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Related, but does anyone know of an app or site that can tell you what you're facing when you're standing on a beach? As in, what country or part of the country - so if you were standing on a Croatian beach somewhere and pointed it east, you could find out what part of Italy you're looking at.

I've always thought it would be cool to stand on a coast of Malta and tell if I'm facing Libya, Israel, or Greece.


Can't any map app do that? I mean it shows you your location on the map, and then you just scroll across the map to see what you'd be looking at, right?

Kind of - but when the country across the water is hundreds of km away, turning slightly to the left or right could mean you're facing a completely different country. But I'd also love to know which part of a country you're facing.

Thanks! You're the best.


Thanks for making the internet a better place!


I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995, before getting hired by Easynet to do tech support on the top floor of the building where Cyberia London was located. It was an interesting time! This article captured the energy pretty well - but there was a whole lot going on at Easynet as well at the time, too.

FWIW, I think the claim was always that Cyberia was The UK's first internet cafe. At least, that's what I've always said.


I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995

Wow, now there is a blast from the past! I hung out there quite a bit in 1995-1996. That was also the first place I used the actual internet (as opposed to BBS's or CompuServe), shortly after it opened. I can probably thank Cyberia for at least a small part of my future career success.


I probably served you coffee at the time, then, brilliant. It was definitely the place I fell in love with the internet - I ended up leaving school early because it.


Technically, you probably severed me a Coke :)


Very cool! I'm acquainted with Kingston but had no idea about that aspect of its history.

This NYT article from 2004 states that it's the world's first: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/business/worldbusiness/th...

There's also a stock image website with photos from the Kingston branch in 2001: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-internet-at-cyberia-cafe-k...


Hah, amazing! That brings back memories. The PC where the guy with the red t-shirt is sitting is where one regular used to come in and send out his erotic fanfic. He'd bring in a floppy disk that he'd set up at home and always seemed to have problems getting it to read - so we'd have to go over and help him out all the time.


I couldn't quite put my finger on the building you can see through the window. I managed to find an address for the cafe (48 High Street) and it clicked after I opened up streetview. It's the corner office block next to the mini roundabout on the High Street: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4075868,-0.3077591,3a,75y,96...

If you spin around in Streetview you can see the building that must have house Cyberia itself to the left of what is now Fillies Kingston. You can also cycle back in time to the earliest Streetview shots in 2008, at which time the cafe must already have closed down, and is next to a place called Bar Elvissa.

In case you're interested, my Googling also resulted in this brief conversation on Mastodon between other apparent previous frequenters of Cyberia Kingston: https://mastodon.social/@ade/109405408248074169


Hey, thanks for that Mastodon link. I think I remember at least one of those guys. I think that building over the road is nothing of note - just some generic commercial real estate.


He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).

What a loss.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...

[3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not


Well, thanks for posting but that page is way out of date! I don't think I've updated it for... 15 years now? The data itself is kept fresh though: https://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php


I love this part: "It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity", because it could be "refactored" into "additional work, risk, and complexity". I assume it hasn't been, because (in the author's opinion) it communicates the intended meaning better - which might be the case with code, too. "Well-designed" is subjective.


Good design has objective and subjective elements. Or... it might be more accurate to say that it is entirely objective, but some/many elements are context-sensitive.

For example, a style of writing that is difficult to follow but rewarding to parse for the dedicated and skilled reader may be considered good. It is good at being an enjoyable reading puzzle. But from an accessibility standpoint, it's not a clear presentation of information, so it's not good.

Mostly we call things that are increasingly accessible well designed. But we're using a specific criterion of accessibility. It's a great criterion and it's one we should generally prioritize. But it's not the only facet of design.

In code, we generally could categorize high quality design as accessibility. Most engineers probably think of themselves as not really needing accessibility features (although how many are undiagnosed neurodivergent?), but writing code that is easy to read and parse and follow is an accessibility feature and an aspect of good design.


I did some research on TXT records a little while back, that might be of interest: https://labs.ripe.net/author/pgl/the-joy-of-txt/


Nice article!

And btw, thanks for all your work as a filter list maintainer. I know it's a lot to keep up with, and I appreciate it very much.


Mullvad really does have a commitment to privacy.

Some key points:

- Acts as a Google proxy, removes tracking links and caches results

- Only available for Mullvad paid users

- 100 free direct searches a day, unlimited cached searches (further search result pages count towards limit)

- Results cached over all users for 30 days


I'm sorry but besides your first point, what is substantial in the claim that they have a commitment to privacy?

Also why would I trust them over Google?


- The offer many types of payment, some that can be anonymous.

- They have strong commitment to open source and have put their finances into that in addition to releasing code.

- They are doing a lot in terms of transparent infrastructure: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/1/12/diskless-infrastructur...

> Also why would I trust them over Google?

For Google your data is the product, for Mullvad you pay for a service.


You can send a carrier pigeon with a tenner and a sticky note holding your account number and they'll take it.


Buying a Mullvad scratch card is probably the most practical anonymous method. Usually the fact that you are using Mullvad at all isn't a secret (your ISPs can see you connecting), so outside of a very overcomplicated scenario where Amazon/$yourlocaltechstore are colluding with Mullvad to track individual scratch cards, it's fine.

Mailing cash in an anonymous envelope has a certain charm, but OTOH I have consistently had terrible experiences with the Swedish postal service and that seems to be a widespread opinion.


You can't trust anyone, but for Mullvad you're a customer not a product.


It all comes down to trust in the end, but over time I've come to trust Mullvad more and more. One particular example that sticks out to me is that they ended subscription based billing, specifically because it required them to hold customer information that they didn't want to have.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...

You can see an example of their lack of data retention from a post about when they were raided - there was nothing to find.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec...

Their blog is a good place if you want to get a sense of what they're like as a company.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/


I don't see anything in their terms of service / privacy policy re Leta. It'd be nice to know if they retain any sort of data at all (there's prominent mention to caching stuff, but just what are they caching?), regardless of whether it is tied to PII.


Problem is that Google search itself has still gone downhill......

This is a cool addition for sure though


Lol. Sure. M247 Ltd limited hosts...


I was wondering already why Sweden, home of the Pirate Bay and Assange lawsuits, does not shut it down. This could be the answer.


I think this may be referring to this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29206091/

"Effects of caffeine administration on sedation and respiratory parameters in patients recovering from anesthesia"

> Caffeine has been shown to enhance the speed of recovery from general anesthesia in murine models, though data in human patients is lacking. This is a retrospective review of intravenous caffeine administration (median dose 150 [125, 250] mg) to 151 heavily sedated patients in the post-anesthesia recovery area, to determine the association between caffeine administration and changes in sedation score, respiratory rate, and oxyhemoglobin saturation.


> I only really noticed this properly when my DNS sinkholing server (Adguard home) started blocking t.co links and I was getting an error when say, clicking a linked news article

Mission accomplished!


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