6 January 2024

49 links · Saturday

Using date-based CSS to make old web pages *look* old

How do you know you're looking at an old website? You may have found a page which has lots of interesting information, but how can you tell it's a modern and relevant result? Some websites don't contain dates in their URls. There may not be a © date or publica…

.NET Aspire with WinUI, WinForms and WPF - Nick's .NET Travels

If you’ve been following the work being done by Microsoft on .NET Aspire you might be curious to see how it works with native client applications built using WinForms, WPF or even WinUI. Late last week Damian Edwards pushed samples for WinForms and WPF and I j…

Running with VSTest | BenchmarkDotNet

BenchmarkDotNet supports discovering and executing benchmarks through VSTest. This provides an alternative user experience to running benchmarks with the CLI and may be preferable for those who like their IDE's VSTest integrations that they may have used when …

Weekly Update 381

Live from Rome with Scott Helme; Blaming Users for Password Reuse; Controlling Deleted Email Addresses; Controlling Lapsed Domains

PeriodicTimer in C# - Code Maze

In this article, we will learn how to use PeriodicTimer class in order to perform tasks in regular time intervals in C#.

Primitive Types in C# - C# in the Cards Episode 2

In this second lesson, you will learn about the primitive variable types in the C# language. Text and notebooks that accompany this lesson can be found at h...

Fixing Macs Door to Door

Fun stories from my time working as an AppleCare Dispatch contractor going door to door in Chicago.

Welcome to 2024, Looking Ahead

Introduction This article will look at some of the forces that are at work defining and driving the high-tech world. This includes various geo-political conflicts currently unfolding as well as fol…

Phishing Your Team Isn't The Answer • Nick Selby

Successful phishing attacks - tricking your employees into clicking a link and then taking an action, such as providing information to a fake web page - is the primary vector for ransomware infections. But it’s really not that simple. Ransomware exploits weakn…

What's the smallest file size for a 1 pixel image?

There are lots of new image compression formats out there. They excel at taking large, complex pictures and algorithmically reducing them to smaller file sizes. All of the comparisons I've seen show how good they are at squashing down big files. I wanted to go…

Bye, RStudio/Posit! - Yihui Xie | 谢益辉

Who is down? Me. After more than 10 years at RStudio/Posit, the time has come for me to explore other opportunities. A little over two weeks ago, I was told that I was laid off and my last day would …

in search of a new tab

A few months ago my friend Eli was sharing his screen and opened a new tab on his browser. Instead of the usual inspirational quote or clock extension, commonly-visited tabs, or my personal pet peeve - recent breaking news articles and photos from disaster zon…

Incremental Codebase Contribution

Software development process must be traceable. How we start from the requirements and how it being converted into a ticket, then in a Pull Request with a set of commits. A set. Not one in the day evening. Why? This post answers.

Analyzing Advent of Code

2023 came with another edition of Advent of Code, an advent calendar with programming challenges. In many ways - e.g. the assessment of both performance of and correctness on official leaderboards - the programming challenges are similar to regular programming…

Substack's Nazi newsletters

In November 2023, The Atlantic denounced the existence of explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack, some of them offering paid subscriptions.

The Artemis security scanner

Artemis is an open-source security vulnerability scanner developed by CERT PL. It is built to look for website misconfigurations and vulnerabilities on a large number of sites. It automatically prepares reports that can be sent to the affected institutions. Th…

How LLMs are and are not like the brain

Hi from buttondown! At the bottom of this newsletter is a bit of administrivia about the new platform How LLMs are and are not like the brain Beneath all the...

.NET R&D Digest (December, 2023)

2023 was a long year with a lot of surprising (for instance, AI boom), well expected (like new release of .NET 8) and a bit sad (cancellation of Project Tye in favour of Aspire) events. Some of the…

Year 2023 as a Lego Content Creator

It’s been a busy year filming Lego videos. Plenty of new ideas were tried, new Lego builds constructed and new revenue sources established. Let’s review 2023 both creatively and financi…

The Life of a Data Byte

A trip through time of various storage technologies.

Here be dragons

Subscribe via email or RSS feed This was inspired by something I saw on Shalim Khan's blog. Take a second to read it (it's short). I'd guess pretty much eve...

Why we got rid of Sentry

“Could probably scan every one of us and find five different doodads that look like cancer”

The unimplemented web standard from ES6

Code Comments by Erik Langille: Chrome and Firefox are not compliant with the ES6 web standard from 2015. How could this be, over eight years later? Is it some nuanced optimization or a crucial feature? Well - it's both.