Week 286 - Interesting links

Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System

No sooner have I started to get my head around OS containers, Docker et al, than I come across the idea of a “unikernel”. As I understand it, the idea is to build a custom OS containing your application code and only the bits of a traditional OS that your application needs.

Mirage OS provides a way to build unikernels using OCaml. OSv is an OS designed from the ground up to run on the Xen hypervisor. It can run unmodified Linux applications and, in particular, it can run an unmodified JVM and applications built on top of one. — JM

My #indieweb life: how my site gives me an awesome social media archive of everything I’ve ever written

This explains how you can host your own content but post any of it to proprietary social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Most interestingly it explains how you can engage in “conversations” on these networks while still owning all your content. — JM

Xiki: The Command Revolution by Craig Muth — Kickstarter

This is an interesting looking tool which seems to be a combination of an editor, a shell and a wiki. I’m intrigued! — JM

Au Ralenti

Beautiful slow motion video of the Tour de France cyclists passing through the Olympic Park on Monday. James and I didn’t manage to see it in person but enjoyed watching the last 30km or so on our big screen. — CR

Dewey - Chrome bookmark manager

I really like this Chrome extension that provides an alternative interface to your Chrome bookmarks. I tend to treat my Chrome bookmarks as a read-it-later type service, and this provides a pretty good interface that allows me to do just that. It’s a shame that the service they were using to generate screenshots (Snapito) has gone away but I think the bookmarks still look pretty good witout them. — CR

Brace.io - Use Google Spreadsheets as your CMS

This seems like quite a neat way of prototyping a data driven website. You give brace.io access to your spreadsheet and you can then use mustache templates to present that data in your website. I’m guessing you can do this irrespective of whether your site is hosted using brace.io, but they make it super simple to go down that route. — CR