605 private links
Video by Royal Society of Chemistry, from Jan 2022.
The infographic plots cities around the world based on the urban population density and per capita transport energy use. North American cities are the least dense with highest energy use, while Asian, African, Latin American and European cities have varying densities, but fall in the category of low energy use per capita.
Via reddit.
Getting enough light is vital for regulating our sleep, combatting depression and seasonal affective disorder and maintaining good physical health.
På Uppsala universitet möts vi över gränser. Här möter du människor från olika bakgrunder, med olika framtidsdrömmar och med olika förutsättningar.
Let's say you have a tablet or reserve phone without a phone number (i.e., SIM-card) that you would nonetheless like to have Signal installed on. Turns out it's possible.
BUT NOTE THAT SIGNAL WILL DE-REGISTER YOUR ORIGINAL DEVICE ONCE YOU REGISTER THE NEW ONE!
There is still no way to have Signal on more than one device, and you can't link Signal on one device to another device. Too bad, would have been nice, especially with database encrypted at rest (which Molly allows).
- Connect your secondary device to the Internet
- Install Molly-FOSS or Molly or Signal on the secondary device, and initiate Signal's registration process (enter your phone number)
- You will get a code via sms on your primary Signal device
- Enter the code on the secondary device using the numeric keyboard (this worked just fine in my case)
- Enter your Signal PIN
- With that, Molly-FOSS/Molly/Signal should start and show you your groups
While we're at it, why not install Molly or even Molly-FOSS instead of the official Signal app? The benefit of using Molly-FOSS is that we can install it on a device not using Google (the drawback is that push notifications will consume a little more battery).
- What originally sent me exploring Signal app forks was this issue
- https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android
- https://molly.im/fdroid/
- https://reddit.com/r/CalyxOS/comments/ptll4t/molly/
- Another Signal fork
- ooh! directory, curated collection of 1000+ blogs by Phil Gyford.
- Ye Olde Blogroll, humanly curated list of personal & independent blogs that are updated regularly. Hat tip to Ben Werdmüller.
- https://theforest.link
- https://indieblog.page
- https://personalsit.es
- https://indieweb.xyz/en
- https://blogroll.club
- https://feedle.world
- https://micro.blog/discover
- https://aboutideasnow.com
- https://nownownow.com
- R-bloggers, R news and tutorials contributed to hundreds of R bloggers.
On personal blogs
In this video produced by the American Chemical Society, George Zaidan does a great job presenting a short but fundamental explanation of what an electron is and why that matters (pun intended).
I can really recommend!
Via Physics World.
Refractive index database
قاموس عربي عربي و قاموس عربي انجليزي ثنائي
Huvudsökande: Uppsala universitet.
Medsökande lärosäten och forskningsinstitut: Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB, Högskolan dalarna, Mälardalens högskola och Karlstads universitet.
Koordinator: professor Marika Edoff
Exciting news! No website or similar yet, but here are some news snippets.
This project involves six universities and 50 companies and organisations, and has a budget of 110 MSEK over five years.
Several research themes:
- advanced technology
- building integration
- enhanced PV systems
- land sharing
- planning for large-scale expansion
- and others
Theme 1: advanced technology
Solar cell devices with higher power, lower resource consumption.
For example, perovskite solar cells and tandem cells.
- https://www.energimyndigheten.se/forskning-och-innovation/forskning/omraden-for-forskning/kompetenscentrum-2022-2026/ (scroll down)
- https://www.energimyndigheten.se/nyhetsarkiv/2021/600-miljoner-till-energiomstallningens-kompetensforsorjning/
- https://energiforsk.se/nyhetsarkiv/energiforsk-och-nya-kompetenscenter/
- https://www.sbp.se/nyheter/sbp-del-av-ny-svensk-solenergiforskning
There's a chemistry tree.
Looks like good fun, and the data that makes up the genealogy is shared under a CC-BY license (bulk data export requires contacting the site admin), but I have found no mention of the license for the code of the website/project.
Their FAQ is very informative.
Gitea is great. So is Codeberg. The ability to share repos, issues, and users across Gitea instances, would be awesome.
Git itself is already federated and decentralised, but there is still a need for federation of the remote repo and its facilities.
The idea of some sort of federation between Gitea instances has been around since 2016.
- https://forgefriends.org/blog/2021/11/22/what-is-forgefriends/
- https://social.gitea.io/@gitea/1075767916260526973
- https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/nlnet-grant-application-for-federation-in-gitea-deadline-october-1st-2021/354
- https://forum.forgefriends.org/t/forge-federation-webinar-january-19th-2022-10am-noon-utc-1/538#a-10000-feet-view-of-problems-with-forge-silos-and-their-solutions-4
- Software Forge performance index (maintained by SourceHut)
- i3wm, tiling window manager for X11.
- sway, drop-in replacement for i3wm on Wayland.
- enlightenment, window manager, compositor and minimal desktop. Not tiling. Supports X11, experimental Wayland support.
There are many more window managers. Add more as I (re)discover them.
Citation File Format (CFF), a YAML 1.2-based format for providing citation metadata for (research/scientific) software.
- CFF github repo
- Guide to the CFF v1.2 schema, including such niceties as credit redirection
- One of many CFF file generators (here is a table of other tools).
- Making software citation easi(er) - The Citation File Format and its integrations, slides for a presentation by Stephan Druskat (one of the CFF maintainers).
- There are, of course, R-based CFF generators.
cffris backed by rOpenSci. - Stephan Druskat's cfftracker answers the question: how many repos on Github contain
CITATION.cfffiles? At the moment just north of 1000 repos (less than I thought, to be honest). Keep adding CFF to your scientific repos, people :-)
Via Martin Fenner (twice over).
or more accurately, how to get around them.
12ft Ladder by Thomas Millar uses a very clever approach - pretend to be the Google crawler!
Does not work for every site (some sites are clearly more serious about locking away their content - one could ask why they even bother publishing on the web?) but works for many.
Only negative is that the code behind 12ft is not available. Which means that the service will only live for as long as the domain stays up, which by the way is hosted by Vercel. Also, any article URLs (along with other metadata such as your IP address) might be logged by the web service or their service providers.
I found myself in need of a source of emojis that could be easily copy-pasted.
In order of decreasing useability:
- https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
- https://getemoji.com/
- https://reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/7l0pin/every_emoji_in_emoji10/
Here are some more:
By Han-Kwang Nienhuys, lagom.nl.
A recent report by Digital Lab highlights their security and data integrity practices, and also examines their ownership structures, clearly demonstrating that many VPN "brands" are owned by the same companies, many of whose owners or executives have known prior legal or moral problems.
Some VPN services are honest in their marketing, though. Still, many (including some of the more popular) employ dark patterns, e.g., making it unnecessarily hard to cancel subscriptions, or auto-renewing subscriptions, etc.
Read for yourself: "Security and Privacy of VPNs Running on Windows 10", by Digital Lab at Consumer Reports, which is an illuminating expose of 16 commercial VPN services.
Via kryptera.se, Swedish, who also graciously hosts the report (PDF, English).
Take care to define what you are trying to achieve before deciding to subscribe to a VPN. Do you primarily want to hide your web traffic from your ISP? A VPN can do that, but you are simply substituting your ISP for the ISP of the VPN provider.
But if all you want is to change the apparent geographic location of your traffic, then a VPN works fine. But you could just as easily make do with a proxy server.
PS. Do you have an extra computer or a Raspberry Pi lying around? Well, then you could build your own virtual private network. This is particularly useful when travelling abroad or anytime you have to use someone else's network.