Thanks for the recommendation! What perspective do the hosts take in their representation of history?

It's similar to "The history of Rome" podcast if you are familiar. From what I gather, the host offers a quasi-linear narrative of the history of the Byzantine empire, with small asides that focus on clarifying important aspects of daily/military/religious/bureaucratic life. It can be somewhat dense in the presentation of a lot of names, places, and religious concepts. But I find it very rewarding.

EDIT: If you are asking who the host follows, it is the Byzantine (Christian) perspective, with generous asides given to explaining the myriad of cultures surrounding Constantinople and how they shape the emerging empire.

He does a good job of showing a broad swath of the Byzantine empire, not just the intrigue among royals.

Good to see this because it means demand for new Linux laptops is still here (or even growing) but why wouldn’t someone go for a System76 laptop instead that comes with custom, FOSS firmware too?

For one, S76 is not shipping icelake. Second, s76 = clevo + coreboot. Not everyone cares about that. Dell/Lenovo have better hardware, support, etc.

well, take a look at System76 laptops and Dell XPS. Dell looks amazing and System76 not so much. also build quality, screens can be important.

also availability and warranty is important for companies too.

Because shipping outside the US is expensive, especially if you need to RMA anything.

Thanks to Mr. Tonsky's post mandating me to upgrade to a 4K monitor for sharply rendered fonts, this is awesome. The text is bleeding-edge sharp.

I got the least expensive 27" 4K@60Hz monitor I could (Sceptre U279W-4000R, $200), and it arrived with no dead pixels. I had to find a color calibration profile, but now it's a beaut. Thanks to Mr. Tonsky.

You're welcome, I hope it helps! To preface this, I think Ubuntu 20 comes with good font rendering options by default, so my suggestions are mostly unnecessary. I just wanted to experiment to see if I was missing anything. All the options I'm referencing are explained in detail in this blog post (e.g., subpixel rendering and lcd filtering), they're all just configuration options in the freetype2 font renderer.

I found that the Arch Linux wiki page (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration) is helpful because it applies to other distributions like Ubuntu, and provides example configuration files. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration/Exam...)

Nice job offering something for free. I'm not as skeptical as some here; looks like you just wanted to build something useful for people and it's not going to cost too much to provide it. At the very least, it's a great project to have under your belt, with real customers, etc. Could help landing jobs, for sure!

I had to figure out how to handle my contact form on my static blog recently, and I decided to simply write a form handler with Go and deploy it on Google's Cloud Functions. It's free for now (and probably always will be considering the fact that I'll probably never receive more than ~10 form submissions per month anyways). The function takes awhile to spin up cold, but it doesn't matter too much. I like it because the code is simple and I "own" the service.

Curious to hear what other static site admins have decided to use for their forms.

Thanks for the thoughts! It's still a young service, and honestly there are a ton more users than I expected so early

GO is super interesting, and I like that you wanted total control over your process. I've never used Google Cloud Functions but that's similar to Azure Functions or AWS Lambda, yea?

The article makes broad, sweeping generalizations, but it was enjoyable and engaging to read, so cheers to the author for that. He's right, too, generally speaking: lots of work can and will be done remotely from various locations across the globe. Of course, there will always be natural divides (that's what makes us human). Someone who can't speak the same language as the rest of the team just isn't going to get hired, no matter how well they can code.

Government regulations also play a huge role in how "globalized" a job can be. If you're working at a defense contractor, for example, you sure as heck aren't going to be replaced by a foreign national. In many cases, the office culture at those companies won't change hardly at all, due to data governance restrictions.

This is awesome, good job! I like how the interface blends so smoothly with the other existing Landscape apps. What's stopping Urbit from saving these canvas images more quickly, though?

Thanks! That's something I'd like to improve.

Saving here means generating a (svg/png) file (each stroke is automatically saved on the backend). There is a chunking of the canvas on the frontend when the image is too big, so that adds a bit of time (multiple http requests... etc) This in a super alpha state, so plenty of room for performance improvements on my end, but I believe that this is probably pushing the limits of what Urbit can handle in terms of networking and file system a little bit for the current status.

Beautiful, thanks for sharing. I'm quite inclined to agree with Mr. Faunce. On a semi-related note, while watching the 50s TV show "The Andy Griffith Show" you can notice that Andy has a print of the "Angelus" above his fireplace. Neat little touch, I thought.

It might work for low level development tasks (which could very well be most of the software development happening in the world, who knows?), but not for anything more advanced.

That wasn't too hard, was it? ;)