Trafalgar Square

Image: Trafalgar Square

#150

Friday, March 15, 2019

In This Edition:
{develop:BBC}, WebAIM 1 million homepages, Firefox Send, behaviours in a driverless car world, Stephen Wolfram's personal infrastructure and Darknet Diaries!

Any time I visit London, I usually end up walking through Trafalgar Square. Coming from Embankment tube station or from Leicester square, it's quite well positioned as a focal point of the city centre and nice to visit day or night :-)

{develop:BBC} London 2019

This week we took a short trip to London where my wife Jenn was giving the opening keynote for the {develop:BBC} internal BBC developers conference at the BBC Radio Theatre in BBC HQ. I got to tag along backstage and also take in some great talks, including some agile wisdom from Kevlin Henney and the environmental burden caused by cloud data centers by Anne Currie (the key takeaway of which was to use Google Cloud, Azure or AWS Dublin and AWS US West, which are climate offset). You can see some photos I took of the morning sessions here.

Accessibility of 1m Homepages

Image: webaim.org

WebAIM conducted an accessibility study of 1,000,000 website homepages. The analysis captured 168 million datapoints and took 66.2 days of cumulative computer processing time. The results are available here and show that the most prevalent WCAG error is low contrast on the page.

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Firefox Send

Image: Mozilla

Mozilla have released a WeTransfer alternative called Firefox Send. The service allows you to send encrypted, self expiring data of up to 1GB unregistered, and up to 2.5GB with an account.

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Future Behaviour in an Autonomous Car World

Jan Chipchase has an interesting post on medium about the different types of behaviours or hacks we could see emerge in a world with prevalent self driving cars. Will these cars be used to advertise to us in "ConvoyAds", will we need hire "dringers" to be the human behind the wheel in certain regulated areas or will we "go vinyl" and drive ourselves the old-fashioned way.

Stephen Wolfram's Personal Infrastructure

Image: stephenwolfram.com

Stephen Wolfram has published a fascinating long-read on his personal infrastructure. He details all the tech he uses in his everyday life and how he organises and categorises everything, most of which are processes which he has optimised over the last 30 years. It is inspiring how efficiently he organises everything, down to having labelled plastic envelopes of devices, tech and accessories for travelling, hotel stays, car hire trips etc. There are lots of tips to be discovered from this post!

Podcasts Of The Week: Darknet Diaries

Image: darknetdiaries.com

The Darknet Diaries podcast was a sick-pick on an episode of Syntax and after listening to the first few episodes, I'm hooked! Each episode tells the story of a major hack or breach in recent years, such as the VTech data breach, or a run of PBX hacking scams by two people on the FBI's Cyber Most Wanted list. Also, the 90's esthetic of the show has a very X-Files/Outer Limits vibe to it.

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About Found This Week

Found This Week is a curated blog of interesting posts, articles, links and stories in the world of technology, science and life in general.
Each edition is curated by Daryl Feehely every Friday and highlights cool stuff found each week.
The first 104 editions were published on Medium before this site was created, check out the archive here.

Daryl Feehely

I’m a web consultant, contract web developer, technical project manager & photographer originally from Cork, now based in London. I offer my clients strategy, planning & technical delivery services, remotely & in person. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com

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