So I got a new iPhone for my wife, and I wanted to put Skype on it. During the setup, it asked me for access to the microphone, the camera and contacts. The first two were obviously needed, but I didn’t think it would be necessary to give access to the contacts. So once I was able to log her in, I figured all was well.
Except it wasn’t. She wasn’t able to make any calls, either to regular numbers or other Skype accounts.
The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars I have a read a few “Young Adult” books in the past couple of years, and I’m not sure really what defines that category. Typically the characters are younger, presumably to be more relatable. They tend to be less dark, less violent, but I guess that wouldn’t necessarily always be the case.
Just what I need leading up to Christmas, typically one of the more stressful times of the year: a month long programming challenge.
As the name suggests Advent of Code is a countdown to Christmas with new coding challenges each day. From what I’ve seen, the challenges are reimiscent of the ones I saw competing in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Although you aren’t as restricted in terms of language, reference material, etc.
Critical Failures by Robert Bevan
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars This book really causes mixed emotions. Logically I can tell it is crude and rough and a bit forced, but damn if I didn’t enjoy it anyway. I listened to this as an audiobook, and I found myself laughing out loud on numerous occasions. Even when walking in the street, so in these cases I was laughing in spite of myself.
As I mentioned in my last post, I like to read escapist fiction. When you go through books at the rate that I do, it is always good to be able to discover new books reliably. One way to do this is from personal recommendations by people with a similar taste in books.
I use Goodreads to track my books, which helps considerably. They also attempt to provide recommendations for new books as well.
I don’t write about it much, but I am a relatively prolific reader. My usual genres are in the mystery, thriller, techno-thriller range. However, I also dabble in science fiction and fantasy from time to time.
Full disclosure: more often than not, I listen to my books, not reading them in the strictest sense. That is really the only way I can manage to consume so many books while raising two little boys.
You may have noticed that I didn’t use the “Fun Links [Date]” title for this post. While I’m a fan of routine, I realized that both the fun links category and the date were part of the metadata of the entry. Not creating a relevant title was me being lazy.
Creating a title in the past either would have been a matter of repeating the names of the links in a list, or extracting a common theme.
It has been just one day shy of a year since I last posted. In that time I had grand plans of creating an automated system where I would capture fun links and save them somewhere and automatically generate the posts and emails to send out each week. Well, it turns out I just didn’t have the free time or energy to really get that sorted out.
That said, I have been using Pinboard to save any links I think are worth talking about, so at least I have a decent backlog to work with.
Today all of my links come from one company, which is Zeit. They build software to help developers and designers, with a mission of making cloud computing as easy and accessible as mobile computing.
They have a number of other open source projects and services other than the ones I mention here, so I would recommend checking them out at https://zeit.co
pkg
https://github.com/zeit/pkg
If you have ever wanted to distribute your Node.
ECMAScript modules in browsers
https://jakearchibald.com/2017/es-modules-in-browsers/
This is something that a lot of web developers have been waiting for since the concept of the standardized ES6 modules first appeared. Up to this point, we’ve had to pre-compile our modules into scripts that the browser could load and understand. Now we are starting to see browser native support (behind flags in most cases) to load these types of modules. It will be a while before we can use them directly for day to day use, but it should be interesting in the long run.