Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

🔗 Links: 2020-01

This is a collection of links I stumbled across and found worth sharing. Also see the blogroll for links to blogs I regularly read.


Why Using WhatsApp Is Dangerous

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Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, wrote about “why using WhatsApp is dangerous”, citing the attack against Jeff Bezos.

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Avast sells user’s browsing data

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Stories like this are a great reminder to not install any “freeware malware protection” software and unknowingly opt-in to data collection. If possible switch to Linux, or if you want to stay on Windows, use the integrated Windows Defender.

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Tinify

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Tinify or TinyPNG or TinyJPEG is the service I use to automatically compress and resize images uploaded to my micropub media endpoint. It’s a great service with a nice developer API that also offers a free limit of 500 compressions per month and has a pay-what-you-use policy after that (but I won’t upload more than 500 images per month anyway). I use a library written in Go to use the API.

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Purelymail

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I’m visiting the site of Purelymail from time to time for over a year now (shortly after they launched), because I’m interested into how the service evolves. It looks like a great service that provides purely mail and is very cheap or even cheaper when you are opting for advanced pricing (“Pay as you go”). You can add as many custom domains and users as you want and just pay for the resources you actually use.

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curl wttr.in - Weather in your terminal

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Thanks to @hacdias, I just discovered this:

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How to create a basic website?

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Kev Quirk started a series of articles on how to handcraft a basic little website. It is always better to self-host a simple website, e.g. with links to contact options, than using services (and silos) like All My Links. His example (with instructions) is available on MyLight.Website. The series isn’t complete yet, but it will probably be useful for everyone looking to create a website with just HTML and CSS, which looks good though.

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Why I quit using Google

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Kyle Piira explains, why he stopped using Google. He used Google products for nearly everything: Emails, calendars, contacts, entertainment, news, web browser, online storage, domains, analytics, ads, … But one day he got an email that changed everything:

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Skip reCAPTCHA challenges with the Buster Add-On

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If you aren’t using Chrome but another browser like Firefox with turned-on privacy settings and an add-on like uBlock Origin, it can happen that you come across reCAPTCHA challenges quite often (because Google thinks, you’re a bot). They are pretty annoying to solve manually, so there is an add-on named Buster that solves the audio challenge by using speech recognition.

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Koko Analytics

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Should I ever setup a WordPress site again, I will use Koko Analytics instead of a 3rd-party service. I really appreciate such efforts to offer fast, privacy-friendly and easy-to-install plugins that can replace things like Google Analytics.

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Ideas on Writing: Shitty First Drafts

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Matthias Ott wrote a good article about writing and drafts. “Shitty drafts” allow one to let all thoughts out of your brain onto paper. Once you have that you can start editing.

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Jan-Lukas Else