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m8rl

145 karma · joined June 27, 2011

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m8rl··on Europe's water reserves drying up due to climate breakdown
Guardian is the primary source obviously, couldn't find anything more detailed. See the website of one of the partners:

https://watershedinvestigations.com/vast-swathes-of-europes-...

m8rl··on So you're a manager now
There are different type of leads, not only people managers. There are architects, chief-of-somethings, designers, people who give all their imagination, creativity and experience into leading teams and companies to achieve great things. Clearly that's empowering, and empowering is crucial: Preparing the ground and conditions for people to do their job as good as possible. But it's a lot more, and it's fun and you get feedback and reward.

Let's not get dragged down by this stories how pathetic the reality of leadership roles has to be, this all depends on the leadership structure and culture.

m8rl··on The Italian towns selling houses for €1
Yes, exactly. In Germany a house is to start with rather a negative value, only the ground counts. You pay for the ground minus the costs for demolishing the house, or bring it a a current standard, or up to your taste.

Of course you will be able to still an get a positive value for an (old) house if it's somehow an enthusiast's object, who wants exactly this: An old Italian small village house or a German architect's house from the 70ies.

m8rl··on Xournalpp++ – closs-platform, open source note taking software
I'm using Xournal++ regularly on a Thinkpad X390 with one of the better Wacom stylus, mostly for note-taking and sketching of diagrams. Functionality is totally great and smooth, though I'd wish the user interface be more minimal without loosing features.
m8rl··on Diagrams: A brand new diagram editor for Mac
OmniGraffle https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle
m8rl··on DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
I see this as an ill-informed decision, from a viewpoint of someone living in a big western city. Results are so error-prone, it's basically useless in 99% of the locations in the world. Even Google has so much wrong information gathered from out-of-date websites and public registers. Even in central Berlin.
m8rl··on DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
In my region (Germany) Apple Maps are not very helpful, compared to Openstreetmap they are incomplete and/or years back. I absoluty can't see why they chose to use them.
m8rl··on Thrangrycat
Short discussion on this Cisco vulnerabilities earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902923
m8rl··on Line Breaking (2014)
Thank you Juraj for this work and the also very promising flat and even projects!
m8rl··on ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard
HyperCard was about empowering users, the opposite of what many tech companies want today, including Apple. It was a "predecessor" to the web (hypertext, HyperTalk scripting language), of Flash (animations, graphics), of user programmable databases (ok, Filemaker is older). It enabled users to smoothly dive into programming, as it not only offered a simple but extremly powerful concept of document-applictions called "stacks", drag-n-drop setup of your own graphical user interfaces, but behind all this a very powerful, extendable object oriented programming language with kind of "real" objects, as every item of your stack could have it's own method. Thankfully we have web technology today, else computer technology would miss its most democratic tool. But still HyperCard was the only way to simply have your own data on your own computer in your own application and not relying to a server, cloud or even paid service.
m8rl··on OpenSnitch – A Linux clone of the Little Snitch application firewall
This is absolutely great news! Just the other week I was again researching every option, from Subgraph OS's fw-daemon to the Douane firewall.
m8rl··on Nokia brand licensee HMD Global is now the new home of Nokia phones
Nice to see the icons from my N9 resurrecting: http://www.hmdglobal.com/about/

(kind of at least).

m8rl··on The Pleasures of Eating (1989)
There is a concept store here in Berlin which only sells food without packaging, you're supposed to bring your own reusable containers of course.

http://original-unverpackt.de/

But I see this more as a political stance against the common package waste, not so much about about selling different food.

m8rl··on CA Comodo used broken OCR and issued certificates to the wrong people
I have my email address open on most websites I've designed and programmed for decades now, and I don't receive more spam at these address than on at those addresses which aren't public. Spammer harvest for years now using many channels: buying addresses, hacking databases, using viruses stealing complete address books from people.

Using images as anti-spam measure really gives you a lot more problems than benefits (except you'd use random single-usage addresses).

Don't obfuscate, but fix your spam filters or switch your email provider. What helps a lot is server-side moving of detected spam emails to your junk folder and looking through this folder from time to time.

m8rl··on Pony is an open-source, actor-model, high performance programming language
Actually, more example code at http://tutorial.ponylang.org/examples/examples/
m8rl··on A Crypto Trick That Makes Software Harder to Reverse-Engineer
Hopefully you're right. For me this kind of endeavor sounds like a nightmare, being the absolute opposite of openess, open source, free standards and customer rights. All those "security" argumentations seem only a means to implement further undemocrative deployments.
m8rl··on Several thousand MongoDBs without access control on the Internet [pdf]
German IT-news-site heise.de is reporting on it, I guess there'll be an english translation soon.

http://www.heise.de/security/meldung/Studenten-entdecken-Tau...

Original (German language) press release is here: http://www.uni-saarland.de/nc/en/news/article/nr/12173.html

m8rl··on Mosh – a robust, responsive replacement for SSH
Mosh is a client/server setup allowing kind of asynchronous interactive session on a ssh server over a ssh connection. It doesn't replace ssh but complements it, making ssh interactive sessions more usable for low-latency and failing connections.

It somehow works like a proxy, with the added feature that it tries to add some sort of advanced local echo.

m8rl··on The Future Arrives in 2045
I don't think that 2045 machines will have become intelligent in terms of having a free will (whatever this means) and being able to think critically, but what I could imagine is that most people got enough dumb that they won't be able to realize the difference anymore. See how many people already take for real what marketing is telling them or using facebook and google bubbles without the slightest idea of the consequences.
m8rl··on German armed forces warn that carbon fiber might be cancer-causing
A research facility of the german armed forces warns that carbon fiber once burned at high temperatures is transformed to micro-sized particles having effects on the lungs comparable to asbestors.
m8rl··on Malcolm Tredinnick (malcolmt) has passed of a burst aneurysm
Jacob Kaplan-Moss posted it today on djanoproject.com:

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/mar/19/goodbye-mal...

m8rl··on Facebook privacy targeted by Austrian law student
I have any of Facebook's servers I know of blocked in my hosts file for years now to avoid being tracked without my consent. Probably this will make my the number one suspect for the next highschool shooting in my area.
m8rl··on Show HN: OxJS - a JavaScript Library for Web Applications
I think you are missing the point as this framework doesn't intend to handle all those simplified webpages but obviously tries to make complex interfaces possible within web browsers. Taking a well-known GUI metaphor and UI architecture makes sense in this case, IMO.