Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

🔗 Links: 2020-02

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


I found a loophole to prevent those pesky cookie notices

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Mattias Geniar found a way to not have to display a cookie warning on his website and it’s surprisingly simple:

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Photopea: Photoshop in the browser

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By chance in a Hacker News thread about “MSPaint in JavaScript” I discovered the tool Photopea. Photopea seems to be a free JavaScript-based Photoshop alternative that runs in any browser. What surprises me the most: Photopea is developed by a single person. I don’t use tools like Photoshop or Gimp very often, but I will try Photopea the next time I need to edit photos and images.

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Apple’s Secret Monopoly

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Updated on

Will Oremus has written a long article on OneZero (Medium paywall) that discusses whether Apple is an illegal monopoly or not.

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Reducing the size of Docker images

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Jérôme Petazzoni published a great article on the Ardan labs blog about reducing the size of Docker images. He compares different ways to package a binary into an image by using different base images and either dynamic or static linking. The conclusion is that although you can get really tiny images with SCRATCH, it is probably not worth it because it is more difficult to debug.

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Google Fonts Analytics

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Normally I don’t link to pages from Google, but the analytics of Google Fonts are quite impressive. In total, over 36 trillion fonts have been loaded from Google Fonts.

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Here WeGo, my favorite Google Maps alternative

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Here WeGo is my favorite alternative to Google Maps. I know it would be better to support Open Street Maps, but Here WeGo (formerly Nokia Maps) also offers great navigation functionality and real-time traffic information. It also seems to be relatively privacy friendly. With the app you can also download maps for offline use. Here Technologies is majority-owned by a consortium of German automotive companies (Wikipedia), so I hope they make sure that there maps have a great quality and so far (I use this service since 2015) my assumption has been confirmed.

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Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want

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This rant is great!

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Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free?

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Chris Coyier is thinking in an article on CSS-Tricks about RSS:

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LibreLingo

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LibreLingo is a relatively new open-source project that seems to be inspired by Duolingo. The demo already looks great, I learned the Spanish words “pan”, “pasta”, “leche” and “pareja”.

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Make music with Excel

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Through this article by The Verge, I discovered this YouTube video by musician Dylan Tallchief. He used Microsoft Excel to create a DAW (a digital audio workstation) called xlStudio. With that you can create entire songs in Excel spreadsheets and even export them to use them in the software suite Ableton. I don’t know much about music or music production, but this looks pretty awesome.

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Jan-Lukas Else