Complexity of David

It is fast && it is creepy because it will be even more difficult to know if certain websites are doing something wrong (IF YOU DON’T KNOW, TH3Y ARE), and is it THIS THING the way of the future. Why? … Because. Wasm, the WebAssembly language is here to stay. That does not mean that we have to like it. But we’ll live with it if we want the browser window to be something more than a browser window. The W3C just published the official WASM recommendations and that means basically NOTHING. Except it does. IT IS OFFICIAL. We are now in the era of the cryptic web. Let’s all hug and keep on coding strange digital currency miners and exhaust our poor users cpus with crappy code.

The guardian has a piece on Podcast, the past, the present and the future or How podcasting is falling prey to the broadcast companies.

But the internet is a marvelous place, because if you choose your pills right, you’ll be able to jump from quality page to another quality page. Only if the authors you start with put some effort into it. And John Naughton did. You should go and read his readings.

And if you follow my lead you’ll read Building a More Honest Internet and maybe think a little about this. The future of the Internet is in danger of becoming a vast rubbish landscape. Or, we can think of new ways to reinvent it. Read it and think.

Also worth reading is The Second Wave of Algorithmic Accountability. It connects with the previous links and touches some interesting points on the ethics of modern technologies. The XXI century will not be about the CAN Tech do this, but instead about the SHOULD tech do it. The discussion has started.

AskSensors is an online IoT dashboard service that allows you to track data coming from your sensors. They have tutorials on the website to get you started, but for raspberry pi they went with an example using node.js. Can’t understand that .

In any case it isn’t difficult to write a python script that reads from your sensor and sends data to the AskSensors api. Here are my tips:

1. In python use the easy to understand requests library.
2. The URL endpoint to send data to is something like https://api.asksensors.com/write/API_KEY?module1=VALUE_1&module2=VALUE_2
   1. Make sure to replace the API_KEY and VALUE_1,2,xxx to the number and values of your application.
   2. The API_KEY is unique for each sensor you have.
   3. Each sensor can have several modules. For example the DHT11 sensor reads both Temperature and Humidity. This means you have one device (sensor) sending two values to module1 and module2, hence the previous url structure.
3. send data with requests.get(URL of POINT 2).
4. profit.

And it’s that time of year again.

Everything that needs to work is broken, every cog in the systems is stuck, and students demanding urgent action that we cannot provide.

That’s the first week of classes. Keep calm and carry on.

Modern web is a pain to mirror, or to make a copy for future reference.
You have to go through every single page in a website and probably print it to keep a copy of what was there.

I end up with mountains of Pdfs. And that sucks, namely when websites have the same title for every page. You manually have to come up with filenames for each of the pages you need to preserve and the all process is slow.

Wget might be a solution, and I’ve used in the past, but it isn’t ideal.

The --mirror switch is not enough and you end up needing to go through the manual anyway to find out what each switch means.
This is because Wget is not a mirroring tool, but a general purpose one.

Yes, I can hammer a screw in, but it isn’t the right tool for the job.

A search engine for datasets… _hm_ it would be interesting if not for the fact that most datasets are not that public anyway. But a good idea, although it crossed my readings one year too late.

And if all cities are equal, at least under some magnifying (or should I say unifying) constant? The Commuting Principle that Shaped Urban History explains how from ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the shape of cities has been defined by the technologies that allow commuters to get to work in about 30 minutes.

And yes, it has been a long time. And I know it has been. But time is something that I don’t have. 1440 minutes of production per day. And you better make good use of those minutes. Something that I tend to forget constantly.

And a side-note: I went to my dentist today and he asked about Brexit since I’ve lived in the UK for a couple of years. This crazy brexit mania is contagious but a train reck is better than the thought of the dentist tools in my mouth, so I talked, and talked and… couldn’t escape his tools, like the no-deal brexit is certain.

I’ve been wanting to move my web assets to Github for a long time. Partially because I’m downsizing my web presence (as many have noticed), and partially because of backup/versioning.

This moving is going to be multi-step process and somethings might break. But everything should be completed soon (I hope).

update: I’m back to my own server.