Week 408 - Interesting links

Open 2017: Platform Cooperatives

Oliver from the The Open Co-op got in touch last week to tell us about this 2-day conference dedicated to Platform Cooperatives that they’re organising for February next year. It sounds as if there will be some interesting talks and the tickets for small organisations look like good value. — JM

Portier

This open-source project considers itself the spiritual successor to Mozilla Persona. It’s a self-hostable, email-address-based, password-less authentication service which can use third-party services (e.g. Google) to authenticate you, but can also fallback to emailing you a sign-in link. Via Paul Battley. — JM

They Used To Last 50 Years

Ryan Finlay explains why fridges and other appliances used to last a lot longer and suggests some ideas for improving the situation. I despair that appliances and devices are not designed to last or to be repairable and I found this a very interesting read. Via Tom Taylor. — JM

hls.js

I’ve recently been re-visiting our GFR Video project and in doing some related research I came across this JavaScript library which implements an HTTP Live Streaming client on top of a standard HTML5 video element. The library integrates with video.js, the open-source video player we used in our project. I’ve been really impressed by the capabilities of some of the JavaScript libraries I’ve come across in recent months. — JM

CodeCity

I really like this idea of visualising software as interactive, navigable 3D cities. The basic idea is that classes are represented as buildings and packages/modules are represented as districts in which the buildings sit. Various other metrics can then be applied to produce a 3D colour visualisation. For example, the number of methods as building height, the number of attributes as building area, and the number of lines as the colour of the building. — JM