lost & found, part 1

Published on 4 Aug 2018

Hello. This is going to be (hopefully) the first iteration of my Lost & Found entry on Caspershire Meta. I always bump into interesting materials on the internet and this is an attempt to document those stuff. Materials that I put here are usually something like cool application or good YouTube videos, good discussion on Reddit and Hnews, etc. For long-form article, I already have a private Git repo (sorry guys).

Let’s begin the first episode.

Zulip Chat, an interesting alternative to Slack. It is completely open source with script for deployment (spoiler: not running Docker, so I was a little bummed). Its killer feature over Slack is how it streams chat. Like Slack, it can have channels for separate discussion. On top of that, each channel can have topics, which further makes organization easier. I might try this at some point in the future.

gifski, converts video frames into animation. Its killer feature is its ability to produce GIF with thousands of colors and looks less blocky. You need FFmpeg to extract video frames first, then gifski can take those video frames to process into GIF.

terminalizer, a CLI app to record your teminal session and render it as GIF. With a little over 4k stars on GitHub as of writing, this has to be good. Terminalizer is available as an NPM package.

WireGuard’s inclusion into the Linux kernel. I have been following news about WireGuard and its frequency being on the HN front-page is delightening. Here we have a brief discussion on how a software can be incorporated into the Linux kernel, a brief discussion about kernel space vs. user space implementation, etc. From this thread, I also learned that OpenVPN is hugely inefficient with a user reporting that it drains battery so fast. As of now, only 2 companies offer VPN with WireGuard: Mullvad and Azire.

Learn the history of internet. Recently I wrote on AmanzMY in Bahasa about the history of P2P technology dating back to the Usenet era. This thread on HNews was timely and maybe I could use all the mentioned sources to write about cool history in technology.

SSD life expectancy by ExplainingComputer. I am planning to write about data storage technology on AmanzMY, starting from the humble beginning of magnetic tape, the HDD, then to SSD. It would be a beast. In this video, I learned about P/E (program/erase) cycle in relation to device lifespan and also the differences between SLC, MLC, and TLC SSD. Fun video to watch!

Joseph Goldberger and his discovery on the deficiency of vitamin B niacin and essential amino acid tryptophan. The name of this disease is pellagra and it is frequently known as the disease of the poor due to diet. The tryptophan deficiency really tells you one thing: that the patient did not eat sufficient amount of meat (fish, chicken, beef, etc).

1854 Broad Street Cholera Outbreak. 616 people were killed during this outbreak. Fun fact: the outbreak was studied by Dr. John Snow (insert GoT reference here). People back then believed that diseases caused by miasma that spread through air, but he said “nawh, must be water”. He later mapped water pumps and proved the correlation between contaminated water sources and outbreak hotspots. There is a book written on this topic: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.

Die shrink a few days ago I tweeted that I was surprised and impressed that my Asus Zenbook produced a lot less heat when running somewhat similar tasks compared to my aging MacBook Pro. A friend replied by saying “as the die (electric board/circuitry) is being shrunk, power consumption becomes more efficient with a loss less power draw, hence cooler temperature”. Technology is amazing!

That is all for now. Thanks for coming here!