The top twenty cafes in Sydney 2024
24 October 2024
Good Food have published their list of the twenty best cafes in Sydney, Australia.
We eat at restaurants, but we live in cafes.
Yes, but we don’t work in cafes. Or we shouldn’t. If we do though, then only for short periods of time, right? And for a minute I thought one place I occasionally go to, had made the cut. But there’s a slight variation in the spelling of their names. Besides, I’m doubt I’m in Sydney enough to be ending up at any of the Good Food top twenty cafes.
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Linux OSs and CGI scripts: awesome, but not for everyone
23 October 2024
David Heinemeier Hansson looks at why more people don’t migrate to Linux operating systems:
The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It’s hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.
I run Linux Mint, possibly the most user-friendly Linux distribution AKA distro. For some reason, who knows, Mint reminds me of when I used to tinker with CGI scripts. I’m not talking about CGI as in computer generated imagery, but common gateway interface. In the days of old, CGI scripts helped make personal websites a little more interactive. They could do all sorts of things, but were widely used to power contact forms and guestbooks.
Web designers would hunt around for a CGI script that might aid them to do something or other on their website. In the same way a, say, WordPress publisher today would search out plug-ins. Once a suitable script had been located, they’d then go about configuring it, obviously provided their web host supported CGI scripts. While most scripts came ready to use, they usually required tweaking. Care needed to be taken doing this, because a misstep could render the script useless. Or worse.
For the first ten years I had a website, I hosted it at a smaller operation based in Sydney, NSW. They had a “sandbox” arrangement in place, where CGI scripts could be loaded, and if something went wrong, isolated, without bringing the whole server down. I haven’t used CGI in a long time now, but the configuration experience seems comparable to Mint. It’s mostly setup and ready to run, but still needs tweaks here and there.
But that’s enough to put off some people, even those who would like to move away from, especially, Windows operating systems. It’s unfortunate, but entirely understandable. Most of us just want to push the button, and see something happen.
I should conclude this discussion by making mention of the webmaster — a person, not a team, they were too small for that — at my long gone old web host. I’d often email the support people with questions about some difficulty configuring a CGI script, and he’d respond. My questions must have been too much for the regular support crew (er, duo), and would be forwarded to the guy actually looking after the servers.
He’d send replies at like three o’clock in the morning with suggestions on what to do, which always helped. Remember we’re talking the late nineties here, but this sort of thing said a lot about the earlier days of the web: it often felt like it was all happening during the middle of the night. But emails from the webmaster themselves: that has to be something you’d probably never see today, a hands-on person, instead of a customer service rep, taking the time to help out.
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history, technology, trends, web design
A school in Iceland shows us what a smartphone ban looks like
22 October 2024
There has been a ban on the use of smartphones at a school in Iceland since 2019. No prizes for guessing what the result was.
A phone ban has been in place at Öldutún School since the beginning of 2019, and according to the principal, it has worked well. The school’s atmosphere and culture have changed for the better, and there is more peace in the classroom.
Hardly surprising. Students are able to bring their phones with them, but in the normal course of events, they must not be used during school hours. Smartphones weren’t around when I was at school, and for that I am thankful… it seemed like there was plenty else to worry as it was.
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education, smartphones, technology, trends
Before the Firefox, Opera, web browsers there was Netscape
21 October 2024
Jamie Zawinski, one of the original creators of the erstwhile Netscape browser, recalls the day the first version, Netscape 0.9, was shipped thirty-years ago, last week:
According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded.
I started using Netscape, by then known as Netscape Navigator, when I bought my own computer in 1996, meaning I could choose the software I wanted to install.
That was a Windows 95 box, and would have had a version of Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s then web browser offering. But Netscape was all anyone could talk about, so I soon migrated there. I’ve never been a fan of IE, or any Microsoft browser, for that matter. The browser wars of the late nineties left me with a distinct distain for their stuff. I took to using Firefox almost the day it was released, and it remains my default browser to this day.
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Automattic, makers of WordPress, and development discipline
21 October 2024
Dave Winer, writing at Scripting News:
One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing — they don’t break users. The code I wrote to run against WordPress in the 00s still runs today. To me as a developer this speaks very loudly. It means it’s safe to develop here. It means there’s discipline in their development organization.
The on-going dispute between Automattic and WP Engine, the lawsuits and counter lawsuits, and staff departures, has me, as a long term WordPress user, a tad nervous. I could surely migrate to another publishing platform if it came to the crunch, and WordPress, somehow, ceased to exist. But would whatever I moved to have the same long-term development consistency and stability?
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Book buyers go indie as they skip social media, algorithms
18 October 2024
Sarah Manavis, writing for The Guardian:
A survey commissioned by the Booksellers Association ahead of Bookshop Day tomorrow has found that gen Z and millennials are more likely to buy a book based on a bookseller’s recommendation — in person, in a bookshop — than older age groups: 49% and 56% respectively, compared with 37% of gen X and 31% of baby boomers.
Younger book buyers, Generation Z and Millennials, would rather a bookseller recommend a title to buy, than rely on a social media influencer, or ideas served up by an algorithm. I don’t think I’ve ever taken up an influencer’s novel suggestion (the few times I see such things), because it strikes me as being paid advertising (of course it’s a great read), and not a bona fide recommendation.
And in other good news: reports of the death of browsing in bookshops for hours on end, also seems to be much exaggerated.
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How to reduce bad screen time, while needing good screen time?
17 October 2024
Mary Grace Descourouez, writing for Stanford Lifestyle Medicine:
Additional studies found that adults who engage in excessive screen time or have a diagnosed smartphone addiction had lower gray matter volume. Gray matter is brain tissue essential for daily human functioning and is responsible for everything from movement to memory to emotions. Gray matter volume naturally decreases as we age, so along with reducing screen time, engaging in activities that maintain our gray matter volume and promote brain health, such as exercise and movement, restorative sleep, social engagement, and stress management, is crucial.
I think it’s a given that an excess of time spent gazing at computer and laptop screens is detrimental to our health and well-being. But these devices are deeply ingrained in our lives, so going cold-turkey, or switching to a dumbphone, AKA a featurephone, aren’t exactly realistic options. Even though some people have reported a marked difference in well-being, from doing so.
Nor are the simplistic calls made by some to go “back to the old ways”, because it worked for them, in their day. For my part, being able to do so much, from a device in my hand, sees me lead a life and work style that earlier generations of my family could not have possibly imagined. While I’m full well aware of the dangers of too much screen time, I’m not about to dumb-down anytime time soon.
We get around over-doing screen time by getting outside for two to three hours daily, weather permitting, in the early evenings. Naturally we carry our phones with us, in the event family or friends need to make contact. Moving at a brisk pace for several hours though is not much conducive to looking at a screen, so we score at least a few screen-free hours. Taking a solid break like this seems more sensible than trying to ration, or restrict, looking at screens, at other times.
At least, that’s our experience.
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health, smartphones, technology
Conservatives and progressives have different brain structures
17 October 2024
When it comes to political leanings, I’m probably centre/left. But I have a number of family and acquaintances who definitely lean more to the right.
Of course, everyone is different, but certain of the mannerisms of the more conservative people I know are particularly distinct. To me, these seemed to go beyond regular personal preference. An inclination towards adhering to convention, and a dislike of uncertainty, to cite a few, seem quite apparent to me. And this well before discussing voting intentions.
Now some recent University College London research, published by Current Biology, seems to confirm what I’ve long suspect: there are differences in the brain structures of politically left leaning and right leaning people:
We speculate that the association of gray matter volume of the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex with political attitudes that we observed may reflect emotional and cognitive traits of individuals that influence their inclination to certain political orientations. For example, our findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty. The amygdala has many functions, including fear processing. Individuals with a large amygdala are more sensitive to fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amygdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief system. Similarly, it is striking that conservatives are more sensitive to disgust, and the insula is involved in the feeling of disgust. On the other hand, our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex volume and political attitudes may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty.
If medical terms baffle you, as they do me, read Sydney Morning Herald writer Angus Dalton’s analysis of the Current Biology report.
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Building a website is easy: a guide to the first steps
16 October 2024
HTML for people, by American software developer Blake Watson, is a helpful resource for people wishing to build their first website, with a simple text editor. HTML for people guides first time web designers through the process of creating webpages, to uploading them, to produce a live website.
You, my friend, are about to go from zero to internet by putting your very first homemade page on the web. I will let you in on a little secret — websites are just files with text. They don’t require fancy, expensive software to create. You can literally make a website with Notepad. In fact, that’s what we’ll do right now.
It’s literally that simple, and it’s what I did — using Notepad, a simple text editor — way back in the day, to create the first version of disassociated. I was still using NotePad until recently, to create the PHP files here. If you’re on Linux, Mousepad is a simple text editor you could try there.
But even today, you can still comfortably go old-school, and build a website using component HTML files, e.g. an index page, about page, blog page, etc, using a simple text editor, without the need for CMS software, such as WordPress, if you so wanted.
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South Korean author Han Kang wins 2024 literature Nobel Prize
16 October 2024
The Seoul based author is the first South Korean to be named a Nobel Prize literature laurate. Han Kang has written over a dozen novels since 1995, so if you’re a book reader, chances are you’ve seen at least one. The Vegetarian, published in 2016, won the International Booker Prize in the same year.
In her oeuvre, Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.
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