Damian’s notes

Z85, a format for encoding arbitrary binary data as text, for transmission in text-based channels. In other words, like base64, except a bit more compact (using 5 characters to encode 4 bytes rather than 4 to encode 3).

A database of European (EU and EEA) alternatives to the cloud services and SaaS essentials that mostly come from more well-known American companies. By Constantin Graf, a software developer in Vienna.

People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities — Until They Live in One (Wired).

Someone’s created a guessing game where you’re told whether your guess is alphabetically before or after the answer. Feels like a binary chop should be the way to go, but thinking of words equidistant between two other words is more confusing than doing the same thing with numbers …

New blog post by me:

I was one of the guest observers at the election count on the evening of
4 July 2024 and it was interesting seeing the process in action in detail.

Wisdom Kaye, a model, director, stylist, photographer, videographer, and all-around social media personality, takes on the challenge of styling himself as different typefaces. Papyrus has never looked so cool.

There are eight different flavours of UUID and here is a short post on when you might use some of them. I like using v5 UUIDs for things that have a natural unique identifier (in some scope) but some protocol requires the entities to also have a UUID.

I’m at the town hall as one of the people observing the counting of the vote. Dozens of people carefully counting, recounting and stacking pieces of paper.

I voted in the city elections this morning before work. This is the first time I have voted under the new voter-suppression-lite regulations, so I had to show my Australian passport before voting. No crowds at all this time of day, so the extra ID faff was not an issue.