Work wise, this week has been a quite normal week, a short business trip, the normal stampede of meetings and some coding for an upcoming release. Next week will a bit more stressful – one important meeting with a prospect, and it is the last week before a two-week holiday. Sadly, it also includes a bank holiday.
Concerning my “new” blogging habit, it sketched out some ideas for upcoming posts. But I also decided to focus on my WordPress blog and leave micro.blog again. Nothing is wrong with micro.blog, but I felt like having WordPress for blogging is enough and microblogging is the domain of Mastodon for me.
I switched over to Firefox again. The 1password plugin, which I totally rely on, works much better in Firefox than in Safari. It is faster, and it doesn’t capture all mouse clicks occasionally and break autofill.
One mastodon post from yesterday caught my attention. Tim Bray shares an interesting a point of view on passkeys, that created quite some discussion in the comments. For me, passkeys work, because 1password offers a brilliant integration and shares them across devices and browsers. But password managers are like ad blockers, only the tech-affine people use them. Without a password manager, you are locked in Safari, Chrome or Firefox with your passkeys. Non chance to mix browsers locally or across devices. If we want passkeys to be a success story, we have to solve this issue and don’t use them as a tool to lock-in users.
Reading
I started reading season 8 of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It is the fun I expected after reading the various reviews. Halfway through the first book, I ordered the rest of the series and now have 10 books to read instead of one. 🤷♂️
Articles, Videos, Podcasts
📃 AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now – This is a long read with tons of great material. Simon once again shares a ton of links, videos, tools and helpful hints on how to use AI tools in (data) journalism.
📃 Programming is mostly thinking – In the lights of AI tools and people discussing replacing programmers, I find this article a very interesting read. It offers a good description of what a software developer actually does, over what people think we do. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against AI tools, but I would love if we take a saner perspective on them.
📃 The biggest AI companies agree to crack down on child abuse images – Yes, these companies have to take care that their platforms can’t be used to create CSAM. Personally, I think, they should also take care to not create deep fakes. What makes me uneasy again is that Thorn is involved, and they lobbied hard in the EU to push rules and regulations that don’t necessarily solve issues but create a market for their products. And the issue could have been avoided by thinking first and then starting to train an AI model.
Tools
Betterfox – I think the overall performance of Firefox has again improved with version 125. But Betterfox has some tweaks, that make it even snappier and also a bit safer. Take a look at my users.js with some of the optional rules activated.
GreenMail – Currently, I have to refactor some mail processing code I wrote almost a decade ago. For SMTP testing I use MailHog, but this time I need POP3 and IMAP support, too. So I searched for something like MailHog, but with POP3 and IMAP support. GreenMail seems to offer all I want.
EchoFeed – I am currently using two Mastodon accounts, experimenting with a BlueSky account and like to post my RSS feed to these accounts and also cross post between my Fosstodon and BlueSky account. EchoFeed solves this in a vary nice way and allows we to use templates for the posts.
django-allauth 0.62.0 – My preferred authentication library for Django projects now includes a Magic Code login method. I am happy, to kick out some custom code I wrote.
Fun
Count Binface is running for mayor of London. 😂
