We reached the end of another year, and generally, this is a good time to look back, to evaluate what was done, what wasn’t done and eventually plan ahead. While dedicating some time to the first task, it occurred to me that I should share some of this stuff. I doubt it will be useful […]
Author: Gonçalo Valério
Software developer and owner of this blog. More in the "about" page.
Occasionally, “modern” baby monitors hit the news, but not for the best reasons. Sometimes for the lack of security, other times for exploitative practices, etc. This also applies to many other categories of products that we can include in the so-called “Internet of Things”. After reading a recent article about the topic, some comments with […]
The possibilities of the ActivityPub protocol, and what it can bring to the table regarding interoperability in the social media landscape, are immense. It is specially welcome after a decade (and half?) plagued by the dominance of centralized walled gardens that almost eradicated the diverse ecosystem that previously existed. It is used by many software […]
No matter how much you try to delay and how many reasons you find to postpone, eventually the time comes. You need to update and upgrade your software, your system components, your apps, your dependencies, etc. This happens to all computer users. On some systems, this is an enjoyable experience, on other systems as painful […]
Ten years ago, after it became clear to almost everyone that all our online activity was being tracked and stored, I wrote a blog post about simple steps a person could take to improve their privacy online. Essentially, it contains a few recommendations that everyone could follow to reduce their fingerprint without much effort. It […]
Two years ago, I made a small tool on top of Cloudflare’s Workers to generate a single feed by taking input from multiple RSS sources, a kind of aggregator or planet software as it was usually known a few years ago. You can read more about it here and here. This is a basic tool […]
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Playing with maps
I’ve always been astonished about how well mapping apps work. Sure, when Google Maps was first released the sense of wonder was much greater than it is nowadays, nevertheless it is still impressive. The number of situations when/where this kind of software becomes handy is huge, from the well-known GPS guides to even games (remember […]
At the start of last week, we received great news regarding new improvements to a very popular security app, “Google Authenticator”. A feature it was lacking for a long time was finally implemented, “cloud backups”. However, after a few days, the security community realized the new feature wasn’t as good as everybody was assuming. It […]
Last year, I built a small tool to detect inline styles and scripts in a given webpage/document and then calculate their hashes. It can be useful for someone trying to write a strict “Content-Security-Policy” (CSP) for pre-built websites. I described the reasoning at the time in this blog post. Today, I’m writing to announce that […]
Last year we saw the rise of the Fediverse. Mostly because of a series of external events, that ended up pushing many people to try other alternatives to their centralized platform of choice. Mastodon was clearly the software component that got most attention and has been under the spotlight in the last few months. It […]