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A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across.

One book I read this week that I really want to recommend is Kallocain by Karin Boye. Published in 1940 it describes a totalitarian World in which a chemist invents a drug that if injected to a person causes this person to reveal all thoughts and emotions.

While on the subject of privacy, I highly recommend the paper on The Risks of Client-Side Scanning by a group of well-known cryptographers (basically the who is who of the crypto scene). Furthermore I recommend the site of Patrick Breyer on messaging and chat control. I’m still baffled how the war on privacy has accompanied me throughout the whole span of my professional life so far.

With the rising numbers of COVID-19 infections it might be time to stockpile material to watch at home instead of going out to clubs. For the nerds among us who love to binge-watch conference material: The recordings from the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021 are available. Last week was also the Open Source Firmware Foundation Mini Summit in San Jose. Aside from a really good talk by Bryan Cantrill on The coming Firmware Revolution there is also a complete youtube playlist

Other noteworthy items include:

• Signing arbitary data with SSH keys
• Scaleway launched serverless containers - While I don’t like the whole ‘serverless’ naming scheme, I must say: they pretty much nailed it with the name and their concept. For the majority of customers kubernetes is way too big and they just need an awesome, simple way of running containers.
• Review of BYTE in 1988 of A/UX 1.0 on a Macintosh II
• An ex-googler about a guide to dev tools when you’re not at google
• How and why we built Masked Email with JMAP – an open API standard - am sharing this less for the 1password aspect, but more for the JMAP part. I’ve been following JMAP a bit and do find it very interesting.
• RC3 Sticker Exchange 2021
• Sysadvent 2021 is looking for contributors
• Issue 4 of OpenBSD Webzine
• Another OpenBSD item: Wayland was imported into the ports tree: Wayland category

Workflow improvement for the week: I wasn’t aware that I can basically drag whatever I want into the Reminders app on macOS. This is especially useful with mails that contain items that I need for an item I work on. Example: I had a mail with return labels for stuff I had to ship. I dragged the mail onto Reminders.app and made an entry ‘ship stuff’. This item now contained a link to the mail with the pdfs. Really convenient.

Last, but not least: A non-technical item. This is an article about three people that elaborate why the lockdown in germany during COVID-19 wasn’t that bad and why it actually had good sides for them. Article is on german: Fuer mich war der Lockdown ein Segen