Assorted Links: 2019-01

My link backlog is now huge enough that I'll publish these posts more often. Occasionally, for example this time, they'll have a German counterpart, with ten German links, so check it out if you understand German!

  1. Rare historical photos, with long explanations. A worthy addition to your feed reader.
  2. The complete Apollo 11 landing, including transcripts and audio files. Very Pale Blue Dot. (more)
  3. Many Ways to Be a Girl, but One Way to Be a Boy
  4. Times Newer Roman, the best kind of hack.
  5. A Brief History of Buildings That Melt Things
  6. Calvin and Muad'dib makes Dune about five times better.
  7. Vintage Books, New Titles
  8. From VNC to reverse shell
  9. Why 2,000 Year-Old Roman Concrete Is So Much Better Than The One We Make Today
  10. The world is on fire but the new Google Pixel 3 is a good phone

Bonus code repository: Using the Google Speech to Text API to defeat ReCaptcha

Bonus video link: Arms Sales: USA vs Russia

I'm publishing these posts monthly ā€“ if you have cool links you want me to include, drop me an email or ping me on the fediverse (or on Twitter).

Books: 2018-12

December was not very impressive, books-wise. I started Malazan (), which I didn't manage to get into at all, and then there was the whole business of Chaos Communication Congress, so I kind of didn't read at all. One book, and one short story, and that's it.

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Introducing c3queue.de

Or: Have fun handing out wristbands to sixteen thousand people

Chaos Communication Congress has grown to be a huge event ā€“ this year, more than sixteen thousand people are expected to attend 35C3, and the numbers have been steadily growing to reach this point. It's an overwhelming event, organised entirely by volunteers, who take care of drinks, space allocation, medical services, logistics, finances, internet and phone services, content selection, talk streaming and recording, and so many other areas that I could fill ten blog posts just telling you about them.

The cash desks in Hamburg

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Books: 2018-11

November was good! I got some work on projects done, 35C3 feels like it can come (and didn't eat all of my time), and I read some good and some great stories! My reading list continued to grow, but it didn't grow unchecked.

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Books: 2018-10

And that's it for October! Let me tell you, I had better months. I was sick a lot, including having caught a cold twice, and finding myself down with a mysterious allergy to something I ate. 0/5, cannot recommend. But, fortunately, I still found the time to read a couple of books, so here you go:

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Books: 2018-09

So this was September, huh? The year is closing in on its end, and there's not much news to tell y'all. My reading list is still steadily growing. Part of that is due to me finding /r/fantasy and /r/printsf for new recommendations, part is finding authors whom I adore (Lois McMaster Bujold!) on Goodreads and going through their recommendations etc. Other than that, September was fairly quiet. I organised another conference, so that made reading a lot a bit harder. I seem to have caught autumn blues in the last few weeks, but what can you do except read until it's gone?

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Books: 2018-08

This was a busy month, reading-wise, and also in terms of book discovery! I started a fediverse account for my reading endeavours, at scifi.fyi, so if you want to read more about what I'm reading and how I'm dealing with my reading list, feel free to follow me there (just make sure to introduce yourselves if we haven't talked about books before).

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EuroPython 2018: Processing Geodata using Python and Open Source Modules

Martin Christen is a professor of Geoinformatics and Computer Graphics at the Institute of Geomatics at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW).

What is geo data? There are some standards, but the most important thing is that it has associations with gographical data (on earth for now). There are popular GIS, for example ArcGIS (ESRI) and QGIS, both of which can be used via Python. But today we'll talk about how to manipulate, analyze, and present geodata using Python.

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