Tech, life and everything else
This is a collection of links I stumbled across and found worth sharing. Also see the blogroll for links to blogs I regularly read.
I currently have two technical topics that interest me a lot. One is SQLite, of which I am always surprised by its functionality and ease, and the other is Tor, which I find quite interesting because of its encryption and because I recently listened to Edward Snowden’s book “Permanent Record” as an audio book.
I found two SQLite related articles in my Pocket list, which I wanted to share.
The attached picture is a visualization of the streets in my home town. I generated this picture with the website “city roads”. This site has been around for a while, but a link post from Julio Biason reminded me to share the link as well. With this site it is possible to display only the streets of a city or surroundings on a plain background.
🖼️ View
The result of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 has been published and as every year it is quite interesting to take a look at it. But it is also important to note that the survey was conducted in February, before some countries went into lockdown.
It is interesting to look at code not only from the content aspect, but also from the appearance. The appearance of code can give hints how to refactor it.
“It’s about time you try Linux.” is a nice little site listing a few Linux distribution options for beginners (and also more advanced users) and explaining why you should try Linux.
There was a discussion on Hacker News the other day about whether blogs are dead or not.
I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw this: Windows has an official package manager now. The lack of a package manager was the thing that annoyed me most about Windows. That’s why I always used Chocolatey on Windows, but even that has room for improvement.
Last year I wrote a tutorial about how it’s possible to run Linux GUI apps on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL 2 (with an integrated Linux Kernel) is coming soon, but Microsoft announced they are bringing support for Linux GUI apps to Windows 10 too. While I still prefer to use Linux directly, I think it’s still a great announcement and new feature. It’s definitely the year of Linux on the desktop.
It is interesting to see that I am not the only one who has a problem with email logins. I find email logins make everything much more complicated than simple password-based authentication. I use a password manager both on the computer in the browser and on my smartphone and can easily have complex passwords filled in automatically.