Monthly Digest - February 2021

Hey folks, welcome back to our monthly digest! February’s short month caught me off guard, even then it’s been a month already. As always, feel free to skip ahead to your preferred content by using the quick links provided above to jump to your the section. I got a lot of interesting stuff to share even with the short month.

Article of the month

These words are frequently used interchangeably, but what’s their difference? Though it’s not as simple and straightforward as presented in the article, they did a pretty good job for an online blog post. These topics could easily be written as a whole book, but nobody got time for that. So, here’s a Sesame Street breakdown

Security - lock on your door

Privacy - blinds in the windows

Anonymity - no name on your shirt

Honorable article mentions

• [VICE] Browser ‘Favicons’ Can Be Used as Undeletable ‘Supercookies’ to Track You Online

It’s both fascinating and scary at the same time, how do you even think about this. Even then, Firefox 85 already does something about this. It’s quite amazing from them, I highly recommend reading their blog post on cracking down supercookies, along with their Firefox 86 blog post which introduces Total Cookie Protection.

• [matklad] ARCHITECTURE.md

Maintaining a project is hard. Maintaining an open-source project? Especially hard. Doesn’t matter how many LoC it has, even coming back to your own project after a couple of weeks would require some time to relearn and understand the whole system again. That’s what any new people coming in to your open-source project would feel.

ARCHITECTURE document would help a lot for maintaining the project next to README and CONTRIBUTING, by giving an explicit map that lets contributors could learn the architecture of the project, they won’t have to spend a lot of time understanding the project and building their own mental model of the code through the code alone.

Take a look on some of the comments and examples Reddit has to offer.

• [TheRegister] Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Title says it all, it described the situation exactly. You know the feeling when somebody’s watching you? Expect that to be all the time when you’re online. There’s so much that went wrong here, it’s better for you to read and decide for yourself. Here’s also a Reddit thread to see what others say.

Content of the month

Clannad changed the way you see family and human interaction.

Wow. Just, wow. What an absolutely beautiful series. I can’t express how fascinated I am by Clannad. The quote above is taken from some people who’ve watched this too. To add from that, “I saw people online that said it stopped them from suicide.” It’s that beautiful.

I can’t believe their testimonies at first, can an anime be that good? What kind of story can they really give you for thousands of people to say this same stuff about it. I went in to find out for myself, and wow.

I’ll save the detailed explanation for the complete review, but if you’re patient, have the time to spare, and are up for some of the best moments anime could provide to you, then you should absolutely watch Clannad and it’s After Story (AS). Don’t forget to prepare yourself when you get to AS, it hits like a truck, don’t say I didn’t warn you ;)

*Note: It’s a really slow burn so you really need to be patient. Also, if it’s your first time watching this, DO NOT search up anything about this until you’ve finished it. It hits different when you least expect it, and you’ll be more satisfied with it, trust me.

Honorable content mentions

• [Alchemauss] The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.

This is on par with the top tier comedy stuff I found. To make things even better, it’s a whole 25 episodes season with 2 seasons and some OVAs to top it off. I can’t remember how many episodes I watched each time, but I do know that I’ll laugh and smile every time I watch this.

I’ve mentioned on the previous digests that we absolutely need something that makes us laugh every time we need it, this was it for me this month. I have my trump cards, but it does lessen the effect when you watch it repeatedly. This was a good breather and addition to that list.

• [Alchemauss] Tsurezure Children

This is no different than above, but without any supernatural powers, a little touch of wholesome, and some romance. The fact that this doesn’t have a second season is a crime. It’s an even bigger crime that it only has 12 episodes with only 12 minutes per episode. Jokes aside, this show checks all of my list on a slice-of-life romance comedy with a school setting.

Music of the month

Another amazing release with a great animation video to pair it with. I’ll be honest, I’ve always has some trouble describing music with words, it almost feels like another language that you can’t really be verbal about. This is no exception, it’s just beautiful and that’s all there is to it. The lyrics speak words to you.

Also, yes we’re slowly moving to YouTube Music.

Honorable music mentions | Spotify / YouTube

An absolutely amazing song by LiSA to pair up with Demon Slayer’s newest movie, Mugen Train. The song itself is beautiful, but it’s a whole different feeling when you’re also watching it. We knew that the movie and this song is made for each other, but still the actual first-hand experience of watching and listening to this is just too good, it’s insane and perfect.

Another one from Grabbitz! His vocals are just too good to pass on. I’m glad that I didn’t miss on this since I can’t seem to find another one other than this video. This song literally sings about a fly on the wall, to sing about something mundane but still produces an amazing song, it’s just… plain amazing.

Well, this was definitely unexpected. I’ve never thought of the day that Chinese lyrics would be released on Monstercat in their own label, it’s catchy and surprisingly soothing too. Well, the last is to be expected as it’s released on the Instinct channel.

Video of the month

Jakarta is the current Indonesia’s capital city. The capital city will be moved in a couple of years, but that doesn’t mean that Jakarta can be abandoned. Just like other capital cities around the world, it’s a concrete jungle filled with tall buildings. But, it also has a lot of unexpected settlements around the city.

Jakarta is already sinking by a couple of centimeters each year, and with the increasing sea levels, it’s even more prominent. But, there’s also another factor that will cause a major disaster the longer the government solves it. This video perfectly explained what’s going on with the current capital city of Indonesia.

Honorable video mentions | YouTube

I would have never, in my life, thought that burning candles would produce oxygen. Yes, you read that right, burning candles produces oxygen. They BURNED the candles that consumes oxygen to produce oxygen. 🤯

It sounds counterintuitive! Because it is, or that’s what I thought before watching this video. There’s no point to the video if I explained everything here. There’s a lot of useful and fun information here, it’s better to watch them for yourself to get the full experience. I just thought that the burning candles part is just too good to not be mentioned here. You’ll find out soon what those “candles” are when you watch the video.

A quick, less than 7-minutes, video explaining how mRNA vaccines work and how it’s different from the traditional (usual) vaccines. It’s pretty amazing to know how it works, and to know that this is a record-breaking vaccine with the fastest development time, by far.

Cancel culture. How did it get this far. What makes someone think they’re decent enough to judge others and act as they’re flawless themselves. This is a pretty heavy topic to discuss, and I can’t say much as I would be indifferent with “those” people. But, Anna Akana did a great job explaining and discussing this topic in her video. She uses a lot of excellent clips where they discusses what we should actually do, and I love every one of it.

Headlines of the month

Android FTW

I’ll do a follow-up in a dedicated post for this, I promise. But, I really need to say this now. Learn and understand your devices, there’s a huge difference between just using and owning your devices.

I can’t believe I’ve lived through years without knowing “this”, I can’t even express how life-changing it is with just words. I won’t and can’t go into the details of this, but look up the term “Modded Apps” and do your own research. Sadly, I have no experience and can’t guide iOS users for this as I don’t think there’s any, so this will only be applicable for Android users.

One thing I can recommend right now is launchers. I’ve never went out of my way to change my launchers as I thought Samsung’s launcher is good enough and have been constantly updated and improving. But, everything changed when I discovered “Niagara Launcher”. More details will come with the follow-up post!

Source(s): [Experience]

Facebook gambles on Australia

Facebook is gambling Australia can’t live without it, proceeds to cuts them off from the world.

I don’t really care anymore about Facebook and its other apps, but cutting of an entire country… nah, entire continent?!? That’s… There’s so much wrong here. From what I read, some of the Australian media itself are also questionable.

But really, if the governments emergency services rely on Facebook (or really any third-party), is the third-party really in the wrong here, or is the government that’s problematic?

Source(s): [TheGuardian | Reddit/Privacy - 1 | Reddit/Privacy - 2]

LastPass is finally a no-brainer to ditch

They truly shot themselves in the foot (see their blog post or Android comment thread) and have given the majority of us a reason to migrate away. The current best alternative (and also my recommendation) is to go with Bitwarden, you can self-host or use it with their server.

Source(s): [Reddit/Android | Reddit/SelfHosted | LastPass Blog]

That’s it for our recap of February 2021, folks! Stay safe and have a great March 👋