Well, well. This is only the fourth installmant of Assorted Links (funny, weird, fascinating, educational, cool stuff I came across while surfing the web), and already my backlog is huge! So, I've decided to include two to three bonus links in every post: A video, a German post, and a code repository somewhere.
This year, I had the pleasure of running DjangoCon Europe in Heidelberg, as part of a wonderful team. As a part of our effort to make DjangoCon Europe feel special, and to make our attendees feel welcomed, I decided to manufacture the badges for nearly 400 attendees myself. This is my story in eight simple steps. (Sing to me of the man, Muse …)
Welcome to the third installment of Assorted Links – funny, weird, fascinating, educational, or plain cool links I found in the internet in the last month. It's a bit late, due to me running a conference this month, but here we go!
April was good, reading-wise, and I have read several books that rated a solid WOW. Let's start with the less than good news, though:
I'm currently busy (<- this is what an understatement looks like) organising a conference that takes place during the last week of May. This would usually mean that I'd get maybe two or three books done this month. Sadly I started "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahnemann on May 1st and now, a week later, I'm about 25% in. So let's just confidently call off the May book blog post, and you'll get a nice long blog post for the books I'll read in June. Deal?
Welcome to the second installment of Assorted Links – funny, weird, fascinating, educational, or plain cool links I found in the internet in the last month. It's only the second one and already I have a local backlog! But I'm sure once I get to the later ones, half of them won't be relevant any more.
Winter still had a firm hold on Germany for most of March, so curling up with a book on the sofa after work still seemed like the way to go. As DjangoCon Europe draws closer (I'm one of the organisers), reading time was harder to come by, especially when some of my open source projects started to complain that they wanted some attention, too. But I had some good and some really amazing books in the mix this month, so here we go:
Welcome to the first installment of Assorted Links – funny, weird, fascinating, educational, or plain cool links I found in the internet in the last month.
What do you do in winter? You go home and curl up with a good book, or, in my case this year, a good bookshelf. I may have overdone it a bit. Here are all of the books in February: those I liked, a section for the short stories (most of which linked and available freely online), and those I can't recommend.
I read a couple of books in January: The first four volumes of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera, The Great Explosion by Eric Frank Russell, and Skin Deep by Brandon Sanderson, so let's get to it.
Imagine you were living in a Linux-only world, and suddenly felt the urgent need to install Windows on a laptop, for reasons entirely your own and not up for debate. (I'll get into that in a different post, promise.) Now, seeing as you have probably installed your fair share of Linux systems, and/or created rescue systems (either urgently required or due to painful experience and resulting paranoia), you download the image file, and use a tool of your choice, maybe dd, to put the .iso onto a USB drive, as you are used to doing. You put the drive into the PC and … it doesn't accept it as a boot device.
Now, since you're not me, you won't first debug partition table fuckups, and figure out how exactly UEFI relates to GPT vs MRB partition tables. Instead, you'll quickly figure out that apparently Windows .isos are not made for easy booting and require some more magic. There are two ways to provide this magic on Linux:
Since you already have a Windows image on your Linux Desktop – just use that image to create a Virtual Machine, and then use the proper Windows tooling to put it onto the USB drive. It's overly complex, but it just works, and had I thought of this, it would have saved me quite some trouble.
But maybe you don't have virtualization software set up already, or you don't want to use it, or you want to get this to work on Linux on principle, this is what you do: You get yourself a copy of WoeUSB, and either use their GUI (woeusbgui) or their command line tool (woeusb).
Caveat: sudo woeusb --device Windows10.iso /dev/sdb did not work for me. Instead I had to wipe the USB drive, make a new partition and a GPT partition table (use any old tool like gparted), and then run sudo woeusb --partition Windows10.iso /dev/sdb1.
Caveat 2: Microsoft does not provide checksums for their downloads, and apparently the installers don't or don't completely check their integrity. If the installation process starts, then aborts for weird reasons, try another download.
pass is great. I started using it as my password manager about a year ago, and since I'll refer to it in future blog posts, I wanted to make clear why and how I use it.
Speaker: Lesia Zasadna
So sometimes the best response to ideal documentation is "Ehh, it's okay."
So, how do you make documentation great instead of good? How do you convince folks that documentation is even necessary?
Speaker: Chris Ward
Documentation appears in many formats (e.g. HTML) where we can do more than just text.
Speaker Lauri Apple (Zalando), Open Source ambassador
Speaker: Ruthie BenDor
Software development is predominantly working with other people's code. This means we have to get to know their code, integrate it into our mental model, and determine if we even want to use it. And the most important factor in this is … names.
Speaker: Cory Williamson
Speaker: Christie Lutz
Feedback is something we all need for written documentation. Design critique guidelines are meant to explain three things:
Speaker: Tim Rogers
Speaker: Meike Chabowski has a Master of Arts in ITE, ended up in IT for 22 years and has started working in documentation at SUSE a year ago.
Speaker: Kate Wilcox