ongoing by Tim Bray, podcast version

I just finished writing about the process of, and lessons from, processing 900 inherited LPs into my collection. I thought it wouldn’t be fair to stay meta, so here is a handful of my favorites from among the new arrivals. Yes, they are all music by dead white men, performed by other dead white men (and a couple of women). Sorry. They were released between 1953 and 1978...

As we’ve slogged through Trump and carbon-loading and Covid, I’ve managed to remain more or less un-depressed and find enough gratifications in day-to-day life to keep the black dog of despair at a distance. But this morning I woke up early and, while the household slept, read most of the May 15th issue of The Economist. And folks, with a very few exceptions, it was pretty well all bad news. I feel an obligation to pass this summary along with a plea: As we relax slowly into post-Covid, maybe try to find a bit of extra energy and put it into politics or philanthropy or some other way to mitigate the awfulness. Our children deserve it...

I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta Thunberg justifiably angry at them...

We’re trying to decarbonize our family as much as we can. We’re not kidding ourselves that this will move any global-warming needles. But sharing the story might, a little bit. [Updated mid-2021 with a bit of progress: No more gas vehicles, heat pumps in production.]...

Welcome once again to Long Links, a monthly curation of long-form pieces that pleased and educated me and that being semi-retired gives me time to enjoy; offered in the hope that one or two might enrich the lives of busier people...

Amazon announced their financial results for the January to March quarter last Thursday. I was reading them when an email popped up asking if I wanted to talk about them on CNBC Squawk, which I did. In preparation, I re-read the report and pulled together a few talking points; here they are...

My Wednesday consisted mostly of running around and moving things. I used five transport modes and now I can’t not think about environmental impact and practicality and urban futures. Hop on board the car-share, boat, electric car, bus, and bike, and come along for the ride...

What happened was, I was fooling around with zero-knowledge proof ideas and needed to post public keys on the Internet in textual form. I picked ed25519 keys (elliptic-curve, also known as EdDSA) so I asked the Internet “How do you turn ed25519 keys into short text strings?” The answer took quite a bit of work to find and, after I posted it, provoked a discussion about whether I was doing the right thing. So today’s question is: Should these things be encoded with the traditional PKIX/PEM serialization, or should developers just blast the key-bits into base64 and ship that?...

Herewith pointers to Java 15 and Go code that converts Ed25119 public keys back and forth between short text strings and key objects you can use to verify signatures. The code isn’t big or complicated, but it took me quite a bit of work and time to figure out, and led down surprisingly dusty and ancient pathways. Posted to help others who need to do this and perhaps provide mild entertainment.
[Update 04/23: “agwa” over at YCombinator showed how to simplify the Go with x509.MarshalPKIXPublicKey and x509.ParsePKIXPublicKey.]...

Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn’t have a way to “Go Back”. This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It’s a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let’s demand perfection...