The best medieval snails rendering bicycle supernests in human skin

21 Jul, 2019

Programming

The Best Refactoring You’ve Never Heard Of

TL;DR: defunctionalize the continuation!
The PGP Problem

TL;DR: no solution in sight (just “use signal” is not a solution).

Neat quote:

Take AEAD ciphers: the Rust-language Sequoia PGP defaulted to the AES-EAX AEAD mode, which is great, and nobody can read those messages because most PGP installs don’t know what EAX mode is, which is not great
Web Rendering Proxy, youtube

An idea so horrible it works: this makes modern websites work on almost any browser (e.g. IE 1.5, of all things) by rendering them server-side and providing the browser with a GIF ismap image.

Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?

Some nice pictures of early bicycles, tricycles and unicycles there.
A material way to make Mars habitable

TL;DR: silica gel greenhouses; this approach is localized, and thus way more achievable than the global terraforming projects
Book bound in human skin (threadreader) (archive link)
Supernester

TL;DR: due to global warming, the wasps have started to build so called super nests which look as creepy as you’d imagine.

5 Composers, 1 Theme (youtube)

This just kind of appeared in my recommendations, and I was not disappointed. 5 composers were asked to orchestrate a (somewhat silly) theme for a given orchestra. The results are quite different, and I liked them all.
Agnar - Summer Insomnia

Speaking of floppycasts, here’s a floppy album! In fact, a whole label of these ._.

(I happen to have one floppy music album myself, it’s a split disk by two local grindcore bands, with total playtime of 36 seconds)

Through the First Antarctic Night by Frederick Albert Cook (1900) (via public domain review)

Not that I’m gonna read this, but at least I enjoyed the article
Jo Marchant - Decoding the Heavens (2009)

And for something a bit different, here’s a book that I just read. It was quite a fun read, although there could probably be a bit more mechanic and engineering parts. Still, it is very brief and easy read on the history of decoding of the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism, and I have enjoyed it a lot.

(NB: goodreads link is for the English version, while I was reading the Russian translation)