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.
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.
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)
Continue reading “Emacs, gpg and pinentry on Mac”
I've been using IntelliJ as my Java editor instead of Eclipse - and I absolutely love it! So much so that I bought a license for all of JetBrains' programmer editors! I'm still learning how to use all the functionality of IntelliJ, but I am finding my productivity has dramatically increased a few days after I started using it.
Last weekend we went to Hever Castle to watch the jousting. The castle was really impressive - more like a fortified house - but full of interesting antiques.
The jousting was cool - quite theatrical. The sword and axe fighting was staged and a bit corny.