I learned about a python library named Arrow that makes time stamp handling better
I stumbled on a new web app called Utopia that seems a lot like a modern DreamWeaver
I read “Modern Python Developers Toolkit and found a lovely page of VSCode plugins
I’m all in with the new Loki series from Disney and CNet had a good explainer for The Variant
I sure hope FLoC is a flop but I feel weird rooting for Amazon
There are some delightful sites out there on the internet. Here’s a few that I’m enjoying. I only had one criteria for this list: the sites must support RSS. Remember RSS? It’s like Twitter without the buttholes.
Waxy.org is a weird and wonderful collection of things from Andy Baio.
Waxy.org turned me on to the new version of StumbleUpon and I can’t stop clicking. I love their rules for submitting new links and the results are proof that there’s still really neat and weird things happening on the internet.
I still prefer the variety of articles I get from RSS feeds over any social media based link aggregator. If you’re getting tired of seeing the same old stuff, here are some suggestions.
First off, subscribe to the Pinboard popular feed. It tends to be pretty nerdy and occasionally political but it’s good at scooping up a good mix of stuff along with the things likely being beaten to death on Twitter.
This new Adobe suite seems like a pretty great deal, considering that it includes 1 TB of storage with sync. For “a limited time” the photography bundle plus storage is $15 per month. Compare that with Apple’s iCloud storage options which is $10 per month for 2 TB. I know it’s not a direct comparison and that iCloud comes with apps too but I think Apple’s pricing is still too high for what you get.
With the latest Nerds on Draft Jeff and I talk about our hobbies and somehow dig into the Daniel Suarez book Change Agent.
This example from Dr. Drang is pretty creative. It uses Python’s Itertools to solve a boring math problem in an interesting way.
From Dave Winer at Scripting News:
Seeding users with test units of products. Or taking 100 bloggers from some random city to a new movie a week before it comes out and letting them write about it.
I think that would make Tumblr a news outlet or at least a review site. Maybe that would work. What do I know. But I don’t think the problem is that we have too few armatures publishing opinions.
Old but new to me, this Apple support page is a nice overview of all the continuity services on iOS and Mac. This includes Handoff, Universal Clipboard, Instant Hotspot, Auot Unlock, Calls and SMS notifications.
From Bloomberg
Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail, as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user’s email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube. Ads based on scanned email messages drew lawsuits and some of the most strident criticism the company faced in its early years, but offered marketers a much more targeted way to reach consumers.
I’m increasingly fascinated by machine learning. Maybe because it feels like there’s more opportunity for machines to learn than for us meat bags. This Github list was really interesting.
Gated Conditional Pixel Convolutional Neural Network using TensorFlow (Demo) Value Iteration Networks using TensorFlow — Best Paper Award NIPS ‘16 (Demo) Flappy Bird using Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep Q-learning) (Demo) LSTM Music Generation with Google Magenta Basic RNN (Demo) Live Captioning using Speech APIs on iOS (Demo) Spotify Artist Search using Speech APIs on iOS (Demo) Convolutional Neural Network using TensorFlow on iOS (Demo) MNIST (of course) on iOS (Demo) MobileNets on iOS (Demo) YOLO on iOS (Demo) Inception on iOS (Demo) Symbolic AI Speech Recognition with iOS 10 Speech APIs(Demo) Video Style Transfer using Torch 7 (Demo) Algorithmia API Photo Colorizer (Demo) Clarifai Information Retrieval for Videos on Android (Demo)
