gauntlet's microblog

[22:30] 34C3 is over and I cannot thank the c3voc enough for their service! Though I wasn't on location I was able to watch all the talks I was interested ind and, in case I missed any, had many recorded talks available even on the same day. Amazing, you guys have outdone yourselves!
BBSs and early Internet access in the 1990ies (available here) must have been my favorite lecture on day one, with "The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk" being a cloe second. If you liked the Apollo Guidance Computer Simulator and/or have a general interest in the Apollo program, this talk (available here) will hit the bull's eye for you. Really impressive!
In retrospect, it seems the majority of lectures interesting to me was held on the first day, I'm hard pressed to point out certain ones on the other days. By which I don't say it was boring. By no means! I spent four days watching the streams (and taking occasional walks to get my head clear) and learned new and exciting things each day.
I'll dig around and watch a few more talks, since everything is available for download. Thanks everyone who helped and made this congress possible!
[01:44] Rube Goldberg text editor: print the file, use whiteout if necessary, write new characters with a pen, scan the paper, run OCR

[23:07] I'm a curious person and like to take a look at the source when surfing websites every now and then. Did so on this site that I mentioned earlier. And I don't get why they would cram the code with loads of unneeded comments. Neither do I understand why they chose to load a font off another webserver, especially since I doubt that anyone can distinguish their "design choice" from any default monospace font on any given OS.
I generally don't trust requests to other servers. In my book, you allow the third party server to track your users whenever you embed external resources. Be it a YouTube video, a Facebook button, a fancy font or a shitload of unnecessary JavaScript libraries. As long as the other server is not entirely under your control - don't request external resources. Else you're guilty of allowing third parties to track your visitors.
[22:51] Ever heard of email that can't reach servers more than 500 miles away?
[22:50] The Screenless Office is an artistic concept that aims to create a working environment without any pixel based displays by printing out the computers' output on paper. Absolutely unprecedented idea.

[22:00] If voice assistants allowed for "skins" (or rather alternate voices and trigger words), I might actually be tempted to get one for myself. I don't want Siri or Alexa. I want CABAL.
[21:57] Lou Montulli has a short history of the "about:" URL.
[21:56] This is already some years old, but I didn't hear of this before: when a wrench was needed but not available on the ISS, NASA emailed one. 3D printers are cool technology.