We work on the Internet. As such, we are constantly consuming information. Believe me, there is a lot of it out there. Sometimes we even forget things unless we write them down. Our blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, php to comic books, music and everything else that we find interesting. Leave us a note when you drop by.
Contributed by Julian Moffatt over the course of April 16th…
Other than the Nashville Predators colours, this CSS framework does look good.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 13th…
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 12th…
Not only do many Android phone vendors fail to make patches available to their users, or delay their release for months; they sometimes also tell users their phone's firmware is fully up to date, even while they've secretly skipped patches.
Apple began the transition to 64-bit hardware and software technology for Mac over a decade ago and is working with developers to transition their apps to 64-bit. At our Worldwide Developers Conference in 2017, Apple informed developers that macOS High Sierra would be the last version of macOS to run 32-bit apps without compromise.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 10th…
The W3C has advanced Web Authentication (WebAuthn), a collaborative effort based on Web API specifications submitted by FIDO to the W3C, to the Candidate Recommendation (CR) stage. The CR is the product of the Web Authentication Working Group, which is comprised of representatives from over 30 member organizations. CR is a precursor to final approval of a web standard, and the W3C has invited online services and web app developers to implement WebAuthn.
Live blog by The Verge. Over the course of two days, Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying before Congress and facing difficult questions about how Facebook was used for election interference, the company’s data-sharing policies, and the continuing fallout around the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This first hearing takes place before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees.
Edited by Solana Larsen and written by Mozilla Foundation research fellows, the report is an evaluation of "what's helping and what's hurting the Internet," and it focuses on five broad areas of concern - personal privacy and security, decentralization, openness, "digital inclusion," and general Web literacy.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 9th…
"Today we’re shipping our first minor release, v4.1! This release comes later than expected and some of the fixes we intended, but there’s still a boatload of fixes, docs updates, build tool changes, and even a few small new features."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 5th…
Design, remix, and share your street. Add bike paths, widen sidewalks or traffic lanes, learn how all of this can impact your community.
You just type in an address, select a nuclear bomb size, and the map shows the radiuses of the resulting fireball, radiation, shockwave and heat, as well as estimated fatalities and injuries. Developed by The Outrider Foundation, and inspired by Nukemap.
This typeface communicates to both the sighted and blind people in the same space. Designed by Kosuke Takahashi, overlaying Braille onto the letters into one simple font. The aim is to use this universal typeset for Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics 2020 to create a universal space where anyone can access information.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of April 2nd…
Cloudflare, a company with a history of resisting surveillance and censorship orders has announced a new DNS service, hosted at the easy-to-remember address of 1.1.1.1, which accepts connections under the still-novel DNS-over-HTTPS protocol, and which has privacy designed in, with all logs written only to RAM (never to disk) and flushed every 24 hours.
Google Maps adopted "Where’s Waldo?" drawings and tagged them at real locations on Android, iOS and desktop. Users have to find Waldo, donned in his signature red-and-white striped shirt whilst waving amiably. The game will be made available through to 4 April.
The company says that new and anonymous users won’t be able to create links through the goo.gl console as of April 13th, but existing users will be able to use it for another year, after which it will be discontinued completely.
macOS 10.13.4 introduces official support for external graphics processors on Thunderbolt 3 Macs. Alongside the release, Apple has published a detailed support document that outlines how eGPU support works and provides graphic card and chassis recommendations for use with your Mac.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 27th…
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 26th…
Microsoft hasn’t included iOS 11 split screen support, so you can’t run the browser alongside another app. Passwords will roam across Edge on Windows 10 to iPad and Android tablets, and the reading list and reading view features are both supported too.
Google is really going with the contradictory name of "Chromebook tablets" for these devices. Notebooks (and Chromebooks) get the "book" name from the fact that they have hinges that allow them to open and close like a book. When you take the hinge away and make a tablet, it's not really a "book" form factor anymore.
Dropbox ended the day of trading, under the ticker symbol “DBX,” with a market valuation of around $10 billion.
Researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications.
Dries Depoorter & David Surprenant's "Die With Me" is a chat app available for iOS and Android, but only if your device has less than 5% of its battery left.
Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of March 22nd…
The world so badly needs more people that try and be a little bit like Mr. Rogers. If you don’t know who he is, you need to spend a week watching his show wherever you can find it. If you do know who he is, you should definitely try and find this movie in theatres.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 21st…
There ought to be a 'Helvetica' of esoteric and occult symbols. Standardized, simple, beautiful - and vectorized. So Avana Vana went ahead an a set... and it looks brilliant!
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 20th…
This song generates a musical sequence using EEG brain wave data of an anonymous female pediatric patient with epilepsy. The song examines the periods before, during, and after a seizure. The goal is to give the listener an empathetic and intuitive understanding of the brain's neural activity during a seizure.
The world has a new record holder for the largest SSD, and it comes in at 100TB. The Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 is a new, massive drive that is currently being tested with select customers and will be available to purchase this summer.
XOXO is the much-loved culture and tech conference in Portland, organized by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan. After skipping 2017 with the chance it might never return, the conference is back in full swing for a September 6-9 event!
The Mozilla Foundation released a new version of Firefox this week—release number 59. It treads further down the performance improvement path that November's Quantum release began, but its most interesting feature is a quality-of-life one: Firefox 59 users can prevent some websites from popping up requests to send notifications to your device or from requesting to use your camera unexpectedly.
“Wikipedia’s content is also freely licensed for reuse by anyone, and that’s part of our mission: that every single person can share in free knowledge,” Wikimedia says. “We want people all over the world to use, share, add to, and remix Wikipedia... At the same time, we encourage companies who use Wikimedia’s content to give back in the spirit of sustainability.”
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 16th…
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 15th…
An August 2015 exposé by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for “$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.”
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 14th…
Stephen Hawking, physicist and author of "A Brief History of Time" has died at his home in Cambridge, at the age of 76. His children said, "We will miss him for ever".
Google is banning ads related to cryptocurrency from its vast advertising network, effective in June. Cryptocurrency markets reacted negatively to the news. The price of bitcoin is down about 6 percent since the Wall Street Journal first reported the new policy early Wednesday morning. Other major currencies, including Ethereum and Litecoin, are also down modestly.
"Using the Creative Commons zero license (CC0), the third most visited museum in the world has essentially turned over a trove of high resolution images to any individual or business who wish to use, copy, or modify them for their projects—with no conditions attached."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 13th…
"Wildcard certificates are only available via ACMEv2. In order to use ACMEv2 for wildcard or non-wildcard certificates you’ll need a client that has been updated to support ACMEv2913. It is our intent to transition all clients and subscribers to ACMEv2, though we have not set an end-of-life date for our ACMEv1 API yet."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 8th…
Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen S. Poloz today unveiled the new $10 bank note featuring Viola Desmond during a ceremony at the Halifax Central Library.
Along with going open source, Ghostery is also announcing two new, simpler ways it plans to make money. The first part of the new business model will be Ghostery Insights, a paid, premium product designed for academics, journalists, researchers, and anyone else curious about the webpage and tracker ecosystem online. The second part will be Ghostery Rewards, a kind of affiliate marketing system that users can opt into.
Starting today, artists can post videos, GIFs, images and good old-fashioned text to a prominent space inside their search results' "Knowledge Panel," the blocked-off area containing photos, a bio and links to areas like YouTube and Spotify. Artists can control the customized content on a dedicated site for verified people, places and things. Fans will be able to tell if the updates are legit by the blue checkmark next to the artist's name.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 7th…
Highlights include enhancements to the notification panel, indoor positioning, and support for iPhone X-style notches. This developer preview only works on the Pixel 1, Pixel 1 XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL.
A game where you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP. Your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users.
Google and Disney announced today that all U.S. Disney theme parks and resorts are on Google Street View. They feature 360-degree panoramic views of attractions from Disneyland to the ESPN Complex to the water parks.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 6th…
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 5th…
"It’s a kind of middle ground for Linux handhelds. After all, the concept of Linux handhelds preceded the advent of smartphones and since then there is probably less of a need for the general public - iOS and Android already seem to answer the needs of most users so far. In fact, it has clearly become a niche market, with only smaller companies operating in it. But the good news is, there are several efforts underway to get there, in several directions."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 2nd…
Thumbor is a smart imaging service. It enables on-demand crop, resizing and flipping of images. It features a very smart detection of important points in the image for better cropping and resizing, using state-of-the-art face and feature detection algorithms (more on that in Detection Algorithms).
Simulating different HTTP response codes is hard. This service mocks HTTP status codes for you, so you can build your applications faster. Send a request (GET, POST, PUT or DELETE) to our their mocked APIs to receive the status code that you need.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of March 1st…
The Light Phone 2 is a simple, 4G LTE phone with a beautiful black & white matte E-ink display. It brings a few essential tools, like messaging and an alarm clock, so it's even easier to ditch your smartphone more often, or for good. Currently on IndieGoGo.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 28th…
Flutter is an open source mobile UI framework that allows developers to make super-fast, cross-platform mobile apps. The beta also works with a pre-release of Dart 2, with improved support for declaring UI in code with minimal language ceremony.
According to a Reuters report, the online retailer agreed to buy Ring, maker of connected video doorbells and smart home security cameras, for reportedly more than $1 billion. Amazon's acquisition of Ring comes a few months after the company purchased Blink, a maker of smart home security cameras, for a reported $90 million.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 26th…
TappCar, an Edmonton-based ride-sharing company similar to Uber and Lyft, announced today it had secured MPI coverage for its drivers and would begin operations in Winnipeg this Friday (March 2nd).
Contributed by Max Chiriac over the course of February 23rd…
Subway MyWay Rewards will offer four tokens for every dollar spent and once 200 tokens have been reached ($50 worth of spending), a $2.00 reward will be granted. So that works out a $2 discount on $50 spent, or 4% off.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 22nd…
"The core technology behind Swype will continue to be utilized and improved upon across other Nuance offerings - and integrated into our broader AI-powered solutions - most notably in Android-based keyboard solutions for our automotive customers," the company said.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 20th…
On the inside, the drive has nine flash controllers driving 32 1TB packages of NAND flash, with each package containing 16 layers of 512Gb 3-bit-per-cell V-NAND. There's also 40GB of DDR4 RAM. The RAM is unusual, too; the 8Gb chips are built using Through Silicon Vias (TSVs), enabling them to be stacked vertically. They're assembled into 10 packages each of 4GB.
"The app, which begins rolling out today, is just one part of everything we’ve got planned. We’re currently working on bringing Google Pay to all Google products, so whether you’re shopping on Chrome or with your Assistant, you’ll have a consistent checkout experience using the cards saved to your Google Account. We’re also working with partners online and in stores, so you’ll see Google Pay on sites, in apps, and at your favorite places around the world."
Apple has released software updates for all four of its consumer operating systems to tackle an issue that allowed usage of the Indian Telugu character to cause those devices to crash.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 16th…
"For those asking, yes, these changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week. They are designed to strike a balance between serving user needs and publisher concerns, both stakeholders we value."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 15th…
"We've previously discussed some of the details surrounding how Chrome protects users from intrusive ads, but as we approach the launch date of February 15, we wanted to go under the hood and discuss how this feature works in more detail."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 12th…
The sketchy investment platform, which promised to earn backers’ money with its proprietary trading algorithm, has abruptly gone dark after raising $4.5 million in a series of initial coin offerings (ICO). The company has since also pulled its website and deleted its social media fingerprint, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Telegram accounts.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 9th…
Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as "not secure"
"Old source code from three years ago appears to have been leaked, but by design the security of our products doesn't depend on the secrecy of our source code. There are many layers of hardware and software protections built into our products, and we always encourage customers to update to the newest software releases to benefit from the latest protections."
Winnipeggers now have access to thousands of classic movies, documentaries and independent films for free with their library card. On Friday, the Winnipeg Public Library became the latest Canadian library system to partner with the online streaming service Kanopy.
"The danger in playing a game is not the game itself, but the desire it may cause - since in Buddhist thought, desire is the cause of suffering. 'If you lose or win, you want to do it again and again. You’re always thinking about the game. If you cling to that mindset, it causes mental suffering or physical suffering.'"
Contributed by Wil Alambre and Julian Moffatt over the course of February 8th…
The Unicode Consortium announced today the approved Emoji 11.0 list for 2018.
Lovely write up with sample code. Nice.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 7th…
Contributed by Max Chiriac and Wil Alambre over the course of February 6th…
"The internet's most popular icon toolkit has been redesigned and built from scratch. On top of this, features like icon font ligatures, an SVG framework, official NPM packages for popular frontend libraries like React, and access to a new CDN."
According to leaked documents provided to Microsoft's partners, with version 1803, Windows 10 S will be a mode of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Education, and Windows 10 Pro, rather than a distinct version. Switching Windows 10 Home S and Windows 10 Education S to regular Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Education will be free; switching from Pro S to Pro will continue to cost $49.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 5th…
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 2nd…
“Manitobans love the great outdoors and our parks are just as beautiful at this time of year as they are in the warmer months,” Sustainable Development Minister Rochelle Squires said. “We encourage everyone to take advantage of the activities and the scenery our parks have to offer.”
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of February 1st…
Defer loading certain below the fold third-party iframes and below-the-fold images on the page until the user scrolls near them. Android only, at least initially. LazyLoad as a feature doesn't need to be Android specific, but the plan is to start with Android since the benefits of LazyLoad will likely have the most impact on Android, and this will also help minimize any negative impact to user experience. If LazyLoad is successful on Android, then desktop platforms will be considered as well.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 30th…
A vulnerability in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN functionality of the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reload of the affected system or to remotely execute code.
"Unfortunately for unsuspecting users and owners of the infected websites, the keylogger behaves the same way as in previous campaigns," Sucuri researcher Denis Sinegubko wrote in a blog post. "The script sends data entered on every website form (including the login form) to the hackers via the WebSocket protocol."
Contributed by Wil Alambre and Max Chiriac over the course of January 29th…
Time crystals, a theoretical phase of matter proposed in 2012, can now be reliably created and measured, thanks to researchers at UC Berkeley. “This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter,” Yao said. “For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter.”
With icongram you can easily use SVG icons from popular icon sets on the fly.
Contributed by Max Chiriac over the course of January 26th…
A constantly updated collection of beautiful svg images that you can use completely free and without attribution.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 25th…
I'm a big fan of Alex Norris's "webcomicname", and now you can make your own by randomly mixing up panels, thanks to this Glitch web app.
This analytics platform will be powered by the massive amount of computing power and storage in Alphabet's server infrastructure. Gillett says this will give Chronicle two big advantages: first, Gillett says, Chronicle "should be able to help teams search and retrieve useful information and run analysis in minutes, rather than the hours or days it currently takes." Second, tons and tons of cheap Google storage will help Chronicle customers "see patterns that emerge from multiple data sources and over years."
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 24th…
As of January 2018, all new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must be 64-bit, and all apps and app updates submitted must be 64-bit by June of 2018. The next version of macOS after High Sierra will include "aggressive" warnings about 32-bit apps before they are phased out entirely.
Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of January 23rd…
Holy cow there are a lot of them.
CSS-Tricks with a nifty little example of using clipping paths create various effects within the browser. Support is limited at present, but keep an eye on this for the future.
A very nice visual guide to CSS.
"Yes, you read that right. Item Numbers. This is some next-level Field Notes nerdery you’re about to witness. All in good fun, of course."
Contributed by Julian Moffatt and Wil Alambre over the course of January 22nd…
CKEditor has been working on a collaborative editing environment. They released some more details and documentation. Go check it out.
A free web game, made in Twine by sci-fi writer John Ayliff, where you're an AI searching for a new planet for the dying human race.
Facebook announces that it has invented a new unit of time. A flick (frame-tick) is a very small unit of time. It is 1/705600000 of a second, exactly. Slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 19th…
Amazon reviewed 238 proposals from across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to host HQ2, the company’s second headquarters in North America. Today, Amazon announced it has chosen the 20 metropolitan areas to move to the next phase of the process. Spoilers: Winnipeg is not on the list.
"The challenge frequently faced is that when the time comes to share recorded content with the world, success is in the hands of algorithms," Twitch's press release stated. "Video Producer gives creators more options, more control, and more opportunities to find viewers, grow an audience, and make a living doing what they love."
"Our first Cloud AutoML release will be Cloud AutoML Vision, a service that makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition. Its drag-and-drop interface lets you easily upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud. Early results using Cloud AutoML Vision to classify popular public datasets like ImageNet and CIFAR have shown more accurate results with fewer misclassifications than generic ML APIs."
Contributed by Wil Alambre and Julian Moffatt over the course of January 17th…
As described. This is pretty awesome!
Epic Mountain is a music and sound design company based in Munich that does all of the music for Kurzgesagt episodes. They’ve put four volumes of their Kurzgesagt music on Spotify, iTunes, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp.
Meant for music creators, Sounds.com is a way to access, download, and build personal libraries of royalty-free samples, loops, and sound packs for use in personal or commercial work.
"Following initial research and investigation, our engineering team is confident that they've determined one of the key origins of the issue. From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some of the recent versions of Android OS and Google Apps."
In posts to its Advertiser and Creator blogs, YouTube details how it's changing the threshold for monetization through its YouTube Partner Program (YPP), from 10,000 lifetime views to 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months.
This takes me back to my youth, which I gladly spent typing away in front of the IBM PC XT.
300 years old and we have broken through most of this wish list thanks to science.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 12th…
Today, researchers at F-Secure have revealed another weakness in Intel's management firmware that could allow an attacker with brief physical access to PCs to gain persistent remote access to the system, thanks to weak security in Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) firmware - remote "out of band" device management technology installed on 100 million systems over the last decade, according to Intel.
“By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”
“Based on the deficiencies in the MPI proposed product versus the type of insurance that is available to ridesharing companies in cities across North America, Uber will, unfortunately, be unable to consider expansion of services to Winnipeg on March 01, 2018,” the company said in its statement.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 11th…
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 8th…
There's also a Safari 11.0.2 update available for macOS Sierra 10.12.6 and OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 that is designed to mitigate the effects of the Spectre vulnerability. Customers running macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan should download the new version of Safari to make sure their machines are protected.
Contributed by Wil Alambre over the course of January 4th…
The researchers who discovered the vulnerabilities, dubbed "Meltdown" and "Spectre," said that "almost every system," since 1995, including computers and phones, is affected by the bug. The researchers verified their findings on Intel chips dating back to 2011, and released their own proof-of-concept code to allow users to test their machines.
According to developer Alex Ionescu, Apple introduced a fix in macOS 10.13.2, with additional tweaks set to be introduced in macOS 10.13.3, currently in beta testing. AppleInsider also says that it has heard from "multiple sources within Apple" that updates made in macOS 10.13.2 have mitigated "most" security concerns associated with the KPTI vulnerability.
On Friday, Wixen Music Publishing filed a lawsuit in California federal court that alleges that Spotify is using Petty's "Free Fallin'," the Doors' "Light My Fire" and tens of thousands of other songs without a license and compensation. The plaintiff is seeking a damages award worth at least $1.6 billion plus injunctive relief.
When your brand is built on boundary-pushing stunts and a rapid (even daily) production cycle with little oversight, it’s easy for good judgment to fall by the wayside. The controversy has renewed questions about YouTube’s role in addressing the abusive and inappropriate content that often proliferates on its platform, and particularly how it responds when its most famous stars violate its stated standards.
"After we recently updated the rules for our built-in ad blocker mechanism, we eliminated cryptocurrency mining scripts that overuse your device’s computing ability. Simply enable Opera’s ad blocker to prevent cryptocurrency mining sites from doing their dirty work on your computer. You can find and change NoCoin in Settings (Preferences on macOS) > Basic > Block ads and under the Recommended lists of ad filters."
While Google championed web standards that worked across many different browsers back in the early days of Chrome, more recently its own services often ignore standards and force people to use Chrome.
