Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Recent Links for 11/29

I’m trying out this “recent links” series where I highlight some stuff I’ve bookmarked. I used to just share them via Pocket, which get fed into the links list on this blog, but the problem with that approach was that I don’t get to comment on each link about why I shared or bookmarked it. Writing them into a blog post gives me a chance to highlight them too. I’ve seen some other blogs where they have something like a weekly list of recent links, let’s see if that works out for me.

  • Firefox announced a replay feature that will allow the webdev to trace the things that are happening on a given web page. This has the potential to be super useful, but for now it looks like it’s only available for MacOS. I don’t have anything that needs tuning at the moment anyway, but it’s something to keep in mind.
  • I found out there was a Micropub validator online, which would be super helpful if and when I decide to implement micropub myself
  • I came upon this list of famous books that are freely available online (legally). A lot of classics in this list. I’ve only read around 5 of these (some fractional value may be due to me not being sure if I’ve read all of Aesop’s fables), so might be a good idea to add to the reading list later.
  • I’ve soured on Quora recently, and now Hacker News has confirmed that they hate it too. Quora used to be really good though. Reading this discussion reminded me that they released a “best of quora” ebook a few years back which I recall as being a pretty good read, but it’s no longer available on their site. I was able to track down a copy from this blog post. He has the files hosted on OneDrive, which I feel has a non-trivial chance of being purged, so I thought I’d also mirror the HTML version here.
  • I’ve written my fair share of web scrapers for various reasons (people need to build more APIs), mostly using Python and BeautifulSoup. I found out recently that there’s a Python library dedicated to writing scrapers (because of course there is). I’ll probably try this out the next time I have the need.
  • I’ve been following Kicks Condor’s blog for a while, especially after getting into this Indieweb stuff. He has a page dedicated to highlighting interesting websites he’s found. Adding this to the list of things to browse in the future. (Ok, I was being metaphorical, but you know what, I’m going to make that list.)
  • Sadness swept across the gaming community when Nintendo shut down the beloved MiiVerse following the discontinuing of the WiiU, but I found out recently that there was an archive of the MiiVerse created and it’s accessible online! Here’s the archive of my own Miiverse posts and my profile page. Since I want to own my content, one of these days I’m going to get around to archiving these posts back into this site. (Even though a fair number of these are just my niece playing with in-game stamps.)
  • I enjoyed this post: You flow downhill (and you can sculpt the hill)
  • Someone shared this TTRPG adventure a while back (I forgot to track who). I don’t really play much TTRPGs but I like the module’s description and maybe it’s something that can be explored in the future.

That’s all for today.

Director’s cut: Some meta notes about this “recent links” effort. The downside here is that I can’t tag individual links by topic. An alternative to consider would be just making shared links as normal notes (but my style of linking doesn’t translate well when syndicated to Twitter and the like). Well, we’ll keep going with this for a bit and see how it works out.

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