This is a collection of links I stumbled across and found worth sharing. Also see the blogroll for links to blogs I regularly read.
Michael Lynch is someone who, when he has an idea or a problem, spares no effort to get to the bottom of it and develop a solution, usually with a combination of hardware and software. Recently he developed a project that allows him to remote control a server just by connecting a Raspberry Pi via USB and HDMI. The Pi runs a program with a web interface that forwards the keyboard input to the server via USB and sends the HDMI output back to the browser. This allows it to control the BIOS and even install a new operating system.
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I once wrote about pure CSS paintings. It’s amazing what you can achieve with just HTML and CSS. Another amazing thing is CSS-Sweeper, a Minesweeper clone written in just HTML and CSS. It’s not the fastest implementation but more a “stress test” and will probably have lags on average computing devices. Nevertheless, it’s awesome! You can play it here.
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Shane Wighton from the YouTube channel “Stuff Made Here” built a robot that cuts his hair. It worked OK for part of his hair, but see yourself… I wonder how one could even come up with such an idea to have one’s hair cut by a robot with scissors? Crazy!
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Social engineering is more like hacking people instead of hacking systems. Still, Twitter has been hacked:
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Max Böck created a nice site featuring “whimsical websites”. Websites that have special features and “spark joy”. A nice idea. 👍
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As always, a real nice essay (musing) by Scott Nesbit. This time it’s about productivity:
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A few days ago, I started writing a rant about the new email service HEY (but I discarded the draft because I could not put my criticism into words properly.) While I appreciate that there is a new privacy-focused email service, I do not understand the hype. I don’t understand how it should revolutionize email. There are already a few email services that you pay for. And also the problem of vendor lock-in (by using provider domains instead of custom domains) is not solved by not (yet) supporting custom domains. And also the UI doesn’t look very appealing to me.
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Nextcloud Notes is my favorite note-taking app that allows me to sync notes across devices using my Nextcloud instance. I don’t like to limit my notes to just one computer, I need to be able to access them from anywhere, whether that’s my desktop computer, my laptop or my phone. And I choose a self-hosted Nextcloud, because then I can also choose any other file editor to edit the notes.
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Marcus Herrmann suggests using a /feeds page on your blog to list all the available (RSS) feeds to follow you.
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If I had to make a list of my 5 favorite blogs, Weekly Musings by Scott Nesbitt would be included. Issue 72 is about blogging:
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