history of Bank Python - "Today will I take you through the keyhole to look at a group of software systems not well known to the public, which I call "Bank Python". Bank Python implementations are effectively proprietary forks of the entire Python ecosystem which are in use at many (but not all) of the biggest investment banks. Bank Python differs considerably from the common, or garden-variety Python that most people know and love (or hate)." - 11/2021, C. Paterson

• Glance - "A self-hosted dashboard that puts all your feeds in one place"

• amber - "The Programming Language compiled to Bash." - amber-lang.com

• ScrollSets - "A New Way to Store Knowledge" - 05/2024, B. Yunits

• The Victorian Internet - "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers is a 1998 book by Tom Standage. [..] The central thesis of the book argues that of these two technologies, it was the telegraph that was the more significant, since the ability to communicate globally at all in real-time was a qualitative shift, while according to Standage the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative shift." - Wikipedia EN

(Overland Pacific Telegraph from San Francisco to Moscow, ca. 1862)

• Transatlantic telegraph cable - "Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications." - Wikipedia EN

('Landing of the Atlantic Cable of 1866' by R. C. Dudley)

• How a 64k intro is made - "I’ve noticed many people have interest in demoscene productions but have no idea how they are actually made. This is a braindump/post-mortem of our recent 64k intro Guberniya and I hope that it will be interesting to newcomers and seasoned veterans alike. This article touches basically all techniques used in the demo and should give you an idea what goes into making one." - 05/2017, P. Väänänen

• Managing dotfiles with GNU Stow - "Managing dotfiles with GNU Stow" - 12/2021, B. Venthur

• Computer Networks - A Systems Approach - 2024, L. Peterson, B. Davie

• The Public Interest Internet - "What if the internet were public interest technology? I mean "internet" the way most people understand it, which is to say our whole digital sphere, and by "public interest" I don't mean tinkering at the margins to reduce harm from some bad actors or painting some glossy ethics principles atop a pile of exploitative rent-seeking — I mean through and through, warts and all, an internet that works in support of a credible, pragmatic definition of the common good." - 06/2024, R. Berjon

• RTranslator - "RTranslator is an (almost) open-source, free, and offline real-time translation app for Android. Connect to someone who has the app, connect Bluetooth headphones, put the phone in your pocket and you can have a conversation as if the other person spoke your language."

• Researchers run high-performing large language model on the energy needed to power a lightbulb - "By eliminating the most computationally expensive element of a large language model, engineers drastically improve energy efficiency while maintaining performance" - 06/2024, E. Cerf

• Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content - "Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it's become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn't about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it's a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine." - 07/2024, V. Schmalbach

• Using an eBook instead of a laptop for daily work - 08/2024, V. Nikishkin

• The TTY demystified - "The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it." - L. Åkesson

• Building Clew - behind the scenes of independent search [engine]

• Dawarich - "Your Self-Hosted Location History Tracker" - dawarich.app

• litecli - "CLI for SQLite Databases with auto-completion and syntax highlighting" - litecli.com

• microui+fenster=small gui - "Sometimes I just want to put pixels on a screen. I don’t want to think about SDL this or OpenGL that—I just want to draw my pixel buffer and be done." - 09/2024, M. Bernstein

• File distribution over DNS: (ab)using DNS as a CDN - "DNS caching could make scaleout and incremental updates quite efficient, at least in theory. Strong hashing gives robust download integrity. DNS replication gives you a kind of high availability, even!" - 07/2023, T. Garnock-Jones

• (A few) Ops Lessons We All Learn The Hard Way - "Nope, not another Falsehoods post, but not entirely unlike one. Only here we have a few lessons in operations that we all (eventually) (have to) learn, often the hard way." - 01/2020, J. Schaumann

Smallweb

• smallweb.txt - "Here is a list of some other protocols and file formats. It is like the "SMALL INTERNET PROTOCOL ROUNDUP" document posted to the mailing list for Gemini previously, but with many differences." - 09/2024

• Where have all the websites gone? - "You reach for your phone. There’s no TikTok or Snapchat yet. Facebook and Instagram are a thing, but they exist as a type of social syndicator— a place to see what your friends were up to last night. You already know as much. The occasional whiff of rank vodka keeps your memory jogged. You tap the browser icon and start typing a webaddress, perhaps appending www as a precautionary relic. Who got drunker than me, you wonder. After a brief page load, you arrive at textsfromlastnight.com. “I cant get the smell of ass out of my nose,” reads the top post." - J. Velazquez

• The Teenage Web - 11/2022, L. Mantia

• Sites on Neocities - neocities.org

• Neatnik LLC - "is an itty bitty indie web concern by Adam Newbold [..] operated from my home office in Louisville, Kentucky."

  • omg.lol - "Get the best internet address that you’ve ever had."

• Indieseek.xyz Indie Web Directory - "A human edited, Indieweb directory."

• SpaceHey - a space for friends - "SpaceHey is a small, independent social network, funded by your donations." - spacehey.com

• PERSONALSIT.ES - "This site was built to share and revel in each others’ personal sites. Witness these in wonderment and awe. Immaculate. Stunning. How did they do that? Yes, you should definitely get around to redesigning yours soon." - personalsit.es

• About smolweb - "Promoting a simple unbloated web!" - smolweb.org

• SMOLNET PORTAL - "This website is a free, public service for exploring alternate internet protocols." - portal.mozz.us

• Diagram Website - another, interesting web directory

• offpunk - "An offline first command-line browser for the smolnet" - Ploum

• GifCities - "The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine" - gifcities.org

• Web Design Museum - "Web Design Museum exhibits thousands of screens and videos of old websites, mobile apps and software from 1990s to mid-00s" - webdesignmuseum.org

• vCard + RSS as an alternative to social media - 05/2024, N. F. R. A. Prado

• Web snapshots? The what, the why and the how - "This article is a conclusion resulting from 6+ months of work, trying to find the best way to create “perfect” snapshots of web pages." - 08/2022, C. Constantin

• Betula - "is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web. Use it to organize bookmarks or maintain a linklog."

• A look at search engines with their own indexes - "The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes are Google, Bing, and Yandex (GBY). Many alternatives to GBY exist, but almost none of them have their own results; instead, they just source their results from GBY. [..] With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find" - 03/2021, R. Kumar

• Curating my Corner of the Internet with a freehand web editor - "TLDR; I've been using an abandonware WYSIWYG web editor called Hotglue to make frivolous, truly drag-and-drop websites with no regard for users other than myself. It has been a lot of fun." - 06/2024, R. Chaudhury

• One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age - Digging through the Geocities Torrent - 03/2024, olia

Computer Security

• The Invisible Internet Project - "The Invisible Internet is a privacy by design, people-powered network. It is a truly free and anonymizing Internet alternative." - geti2p.net

• Why I don't like smartcards, HSMs, YubiKeys, etc. - "This is a rant about smartcards with some digression into ranting about the integrated circuit industry." - 10/2015, H. Landau

• Mitigating the Hetzner/Linode XMPP.ru MitM interception incident - 10/2023, H. Landau

• Law enforcement undermines Tor - "Few weeks ago, the German political magazine Panorama and STRG_F reported that law enforcement agencies infiltrated the Tor network in order to expose criminals. The reporters had access to documents showing four successful deanonymizations. I was given the chance to review some documents. In this post, I am highlighting publicly documented key findings." - 10/2024, M. Marx

• Hacking Millions of Modems - "(and Investigating Who Hacked My Modem) [..] Two years ago, something very strange happened to me while working from my home network." - 06/2024, S. Curry

• icmptunnel - "..works by encapsulating your IP traffic in ICMP echo packets and sending them to your own proxy server. The proxy server decapsulates the packet and forwards the IP traffic. The incoming IP packets which are destined for the client are again encapsulated in ICMP reply packets and sent back to the client. The IP traffic is sent in the 'data' field of ICMP packets.", D. Kapil

• iodine - "..lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed." - 04/2023, Kryo

• File Tunnel - "Tunnel TCP connections through a file" - F. Perez-Smith

• entropy - "Entropy is a CLI tool that will scan your codebase for high entropy lines, which are often secrets." - E. Quimerc'h

• Fingerprinting VPNs with Custom Router Firmware - A New Censorship Threat Model - 2024, S. Almutairi, Y. Neumann, K. Harfoush Firmware)

• Understanding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: A Simple Guide - "Email security is a key part of internet communication. But what are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and how do they work? This guide will explain it all in simple terms to make these concepts clearer." - 06/2024, N. Flavier

• Off-path TCP hijacking in NAT-enabled Wi-Fi networks - "Our recent discovery in router firmware exposes a security flaw in routers’ Network Address Translation (NAT) mapping handling, which can be exploited by attackers to bypass TCP’s built-in randomization. This facilitates off-path TCP hijacking attacks, intercepting Wi-Fi TCP traffic." - 06/2024, Y. Yang, APNIC

• Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub - "You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way." - 07/2024, trufflesecurity.com

• A Layman's Guide to a Subset of ASN.1, BER, and DER - "This note gives a layman's introduction to a subset of OSI's Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), Basic Encoding Rules (BER), and Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER). The particular purpose of this note is to provide background material sufficient for understanding and implementing the PKCS family of standards." 11/1993, B. S. Kaliski Jr.

Retrocomputing

• Wie AOL, BTX und Compuserve Privatkunden online brachten - "Vor dem Start des Internets in den 90er-Jahren boten Onlinedienste Zugang zu aktuellen Informationen. Die Bedienung war kompliziert, der Preis pro Stunde hoch. " - 1ß/2021, U. Mansmann

• Indigo Magic Desktop - "Pioneering Desktop Environment for UNIX" - S. Yohanan

(The Indigo Magic Desktop - from Steve Yohanan, yohanan.org/steve/)

• Inoffizielles Windows 98 SE Service Pack 2.1 + 3.2

• The Cyberscene, chat like it's 1995! - "The Cyberscene is a community of retrophiles, tech tinkerers, gamers, programmers, Wireshark wizards, and everything in between. Though it is run by someone who is totally blind, everyone is welcome in the Cyberscene, regardless of whether they have working eyes or not." - cyberscene.seedy.cc

• The Making of the MS-DOS Command Reference Bot - 01/2024, fabulous.systems

• Smashing the limits: Installing Windows XP in DOSBox-X - 07/2023, fabulous.systems

• X11 Conservancy Project - "The X11 Conservancy Project (X11CP) pulls together the disparate set of programs which were being written between the very late 80s, and early 90s – usually for Unix and Linux." - T. Adam

  • Linux Software Map - "The LSM (Linux Software Map) was an early database cataloguing software developed for Linux (and other systems, such as *BSD). The term LSM refers to both the file format itself, and the information with which one could use it for." - 11/2022, T. Adam

• SvarDOS - an open source DOS with a package manager and roling release - svardos.org

• FLOPPINUX - "An Embedded 🐧Linux on a Single 💾Floppy" - K. K. Jankowski

• The Vintage Software Collection - "The Vintage Software collection gathers various efforts by groups to classify, preserve, and provide historical software. These older programs, many of them running on defunct and rare hardware, are provided for purposes of study, education, and historical reference." - archive.org

• The History of Multitasking MS-DOS - "Today (April 25th, 2024), the source code to Microsoft MS-DOS 4.0 as well as part of the source code and documentation to a very early build of a very little-known and very limited release Microsoft operating system known as MT-DOS (Multitasking MS-DOS, also called MT-MSDOS, Multitasking DOS 4, and...MS-DOS 4.0. It's confusing, but you'll see why the distinction matters very soon) was released officially by Microsoft. I worked with Microsoft (mostly via Scott Hanselman) to have this released. I haven't perused the MS-DOS 4.0 code yet, but I have done quite a bit on the Multitasking MS-DOS stuff, so this post is on that. In a while, I'll write a follow-up blog post on the regular DOS 4 release." - 04/2024, starfrost

• FreeDOS running Windows 3.1 - "Yes, really it’s FreeDOS running Windows 386 Enhanced mode. For real." - 07/2021, neozeed

(Yes, really it’s FreeDOS running Windows 386 Enhanced mode. For real.)

• JS Kid Pix - In 1989 Kid Pix 1.0 was released into the public domain and this is an HTML/JS reimplementation. - vikrum

(kidpix.app - an HTML/JS reimplementation of the 1980's drawing program)

• World Wide Web - the very first web site - cern.ch

• winevdm on 64-bit Windows - 16-bit Windows (Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.0, 3.1, etc.) on 64-bit Windows

• NINA - "We're working to primarily rebuild the original AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), AOL Desktop, Yahoo and ICQ platforms as close to the originals as possible, and document the entire thing." - nina.chat

• Running Man Instant Messenger Network - "..is an open-source, hosted OSCAR server that lets you communicate with friends using ancient AIM clients. It's meant to revive and repurpose old software that was decomissioned by AOL and use it in the modern era. We also have a goal to expand the network and integrate it into contemporary systems like Slack and Discord." - runningman.network

• THE HISTORY OF USER INTERFACES - "A user interface is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur" - V. Ponamariov

• Windows 3.1 Flash Edition - sdomi.pl

• The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack - "The world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles"

• SymbOS - "SYmbiosis Multitasking Based Operating System (SymbOS) is a multitasking operating system for Zilog Z80-based 8-bit computer systems. Unlike early 8-bit operating systems, SymbOS is based on a microkernel, which provides preemptive and priority-oriented multitasking and manages random-access memory (RAM) with a size of up to 1024 KB. It has a Windows-like graphical user interface (GUI) [..]" - Wikipedia EN

(Screenshot of the SymbOS desktop on the Amstrad CPC)

Retrogaming

• Another World - "Another World is a cinematic platform action-adventure game designed by Éric Chahi and published by Delphine Software in November 1991. In North America it was published as Out of This World. The game tells the story of Lester, a young scientist who, as a result of an experiment gone wrong, finds himself on a dangerous alien world where he is forced to fight for his survival." - Wikipedia EN

• Jagged Alliance - "is a series of turn-based tactics video games. The first games in the series were released for DOS. From Jagged Alliance 2 on, the games were developed using DirectX for native Windows operation. Jagged Alliance 2 was also released for Linux and is available on Steam and on GOG.com for Windows" - Wikipedia EN

• Die ROBOT Spiele - "Die Spiele der ROBOT-Reihe sind grafisch orientierte Arcade-Adventures. Du steuerst dabei eine Spielfigur durch unterschiedlichste Szenarien, in denen immer neue und unerwartete Dinge auf Dich warten. Oft müssen erst bestimmte Dinge gefunden oder Voraussetzungen erfüllt werden, bevor Du an anderen Stellen im Spiel weiterkommst." - TOM Productions

(Robot I - tom-productions.de)

• FreeDoom - "The Freedoom project aims to provide all the content needed to form a complete, entirely free/libre game for the Doom engine. It is designed to be compatible with most custom levels, music, graphics and other modifications (“mods”) made for the original Doom games by Doom fans and artists over the decades." - freedoom.github.io

• Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987 - a low level Minesweeper clone for X11 - 06/2024, P. Gaultier

• V for Victory: D-Day Utah Beach - "V for Victory: D-Day Utah Beach is a 1991 computer wargame developed by Atomic Games and published by Three-Sixty Pacific. It was widely lauded and repeatedly reviewed as the best wargame of its era." - Wikipedia EN

(V for Victory: D-Day Utah Beach - Image from myabandonware.com)

• Nethack 12x12 and 16x16 Tile Font - "Sometimes (e.g, when playing at alt.org) I play Nethack through a terminal, and not with tiles like I am used to. I mostly use xterm then, and I do it most often because I am logged in from remote, and ssh's X11-forwarding is too slow. However, I find the standard nethack text-rendering a bit too oldfashioned, so I set out to do something about it." - R. Lauritzsen

(Nethack 12x12 and 16x16 Tile Font)

• The Classic Super Star Trek Game - "Super Star Trek is quite possibly the best of the "Star Trek" games from the 1970's. Of course, it does not make use of graphics, or even assume a video display, but it still an interesting game to play, particularly for those of us who don't have the reflexes we used to and prefer a more cerebral computer game." - 02/2019, T. Almy

Society, Media, Psychology & History

• Słowa niewinne (Wikipedia) - "Słowa niewinne (polnisch; „Unschuldige Wörter“) ist ein 1947 veröffentlichtes Buch über die Sprache des Nationalsozialismus von Nachman Blumental (1902–1983), der nach der Befreiung Polens ab 1944 für die Zentrale Jüdische Historische Kommission (CŻKH) arbeitete und von 1947 bis 1949 der erste Direktor des Jüdischen Historischen Instituts in Warschau war." - Wikipedia DE

• TOTAL TRUST - "Total Trust is an eye-opening and deeply disturbing story of surveillance technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship that confronts us with what can happen when our privacy is ignored. Through the haunting stories of people in China who have been monitored, intimidated and even tortured, the film tells of the dangers of technology in the hands of unbridled power. Taking China as a mirror, Total Trust sounds an alarm about the increasing use of surveillance tools around the world – even by democratic governments like those in Europe. If this is the present, what is our future? ", 2023

• Doomsday Clock - "The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Created by J. Robert Oppenheime and maintained since 1947, the Clock is a metaphor, not a prediction, for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances." - Wikipedia EN

• What I learned Joining a Climate Civil Resistance Organization For 18 Months - "I joined a climate-activism campaign in 2022 because of my growing concern for climate-related matters and my background as a tech-entrepreneur drove me to Dernière Rénovation, a KPI-driven, success-oriented non-profit. I am writing this article to help wannabe activists, founders, and anybody interested in the dynamics of non-profit organizations. We are many thinking about launching a social or climate-related organization, or simply thinking of joining one: it doesn’t always go as you would think!" - 12/2023, G. L’Hostis, lhostis.me

• The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood - "When I was writing The Anxious Generation, I thought of it as a tragedy in two acts: In Act I, we took away the play-based childhood (1990-2010), and in Act II, we gave kids the phone-based childhood (2010-2015). Teen mental health plunged in the middle of Act II." - 06/2024, Z. Rausch

• First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us - "The inside of a womb looks as it did 70,000 years ago, but the world outside has changed. In July 2021, when our daughter was born, the night sky didn’t light up with stars; it was lit up by the warm afterglow of sodium street lamps. Green-clad women carried the baby away, pumping oxygen into her mouth. It was like something out of a sci-fi: she had woken up, without a memory, in an alien world. Smeared in white-yellow fat, she didn’t know who she was nor what she was doing here. The only thing she knew, genetically, was that she needed to figure this out fast or die." - 07/2022, H. Karlsson

• Wie die Polizei verhört und wie wir uns dagegen verteidigen können - 07/2022, Projet-Evasions

• Darüber lacht Fefe - "Sprachliche Marker für Emotionen im Dienst der Ideologieerkennung" - 07/2022, security-informatics.de

  • Fefes Blog - Eine Analyse - 11/2019, N. Reinert

  • Fefe Research Institute - An attempt to analyse Fefe’s language - 05/2016, R. Jäschke, F. Fischer

• Eine Welt aus Resten und Ideen - "In vom Bergbau gehäuteten Landschaften Sachsens trifft unsere Autorin Menschen, die trinken und träumen. Und denkt an Gedichte von Wolfgang Hilbig." - 07/2024, T. Pruschmann, taz.de

• Smashing idea: how East Germany invented ‘unbreakable’ drinking glasses - "In the 1980s, a company called Superfest pioneered extra strong glass – but it disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now it’s making a comeback" - 08/2024, J. Malling, theguardian.com

• Hitler's Table Talk - "'Hitler's Table Talk' (...) is the title given to a series of World War II monologues delivered by Adolf Hitler, which were transcribed from 1941 to 1944. (...) According to historian Max Domarus, Hitler insisted on absolute silence when he delivered his monologues. No one was allowed to interrupt or contradict him. Magda Goebbels reported to Galeazzo Ciano: "It is always Hitler who talks! He can be Führer as much as he likes, but he always repeats himself and bores his guests".

Miscellaneous

• Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure - "I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself. Some of them are, yes, quite nerdy. But they certainly help me be productive. And maybe in time more and more of them will become mainstream, as a few already have." - 02/2019, S. Wolfram

• Koch-Wiki - "Das Koch-Wiki ist eine der größten deutschsprachigen, freien und unabhängigen Sammlungen von Koch- und Backrezepten, Mixgetränken und vielem mehr, zu der jeder seine Lieblingsrezepte nach vorheriger Anmeldung beitragen kann." - kochwiki.org

• collectif amifusion - "is with a european set of eyes a postpunkperformance collective [..] with a chilean perspective a try of decolonial performance collective", amifusion.me

• How I Get 100 Hours Worth of Work Done in a 40-hour Work Week - 07/2023, X. Yang

• How Complex Systems Fail - "Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety" - 2000, R. I. Cook, Cognitive Technologies Labratory, University of Chicago

• Virtuelles Kartenforum - "Im Virtuellen Kartenforum der SLUB Dresden können historische Karten georeferenziert und mit weiteren Karten positionsgleich dargestellt werden." - kartenforum.slub-dresden.de

(kartenforum.slub-dresden.de)

• How Do You Spend Your Time? - "Some people who ask me for advice at work get very long responses. Sometimes, those responses aren’t specific to my particular workplace, and so I share them here. In the past, I’ve written about writing, writing for an audience, heuristics, and getting big things done. This is another of those emails." - 02/2024, M. Brooker

• Analog Office - "Time Away from Screens, with Old School Tools [..] I write here about how to selectively untether yourself from the digital world, by thinking and organizing with paper-based tools and systems." - 2024, A. Havron

(analogoffice.net)

• Designing a Lego orrery - 06/2024, marian42.de

(Lego orrery by marian42.de)

• Sending Emails to my 3-year-old - "Sending him the family history while it's still in the making.." - 05/2024, Z. Haschek

• Heliograph - "A heliograph (from Ancient Greek ἥλιος (hḗlios) 'sun' and γράφειν (gráphein) 'to write') is a solar telegraph system that signals by flashes of sunlight (generally using Morse code from the 1840s) reflected by a mirror." - Wikipedia EN

• How To Found a Company In Germany: 14 “Easy” Steps And Lots Of Pain - "[..] I have performed this feat successfully in the past (twice!), so I thought I’d share my experience with you and hopefully save you a huge chunk of time. Also, the top-ranked Google search results for this topic are usually semi – content marketing posts of bookkeeping software or lawyers, and I thought a more rant-focused post was exactly the thing which the world needs right now." - 04/2024, O. Eidel

• paperless-ngx - "A community-supported supercharged version of paperless: scan, index and archive all your physical documents" - paperless-ngx.com

• Sticky tape takes X-ray images - "Adhesive tape is turning out to be an unexpected scientific tool. [..] researchers in the US have used this household item to generate nanosecond-length X-ray bursts. They show that simply peeling the tape from its roll can create flashes of X-rays intense enough to record images of a human finger."

• Leck mich im Arsch - "'Leck mich im Arsch' (German for 'Lick me in the arse') is a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, K. 231 (K. 382c), with lyrics in German. It was one of a set of at least six canons probably written in Vienna in 1782. Sung by six voices as a three-part round, it is thought to be a party piece for his friends." - Wikipedia EN

• openScope Air Traffic Control Simulator

• Metropolis 1998 - "lets you design every building in an isometric, pixel-art city" - 08/2024, arstechnica.com

(Metropolis 1998 - arstechnica.com)

• Downs–Thomson paradox - "Although consistent with economic theory, it is a paradox in that it contradicts the common expectation that improvements in the road network will reduce traffic congestion. In actuality, any improvements in road networks lead to no alleviation of congestion, but usually more use of those roads: what is often referred to as induced demand." - 01/2025, Wikipedia EN

• Service recovery paradox - ".. is a situation in which a customer thinks more highly of a company after the company has corrected a problem with their service, compared to how they would regard the company if non-faulty service had been provided." - Wikipedia EN

• Beauty Revealed - "..is an 1828 self-portrait by the American artist Sarah Goodridge. Depicting only the artist's bared breasts surrounded by white cloth, the 2.6-by-3.1-inch (6.7 by 8 cm) painting, originally backed with paper, is now in a modern frame." - Wikipedia EN

( Beauty Revealed, a self-portrait by Sarah Goodridge)