Excursions

I’ve been working with IndieWeb for quite some time now and I still get confused with implementing a simple IndieLogin workflow before a micropub request. There’s just too much back and forth between multiple endpoints. Time to put the head down and get this working!

I am still not sure about dates of the posts! Ignore this pls.

I’m getting tired of the Coronavirus coverage around. I don’t want to watch it, read it. Anyway there’s hardly any news that’s not regular anymore. Of course, avoiding it means avoiding Television and internet altogether. My Kindle’s been the only savior. Dependable as always.

Apparently, the lockdown and stay at home orders have caused the podcast downloads to decline. I guess it’s mainly due to the lack of any form of commutes. Has been, for sure, the case with me. Contrarily, I believe the podcasts episodes being released must be on the rise.

It has been a wonderfully productive day today. There’s a dev project that had been stagnant for long. Almost forgotten. All that was needed was some focused, distraction-free time. I managed to find that today.

And that leaves me absolutely delighted!

Dear people, we are divided by Nation. Region. Race. Religion. Launguage. Culture. Economies. And many more things. But I believe it is time now to be united by one resolve - stay the fuck at home. Don’t listen to your deranged peers. Your idiotic leaders. Even your families.

Coronavirus looks pretty much the same, no strains more deadlier that others - and that is a good news. What that means is it has not been mutating at a rapid pace. In more technical terms, the virus has a “proofreading machinery, however, and that reduces the ‘error rate’ and the pace of mutation”. Here’s Benjamin Neuman of Texas A&M University contrasting the coronavirus with influenza, “which is notoriously slippery”.

Flu does have one trick up its sleeve that coronaviruses do not have — the flu virus genome is broken up into several segments, each of which codes for a gene. When two flu viruses are in the same cell, they can swap some segments, potentially creating a new combination instantly — this is how the H1N1 ‘swine’ flu originated.

It was exactly a year ago that I had given up on Stoop, the newsletter app. I had a smaller device, an iPhone SE, and I didn’t like the app then. Today I find it so useful, not sure if it’s due to the larger display of my OnePlus or the testing times we are living through.

In today’s time of confusion and uncertainty, safety of the food, our essential need, is equally important. Serious eats has a brilliant essay on just this topic. I think the writer or me are not alone who are troubled with all these concerns, and the essay is must read in that regard.

Even so, plenty of folks—myself included—have been confused or curious about the safety of allowing restaurants to continue preparing and serving food. Is it actually safe? Should I reheat the food when I get it home? Is it better to support local businesses by ordering food, or am I only putting workers and delivery people at risk? And if I’m cooking my own food, what guidelines should I follow?

E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

Fascinating use of available technology. This would be brilliant for passive viewing - for dashboards or billboards or all sorts of boards that do not need regular change of content.