Weeknotes 136

In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox

Mastodon published a vulnerability this week – Remote user impersonation and takeover. Seems pretty bad. Upgrade as soon as possible.

I’ve spent a large amount of time this week researching smart locks. There are a lot of different lock types, and trying to find something compatible with my door is proving tricky.

A lot of the reviews I’ve found are US focussed, but of course they have different incompatible standards in North America. Here in the UK, the market seems to be dominated by cheaper locks built on the TTLock platform, a sort of SDK for building smart locks, and a lot of the lock hardware from different manufacturers is almost identical apart from their logo. It’s very confusing.

Finding detailed specifications of UniFi equipment, especially if it’s not sold anymore, is difficult. Thankfully, I found this UniFi Network Comparison Charts page.

GitHub apparently supports these blockquote extensions.

Alerts are an extension of Markdown used to emphasize critical information. On GitHub, they are displayed with distinctive colors and icons to indicate the importance of the content.

Nice for making certain page elements more visible.

PRO TIP: Never fuck up a payment to HMRC. You will quickly regret your error after having to ring them, be on hold for ages, and having to listen to them insisting that there is “help available online” EVERY FIVE MINUTES!

A Fresh Start for Castro – Castro has new owners!

We know that over the past few months Castro has not communicated well. The new team’s #1 priority will be keeping our users informed. Starting today, all support emails will be answered in a timely manner.

We’ll see.

“No way to prevent this” say users of only language where this regularly happens

‘This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,’ said programmer Willodean Santorella, echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world’s memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities.

🤣

Unsigned Commits – an interesting perspective on signing git commits. I sign my commits at the moment; maybe I should stop.

Arc Search on iOS is really good. It will “build” a webpage which is a summary of whatever you search for. You have to check what it returns, this is LLM generated I assume, but you have to do that anyway when manually searching.

I’ve seen discourse online along the lines of “Why don’t they stick to making a good web browser?” – I don’t understand this. Of course a good web browser is what we all want, but is there no room for something different? Some innovation in what a web browser is?

I’m looking forward to what the Arc team are planning on the desktop.