This project is a way for people to use CSS Grid features quickly to create dynamic layouts.
You can set the numbers, and units of your columns and rows, and I’ll generate a CSS grid for you! Drag within the boxes to create divs placed within the grid.
I noticed a lot of people weren’t using Grid because they felt it was too complicated and they couldn’t understand it. Grid is capable of so much, and this small generator only touches on a fraction of the features. The purpose of this is so people get up and running quickly, and create more interesting layouts.
Seemingly short-message services are becoming the standard mode of communication for the powerful and rich. It seems that especially Twitter is capable of bringing the worst in those among us to the outside.
Of course the most controversial statements are being washed away by the sheer throughput. The next one always comes up quicker than you expect.
Helping the masses to keep track is a main task of journalism. That being said traditional journalism (as in newspapers, television) sees great difficulties to keep track as well. Too much, too quick.
So new forms of journalism develop. Often more tendentious then helpful for the cause so they require the cautious mind of the reader to add some more perspective.
This is the example of such a newly developing “tracking journalism” site around the dazzling public character that is Elon Musk. It is called “elonmusk.today“.
Editor’s note: others have done great work exposing Musk’s shameless charlatan carnival barking. If you enjoy this sort of thing, I highly recommend Niya White’s excellent article Musk Misses: The Stories You Don’t Hear About Tesla Anymore …
And of course there’s this list of craft beer breweries missing:
A microbrewery or craft brewery is a brewery that produces small amounts of beer, typically much smaller than large-scale corporate breweries, and is independently owned. Such breweries are generally characterized by their emphasis on quality, flavor and brewing technique.
TOKYO — Japan’s government will allow NTT Docomo and its three major mobile rivals to set up 5G base stations on traffic signals, hoping to reduce the cost and time it takes to roll out the ultrafast networks by taking advantage of the nation’s high density of traffic lights.
Interesting. It seems that there is another way of doing things when you want to see success. Japan always seems very determined when the decision has been made to adopt something. In the curious case of the mobile communication standard 5G they have chosen a different way over countries like Germany.
Last year when I had asked for a new mobile plan here in Germany and I expressed my surprise about the enormous prices for just data quota I was told “That’s because we had to bid on the frequencies and that was soooo expensive that now we cannot offer the service cheaper”.
drop in replacement for tail -F that asks you if you are still watching
Just like Laura I am also was having a moment when I stumbled across tailflix.
For those not understanding the reference: At the end of an episode you’ve watched on Netflix you will be shown another one, and so on, and so on. Until if you have not touched the remote at all for several episodes Netflix will ask you “Are you still watching?”.
We are using computers every day and we are doing this in many different environments. Some of us give their desk space and work environment some more thoughts.
If you want some inspiration regarding your desk and work space, take a look at this great Twitter Hashtag: #絵描きさんの作業環境が見たい
It means “I want to see artists’ work environments” and is used for some years now for japanese artists to post pictures of their work environments…
Every month there are free games to download and try out with the Playstation Plus subscription. There was a game named “Conan Exiles” included and so my Playstation started the download.
After the download taking unexpectedly long I checked the download queue and found the reason why it would take so long to download. This game is over 82 Gbyte in size. This is quite unexpected.
Conan Exiles is an open-world survival game set in the brutal lands of Conan the Barbarian. Survive in a savage world, build your kingdom, and dominate your enemies in brutal combat and epic warfare.
Start with nothing but your bare hands and forge the legacy of your clan, building anything a small home to gigantic fortresses and entire cities. Wage war using swords, bows, siege weapons, and even take control of giant avatars of the gods and lay waste to enemy cities.
Explore a vast, seamless world full of challenge and opportunity. Hunt animals for resources, slay monsters for treasure, and delve deep underground to discover the secrets of ancient civilizations.
I can never wrap my head around how people really only use audio to communicate within teams, across cultures and timezones.
I’ve experienced first hand what a difference it makes to use good video conferencing that actually works. And it makes such a difference on productivity and team collaboration.
Video conferencing never replaces real-life face-2-face meetings. It just does not start relationships.
If you already had your work and personal relationship started video conferencing will make all the difference to your work.
Anyhow: I am also a big believer in augmented-reality glasses. I have to wear glasses anyhow all the time – why not improving them with the ability to display stuff.
Now, think of this. You’ve got one of those AR glasses on and you start the video conference call. And this happens:
About 2 years ago I sat down and wrote a filesystem. Well not from scratch but using the great FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) framework. I’ve released it as open-source later on Github:
This script acts as glue between a local file storage mount point and RIAK. It is targeted at specific use cases when local mount-points need to be migrated to RIAK without changing the applications accessing those mount point. Think of it as a transparent RIAK filesystem layer with multiple options to control it’s behavior regarding local files.
I had a very specific purpose in mind when I wrote this: There was a local filesystem that got filled up and because of technical restrictions we were not able to resize it or even completely copy it without interrupting the service using the data stored there.
Since we were already using the RIAK Key-Value Database for certain binary loads the idea came up to also utilize this key-value concept for a filesystem.
The idea now is: You have a local filesystem that holds a lot of folders and files already and you want to gradually want to move it to new grounds.
This migration needed to happen with minimal service interruptions assuming that there is constant reading and writing happening.
In this riak-fuse project I’ve written an overlay filesystem that steps between the application and the underlying “old”-filesystem. It looks and behaves identical to the application reading and writing.
But, depending on the mode you have chosen while mounting, every file read will at first be read from the “old”-filesystem and after successfull read stored into the key-value store.
On the next read it will be read from the key-value store directly.
The same applies for writing. Riak-fuse will write either to both, local storage and key-value store or just to the key-value store.
So in a nutshell: Data is slowly but surely on each access transferred over to the key-value store and load + storage space is slowly moving over from the local storage to the key-value store.
To facilitate this there are a lot of options for this script:
This all comes with ready-to-use docker and docker-compose files for you to try out.
Also it might interest you as an extremely simplified example of how to write an actual file system module for FUSE in Python.
Disclaimer: This effectively is my first python script as well as fuse module. Don’t be too hard on your judgement.
You are likely aware of the existence of the “Michelin Guide“.
Michelin Guides are a series of guide books published by the French tyre company Michelin for more than a century. The term normally refers to the annually published Michelin Red Guide, the oldest European hotel and restaurant reference guide, which awards up to three Michelin stars for excellence to a select few establishments.
A purchase of this guide is recommended in any case but these days people also need something they can intuitively use and which integrates into already existing workflows.
These people, like myself, need a map and maybe more details in a machine readable, filterable spreadsheet.
And as time goes on it might be quite useful to have all the sources that lead to these great tables and maps. Sources that allow you to crawl and grab these information.
A script that crawls Tokyo-based michelin guide establishments and saves it into a JSON file. I personally did this project so I can plan my tokyo trip based on the cheapest and most-renowned restaurants,
Commemorating the Ordination of the Universe by passing out as many Authorized and Authentic All-Purpose Discordian Society Ordination Certificates as possible.
Upon completing 52 years and 11 days of studying the universe, Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (under his alias of Kerry Wendell Thornley) became an ordained Minister of the Universal Life Church — on Sweetmorn 43 Discord, 3156 (April 26th 1990).
A subtle Buddhist teaching that nobody without the Buddha Mind understands is that when the Buddha was enlightened, the whole universe — with all its sentient beings, inanimate objects and blunt instruments — attained Satori with him.
On April 26th of 1990 the entire cosmos — people, stars, space rubbish and all — became an ordained minister and so anyone or anything is now legally qualified in most states to get drunk at weddings and giggle at funerals, spit holy water, christen puppies and preach salvation by fire and brimstone.
Only an ordained minister, however, can see how this is possible.
So, on Universal Ordination Day we commemorate the Ordination of the Universe by passing out as many Authorized and Authentic All-Purpose Discordian Society Ordination Certificates as possible.
Whoever distributes the most of these becomes Pastor Present of the Permanent Universal Tax Strike Universal Life Church of the Permanent Universal Rent Strike and may fly anywhere in the world, for a whole year, free — if they can figure out how to fly and providing they always first say “Up, up and away!”
RSS aka RDF Site Summary aka Rich Site Summary aka Really Simple Syndication is a standardized web format that works for you.
At least it would work for you if you would use a a tool which would allow you to “subscribe” to RSS feeds from all sorts of websites. These tools are called feed-reader.
The website you are reading this on offers such a link. By subscribing to its feed you will be able to see all content but without having to actually go to each of your subscriptions one by one. That is done by the feed reader. This process of aggregation is it why feed readers are also called aggregator.
Invented exactly 20 years ago this month on the back-end of a feverish dot-com boom, RSS (Real Simple Syndication) has persisted as a technology despite Google’s infamous abandonment with the death of Google Reader and Silicon Valley social media companies trying and succeeding to supplant it. In the six years since Google shut down Reader, there have been a million words written about the technology’s rise and apparent fall. Here’s what’s important: RSS is very much still here. Better yet, RSS can be a healthy alternative…
I am using Liferea as my feed reader on desktop and Reeder on all that is iOS/macOS.
I’ve found that by using RSS feeds and not following a pre-filtered timeline I would not “follow” 1000 sources of information but choose more carefully whom to follow.
Some do not offer any feeds – so my decision in these cases is wether or not I would invest the time to create a custom parser for their content to pull in.
After RSS being just another XML format you quickly realize that HTML is just another XML format as well. There are simple ways to convert between both on the fly. Like fetchrss.com or your command-line.
Of course RSS is not the only feed format: ATOM would be another one worth mentioning.
Zero-Sharp is using the CoreRT runtime to very impressively demonstrate how to get down to bare-metal application operation using C#. It compiles programs into native code…
Everything you wanted to know about making C# apps that run on bare metal, but were afraid to ask:
A complete EFI boot application in a single .cs file.
Many use and love archive.org. A service that roams the public internet and archives whatever it finds. It even creates timelines of websites so you can dive right into history.
Have a piece of history right here:
You can have something similar hosted in your own environment. There are numerous open source projects dedicated to this archival purpose. One of them is ArchiveBox.
ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).
I’ve done my set-up of ArchiveBox with the provided Dockerfile. Every once in a while it will start the docker container and check my Pocket feed for any new bookmarks. If found it will then archive those bookmarks.
As the HTML as well as PDF and Screenshot is saved this is extremely useful for later look-ups and even full-text search indexing.
When you are searching the internet for more information and things to learn about Japan you will inevitably also find John Daub and his “Only in Japan” productions. And that is a good thing!
ONLY in JAPAN is a series produced in Tokyo by one-man band John Daub.
Back in 2018 we even where around when John announced that he is going to live-stream.
And so we met up with him and eventually even said “Hi”.
this is John in full gear
Of course it wasn’t just us who got a good picture. We were part of the live stream as well – involuntarily as we had tried very hard to not be in frame.
Have you ever asked yourself what those generations coming after us will know about what was part of our culture when we grew up? As much as computers are a part of my story a bit of gaming also is.
From games on tape to games on floppy disks to CDs to no-media game streaming it has been quite a couple of decades. And with the demise of physical media access to the actual games will become harder for those games never delivered outside of online platforms. Those platforms will die. None of them will remain forever.
Hardware platforms follow the same logic: Today it’s the new hype. Tomorrow the software from yesterday won’t be supported by hardware and/or operating systems. Everything is in constant flux.
Emulation is a great tool for many use-cases. But it probably won’t solve all challenges. Preserving access to software and the knowledge around the required dependencies is the mission of the Video Game History Foundation.
Video game preservation matters because video games matter. Games are deeply ingrained in our culture, and they’re here to stay. They generated an unprecedented $91 billion dollars in revenue in 2016. They’re being collected by the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress. They’ve inspired dozens of feature films and even more books. They’re used as a medium of personal expression, as the means for raising money for charity, as educational tools, and in therapy. And yet, despite all this, video game history is disappearing. The majority of games that have been created throughout history are no longer easily accessible to study and play. And even when we can play games, that playable code is only a part of the story.
We’ve all used them. And if they are made well they really make life easier: Transit Maps.
Apart from using transit map art style to visualize a train line transit maps can be applied to a lot of data visualization needs.
Take time to consider everything about your diagram. How thick do you want the route lines to be? Are they touching, or is there a slight gap between them? Are you going to use curves or straight edges where a line changes direction? Consider your station markers – will they be ticks, dots or something else? Think about how you would like to differentiate interchange stations or transit centres as well. Consider the typeface you’re going to use for station names – it should be legible and simple. When you’ve considered all these points, you’ve given yourself a set of rules that you will use to construct the diagram. Every design decision you make should be evaluated against these rules: sometimes, you can break them if needed, but it definitely helps to have them in your head as you work.
About a year ago there were some very interesting reports about a german inventor and his invention: a highly futuristic, transforming smartphone airbag.
It would be attached to your phone and when you drop it, it would automatically deploy and dampen the impact.
Like so:
Impressive, right? There’s now a Kickstarter campaign behind this to deliver it as a product. All very nice and innovative.
I have no usue of a smartphone airbag of some sort. But hear me out on my train of thought:
I do partake in the hobby of quadcopter flying. I’ve built some myself in the past.
Now these quadcopters are very powerful and have very short flight times due to their power-dynamics. 4-5 Minutes and you’ve emptied a LiPo pack.
Model airplanes, essentially everything with wings, flys much much longer.
My thought now: Why not have a convertible drone.
When the pilot wants a switch could be flipped and it would convert a low-profile quadcopter to a low-profile quadcopter with wings. Similar to how the above mentioned smartphone “airbag”.
I don’t know anything about mechanics. I have no clue whatsoever. So go figure. But what I do know: the current path of the mini-quad industry is to create more powerful and bigger “mini”-quadcopters. And this is a good direction for some. It’s not for me. Having a 10kg 150km/h 50cm projectile in the air that also delivers a 1kg Lithium-Polymer, highly flammable and explosion-ready battery pack does frighten me.
Why not turn the wheel of innovation into the convertible-in-air-with-much-longer-flight-times direction and make the mini-quadcopters even more interesting?
MyFitnessPal is a great online service we are using to track what we eat. It’s well integrated into our daily routine – it works!
Unfortunately MyFitnessPal is not well set-up to interface 3rd party applications with it. In fact it appears they are actively trying to make it harder for externals to utilize the data there.
To access your data there’s an open source project called “python-myfitnesspal” which allows you to interface with MyFitnessPal from the command line. This project uses web-scraping to extract the information from the website and will break everytime MyFitnessPal is changing the design/layout.
Since the output for this would be command line text output it is not of great use for a standardized system. What is needed is to have the data sent in a re-useable way into the automation system.
This is why I wrote the additional tool “myfitnesspal2mqtt“. It takes the output provided by python-myfitnesspal and sends it to an MQTT topic. The message then can be decoded, for example with NodeRed, and further processed.
As you can see in the image above I am taking the MQTT message coming from myfitnesspal2mqtt and decoding it with a bit of javascript and outputting it back to MQTT.
In the end it expands into a multitude of topics with one piece of information per MQTT topic.
And with just that every time the script is run (which I do in a docker container and with a cronjob) the whole lot of pieces of information about nutrition and health stats are being pushed and stored in the home automation system.
This way they are of course also available to the home automation system to do things with it.
This experiment great since it’s completely effortless. You link your block lists once and from thereon you keep using Twitter like you always did. Whenever you see a paid promotion you “block it”. Everybody from thereon will not see promotions and timeline entries from this specific Twitter user (unless you would actively follow them).
17326 accounts blocked! Wow! I started with about 3500 before merging with others.
And the effect after about a week is just great! I cannot see a downside so far but the amount of promotion content on my timeline has shrunk to a degree where I do not see any at all.
This is a great way to get rid of content you’ve never wanted and focus on the information you want.
In 2012 I’ve experienced streamed game play for the first time. I was a beta-user of the OnLive service which created a bit of fuzz back then.
Last week Google had announced to step into the game streaming business as well. They’ve announce Google Stadia as the Google powered game streaming platform. It would come with it’s own controller.
3 color variants
And this controller is the most interesting bit. We have seen video live streaming. We have seen and played streamed games. But every time we needed some piece of software or hardware that brought screen, controller and player together.
The Google Stadia controllers now do not connect to the screen in front of you. The screen, by all it knows, just shows a low-latency video/audio stream.
The controller connects to your wifi and directly to the game session. Everything you input with the controller will be directly sent to the Google Stadia session in a Google datacenter. No dedicated console hardware in between. And this will make a huge difference. Because all of a sudden the screen only is a screen. And the controller will connect to the “cloud-console” far-far away. As if it was sitting right below the screen. This will make a huge difference!
This feature replaces numeral glyphs set on glyph-specific (proportional) widths with corresponding glyphs set on uniform (tabular) widths. Note that some fonts may contain tabular figures by default, in which case enabling this feature may not appear to affect the width of glyphs.
You want or you have to use shells – command line interfaces. And it’s something that always leads to stackoverflow / google sessions. Or you’re studying man-pages for hours.
But there’s a better way to view and understand these man-pages. There’s explainshell.com. Here is an example of what it can do:
As you can see it not only takes one command and shows you the meaning/function of a parameter. But it takes complex structured commands and unfolds it for you nicely onto a web page. Even the harder examples:
Cascading Style Sheets or CSS in short are a very powerful tool to control how content is being displayed.
CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple web pages to share formatting by specifying the relevant CSS in a separate .css file, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. Separation of formatting and content also makes it feasible to present the same markup page in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (via speech-based browser or screen reader), and on Braille-based tactile devices. CSS also has rules for alternate formatting if the content is accessed on a mobile device.
I frequently come across content I want to read. And almost as frequently I do not have time for a longer read when I come across interesting content.
My workflow for this is: keeping some to-be-read backlog of PDF files I have printed from websites. These PDF files are automatically synced to various devices and I can read them at a later stage.
What often is frustrating to see: bad the print results of website layouts as these websites have not even thought of the remote option of being printed.
With this blog I want to support any workflow and first and foremost my own. Therefore printing this blog adds some print-audience specifics.
For example the links I am using in the articles are usually inline when you are using a browser. When you’re printing the article those links get converted and are being written out with the text. So you can have them in your print-outs without loosing information.
this is how Google Chrome shows you the print preview…
And the changes you need to apply to any webpage to instantly enable this are very simple as well! Just add this to your page stylesheet:
My usual twitter use looks like this: I am scrolling through the timeline reading up things and I see an ad. I click block and never again will I see anything from this advertiser. As I’ve written here earlier.
As Twitter is also a place of very disturbing content there are numerous services built around the official block list functionality. One of those services is “Block Together“.
Block Together is designed to reduce the burden of blocking when many accounts are attacking you, or when a few accounts are attacking many people in your community. It uses the Twitter API. If you choose to share your list of blocks, your friends can subscribe to your list so that when you block an account, they block that account automatically. You can also use Block Together without sharing your blocks with anyone.
My block list on Twitter currently includes 1881 accounts and these are only accounts that put paid promotions without my request into my timeline.
I’ve read that Volker has such a long list as well – maybe it’s worth sharing as Volker is one person I would trust on his decisions for such a list. (vowe is a good mother!)
For about 2 years now I am using Todoist as my main task management / todo-list service.
This lead to a lot of interesting statistics and usage patterns as this service seems to integrate oh-so-nicely into a lot of daily tasks.
What kind of integration is it? Glad you asked!
At first we were using all sorts of different ways to manage task lists across the family with the main lists around everything evolved being the personal tasks and todos of each family member as well as the obvious groceries shopping list.
We’ve been happy customers of Wunderlist before but then Microsoft bought it and announced they will shut it down soon and replace it with “Todo” out of Office 365. Not being an Office 365 customer did lead to a dead-end on this path.
And then Amazon Alexa showed up and we wanted to naturally use those assistants around the house to add things to shopping and todo lists right away. Unfortunately neither Wunderlist nor the intermediate solution Toodledo were integrated with Alexa.
Then there suddenly was a window of opportunity We wanted Alexa integration and at least all the features we knew from Wunderlist and Toodledo and Todoist delivered right out of the box.
It takes todos and shopping items from Alexa, through the website, through Apps, Siri can use it and in general it’s well integrated with lots of services around. You can even send it eMails! Also we’ve never experienced syncing issues whatsoever.
And it’s the little things that really make a difference. Like that Chrome browser integration above.
You see that “Add website as task”? Yes it does exactly what you would expect. Within Chrome and two clicks you’ve added the current website URL and title as a task to any of your lists in Todoist. I’ve never been a fan of favourites / bookmarks in browsers. Because I usually do not store any history or bookmarks for longer. But I always need to add that website to a list to work through later the day. I used to send myself eMails with those links but with this is a much better solution to keep track of those links and not have them pile up over a long time.
What’s also very nice is the way Todoist generates statistics and tracks your progress over time. There’s a system in Todoist called “Karma”.
Which allows you to marvel at your progress and sun yourself in the immense productivity you’ve shown.
But hey – there’s actual value coming from this. Like if you do it for a year or two you get such nice statistics which show how you did structure your day and how you might be able to improve. Look at a simple yearly graph of how many tasks have been completed at specific times of the day.
2017
2018
So when most people in the office spend their time on lunch breaks I usually complete the most tasks from my task list. Also I am quite early in “before the crowd” and it shows. Lots of stuff done then.
And improvements also show. On a yearly base you can see for example how many tasks you did postpone / re-schedule when. Like those Mondays which are currently the days most tasks get postponed. What to do about that?
![var complete = {};
var sodium = {};
var carbohydrates = {};
var calories = {};
var daydate = {};
var fat = {};
var sugar = {};
var protein = {};
var weight = {};
var bodyfat = {};
var goalsodium = {};
var goalcarbohydrates = {};
var goalcalories = {};
var goalfat = {};
var goalsugar = {};
var goalprotein = {};
var caloriesdiff = {};
var ttopic = msg.topic.toLowerCase();
var firstobject = Object.keys(msg.payload)[0];
complete.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].complete;
complete.topic = ttopic+'/complete';
sodium.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.sodium;
sodium.topic = ttopic+'/total/sodium';
carbohydrates.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.carbohydrates;
carbohydrates.topic = ttopic+'/total/carbohydrates';
calories.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.calories;
calories.topic = ttopic+'/total/calories';
fat.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.fat;
fat.topic = ttopic+'/total/fat';
sugar.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.sugar;
sugar.topic = ttopic+'/total/sugar';
protein.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].totals.protein;
protein.topic = ttopic+'/total/protein';
weight.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].measurements.weight;
weight.topic = ttopic+'/measurement/weight';
bodyfat.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].measurements.bodyfat;
bodyfat.topic = ttopic+'/measurement/bodyfat';
goalsodium.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.sodium;
goalsodium.topic = ttopic+'/goal/sodium';
goalcarbohydrates.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.carbohydrates;
goalcarbohydrates.topic = ttopic+'/goal/carbohydrates';
goalcalories.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.calories;
goalcalories.topic = ttopic+'/goal/calories';
goalfat.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.fat;
goalfat.topic = ttopic+'/goal/fat';
goalsugar.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.sugar;
goalsugar.topic = ttopic+'/goal/sugar';
goalprotein.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.protein;
goalprotein.topic = ttopic+'/goal/protein';
caloriesdiff.payload = msg.payload[firstobject].goals.calories - msg.payload[firstobject].totals.calories;
caloriesdiff.topic = ttopic+'/caloriedeficit';
daydate.payload = firstobject;
daydate.topic = ttopic+"/date";
return [complete, sodium, carbohydrates, calories, fat, sugar, protein, weight, bodyfat, goalsodium, goalcarbohydrates, goalcalories, goalfat, goalsugar, goalprotein, daydate, caloriesdiff];](https://www.schrankmonster.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Bildschirmfoto-zu-2019-03-22-14-13-41.png)
