Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. Here’s how we can change our perceptions by making and experiencing art.

Zendesk has built out a global engineering team spread across four continents, nine countries and 10 cities around the world. We started the journey relatively early in our company’s life, it’s been difficult, and we’ve learned lessons along the way. Many of the things we got right, came from key people who had run global teams before (and knew the mistakes they didn’t want to repeat). Many of the things we got wrong, were based on assumptions that Zendesk would work as another business did. We’ve learned there’s no perfect strategy for expanding beyond head office, but we have been able to refine down some of the core beliefs that anchor us. These seem applicable beyond Zendesk, so I wanted to share. To do that, it’s worth spending a little time talking about how Zendesk grew up, so you can understand the incremental decisions we made to get to where we are today.

Sowohl der deutsche als auch der österreichische Verfassungsgerichtshof haben im Zusammenhang mit E-Voting bereits Erkenntnisse getroffen: Wahlverfahren müssen so konstruiert und implementiert sein, dass auch StaatsbürgerInnen ohne besondere technische und wissenschaftliche Kenntnisse in der Lage sind, zu verstehen, warum diese Verfahren die Prinzipien einer geheimen, persönlichen, anonymen und fälschungssicheren Wahl zweifelsfrei verwirklichen.
Das ist bei technisch vermittelten Wahlverfahren nicht der Fall. Die Wahlkommission, die für die ordnungsgemäße Durchführung einer Wahl verantwortlich ist, kann das nicht einmal dann verifizieren, wenn sie aus entsprechenden ExpertInnen zusammengesetzt ist. Zu intransparent ist Code, der auf Computern läuft.
Da muss darauf vertraut werden, dass die eingesetzten Systeme frei von Fremd- und Schadsoftware sind, eine Annahme, die InformatikerInnen zu spontanen Heiterkeitsausbrüchen verleiten kann.

Bei jedem vierten Paar hat sich die Beziehung während der Corona-Krise verändert: bei 17% hat sie sich verbessert und bei 8% verschlechtert.
Junge Paare erleben deutlich häufiger eine Verbesserung ihrer Beziehung als Paare im mittleren Lebensalter und im Pensionsalter.
In Familien mit Kindern ist eine Tendenz zur Polarisierung erkennbar: die Paarbeziehung hat sich in einem Teil verbessert, in einem anderen Teil verschlechtert.
Finanzielle Einbußen, z.B. durch Kurzarbeit oder Verlust des Arbeitsplatzes, gehen zu Lasten der Beziehungsqualität
Häufiger Anlass für Streit in Partnerschaften ist – auch in der Corona-Krise – die Hausarbeit.

Die Corona-Krise hat das Augenmerk auch auf eine Gruppe gerichtet, der in der Öffentlichkeit ansonsten wenig Beachtung geschenkt wird: nämlich der Gruppe der Alleinlebenden. Aber wer lebt überhaupt alleine? Und wie bewältigen diese alleinlebenden Personen die Krise? Würde man die Frage, welche Merkmale jemand mit dem Begriff „alleinlebend“ verbindet, verschiedenen Personen stellen, dann wären die Antworten bunt und vielfältig – genauso wie die Wissenschaft keine eindeutige Antwort darauf hat. Das Spektrum der Antworten würde das klassische Bild vom Single, Anfang 30, beruflich erfolgreich ebenso beinhalten wie die alleinwohnende Studentin, den geschiedenen Familienvater wie die alleinlebende, verwitwete Seniorin. Alleinleben hat viele Gesichter und die typisch alleinlebende Person gibt es nicht.

This is the recipe for building the DisplayLink driver in a RPM package for Fedora and CentOS. This driver supports the following device families:

DL-6xxx
DL-5xxx
DL-41xx
DL-3xxx

The package includes the Open Source evdi library.

Packages get automatically built by Travis CI and get uploaded to GitHub releases.

Ecoji encodes data as 1024 emojis, its base1024 with an emoji character set. As a bonus, includes code to decode emojis to original data.

NUS researchers have created a device called a ‘shadow-effect energy generator’ that makes use of the contrast in illumination between lit and shadowed areas to generate electricity. This novel concept opens up new approaches in harnessing indoor lighting conditions to power electronics.

”Whoa. The wait is finally over, dudes!”

The concept of a mechanical, 3D printed smart dress, to safeguard one's proximity and personal space, was first explored by Anouk Wipprecht several years ago with her Spider Dress. In times of social distancing, the Dutch designers is presenting an evolution of that early work, extending her research into proxemics and the body. The new Proximity Dress creates physical barriers when a person is detected in the immediate surroundings of the wearer. These twin dresses respond based on proximity and thermal sensors and indicate strangers within the intimate, personal, social and public space around the wearer.

“He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily across the seat back. He steered with an extra arm he’d recently fitted just beneath his right one to help improve his ski-boxing.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This is a working display based on Star Trek TNG. Uses APIs and sensors for weather, VOCs, power measurement, calendar, fitness, and news.

With the digital equivalent of trowels and shovels, archaeologists are digging into the code of early video games to uncover long forgotten secrets that could have relevance today.

Autodetecting autogenerated text: The answer to the machine is the machine.

There have been modern designs for portable Commodore 64s, and the official portable Commodore 64 you perhaps didn't even know about, but none of them are as handsome as Cem Tezcan's.

Using a terminal from 1976 as home automation hub, because why not?

In 2003, Eileen Gunn's pioneering online sf magazine shut down, and so did @bruces' early seminal blog, the Schism Matrix.

But thankfully, that wasn't the end of Bruce Sterling's blogging career: Wired gave him an (unpaid) online home for a new blog, every bit as cranky, esoteric, gnomic and darkly comic as Bruce himself: Beyond the Beyond.

Now, Beyond the Beyond is done. Wired publisher Conde Nast is in such deep financial trouble that they're realizing minuscule savings like those to be gleaned from shutting down an unpaid blog.

Pricing constraints brought further limitations. The ZX Spectrum had no dedicated sprite generation ICs. This was in contrast to other emerging micro-computers of the period, such as the Commodore 64. The Spectrum’s Z80 CPU and ULA would do all the graphical heavy lifting. The ULA or Un-committed Logic Array is similar in function, but not in implementation to today’s CPLD’s where the work of many TTL logic chips is combined into one IC. The Spectrum’s minimal graphics processing hardware and constrained 16k of RAM led to Altwasser’s’ invention of an extremely efficient and somewhat esoteric display system.

The conceived design was unique, allowing Sinclair Research and Richard Altwasser to patent the implementation. The Spectrum set aside 6912 Bytes of RAM to be used for a display file and an attribute array. The display file holds 256×192 pixel data in 32×24 characters blocks, taking 6144 bytes of RAM, leaving 768 bytes for the attribute array. The attribute array stores colour information for each character block. One byte per block holds foreground and background colours, plus a blink value for on or off. This is an excellent space saving solution for displaying coloured text, though slightly limiting in advanced graphics usage.

In vielen österreichischen Unternehmen undenkbar. Da zieht noch immer der geistige Mief der 1970er Jahre durch die neu eingerichteten Großraumbüros mit den vorgeschriebenen 2 m²/MA: "wer nicht kontrolliert wird, arbeitet nicht".

The Big List of Naughty Strings is an evolving list of strings which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data. This is intended for use in helping both automated and manual QA testing; useful for whenever your QA engineer walks into a bar.

Why Test Naughty Strings?
Even multi-billion dollar companies with huge amounts of automated testing can't find every bad input. For example, look at what happens when you try to Tweet a zero-width space (U+200B) on Twitter: