- ‘Minisforum U850—solid hardware and easy upgrades in a little box’ by Jim Salter for Ars Technica
- ‘Typing my way down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole with the Drop CTRL’ by Iljitsch van Beijnum for Ars Technica
- ‘One Week with the iPad and Apple Pencil’ by Mint for his blog
- ‘A brief history of router architecture’ by Tony Li for the APNIC blog
- ‘My Mom Believes In QAnon. I’ve Been Trying To Get Her Out.’ by Albert Samaha for Buzzfeed News
- ‘Here’s why Substack’s scam worked so well’ by Annalee Newitz for The Hypothesis
Jim Salter reviews a very nice piece of computer hardware. I am strongly considering getting one of these to serve as a home server for running things like unbound and my LibreNMS instance. I am currently running LibreNMS on a VM on my desktop machine which to me is a less than ideal setup. I like the look of how easy this thing is to take apart, which means its going to be easy to maintain long term unlike the Intel NUC that I used to use but had to retire because I couldn’t figure out how to replace the creaking fan in it.
Iljitsch’s journey into the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards is a fun read. Personally, I use a mechanical keyboard but I haven’t gotten too deep into the hobby. I am typing this on a ZSA Moonlander Mark 1 (Kalih Box Red switches) which is my third mechanical keyboard, baby stuff really. I see computer keyboards in a more utilitarian way than I suspect a lot of other hardcore hobbyists do. I don’t care about custom or artisan keycaps which is where it seems you end up if you go really deep down the rabbit hole.
Mint talks about his experience with using an iPad with an Apple Pencil. I have a iPad Air sitting around which I ostensibly bought for watching media on but most of the time it collects dust because I prefer to watch things on my desktop monitors instead. I do wonder if an Apple Pencil setup would be more useful to me as a thing I can handwrite notes into rather than just a single purpose media viewing device.
Tony Li writes about the evolution of router architectures over the years and what the future looks like for routers. A good read for my fellow computer networking nerds. On that note, I really need to read up on the basics of how Clos topologies and architectures work.
Albert Samaha writes a gut wrenching story about his relationship with his mom who fell into the QAnon rabbit hole. This one made me cry, it really is quite a sad story and Albert does a excellent job writing about a extremely personal topic.
Annalee writes her last post on Substack and it is one showcasing that Substack is not the saviour of writers everywhere but instead is a publishing venture pretending to be a platform.
Substack’s business is a scam. They claim to offer writers a level playing field for making a living, and instead they pay an elite, secret group of writers to be on the platform and make newsletter writing appear to be more lucrative than it is. They claim to be an app when they are a publication with an editorial policy. They claim in their terms of service that they will protect writers from abuse, but they don’t.
Annalee Newitz, Here’s why Substack’s scam worked so well