Volume 11: Go for it, Connect 4!
Welcome, new subscribers (I have no idea where you came from, but I’m happy you’re here)! And, hello to everyone tuning in for another edition!
Long before hifi, I did a similar thing in blog form called fold, more regularly, same type of commentary, possibly more oriented at blog posts than projects. This week, I was flipping through the pages of it, and was saddened to see that a large amount of the posts link to the ether. I’m sure the Internet Archive has a portion of them, but it got me thinking.
A neat browser plugin would modify the current page with Wayback Machine buttons next to hyperlinked text. An even neater browser plugin would attempt to figure out the date in which the link was linked to, using clues like post time, if it appears to be a blog, or news article. Both of these tools probably already exist, but I’ll almost certainly never install them, so I’ll just complain again in 2 years when I revisit fold. Of course, I wouldn’t have had this problem at all if I had just been “blogging with Pinboard,” and it’s archive feature. So say we all.
Hackity Hacks (in pseudo random order)
jsscript – Victor Widell
Replay terminal sessions recorded with a BSD based script(1).
CAAT – Ibon Tolosana
Canvas Advanced Animation Toolkit, for drawing pictures on a webpage. [which face it, was never intended by our fearless leader–ed]
klipse – Yehonathan Sharvit
A simple client-side code evaluator pluggable on any web page. Supports Clojure, Ruby, Javascript, and even PHP!
em – Kenneth Reitz
CLI based emoji keyboard.
m-cli – Rogelio Cedillo
Control most system things on MacOS right from a single, easy to use CLI tool.
piknik – Frank Denis
Copy/paste anything securely(?) over the network.
netmonitor – Awal Garg
A Chrome extension which shows background network activity of web pages after they are loaded.
say_what – Josh Newlan
Use speech-to-text to fully check out during conference calls. Has some clever optimizations, like, pre-recorded “I didn’t realize I was muted.”
sol – Emil Ernerfeldt
Sol is a type-safe variant of Lua, which produces code fully compatible with Lua.
Slack-Gitsin – Yasin Toy
A command line slack client, written in Python, that allows you to do almost everything, except for chat in real time.
stockfish_lua – Richard John MacReady
A chess engine that is scriptable in Lua.
Things to read
- Handmade Manifesto
- 500 Lines or Less is out. I was a reviewer, but neither chapter I reviewed made it into the final book. I guess I was too harsh? Or, more likely, the authors got busy and had no time to respond to feedback / keep up with the editing process.
- Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems Engineer is an a few years old now, but never not relevant.
- Reverse Engineering for Beginners is a free book, which I’ll, unfortunately, almost certainly never have time for.
Boilerplate wrapup
I’m always on the lookout for interesting hacks, projects, pieces of art, neat papers, etc. If you have something I should see, don’t hesitate to reply to this email!
Oh! And, are you or someone you know working on a big project with an interesting story (or even a boring story, but with interesting problems)? Let me know! I’d love to ch chat with you/them.
Until next time!
Happy hacking,
Andrew