Scraps from 2025-06-27 to 2025-07-04
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The third scrap! Whoda ever thunk it'd reach the lofty heights of three editions? Not me, that's for sure.
This week, I'm happy to tell you that Scraps is fully sponsored by absolutely nobody and contains no product placement or adverts! Ain't that great?!
Once is once, twice is a coincidence, but thrice? Well now, that's a pattern. I guess I'm going to have to carve some time out this week to sort out a dedicated Scraps RSS feed, as well as /scraps slashpage. I mean, the header already links there and it 404's so I guess it needs to happen? I'll add it to my todo list!
As for your own todo list, perhaps peruse the presently provided posts post-haste? I don't know, you do you. BUT we do have some cool stuff to read this week!
Spotlight
- small_cypress has started Small Web July - cutting out walled garden social media, the 'big web', and scrolling forever in the month of July
Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff
Because people are people too, y'know!?
- With large language models still churning out a lot of slop, their integration into everything continues. What does this mean for the future of the web?
when the tech giants cut their connection to the web - with AI summaries and walled gardens - they freed us. There's little point farming backlinks or bowing to their demands now. And in their wake of destruction I see space to grow. So lets establish a small, human, sustainable web of independent sites. For ourselves and any friends that will join us.
- Homestead the Web by @caolan- @elazar misses the internet
- The old internet is still here - we've wrapped up June, and that means we get to take a look at the take two posts that have been written for June's Indieweb Carnival!
- It's now July! New month means new Indieweb Carnival theme, and this time around it's totems hosted by Maxwell
- The lack of self awareness of the wider web never ceases to amaze, Aram spotted this beautiful and disappointing piece of irony on The Verge
- @Nina raised a good point... what happened to my Status option on IM applications? Sure there are some current implementations, but there are too few!
Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff
By welcoming our robot overlords, you're actually just welcoming the billionaire who owns them. And that, to me, seems like a pretty shitty deal! Tech is still cool though - like all tools, they can be used or abused.
- Speaking of cool tech, Tech Greatness The Internet Archive is expecting to archive their 1 trillionth page in October. To celebrate, they're holding a party and a live stream! Be there, or be square! ...or watch an archived copy afterwards I guess that's cool too.
- 689 Brother printers were in the news recently for having easily guessable passwords - Terence Eden speculates that they may therefore be illegal in the UK. Interesting thought!
- Let's encrypt has now stopped email notifications - less infrastructure for them to manage, which is a good thing!
- Staying with Let's Encrypt, they have now issued a cert for an IP address and will begin rolling this out to prod sometime this year
- There's a new method to extract different content from the same .zip file, depending on the tool used to extract the files
- Every public commit to GitHub is archived in GitHub Archive, including ones developers try to delete (because they contain secrets, for example) and you can easily extract them with this writeup and tool
Bonus
It's a good idea to bring ourselves out of technology and websites occasionally.
That hasn't happened this week, as I've been busy reading about game development! For no reason I tell you, no reason at all.
- Two similar Dev logs from two different games were posted online recently, going over efficiency gains related to multi threading. Whilst I don't have the nuerons to fully understand each detail, they're nonetheless fascinating and I certainly appreciate a good, deep technical analysis of a problem. Here's the Arma 3 OpRep, and the Dyson Sphere Program post