I took this week off as my children are on their Easter break. It is nice to not worry about work and stay fairly unplugged for the week.
On that note, I will be keeping this week’s issue short and just sharing my picks of the week, so I don’t take up too much family time.
❤️ Picks of the Week
📝 Article - Mario meets Pareto - when I saw the name Pareto I thought of the 80/20 rule. This isn’t it. This is instead talking about the Pareto Frontier. It allows you to work out the best options given a number of different choices. This great example shows how to apply it to Mario Kart characters to find the best characters to play. TLDR; Use Peach, Teddy Buggy, roller tires and cloud glider.
🛠 Tool - No Maintenance Intended - The projects I code in my spare time are just for me. I don’t have time to maintain them and add features for others to use for free. If they want to do that they can just for the project and add the code themselves. Turns out there is a badge you can add to your repos to indicate that it isn’t actively maintained.
🤖 Robots.txt - ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt - If you don’t like the idea of your writing being scrapped and used for AI training then you can try updating the robots.txt on your website to this one. Of course there will be many scrapers that just ignore this file but at least you can limit some of them.
❓ - YTMND - Blue Ball Machine - This is just fun to watch and very clever.
🛠 Tool - Upscayl - Free and Open Source AI Image Upscaler for Linux, MacOS and Windows built with Linux-First philosophy. - there are a lot of dubious uses for generative AI, however there are useful uses for it as well. One of these upscaling images. It has been possible to do this with Stable Diffusion for a while but this makes it a lot easier for anyone to use. It is available as a desktop application which you can just install. If you are on a Mac make sure you download the free DMG rather than paying $12.99 on the App Store. This is great for enlarging old photos for example.
🛠 Tool - Hyperkey - Need more shortcut combinations on a Mac? You can turn any unused key (such as caps lock) into a Hyperkey which combines all four modifiers on a Mac (⌃⌥⌘⇧).
📝 Article - How to Favicon in 2024 - My current site has 25 favicons to cover Apple, Android and Microsoft devices. Is all this necessary? It looks like I can cut this down to just 5 for my new site!
🛠 Tool - O’Rly Generator – 1.4.0 - I never quite understood the seemingly random book covers on O’Reilly programming books. Still if you wanted to make one for fun, now you can.
📝 Article - Visual design rules you can safely follow every time - I am not much of a designer, I am a programmer, and it often shows when I do frontend. If you are a backend developer and do any frontend work this is worth a read.
🛠 Tool - Open Voice - There are diseases such as ALS that can cause you to lose your voice. Generative voices is another good use of AI that I can get behind. Luckily with all the videos I have from my YouTube video and course I have plenty of voice samples I can use in case I need in the future. I might even use this to create my own JARVIS in the future.
💬 Quote of the Week
Would the material desires you harbored when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished? Probably not. Without anyone else to impress, why own an expensive car, a palace, fancy clothes, or jewelry? … The thought experiment shows that we choose our lifestyles – our houses, our clothes, our watches – with other people in mind. One way or another, we project a style designed to make others admire or envy us.
From the book Happy by Derren Brown.