Recently metadata retention laws came into effect in Australia and your activities both online and offline are being tracked and stored for up to two years all under the guise of terrorism.
Ironically the very law that is supposedly meant to protect Australian citizens might end up doing the opposite. Every call, text, web search or activity you do that can be tracked most likely will be tracked and stored. Depending on who you are or what you do, you might come up as a person of interest in a criminal case and not even know it.
As much as I like Windows 10 there is a new feature that annoys the absolute crap out of me: quick access in Explorer.
By default quick access will show you your recently used files and folders. Sounds great, right? Well not really. As a result you get junk folders and files clogging up the sidebar of your File Explorer windows. Fortunately, you can disable the annoying behaviour.
Open File Explorer Right click on Quick Access and select “Options” In Folder Options, the Privacy options group at the bottom is where you can disable the Quick Access feature. I also recommend you click the “Clear” button as well. Uncheck both or desired checkboxes and click “Ok” That’s all there is. Quick Access is now disabled.
What happens if and when the newly introduced metadata retention scheme in Australia encounters its first leak?
Effective today October 13th, 2015 the scheme is active. Although, comically there supposedly are a lot of companies still awaiting for approval on their data retention implementations. You can rest assured telcos like Telstra and Optus are already compliant and ready to store your calls and internet details.
The sheer amount of data that will be logged per second (probably tens of gigs) is also going to undoubtedly show some stress fractures in the infrastructure. Australian telcos can barely keep their networks congestion free and stable, I don’t know how a retention scheme is going to fare any better for them.
Update January 2020: I did not have high hopes for this thing given it was a cheap Bunnings purchase. I managed to do a couple of cooks with this before it started acting up on me. The thin wire that connects to the probe eventually discoloured and then I started experiencing inaccurate temperatures.
I have vowed to never buy cheap essential items ever again. Instead, I bought the ThermoPro TP20 Wireless Remote Digital Cooking Food Meat Thermometer with Dual Probe for Smoker Grill BBQ ThermometerThermoPro TP20 which has been incredibly reliable. It cost way more than the Bunnings probe but has elevated my smoking game considerably.
Over the last year or so there have been a lot of articles all decrying the use of the hamburger icon for navigation. The icon itself isn’t a hamburger, it’s just three horizontal lines that resemble one.
In the early days of the iPhone and rise of mobile sites, the hamburger icon was a popular choice for showing a menu. And depending on which sites and applications you use, it might still be.
As great as CSS is, there is one thing that it lacks and that is a parent selector. The supposed reason for its nonexistence is performance concerns.
People forget that the CSS specification as it currently stands offers many selector features which when used incorrectly could be considered bad for performance.
I think justifying the lack of :parent selector purely because of performance concerns is silly. It’s like Javascript lacking the native forEach method because it is less performant than a native for or while and can introduced performance issues.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term coined for describing devices connected to the internet. Your fitness band tracker is an IoT device, your climate control system, perhaps your lights and if you’ve got an expendable income: your fridge might be as well.
I have always loved tinkering with hardware since I was a kid. Pulling apart old devices, puting devices inside of devices. In my hardware hacking travels, I have been buying cheap Android powered touchscreen tablets off of eBay.
When it comes to music streaming, Spotify is the leader with over 60 million listeners, 15 million of which are paid listeners.
Over the last year or so, some artists have been VERY vocal about the small amount of revenue that Spotify actually pays out per X amount of listens. It got to the point where Taylor Swift pulled her music down, refusing to put her new album 1989 up for streaming because she felt that Spotify was undervaluing music and underpaying artists, before striking up an undoubtedly profitable deal for herself with Apple for their fledgling music offering.
Today we are going to be discussing how to use the Sortable Javascript library by RubaXa in our Aurelia applications.
Sortable is a highly configurable, no frills drag and drop library that has zero dependencies. So if you’re not using jQuery or just not a fan of libraries with dependencies, then this is the library for you. I also highly recommend Dragula but this article will be focusing on Sortable.
Getting Started This article is going to assume you have an Aurelia application already up and running and using JSPM as your package manager. If you do not have Aurelia installed, the recommended and easiest way to get an Aurelia application up and running is to download the Skeleton Navigation application from Github here.
Cooking steak isn’t difficult and certainly isn’t rocket science. But for some reason, many people screw up cooking the perfect steak. As with anything; patience, attention and the right tools for the job are crucial. You wouldn’t trust a carpenter without a hammer to do a good job.
When it comes to smoking, things are a little more involved. You’re not just grilling a steak, you’re smoking it and temperature control, as well as the right amount of coals and positioning, is crucial.