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Personal

Starting the “1ppm Challenge”

So certain parts of the world already entered the year 2017 (this system doesn’t sound that great, but I will leave this discussion for another occasion) and we, here in Europe, are making the preparations to start the new year in a few hours. I am not found of those traditional new year resolutions that […]

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Random Bits

Before the flood

Yesterday I watched the above documentary on National Geography Channel, it is a good piece of work and it alerts to very pertinent issues, that have been in the agenda for many years/decades. Yet, we haven’t been able to overcome lobbies and established interests, that maintain the status quo and their “money machines” running with […]

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Personal Portugal Technology and Internet

Pixels Camp 2016

A few weeks ago took place in Lisbon the first edition of Pixels Camp (aka Codebits 2.0), an event that I try to attend whenever it happens (see previous posts about it). It is the biggest technology focused event/conference in Portugal with a number of attendees close to 1000. This year the venue changed to […]

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Technology and Internet

EU-Free and Open Source Software Auditing project

Today I stumbled on this blog post about a poll for the EU-FOSSA. I’m not familiarized with all aspects of this pilot project, however by the information I could gather, it seems to be a really great idea. Most of us regularly use, up to a certain degree, several pieces of free (as in freedom) […]

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Technology and Internet

Test driving ZeroNet

A few weeks ago the “Decentralized Web Summit” took place in San Francisco, even though there was a video stream available at the time, I wasn’t able to watch it, but later I saw some excerpts of it. One of the talks that caught my attention was about a new thing called ZeroNet. It seemed […]

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Random Bits

Blogs, web feeds and the open web

As I already published before (twice), I’m a big supporter of an “ancient” and practically dead technology, at least as many like to call it, that still can be found in the Internet. It is the RSS, a very useful standard that is one of the foundations for publishing content to the Web in a […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Timezone per user

Adding support for time zones in your website, in order to allow its users to work using their own timezone is a “must” nowadays. So in this post I’m gonna try to show you how to implement a simple version of it. Even though Django’s documentation is very good and complete, the only example given […]

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Python Technology and Internet

Receive PGP encrypted emails, without the sender needing to know how to do it

One common trouble of people trying to secure their email communications with PGP, is that more often that not the other end doesn’t know how to use these kind of tools. I’ll be honest, at the current state the learning curve is too steep for the common user. This causes a huge deal of trouble […]

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Random Bits Technology and Internet

Log based analytics are still useful

A long time ago, most of the modern website analytics software made the shift from relying on server logs to use client-side code snippets to gather information about the user, in this last category we can include as examples Google Analytics and Piwik. In fact, this paradigm allows to collect information with greater detail about […]

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Python

Django Friday Tips: Secret Key

One thing that is always generated for you when you start a new django project is the SECRET_KEY string. This value is described in the documentation as: A secret key for a particular Django installation. This is used to provide cryptographic signing, and should be set to a unique, unpredictable value. The rule book mandates […]