There is an interesting idea that some researchers are thinking about which they are calling Intermittent Living. The general idea is that as the benefits of Intermittent Fasting occur by the triggering of the immune system through stressing the body, there are other stressing mechanisms which could trigger the body in a similar way. Body temperatures outside comfortable ranges for example.
Avro versus Protobuf
There is an interesting comparison in this post that compares Avro, Protobuf and Thrift of binary messages sizes and how well the protocol supports schema evolution. Another interesting data transfer protocol is Parquet, which is optimized for column- oriented data.
ActivityPub
I really like the ideas behind ActivityPub as used by Mastodon and gnu.social. There is an interesting post called "What is ActivityPub and how will it change the Internet?" that describes the promise of the protocol. For a contrasting look at ActivityPub versus Atom/RSS feeds see here.
Mastodon
I want to try using Mastodon, but I'm unsure about whether to set up a new Mastodon pod, or join one of the existing ones.
Emacs, gpg and pinentry on Mac
I use Emacs and GnuPG to save my passwords to an encrypted file. I'm really happy with this, as I save the encrypted file in Dropbox, and I can decrypt it across all machines and Operating Systems, and it syncs automatically. My Emacs config looks as follows:
(setenv "GPG_AGENT_INFO" nil) (require 'password-cache) (require 'epa-file) (epa-file-enable) (setq password-cache-expiry (* 15 60)) (setq epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption t)