paritybit.ca

Links

Useful links that I’ve collected and wish to share or remember for the future. Everything from Internet culture, useful pieces of wisdom, other blogs, and more.

Arguing and Debate
Business
Computing
  • Tech’s Masturbatory Historiography - A criticism of the way we look at the history of technology.
  • Permacomputing - "A collection of random thoughts regarding the application of permacultural ideas to the computer world."
  • Permacomputing - XXIIVV - A good jumping off point for a lot of thoughts about The Collapse, permacomputing, sustainable living, and related topics.
  • The Missing Semester of Your CS Education - A great resource on the things that are really helpful as a programmer and computer scientist but which school glosses over and expects you to figure out on your own. Things like making effective use of the terminal, using tools like vim, and version control.
  • Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing - Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We can learn by looking back. Can we make a friendly Libre Desktop operating system with focus on simplicity, minimalist elegance, and usability?
  • Old Is the New New • Kevlin Henney • GOTO 2018 - Everything is changing. Everything is new. Frameworks, platforms and trends are displaced on a weekly basis. Skills are churning. And yet... Beneath this seemingly turbulent flow there is a slow current, strong and steady, changing relatively little over the decades.
  • Computers That Can Run Backwards (Reversible Computing) - "Reversible computations—which can, in principle, be performed without giving off heat—may be the future of computing."
  • Ancient Computers - An exploration of ancient accounting and engineering computing mechanisms and devices.
  • Damaged Earth Catalog - A collection of information about various technological projects and philosophies working towards a healthier future.
  • "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - Though we have been building and programming computing machines for about 60 years and have learned a great deal about composition and abstraction, we have just begun to scratch the surface. [...] New design principles and new linguistic support are needed. I will address this issue and show some ideas that can perhaps get us to the next phase of engineering design.
  • Handmade Dev Show - Ink & Switch (2022) - A discussion with the head of independent research lab Ink & Switch, Peter van Hardenberg, about how today's computing platforms are working against the needs of professionals.
  • Local-first Software - A new generation of collaborative software that allows users to retain ownership of their data.
  • Use One Big Server - Using one big server instead of several tiny cloud container things or whatever is often cheaper, simpler to manage, less prone to incomprehensible failures, and just as if not more powerful and capable.
Email
Fun
Hacker & FOSS Culture
Internet
Programming and Software
Society
Tools and Cheatsheets
  • 256-Color Cheat Sheet - "List of 256 colors for Xterm prompt (console). Contains displayed color, Xterm Name, Xterm Number, HEX, RGB and HSL codes."
Vim
Web Accessibility Tools and Resources
Web Design
Workplace
Writing
  • George Orwell's Essay: Politics and the English Language - A very compelling essay on how writers and speakers use the English language to say very little and what we should try to do in our writing to not succumb to these anti-patterns. Although this was written in 1946, it easily sounds like it could have been written today.
  • Towards a Blogger Peer Review - How could online writing be able to be taken as seriously as writing published by an institution? What would that look like?
  • So You Want To Write a Technical Book - Some pointers about publisher contracts, self-publishing, and what's involved in getting a book onto shelves.
  • Documentation System - A guide to creating effective documentation depending on the end goal.

Blogroll

Below are a bunch of feeds that I follow. The content of any site below does not necessarily represent my views or opinions.

Blogs

News

News about various software projects (releases, security fixes, etc.).

Podcasts

Mostly tech-related but with some other stuff mixed in too.

Publications

YouTube Channels

Largely a mix of woodworking, gardening, tech, and repair channels.

These sites don't have a feed or are inactive, but I still want to include them:

The blogroll listing is generated by exporting from yarr and running the exported file through the following command:

grep "xmlUrl" static/subscriptions.opml | sed 's/.*text=\"\(.*\)\" xmlUrl=\"\(https\?:\/\/[^\/]*\/\)\(.*\)\" .*/<li><a href=\"\2\">\1<\/a> (<a href=\"\2\3\">feed<\/a>)<\/li>/g'

(I know it doesn’t correctly link to things like YouTube channels directly or work for sites using services like FeedBurner, but that doesn’t matter too much to me as long as the personal sites are easy to navigate to.)