Thinking about Len Sassaman, remembering him fondly. Good times on the p2p-hackers mailing list, at CodeCon and SuperHappyDevHouse, and elsewhere. Giant of the cypherpunk and security communities, unfailingly kind and generous to me and others, truly good person. We lost you before your time.
Bridgy stats update
It’s been a year since I last looked at Bridgy usage stats, so here’s an update!
The most noticeable event since last year is that Instagram finally blocked our server side scraping for good. We quickly launched a browser extension for both Instagram and Facebook, which is working well, but meant we had start to all over again with adoption and growth. Ah well, silos gonna silo.
I drink coffee throughout the morning, including before and after brushing my teeth, which makes the coffee taste flat and sweet and nutty, not horrible but definitely not right. I always hated that.
It occurred to me recently that I could just brush without toothpaste. It works! Coffee tastes pretty much normal afterward, and supposedly something like 90% of cleaning comes from the brushing, not the toothpaste.
Odd life hack, but I’ll take it.
TIL: as a rule of thumb, roughly half of the average tree’s total biomass is stored carbon.
(Thanks Brian!)
New job, hello climate tech
I have a new job! I’m doing climate tech at NCX (née SilviaTerra), using satellite imagery to prevent deforestation and sequester more carbon in trees.
A few years ago, I looked around for a side project on the climate crisis. Nothing big, maybe 5-10 hours a week, but I was ready to roll up my sleeves, jump in, and do my part. I found lots of people who were excited to talk, and plenty of interesting projects. I hacked on electricityMap a bit, helping them calculate and monitor the carbon intensity of electricity across the world. Even so, I never quite found anything part time that was truly satisfying.
The itch didn’t go away, though. It kept gnawing at me, in the back of my mind, just below the surface. I was happy at Color, health was a great mission, but I knew that over the long term, health was improving. Life expectancy has consistently increased over the last couple centuries, across the board. I was pushing a boulder downhill. Continue reading
Discovered a fascinating job in late 19th century London: train timekeepers. Stations in cities across England wanted to keep track of London time, aka railway time. Railway workers would set their watches, ride the train, get off at each stop, and show their watch to the station master, who would set a clock marked "London time."
Clocks were imperfect and inevitably skewed, so the timekeepers did this regularly to fix them.
This is basically NTP, the venerable protocol for synchronizing clocks between computers connected over a network. The timekeepers even correspond to the UDP packets that NTP uses to communicate the current time over the network. Love it.
