Links for Jan 19 - 26, 2025

2025-01-27

Interesting links and articles I’ve found for the week of Jan 19-26, 2024.

Culture and Society

https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very-stupid

What is stupidity? Why are some smart people so stupid?

https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

The US Post Office will send you pictures of your (physical) mail every day, at no cost.

https://theconversation.com/transform-the-daily-grind-to-make-life-more-interesting-a-philosopher-shares-3-strategies-to-help-you-attain-the-good-life-243242

The Conversation is one of my best daily sources of excellent writing. Here, a philosopher suggest three simple steps to improve our daily outlook on life.

https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/hotel-booking-sites-overcharge-bay-area-travelers-20025145.php

If you live in a high-rent area, you are likely being charged more to book hotels. Perhaps use a VPN (via).

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/bay-area-lawyer-mark-lemley-fires-zuckerberg-meta-20034699.php

One nice feature of having some money is being able to take a stand. Here a prominent lawyer fires Meta as a client.

Technology

https://www.latent.space/p/o1-skill-issue

ChatGPT’s o1 model should not be used as a chat model for maximum effectiveness.

https://kobzol.github.io/rust/2025/01/15/async-rust-is-about-concurrency.html

Since my earliest days of dealing with parallelism, processes, threads and concurrency, I’ve seen confusion on what “async” means. See also Rob Pike’s talk on this.

https://github.com/tjhorner/upsy-desky

The “Upsy-Desky” brings your standing desk to the home automation world. Finally :-)!

https://eylenburg.github.io/

A comprehensive website comparing a variety of technologies like Operating Systems, Browsers, Desktops, and Spreadsheets.

https://github.com/santinic/audiblez

Text to speech is so good now that programs like this to convert an epub book to an audio file are quite useful and usable. It’s still no dramatic production, but quite passable.

Amateur Radio

https://www.thetechprepper.com/emcomm-tools

A suite of communications tools for a Raspberry PI, focused on Emergency Communications, wrapped up with a nice web UI. A video walkthrough is also available.

https://www.onallbands.com/ham-radio-tech-guide-to-building-an-effective-dipole-antenna-answers-to-common-dipole-questions/

https://hamradiooutsidethebox.ca/2025/01/16/a-top-loaded-end-fed-half-wave-antenna-for-20m/

Two nice articles on practicalities of building certain antennas.

https://w0xz.com/ftdx10/

I recently added an FTDX-10 to my radio setup. There are several applications for computer control of the transceiver. This one looks interesting.

#links