Tech News and Tutorials
I have plans on creating what I call the “Raspberry Arcade” – a Raspberry PI
with emulators to play all the old NES and Atari games of my youth that don’t
work. This is just an amazing mod of a game boy and Rasberry PI into one.
I think a theme for myself this week is really inter-operable protocols. These
two articles really belong together since they are both discussing the
essentially same thing. A transition from an internet where we paid for our
services – email, hosting, premium access – to an internet where we are spied
upon and monetized. I don’t really know how we could get back to the “old”
internet of desperate home pages, fan pages, and self-curated, self-hosted
sources where the author pays to host not because they want ad revenue but
because they want to share their particular passion with the world. What other
medium allows such a broad audience with the only gateway being a $5/mo VPS?
This is just a good read, not because installing SSL certificates is hard, but
it that it is quite easy to forget to check in on them.
This is a new series I’m thinking of creating. It’s more for my use than it is
for anyone else. A weekly list of all the blog posts, articles, videos, etc.
that I uncover through the week that I found interesting or worthy of sharing.
Tech News & Tutorials
An excellent look at how bootstrap is in some ways a regression back to
table-based html and away from semantic html. This is something that has always
bothered me a little about bootstrap – just how much it looks like a recreation
of tables.
Granted, I’ve solved the problem by breaking the page up into views and
composing them using PHP. The un-semantic bootstrap goes into “layout” level
view which in turn loads semantic views that are free from the bootstrap’s
representational classes. The result is that I can change out the layout views,
or remove them entirely to get a semantic html document or swap out the CSS
framework without impacting the semantic views. This might be a good topic for a
new article.
I love how programming tends to inspire people towards reflecting on Eastern
thinking. It is true that programming is a very meditative activity. The Tao of
Programming, I just found this week, but I’m also adding the Codeless Code since
that is a site that I do like to begin my work days.
Being in the Midwest, I stopped really paying attention to the West Coast’s tech
environment. It simply didn’t feel like something that would involve me much.
Now that I’m out in Jackson, I’ve really started to put my mind towards thinking
more about the West Coast tech and what it would mean to get involved in it.
I don’t think I really noticed this effect until I moved to Idaho. The Dakotas
are such a vastly educated group for their rural upbringings. Sioux Falls is
overflowing with degree holders. Something like 80% of my high school class went
on to college. Going on to college was something that I just assumed everyone
did and that the majority of people had at least some collegiate experience. Not
so in Idaho, it was a complete inversion. Most people just finished high school,
if they had any college experience is was for an associates not a Bachelors or
graduate degree. Suddenly, my typical “ice breaker” small talk of where did you
go for school, what as your degree in, etc. was completely useless.
This seems so true about web programming. I have met far too many people who
think installing wordpress (or the CMS du jour), editing config files or xml is
the height of development. I fear that I am just a marginal step above that with
my frameworks, high-level scripting languages, and package list libraries. Over
time, it seems like there is less and less of a distinction between the
programmer as scientist and the programmer as technological bolt turner in the
modern assembly line.
Entertainment
Hey, what I can I say. I like Weird Al.
Kathryn Hemmann’s Contemporary Japanese Literature blog is a new addition to my
RSS feed. I love her assessment of Sword Art Online, and I’m amazed that series
has gone on to produce a second season. I could hardly stomach watching the
first six episodes.
I must be honest: I haven’t read through this entire article yet. But the first
few paragraphs just seem like a wealth of information about architecture and
Americana-tiki.
Just a fun article examining how much pressure a lego brick can withstand and
how that would add up to a theoretical lego tower of 375,000 bricks.
God, do I love the work of Massaaki Yuasa. Enough that I might even be tempted
to order this from Japan. If you don’t recognize the name, you probably will
recognize the anime: Tatami Galaxy, Kaiba, Cat Soup all three on my list of
must haves for anime. I haven’t started watching Ping Ping (maybe next week),
but from what I’ve heard, it should live up to the hype.
