📮 My inbox is filled with messages from various Democrats begging me to pay attention to what’s happening at the Democratic National Convention, and wanting me to donate now. At this point, the thing I want to donate to most is a fund to fight misinformation targeted at the legitimacy of voting by mail. If enough people distrust the results, it won’t matter if fraud was actually committed.
🕵️♀️ David Shayer’s story about helping some government contractors with a top secret iPod is incredible. If his guess is right and it was for undercover radiation monitoring, that’s super cool. Certainly, the way that Apple organizes their teams lends itself to this kind of stealthy activity. (via Daring Fireball)
☕️ I’m going to offend some of my best friends by saying this, but I came across the new Starbucks by Nespresso pods here in Greece and — I gotta say, I really like them. Nothing beats a great barista with a good machine and fresh beans, of course, and let’s also not compare with well executed pour over. But when you’re somewhere without a really great barista with a good machine and fresh beans, this works well.
🔎 A few weeks ago, I started daily testing all the links on my site with the Markdown link check GitHub action to ensure that all the links that this site points too are still valid. If they aren’t, I can edit or remove content that’s no longer up-to-date. It’s a nice tool, but I think it needs some sort of retry ability. A few times a week, I see one link or another go unreachable:
FILE: content/posts/2020/06/22.md
[✖] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-latest-german-reproduction-rate-spikes-60-in-a-day/a-53886880 -> Status: 0 Error: ESOCKETTIMEDOUT
at ClientRequest.<anonymous> (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/markdown-link-check/node_modules/request/request.js:816:19)
at Object.onceWrapper (events.js:420:28)
at ClientRequest.emit (events.js:314:20)
at TLSSocket.emitRequestTimeout (_http_client.js:769:9)
at Object.onceWrapper (events.js:420:28)
at TLSSocket.emit (events.js:326:22)
at TLSSocket.Socket._onTimeout (net.js:483:8)
at listOnTimeout (internal/timers.js:551:17)
at processTimers (internal/timers.js:494:7) {
code: 'ESOCKETTIMEDOUT',
connect: false
}
Regardless, it’s a nice tool and a useful addition to the web builder’s toolkit.
🦠 No matter how well you isolate, news about COVID-19 can find you. Today, I was relaxing on our patio when an emergency notification beeped loudly on my iPhone. It was a notice from the Greek civil protection agency saying that the case load in the local area is on the rise. Great.
😷 We’ve got angry anti-maskers are here as well. A friend of the family came by unannounced. We were happy to see them, and spend time outside on the patio, appropriately distanced, and masked up. As soon as we mentioned masks, however, they got very angry and offended, then got back in their car and drove off in a huff.
🤷♂️ If somebody thinks I’m the asshole for wanting to stick to the fundamentals that we know have an effect: distance, masks, washing hands (using alcohol when soap and water aren’t around), and testing — I’m OK with that.