🔗 DOS_deck
Experience classic games with modern convenience at DOS_deck. With full controller support and a carefully curated game collection, enjoy timeless classics and hidden gems, readily available for instant play in your web browser on devices you already own.
Filing this away to try later. Also interesting to see they’re using JS-Dos for this, the same thing being used by F5 To Run, which is cool.
Via Ars Technica.
Seeing everyone blog (yes, actually blog) about their default apps over the last two weeks has been absolutely wonderful. Robb has been doing a fantastic job maintaining an index of these posts, and has now added a network graph showing the links between them. Works great.
100% this!
It was only a year or so ago that I found out that RSS discovery was a thing (coincidentally-but-probably-not-really it was also a year or so ago when I first read Manton’s book which mentions this).
Before that, if there was a site I wanted to subscribe to, and there was no RSS link on the page itself, I wouldn’t bother. Apart from thinking that I needed the link to the RSS feed to subscribe, I also got burned so often by sites that didn’t even have RSS that I just defaulted to assuming there was no way to read their site in my feed reader.
Browsers are getting better at surfacing this though. Vivaldi now shows an RSS indicator in the address bar when it detects that the site has one. But it’s small, and I’m usually not looking at the address bar after entering the URL, so it’s easy to miss. Really, nothing beats putting a link on the site itself.
Now, if you escuse me for a second, I just need to check that I’ve got a link to an RSS feed on my site…
🔗 Google is moving Shopping List and other notes into one app to worry about, Keep
This is somewhat good news, as Keep is a decent note-keeping app. But it’s also concerning because there’s now one major place to keep your data that Google might one day abandon.
It’s striking seeing this line in the first paragraph. I use Keep for my shopping list. It works well, and it’ll be a shame if Google were to shut it down. But there’s also a risk of them being too focused on the app, where they cram some useless AI feature into it. Notion does this, and I wish there was a way to turn it off.
🔗 Canada’s 84-year radio time check has stopped because of accuracy concerns
Interesting article about how Canada broadcasted timing information via radio. Reminds me of the 6 pips played just before the news on ABC radio when I was a kid. I’m guessing they served a similar role.
One way to think about age – we become old when we think and talk more about the past than the future.
Oooh. I feel a little seen. 🫣
🔗 Using Web Components on My Icon Galleries Websites
Lot of neat stuff referenced in this post, like htmx and web components. I’d like to try them in some capacity, like some small web project. Unfortunately, the only things I can think of building right now are things for my job.
Greg Morris wrote an excellent post about personal blogging that resonated with me. I know this is something that I struggle with. There are many posts on my blog that are formal and impersonal. And I hate re-reading them: they’re super boring. On the flip side, seeing posts about my day (sans post about work), of photos and videos I’ve taken, are a joy to relive. I know these are posts I tend to prefer reading on personal blogs of others. I’ll try to write more of those.
Related: Nobody cares about your blog, via. Skoobs.
🔗 XML is the future - Bite code!
I wanted to write something about fads in the software development industry when the post about Amazon Prime Video moving away from micro-services back to monoliths was making the rounds. A lot of the motivation towards micro-services can be traced back to Amazon’s preaching about them being the best way to architect scalable software. Having a team from Amazon saying “micro-services didn’t work; we went back to a monolith and it was more scalable and cheaper to run” is, frankly, a bit like the Pope renouncing his Catholic faith.
I didn’t say anything at the time as doing so seemed like jumping on the fad wagon along with everyone else, but I have to agree with this article that this following along with the crowd is quite pervasive in the circuits I travel in. I did witness the tail end of the XML fad when I first started working. My first job had all the good stuff: XML for data and configuration, XSLT to render HTML and to ingest HL71, XForms for customisable forms. We may have used XSD somewhere as well. Good thing we stopped short of SOAP.
The whole feeling that XML was the answer to any problem was quite pervasive, and with only a few evangelists, it was enough to drive the team in a particular direction. And I wish I could say that I was above it all, but that would be a lie. I drank the cool-aid like many others about the virtues of XML.
But here lies the seductive thing about these technology fads: they’re not without their merits. There were cases where XML was the answer, just like there are cases where micro-services are. The trap is assuming that just because it worked before, it would work again, 100% of the time in fact, even if the problem is different. After all, Amazon or whatever is using it, and they’re successful. And you do want to see this project succeed, right? Especially when we’re pouring all this money into it and your job is on the line, hmm?
Thus, teams are using micro-services, Kubernetes, 50 different middleware and sidecar containers, and pages and pages of configuration to build a service where the total amount of data can be loaded into an SQLite3 database2. And so it goes.
So we’ll see what would come of it all. I hope there is a move away from micro-services back to simpler forms of software designs; one where the architecture can fit entirely in one’s head. Of course, just as this article says, they’ll probably be an overcorrection, and a whole set of new problems arise when micro-services are ditched in favour of monoliths. I only hope that, should teams decide to do this, they do so with both eyes open and avoid the pitfalls these fads can lay for them.
A lawsuit, the last refuge of a scoundrel.
(With apologies to the Simpsons).
P.S. Like the new design of Birchtree.
