“Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.”
https://themarkup.org/blacklight
Category: software
Magic Earth
“Turn-by-turn navigation, HD Traffic, OpenStreetMap, 3D maps, Satellite maps, Offline maps and Transit. Entirely free.”
—https://www.magicearth.com/
A privacy friendly alternative to Google Maps.
TextExpander
Enables canned input, such as ty = thank you, addy = your address, etc.
Session, Encrypted Messenger
“Session is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that removes sensitive metadata collection, and is designed for people who want privacy and freedom from any forms of surveillance.”
https://getsession.org/
Session is a fork of Signal that is trying to remove the need for a phone number and centralized servers.
Beaker Browser
“Beaker uses a peer-to-peer protocol called Hyperdrive. ‘Hyperdrives’ are like websites. They store webpages, pictures, media, user data, and so on. Hyperdrives power a lot of Beaker’s best features.
Peer-to-peer means that you host data directly from your device.
One fun attribute of peer-to-peer is ‘co-hosting.’ This is where you help keep a hyperdrive online by storing the data and contributing bandwidth to other users. It happens temporarily when you visit a hyperdrive, but you can turn it on permanently for sites you like.”
–Beaker Browser
Min, The Minimalist Web Browser
See quick definitions and answers with information from DuckDuckGo, including Wikipedia entries and more. Jump to any site quickly with fuzzy search. Or search through the full text of every page you’ve visited, even if you don’t remember the title.
—Min
I haven’t tried this browser. I like the idea. But, I think being able to use a SOCKS5 proxy is important, and I don’t see that functionality on a casual scan. Still, I thought it might be worth looking into as a secondary browser.
NetHack / The NetHack Learning Environment
Reminded of NetHack this morning after hearing of Facebook’s release of The NetHack Learning Environment.
“NetHack is one of the oldest and arguably most impactful videogames in history, as well as being one of the hardest roguelikes currently being played by humans. It is procedurally generated, rich in entities and dynamics, and overall an extremely challenging environment…”
I’ve only played this casually, but it’s very complex. It might be a fun project to learn a little bit about artificial intelligence. Or, you might simply wish to play the game yourself.
Worth a look. It’s free and runs on pretty much any computer you’d want to use. Almost everyone will want to get a version with graphic tiles.
Jellyfin
“Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached. Your media, your server, your way.”
–https://jellyfin.org/
Minimal Make
“I would argue that the most important tool for reproducible research is not Sweave or knitr but GNU make.”
-Karl Broman, “minimal make.” kbroman.org.
Karl also has tutorials on git/github, knitr, R packages, making a web site with GitHub Pages, data organization, and reproducible research.
A Community is Defined By Its Center and Not Its Periphery
“My sense is that you need to build up a nucleus of people who know each other and who can network and support each other [in developing a proficiency in a technology with the complexity of R.]”
—Hadley Wickham in an interview with Dan Kopf, “What’s next for the popular programming language R?” Quartz. August 17, 2019.
Made me think of a Larry Wall Slashdot interview, question 7, from back in the day.
