Society
Note to self: Never give United Airlines any of my business.
Control, or lack thereof
Steve Wozniak sees trouble in the cloud (that makes two of us) and doesn’t think that the Internet should have gatekeepers or regulators.
This hacker news thread contains a quote which perfectly sums up one aspect of what I feel is wrong with SAAS: SAAS means you’re vulnerable to vendor change with every pageload.
Privacy
Sociability’s value comes from privacy An essay by Kyro Beshay, via Cory Doctorow.
It is a poor grade upon humanity that sites like this need even exist.
Olympics and corporate greed
The Olympic games this year really made capitalism show its ugliest sides:
Case in point: VISA. Did they really think that hassling non-VISA-card holders would make them any new friends?
Case in point: London Olympics committee. I am not completely unreasonable, I understand that if too many people set up their own wireless hot-spots in close proximity to the “sanctioned” hot-spots, and on the same frequencies, bad things will happen, but at the same time I can’t shake the feeling that they just wanted a monopoly on providing connectivity, and forcing people to pay through the nose for it.
Good intentions and the road to hell
I understand the benefit to first responders, if we allowed for a government-controlled “emergency switch” to open up wireless routers for mesh-use in disaster areas, many people on Twitter recommended the inhabitants of Oslo to do just that after the attack, but I see the very real potential for abuse from the same government and since they get to define what is or isn’t an emergency, and when things are in people’s and society’s best interests, I give this idea a “thumbs down”-grade.
Drawing the wrong lessons from horrific events
Abuse of power
Case in point: VISA
DHS issuing take-down notices No free speech for you!
Security
A tutorial about off-the-record messaging courtesy of monkeyiq
Albeit not being anywhere near ready for primetime, cryptosphere still looks like a really interesting project
I am unsure as to whether Burner, the service which provides temporary phone numbers, will have a net positive or negative impact on society at large (if it has any impact at all). The concept is cool, and perhaps can be useful in certain settings, while it could probably be abused in others.
And I feel much the same way about Deadman. It could probably be awesome for hiking trips and the likes, for when you really don’t want to be disturbed, but if something were to happen it would be nice if emergency services knew roughly where to look.
Schneier on Security: $200 for a Fake Security System And as one commenter said: It’s all fun and games until your cat dies of exhaustion.
Development
The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got, a rather refreshing thought, it probably would be good to make ourselves a little less dependent on tools and have that grey matter exercise some more.
A jQuery extension called labelfor to associate labels with form input elements.
I’ve written before about this game, but I keep thinking about it and always forgetting what it’s called, so just a reminder to myself.
More than that however, is that I’ve also started taking an interest in Ren’Py the framework on which don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story is built.
I think that could be used in a plethora of ways, both for entertainment, but also education, if not both at once.
The shell
A blog post about steps to take to improve the performance of shell scripts. Really nice.
SSH
SSH forced commands pretty useful stuff.
Sorting on multiple columns
One of the previous weeks I needed to sort a bunch of lines, but I had concluded that it would be way too much work to transpose the columns in the file in a way that sort would magically work.
Which meant I needed to dig into the flags sort support. I was fairly certain that what I wanted done could be done, I just had to find the way. man sort got old real quick, so I hit duckduckgo instead and found this post which gave me everything I needed, and in a nicely formatted way 
I can’t remember the actual data I needed sorting, but his example of sorting IP addresses was what helped me, specifically -k 2,2n -k4,4n (i.e. numeric sort by column 2 first, then by column 4)
Vim, autocmd and context-aware file headers
I don’t know when I picked it up, or from where (probably pesa’s Vim config, but for some time I’ve been using a filetype.vim file, in the root of my .vim directory, the contents of which is a bunch of lines, looking something like this:
au! BufRead,BufNewFile *.sh setfiletype sh au! BufNewFile *.sh so ~/.vim/templates/sh_header
And this works like a charm, every new script I start writing on will get a shebang automatically inserted at the beginning of the file.
I never thought about what else one could do with these autocommands though, until I stumbled over a reddit thread, which pointed me here.
If you look into step 2, you will see that the autocmds there does not only read a header into the new file, but also modifies dates etc.
That’s actually pretty sweet.
Data mirroring
Using duplicity as a stateful rsync
Git stuff
A whole bunch of (git) ignore-files for use in various projects
And uet another git feature I feel I really need to learn 
Misc
As this video will tell you it is pretty darn hard to understand the scales of stuff like planets. The video does however make a pretty good attempt at visualizing it.
In the past I have linked to a post which wasn’t all that impressed with the idea of hiding the concept of files from users, and here’s another post, this one not particularly impressed with hiding the concept of directories from the users.
For my part, I consider this to be pure idiocracy
Depending on how well executed it ends up being (in my case, light weight has precedence) reditr could be enormously useful.
I have been eyeing dwb as a potential firefox replacement. We’ll see what happens.
Syntactic parses text, and try to build an “understanding” about words, and how they fit together.
The Future is not Real-Time. Put that way, I too really hope it isn’t