Hear about travel to Central Europe (Prague, Krakow, Budapest) as the Amateur Traveler talks to 4 people who joined me on this year's Amateur Traveler trip: Darrell, Derrick, Loraine and Holly.

Hear about what to do in Guangzhou as the Amateur Traveler talks to Bill Abbott about a somewhat less well known area for tourists in China.

Hear about travel to Alaska's National Parks as the Amateur Traveler talks once again to Gary Arndt about his visits to each of the 8 National Parks in Alaska.

Hear about travel to Curaçao as the Amateur Traveler talks to Wendy Blumenstein-Elliott from adventurousretirement.com about her favorite Caribbean island.

Hear about travel to Mantua, Verona, Padua Italy as the Amateur Traveler talks to Gina Mussio from ginamussio.com about these wonderful cities in her adopted country.

Hear about travel to Barolo and the Piedmont region of Italy as the Amateur Traveler talks to Betsy and Greg Ball from eurotravelcoach.com about this wine region that they love.

Hear about hiking the Kumano Koto trek in Japan as the Amateur Traveler talks to Sherry Ott about her experience on this trail that was used by medieval emperors on the Kii Peninsula. 

Hear about travel to Virunga National Park as the Amateur Traveler talks to Niall from Ireland about his visit to this stunning national park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Hear about travel to the Yunnan province of China as the Amateur Traveler talks to Zach and Leah from peregrination-travel.com about their trip to this mountainous corner of the country.

Hear about travel to West Africa to Senegal and the Gambia as the Amateur Traveler talks to Brian Asher from theworldhiker.com about this under-visited region.

After three decades of mystery, the cold case murder of a 17-year-old Ohio teen named Barbara Blatnik has been solved thanks in part to DNA genealogical research. The last time anyone saw Blatnik alive was around midnight on Dec. 19, 1987, when a friend dropped her off in Garfield Heights, Ohio. The following day, Blatnik,…

The post 32 Years After Teen’s Body Found Strangled on Side of Road, Suspect Finally Arrested appeared first on The Western Journal.

Celebrity Deaths in April 2020 Here’s a look at some of the famous faces we lost in the month of April. Ellis Marsalis Jr. Ellis Marsalis, 1934 – 2020 He went out the way he lived: embracing reality pic.twitter.com/sPyYUuBoIG — Wynton Marsalis (@wyntonmarsalis) April 2, 2020 New Orleans jazz legend Ellis Marsalis Jr., 85, died on…

The post Famous Faces Who Passed Away in April 2020 appeared first on The Western Journal.

This past year, I predicted the fall of both Zuck and Trump, not to mention the triumph of cannabis and rationale markets. But in 2019, the sociopaths won – bigly. Damn, was I wrong. One year ago this week, I sat down to write my annual list of ten or so predictions for the coming … Continue reading "Predictions Review: Trump, Zuck Crush My Optimism In 2019"

A new year brings another run at my annual predictions: For 17 years now, I’ve taken a few hours to imagine what might happen over the course of the coming twelve months. And my goodness did I swing for the fences last year — and I pretty much whiffed. Batting .300 is great in the majors, but it … Continue reading "Predictions 2020: Facebook Caves, Google Zags, Netflix Sells Out, and Data Policy Gets Sexy"

The online gambling ring allegedly used an offshore website to help book $32 million in illegal sports wagers placed by more than 2,000 bettors in the United States.

Striso is a digital instrument with pressure-sensitive buttons that plays a variety of acoustic-like sounds.  Read more...

TL;DR: You don't have to buy a drum set to learn how to play the drums. Instead, just grab the Senstroke by Redison bluetooth drum kit for $189.95, on sale for 5% off as of May 9.

If you want to learn how to play the drums, then a quality set may cost you upwards of $1,000. Not only is this a hefty price to play for individuals who aren't fully committed to the instrument yet, but their massive size may be impossible to fit inside your space. Or at least your housemates may not appreciate it.

With the Senstroke by Redison Bluetooth Drum Kit and App Bundle, you can practice, play, and record on just about any surface for a much more affordable price — and it'll take up little to no space.  Read more...

What happens when memers meet the subject of their memes? In the case of the BA Test Kitchen meeting the brains behind @meme_appetit, pure gold. Harry Kersh and Will Martin started the accounts when they discovered their shared love of BA videos, and the Instagram and Twitter accounts have since taken off. 

Now with almost 400,000 followers on Instagram, the account has a lot of fans — including some members of the test kitchen. In this video, the BA cooks explain why they love (or dislike) some of the account's memes, whether it's accurate, and whether they even "get it." Watch them react to various memes and Kersh and Martin attempt to explain their reasoning behind them. Read more...

libfacedetection — they claim 1000fps. Open source. Rich Hickey on Becoming a Better Developer — By constantly switching from one thing to another you are always reaching above your comfort zone, yes, but doing so by resetting your skill and knowledge level to zero. Mastery comes from a combination of at least several of the […]

AI in practice In his book TinyML, Pete Warden talks about smart stickers that can do limited AI, communicate via radio, and contain sensors so they can easily be put onto machinery or other objects. That technology is here, with disposable bluetooth stickers powered by ambient RF. A year ago, Foster Provost said that causality […]

Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer (Bryan Cantrill) — talk at Stanford, about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine—and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision. Let’s Use Kubernetes: Now You Have 8 Problems — If you’re part of […]

Sno — Distributed version control for geospatial and tabular data. Finally, git for (geo)data done right. Open source. The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation — plugging prompts like “the woman worked as” and “the white person worked as” into text generation systems, and the horrors you get back. (via Violent […]

MLflow — an open source platform to manage the ML lifecycle, including experimentation, reproducibility, and deployment. It currently offers three components: tracking, projects, and models. Eventing Facets (Tim Bray) — the word “eventing” makes my skin crawl, but this series of posts has A+ info in it. Workbox — JavaScript Libraries for adding offline support […]

Pluralistic — Cory Doctorow’s news site and newsletter, where you can learn about African WhatsApp modders among other things. Mapnik — LGPLed software that combines pixel-perfect image output with lightning-fast cartographic algorithms, and exposes interfaces in C++, Python, and Node. pi node — A π-box is a modular system of radio/streaming broadcast, composed of multiples […]

AWS Bill Analysis — always interesting to see how to approach lowering your costs. In this case, the project owner works for Amazon on AWS, but still there were savings to be had. A Design Guide to Writing Offline-first Apps — In this article, we will be diving into some of the engineering challenges that […]

OpenAM — an open-access management solution that includes authentication, SSO, authorization, federation, entitlements and web services security. Building Relationships as a Remote Engineering Manager — And if you haven’t realized it yet, get used to this—you’re going to spend a lot of time writing. API Security Maturity Model — I’m not sure if I agree […]

The Uncensored Library — Reporters Without Borders built a library in Minecraft, in which you can read banned books. (via Gizmodo) Shmoocon 2020 Talk Recordings — everything from email addresses to Verilog by way of Zero Trust, social media, and choose-your-own-adventure ransomware. Differential Privacy: A Comparison of Libraries — We will have a look at […]

How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers — really interesting CCC talk from a few years ago. The Challenge of Software Liability — Liability for insecure software is already a reality. The question is whether Congress will step in to give it shape and a coherent legal structure. XOXO Talks — video archive of […]

Inklewriter — open source interactive text adventure game creator. (Fun for adults, but also great to give to kids who love to read) (via Andy Baio) The Virus Survival Strategy Guide for Your Startup (Steve Blank) — Unfortunately, it’s no longer a normal market. All your assumptions about customers; sales cycle; and, most importantly, revenue, […]

Last year, when we felt interest in artificial intelligence (AI) was approaching a fever pitch, we created a survey to ask about AI adoption. When we analyzed the results, we determined the AI space was in a state of rapid change, so we eagerly commissioned a follow-up survey to help find out where AI stands […]

Dos and Don’ts in Open Source (Olaf Geirsson) — really useful advice to would-be contributors and project owners. It’s tempting to respond to a welcome contribution with a quick, “This looks amazing, I will review tomorrow!” Consider giving a thumbs-up reaction instead and wait with commenting until you complete the review. Promises are estimates and […]

NASCAR Replaces Canceled Races with Esports Featuring Pro Drivers (Engadget) — the world is getting weirder. Firebase Scrutinized By Antitrust Regulators — Firebase tools give Google, the internet’s top ad seller, information on what consumers are doing inside apps that it can exploit to target ads to users, according to makers of Firebase alternatives. Journey […]

Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages — Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. Code and models available for 66 languages. Dropbear SSH — Dropbear is a relatively small SSH […]

Potential Distributed Reading Group on Distributed Systems — for some folks, this will be a great time to start reading groups to work through papers. You’ll never get a time with less physical distraction. (Just remember to ration your socials time or you and your time will vanish into the maelstrom.) Jitsi Meet — open […]

Medtronic Releases Ventilator Designs — not open source, as the license is a limited-time limited-purpose license that retains rights. I imagine some corporate lawyers have done some frantic Googling for open meditech licensing clauses. dolt — version history for tabular data. Compare to sno, which is version control for geospatial and tabular data. Toast UI […]

Replaying Traffic to Test Proprietary Systems — using Wiresham to replay traffic to test blackbox proprietary systems. Outlaw Innovations — This paper will explore how the often illegal activities of hackers (in the original usage of the term to refer to individuals who modify computer hardware and software) may produce valuable innovations. It will explore […]

Imperial College’s COVID19 Model — in github, in R, MIT-licensed. This repository has code for replication purposes. The bleeding edge code and advancements are done in a private repository. Readings on Time — I bumped on this idea while reading Alan Kay’s writing about making the difference between mutable and immutable data “moot” in the […]

The Zero Trust Learning Curve (Palo Alto Networks) — don’t learn with the Crown Jewels. The trouble with starting with the most sensitive protect surfaces is that they’re often too fragile and many people don’t know how they work. Starting there with Zero Trust frequently results in failures. Too often, when this happens, organizations blame […]

Rufus — Create bootable USB drives the easy way. Improving Audio Quality in Duo with WaveNetEQ — Google filling in missing packets in voice calls using deep learning. CRN++ — language for programming deterministic (mass-action) chemical kinetics to perform computation. Crafting Crafting Interpreters — story behind the writing of the Crafting Interpreters book.

locust — open source load testing tool: define user behaviour with Python code, and swarm your system with millions of simultaneous users. (via @nzigel) Background Matting — a method for creating a matte – the per-pixel foreground color and alpha – of a person by taking photos or videos in an everyday setting with a […]

System Design for Advanced Beginners — a friendly explanation of the what and why of systems, with acknowledgement of the real world like There are many tools out there, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and many ways to build a technology company. The real, honest reasons that we will make many of our technological […]

The Fuzzy Edges of Character Encoding — the history, politics, and computational basics of text-based character encoding and digital representations of text, from Morse Code to ASCII to Unicode (and emoji), as well as alternative text encoding schemes. (via Everest Pipkin) AutoHotkey — an automation scripting language for Windows. The Electronic Nose and its Applications: […]

FairMOT — one-shot multi-object tracking that remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the MOT challenge datasets at 30 FPS. pipedream — IFTTT for coders. Compiler Explorer — an interactive tool that lets you type code in one window and see the results of its compilation in another window. Using the site should be pretty self-explanatory: by […]

Introduction to COBOL — a 1999 web site (!) with slides from a University of Limerick course. IBM will offer free (presumably more modern) training. zoombot — a highly advanced AI to handle Zoom calls. storybook.js — open source toolkit and sandbox to build UI components in isolation so you can develop hard-to-reach states and […]

Since early in March, technology news has been all Coronavirus, all the time. That’s a trend we expect to continue through April and probably beyond. So let’s start with Coronavirus news, and hope that we have something different for next month. Coronavirus The Coronavirus pandemic is forcing reconsideration of how private data is used.  Maciej […]

The Science of Happiness — free enrolment in Berkeley’s MOOC to teach positive psychology. Learn science-based principles and practices for a happy, meaningful life. The New Business of AI (A16Z) — many AI companies have: Lower gross margins due to heavy cloud infrastructure usage and ongoing human support; Scaling challenges due to the thorny problem […]

Coding vs Programming (John Gruber) — I’d noticed this linguistic change too. See also Engineering vs Programming vs Computer Science. Coding is shorter so it’s probably gaining in popularity because shorter is easier to say and thus more convenient. micrograd (Andre Karpathy) — A tiny Autograd engine (with a bite! :D). Implements backpropagation (reverse-mode autodiff) […]

Kanboard — free and open source Trello-like Kanban boards. Remote Work Playbook — really useful advice on the actual mechanics of working remotely, not just which tools to use but how to use them. E.g., As an individual contributor, is there something you just did that you think a colleague would have to do at […]

Nebula —open source distributed, scalable, lightning-fast graph database. COBOL Programming Course — from the Open Mainframe Project. Serverless Handbook — a resource teaching frontend engineers everything they need to know to dive into backend. Novel Annealing Processor Is the Best Ever at Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems (IEEE Spectrum) — Dubbed STATICA (Stochastic Cellular Automata Annealer […]

CastleDB — a structured static database […]. CastleDB looks like any spreadsheet editor, except that each sheet has a data model. […] stores both its data model and the data contained in the rows into an easily readable JSON file. […] allows efficient collaboration on data editing. Mainframes Are Having a Moment (IEEE Spectrum) — […]