Monthly Shaarli

All links of one month in a single page.

April, 2022

IUPAC resource page on digital standards

With the increasing focus on open science and FAIR data, IUPAC is focusing effort toward the development of digital standards for chemistry. Its Committee on Publications and Cheminformatics Data Standards (CPCDS) has compiled this page with IUPAC resources.

A commendable effort!

Via newsletter IUPAC Concentrate March 16, 2022

Live CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption
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electricityMap is a live visualization of where your electricity comes from and how much CO2 was emitted to produce it.

The map is open source, and improves weekly thanks to 1700 contributors and counting.

The project has an informative FAQ, a list of its data sources, and a wiki.

The big tech threat to free thought
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Well-written review, with thus nugget of a quote by Susie Alegre:

When my daughter asked why she couldn’t have an Alexa like her friends, I told her that it is because Alexa steals your dreams and sells them.

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

100,000 Stars

An interactive 3D visualization of the stellar neighborhood, including over 100,000 nearby stars.

Pretty cool that this kind of visualisation can be run in the browser (Chromium works fine, so does Chrome). But I'm getting no sound, I suppose that's something to do with my machine.

Via Jason Kottke.

Encode arbitrary string as QR-code from the bash terminal

This is a neat way to quickly generate a QR-code, for example to transfer text from computer to phone (thanks to Solène Rapenne for the original idea and implementation). On the phone, you'll of course need to use a QR-reader app, such as Binary Eye.

xclip -o -selection clipboard | qrencode -o - -t PNG | feh -g 600x600 -Z -

Using this command, whatever is in your clipboard will be encoded to QR and displayed on your monitor. Note that xclip can pull stuff from different clipboards, and in my case the contents were not picked up with -selection default but -selection clipboard did the trick.

Linux (well, really the window managers, so X11 and then, i3, Wayland, etc…​) have multiple clipboards. The default ones are the Primary selection one, and the Secondary one. The names are historical accidents, but the “primary” one always has a copy of the last text you selected from anywhere, which can be pasted anywhere by clicking the middle mouse button. You just select some text and that’s it - you don’t have to do anything else and you can then middle-click paste this anywhere. The “secondary” clipboard is the “normal” Cut, Copy, Paste, Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v one.
https://duncanlock.net/blog/2022/04/06/using-windows-after-15-years-on-linux/