Firefox, Linux, Open Access and More
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Addons Blog: Developer Spotlight: YouTube Search Fixer
Like a lot of us during the pandemic lockdown, Shubham Bose found himself consuming more YouTube content than ever before. That’s when he started to notice all the unwanted oddities appearing in his YouTube search results — irrelevant suggested videos, shorts, playlists, etc. Shubham wanted a cleaner, more focused search experience, so he decided to do something about it. He built YouTube Search Fixer. The extension streamlines YouTube search results in a slew of customizable ways, like removing “For you,” “People also search for,” “Related to your search,” and so on. You can also remove entire types of content like shorts, live streams, auto-generated mixes, and more.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Atlantic ☛ The Radio Squirrels of Point Reyes
Nestled within the Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco, KPH Maritime Radio is the last operational Morse-code radio station in North America. The station—which consists of two buildings some 25 miles apart—once watched over the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Both KPH sites shut down in 1997, but a few years later, a couple of radio enthusiasts brought them back to life. The crew has gotten slightly larger over the years. Its members call themselves the “radio squirrels.” Every Saturday, they beep out maritime news and weather reports, and receive any stray messages. Much of their communication is with the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a World War II–era ship permanently parked at a San Francisco pier.
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Programming/Development
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Pete Brown ☛ Companies are financially disincentivized from fixing their old broken tech crap.
Having worked in IT and application hosting for a few decades now, I am not at all surprised by these number. If anything, I’d be they are low, since most tech leaders tend to underestimate or deliberately downplay the amount of technical debt they are carrying.
Farther down, the article notes that reducing technical debt is challenging because companies “may be willing to spend on building new technical capabilities, but shy away from paying for work that doesn’t necessarily bring them anything new.” That is true but I think it misses a critical factor.
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Windows TCO
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NPR ☛ Health care company ties Russian-linked cybercriminals to prescriptions breach
UnitedHealth says that as of Monday it estimated that more than 90% of 70,000 pharmacies in the U.S. have had to change how they process electronic claims as a result of the outage.
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Open Access/Content
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ACM ☛ CACM Is Now Open Access – Communications of the ACM
More than six decades of CACM’s renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library.
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Education
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Stephen Smith ☛ Speaking at the Upcoming LinuxFest NorthWest
LinuxFest Northwest is finally getting up and running again at the Bellingham Technical College on April 26-28, 2024. The last in-person event was held in 2019 which I attended and greatly enjoyed. Then the pandemic hit. The 2020 LinuxFest was held virtually and I participated by submitting a video of my intended presentation. Last year they were going to restart the in-person conference, but due to emergency renovations at the Bellingham Technical College, they had to cancel the event. Hopefully the Technical College buildings are all good and the conference is able to run successfully,
Bellingham is a great location for this show as it is halfway between Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA, providing quite a large metropolitan area to draw attendees and presenters from.
I’ll be giving a presentation: An Introduction to the RISC-V Architecture at 11:00am on Saturday April 27 in room HC111.
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