Here is the monthly micro review of (not so) random links I found while browsing the interweb lately.

Here we are, finally:

I’ve heard a bit of Catalina during the beta, but not so much. It’s probably because I mostly turn away from Twitter lately. Now that I reviewed the new features and checked what’s working (yeah, apparently notifications work great!) and what’s not, I will put on hold the upgrade. My current config looks ok to me and I clearly don’t see any added value to the upcoming macOS version: I already have an iPhone, and I don’t need an iPad. This just led me to think that I could probably turn back to Linux, using some kind of a minimalist desktop (e.g., i3) running on a Matebook. So now you know what my dream setup would be if things get too broken on macOS or my Macbook were suddenly to crash.

We haven’t seen a ton of machine improvement in the past decade so I aim for reliable workhorses a ways down the cost-depreciation curve.

Unlike Graydon Hoare, I think there still is a place for nice laptops on the market. Problem is that Macbook are getting too expensive (at least for me, now that I have to buy then again myself), so if the software get broken there’s no point in keeping fighting again and again.

I’m done with the Hacktoberfest, which I completed quickly Wednesday morning. If I have read the rules before, I would have chosen otehr repository, surely, or I would have worked on my GH solely. Anyway, if I get a T-shirt, it will go to my preferred Fortnite and Minecraft player (you already guessed who’s the guy, right?).

If you like math and CS, here are a bunch of textbooks available online or in PDF format that I came across recently:

• Algebra, Topology, Differential Calculus, and Optimization Theory For Computer Science and Machine Learning, by Jean Gallier and Jocelyn Quaintance;
• Linear Algebra and Applications: An Inquiry-Based Approach, by Feryal Alayont and Steven Schlicker;
• Bayesina inference with INLA, by Virgilio Gómez-Rubio. Note that Aki Vehtari also made his BDA course available for free on Github.

Solving a Danish Defense Intelligence Puzzle: I like discovering new content or long standing blogs that I just learned about via some other blog posts. In this case, this post is far beyond my technical knowledge but I found it interesting anyway and I learned a bit of reverse engineering.

I am quite happy with my Micro blog since I don not use any extra package and just use basic Hugo facilities to run the two blog simultaneously. It could be better, of course, but that’s okay as far as I am concerned. I am aware of other micro-blogging platforms or APIs, but I just learned about Microblog (h/t Jan-Lukas Else).

Brett Terpstra has a nice post regarding the Fish shell on his blog: Branching out from Bash: Fishing expedition. This was especially useful since I switched to Fish recently myself. I learned quite a bit from reading his blog post and looking at his code available on Github.

Blog rolling:

• Computational survivalist. The last point is very well put:

  I’m more sympathetic to minimalism than survivalism. You can be more productive by learning to use a small set of tools well than by hacking away with a large set of tools you hardly know how to use.

• Combining automatically factor levels with trees. It’s getting rarer that I read posts on R, the language. However, from time to time I came across some posts I used to like, you know, those posts where you get both the code and some pretty figures around.

• Handy FFMpeg Automator Scripts. It’s been a while since I haven’t used ffmpeg. last time was probably for a talk where I needed to assemble some pieces of ggplot into a movie.

• Old bugs never die or fade away. The take away message is probably to be careful with what you put in your init files.