594 private links
I keep getting annoyed by Doodle. In this latest example, it proved impossible to change the shown "name" as guest user once my answer was submitted, despite it being possible to change everything else, or even decline. (I wanted to make use of the "name" field to include a single-word message to the organizer.) And when logged in the name field never even showed up during the answer flow.
Alternatives to Doodle
- https://crab.fit (it's FOSS, source code on Github)
- https://framadate.org/abc/en (FOSS, by the well-known French organization Framasoft)
- https://datumprikker.nl (not FOSS, but perhaps convenient since it offers Google and Apple apps). Don't forget to change to English in the menu.
Self-hostable alternatives
- https://github.com/lukevella/Rallly >2k stars, on v3.3.0, built on Next.js. Reddit thread.
- https://github.com/kellerben/dudle >300 stars, on v1.2, built on Ruby. Reddit thread.
- Nextcloud may have some doodle-like app (I haven't checked).
The de-facto industry standard chart from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory now published as an interactive web app.
Find a Fediverse server to sign up for, find one close to you!
A site that shows Fediverse servers status. Cool.
This unofficial guide to the Fediverse is also really good
https://fedi.tips
More good introductions to the Fediverse keep popping up:
Utility for converting cURL commands to code (Python, JavaScript, PHP, R, Go, C#, Ruby, Rust, Elixir, Java, MATLAB, Dart, CFML, Ansible URI, Strest or JSON).
Fun little map-based game.
How well do you know your area? Test your knowledge by locating streets on a map.
There's a forest of sites out there with the sole purpose of allowing you to test your microphone.
This is the only decent one, as far as I know.
By that I mean it does what it says, runs no ads, and handles your recording strictly client-side.
Annotate the web, with anyone, anywhere.
I have enabled the hypothes.is sidebar on my blog since its inception.
- Annotation is now a web standard via lobste.rs
- Using annotation as a blogger, video recording of talk by Tom Critchlow at "I Annotate 2019"
- How to subscribe to the Hypothesis public stream for an entire domain using RSS
- A coalition for scholarly annotation
- Viewing and exporting Hypothesis annotations
or more accurately, how to get around them.
12ft Ladder by Thomas Millar uses a very clever approach - pretend to be the Google crawler!
Does not work for every site (some sites are clearly more serious about locking away their content - one could ask why they even bother publishing on the web?) but works for many.
Only negative is that the code behind 12ft is not available. Which means that the service will only live for as long as the domain stays up, which by the way is hosted by Vercel. Also, any article URLs (along with other metadata such as your IP address) might be logged by the web service or their service providers.
By Han-Kwang Nienhuys, lagom.nl.
A recent report by Digital Lab highlights their security and data integrity practices, and also examines their ownership structures, clearly demonstrating that many VPN "brands" are owned by the same companies, many of whose owners or executives have known prior legal or moral problems.
Some VPN services are honest in their marketing, though. Still, many (including some of the more popular) employ dark patterns, e.g., making it unnecessarily hard to cancel subscriptions, or auto-renewing subscriptions, etc.
Read for yourself: "Security and Privacy of VPNs Running on Windows 10", by Digital Lab at Consumer Reports, which is an illuminating expose of 16 commercial VPN services.
Via kryptera.se, Swedish, who also graciously hosts the report (PDF, English).
Take care to define what you are trying to achieve before deciding to subscribe to a VPN. Do you primarily want to hide your web traffic from your ISP? A VPN can do that, but you are simply substituting your ISP for the ISP of the VPN provider.
But if all you want is to change the apparent geographic location of your traffic, then a VPN works fine. But you could just as easily make do with a proxy server.
PS. Do you have an extra computer or a Raspberry Pi lying around? Well, then you could build your own virtual private network. This is particularly useful when travelling abroad or anytime you have to use someone else's network.
To Beautify, Validate, Minify, Analyse, Convert JSON, XML, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Excel
For example, to render HTML directly.
Via "How to check a LinkedIn profile" by Lazybear.
- https://dns-lookup.jvns.ca/.
- https://zone.vision (queries the authoritative nameservers for a domain directly)
- https://mxtoolbox.com (oriented towards MX/SPF queries)
- https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/#A/
Via Julia Evans.
The NIST Uncertainty Machine is a web-based software application produced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to evaluate the measurement uncertainty associated with a scalar or vectorial output quantity that is a known and explicit function of a set of scalar input quantities for which estimates and evaluations of measurement uncertainty are available.
Search by chemical name or CAS registry number.
By CAS, the American Chemical Society.
Sketch a chemical structure in the browser.
Also has built-in functions for producing Wikipedia ChemBox for the structure (cool!).
This service works as a resolver for different chemical structure identifiers and allows one to convert a given structure identifier into another representation or structure identifier. It can help you identify and find the chemical structure if you have an identifier such as an InChIKey.
Does not seem to work right now, though.
OPSIN is the (open source) standard for parsing IUPAC names.
Created as a fun way to discover interesting color combinations. Palettes are hand-selected from the Twitter bot @colorschemez. The feed randomly generates color combinations as well as their descriptions, with each color being matched with an adjective from a list of over 20,000 words.
Created by Adam Fuhrer.
- The League of Moveable Type, the open-source font foundry. All the fonts from The League of Moveable Type are free & open source, available to use commercially and subject to the Open Font License.
- Guide to Only the Best Open-Source Typefaces, by Chad Mazzola.