Links and Notes - March 20th 2021

Self hosting adventures

Last night I spun up my own server. Been a while since I did that. The last server I spun up was for my blog and that was some time ago. I realised I never took down notes so I did this time. This should make setting up a fresh server a breeze in the future.

But why setup fresh servers? Because I'm hosting my own stuff. RSS reader. Check. Airtable alternative. Check. Instapaper alternative. Check. The only thing I probably won't do is to host my own git and mail server.

As much as I love the convenience that platforms as a service give you, I think developers shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that there's no need to learn about server management anymore. You may not need it for development. But being able to host your own stuff makes it fully worth it ^[1].

Sri Lanka makes it to the finals in the legends cricket tournament

Woot. Sri Lanka handily beat South Africa in the semi final of the road safety cricket tournament. I'm still not sure they'll have enough time to physically recover ahead of the finals with India. That is going to be a tough match.

Separately, how are people packed into the stadium the way they are? That might be 50% capacity, but it certainly fails to meet the idea of lesser capacity. No social distancing, masks seem to be a confusing inconvenience. You'd never believe a pandemic was in existence right now.

Helping out

I received a mail around the second week of March. Unfortunately I was busy with getting vaccinated, and then catching up on work. I finally replied to it today. The person mailing in was asking if I had any advice on setting up and managing dev environments. This was after they had seen a comment I had left on Hacker News.

I hope my reply was helpful. I'm looking forward to a good conversation around this. I really respect anyone willing to reach out and ask for help like this.

What struck me was how good it felt to send a reply. Having a feeling of helping out is just great. I'd love to try and lean into this more. Whenever I've mentored or shared information it's just felt awesome.

Streaming should be global already

We've been through a pandemic. Actually we are still in it. Especially as numbers around the world are starting to go up again (use archive.is to access). Cinemas are amongst the worst affected business in the world. Yet Disney plus, hbo, and others can't seem to figure out how to get their streaming services launched globally. It sucks because I'd love to watch stuff legally but the studios do their best to say "lol no".

Also, also, I'd love to see someone investing in the space of online rentals much like how Google TV is doing it. I don't really want to subscribe to Disney plus. I'd much rather rent their new movies when they come out. Ditto for Warner Bros stuff. I get why streaming and recurring revenue is the big deal but lawds, studios managed just fine with that revenue model all these days.

For the moment I use Google TV although it is a little painful since movies take a while before they allow for renting vs only having the option of buying. To give an idea of price difference, renting costs aroung 7 USD on average. Buying costs 15 USD to 20. But it's alright enough. I just hope that Google never discontinues this service. They are the only ones with global availability.

A Japanese gentleman poses as a young female biker using a face swap app

A story showed up today that a 50 year old man has been posing as a young biker woman. His rationale being "no one wants to see an uncle".

I've been wanting to write lengthily about this for a while; it's impossible to really trust anything on the internet anymore. On meme sites, videos regularly pop up that are faked. I've run into various videos that have CG elements that are impossible to discern especially when the videos have their quality lowered to seem like a quick phone video. People write stories that never happened. Companies create videos to trick the public. Even this story had me checking Twitter extensively to see if I was being duped.

Previous links and notes (March 19th 2021)

Next links and notes (March 21st 2021)

Posted on March 20 2021 by Adnan Issadeen