Brett Hutley's Blog

... versus media coverage...

From https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-vs.-media-coverage.png

... that Helen has liked. She actually said that she loved it!

Continue reading “The first home-made wine...”

For the last few days I have been on an Internet fast. That means no news, no Twitter, no surfing, no games, no Netflix. I still check my email, and I send and receive the occasional WhatsApp message, but that's about it.

I feel so much more productive! When I would normally reach for my phone to check twitter, or read the news, I have been studying, or doing something active. When I go back to accessing the Internet again, I will probably try and limit myself to certain times of the day.

On Wednesday we arrived back from France. We spent a week walking the first part of the Robert Louis Stevenson track (or the GR-70) as it's known by on the maps. We started off by spending a couple of days in Paris, staying at the Marriott Courtyard near the Gare de Lyon station. We had a fantastic view over Paris - including the Eiffal Tower!

Continue reading “Back from France”

Helen and I are popping over to Porto for a few days. Apparently a hurricane has just hit southern Portugal.

Playing around with an InkyPhat from Pimoroni.

The project OwnTracks looks really cool. It uses your phone to broadcast your location whenever you move. You can send your location to a designated MQTT or HTTP server.

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.

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.

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.