Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or informative.
- Sometimes you go through Uncle Peter’s attic and find letters from decades past, or photos of grandma. Sometimes you find a medal for Impeccable Service to the USSR, and suddenly Uncle Peter is far more interesting than you ever knew while he was alive.
- The Doomsday Clock is moving ever closer to midnight, just to emphasize how cool and good our world is.
- The state of Vermont may allow a selection of emoji on license plates, which Queensland, Australia already does. We’re edging ever closer to my dream of being able to put anything from the Unicode standard on my license plate.
- An unavoidable part of existing online in our dystopian cyberpunk present is keeping track of who’s selling your information and what information they have to sell.
- This Week in Tech Demos: Sometimes starting a YouTube channel leads you eventually to kicking your TV. Sometimes you do it as part of your tech demo rather than out of frustration.
- Don’t say namaste. Just don’t.
- Lots of things about the US presidential campaign are nonsensical and frustrating, but perhaps only Tom Steyer’s merch shop truly takes on the feeling of a fever dream.
- We’ve seen Y2K issues resurface as Y2.02K issues due to quick fixes from 1999 that weren’t expected to still be in place this long, such as whatever old bug fix in whatever bit of background programming killed WWE 2K20 on New Year’s Day. But the Y2.038K problem isn’t just looming on the horizon, it’s looming so much that it’s already causing huge headaches in large industries.
- This Week in Historical Heroes: William Arondeus was a hero of antifascist resistance, a gay man who used his artistic talents to forge documents for the Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation and then blew up the occupational government’s records office.
- This Week in Ingenuity: It turns out that if you very carefully measure the interference in undersea fiber optic lines, you’ve turned the lines into a vast network of seismographs.
