Weekly Tech Roundup #14
"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value" - Carl Sagan
Boot Up Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft And Play Doom On It
All the Minecrafters who are engulfed into the legendary game should hear this one. Apparently, a VM Computer’s mod has made it possible for gamers to install Windows 95 inside Minecraft. And wait for it, play Doom on the installed Windows OS inside Minecraft server.
The players join a server and enter a Minecraft world. After that, they order computer components from the satellites orbiting around your world of Minecraft.
Not only Windows 95, but players can also create computers that can boot up other operating systems.
One Reddit user decided to up it a notch and have successfully run Doom on Windows 95 installed inside Minecraft.
Chromium browsers support iframe lazy loading now to support performance
Google revealed on July 24, 2020 that Google Chrome and Chromium-based web browsers support the lazy loading of iframe content now. The integration of the feature comes right after Google introduced support for the lazy loading of images in Chromium and Chrome. Mozilla's Firefox web browser supports the lazy loading of images as well.
Technically speaking, lazy loading keeps the browser from loading certain content until it is accessed by the user. When a page is loaded for the first time, content that is not visible, below the fold, may be lazy loaded. When a user scrolls down, content gets loaded while the scroll action takes place.
The lazy loading of iframes in Chromium-based web browsers follows the same methodology. Webmasters need to use the loading="lazy" attribute for iframes in the code of the site to inform the browser that the content should not be loaded right away. Browsers that don't support the functionality will ignore the attribute while browsers that support it will handle the loading accordingly.
Big news! WhatsApp will soon let you use the same account on multiple devices
One feature which has always set WhatsApp apart from other messaging apps was that your account was tied to your physical device and phone number, rather than something more portable like a user name and password, meaning you could really only use the app on one device at a time.
According to WABetaInfo this is about to change, with Facebook building in a new UI which allows users to link multiple devices (up to 4) and use them at the same time.
How To: Build Your Own Rather Impressive Invisibility Shield
This is a video of Youtuber Randomonium discussing, building, and demonstrating his homemade invisibility/distortion shield constructed using sheets of lenticular lens. For those of you unfamiliar with how lenticular lenses work, he provides an explanation and diagram at around 2:30. Randomium estimates the cost of building your own shield to be around $130, which, I think we can all agree, is a small price to pay to never lose at the hiding portion of hide-and-seek ever again.
Amazon has just launched a helpful face mask store
We've tried to stay on top of the best places to purchase face masks over the past few months, with Etsy and ASOS topping the list.
Amazon has been suspiciously quiet when it comes to face masks, but that has all changed with the launch of its Face Mask Store. It's designed to help customers find the most suitable face mask for their needs.
Writing a file system from scratch in Rust
Data produced by programs need to be stored somewhere for future reference, and there must be some sort of organisation so we can quickly retrieve the desired information. A file system (FS) is responsible for this task and provides an abstraction over the storage devices where the data is physically stored.
In this post, we will learn more about the concepts used by file systems, and how they fit together when writing your own.
Building the Ultimate Home Office (Again)
I was searching around for a quote along the lines of you only being as good as the tools you use and somehow, I ended up down this rabbit hole of painters quotes and carpenters quotes and stuff about artists and their brushes. Then I started thinking it sounds a bit obnoxious anyway so maybe it wasn't really that relevant (yet somehow, here we are...) until eventually, I thought "stuff it, let's just write about the computer bits". So here we are.
More than a decade ago, I wrote about building the ultimate home office. Truth be told, that was originally written as an internal blog post at my old corporate job, largely because I wanted to demonstrate that a lot of thought had gone into my home workspace and consequently, I should spend more time working from there instead of from my windowless corporate office. How times have changed!