Chinchilla Squeaks - Internet 3 point uh oh

Podcast version

A weekly podcast from Chris Chinchilla covering technology, board and role play games, history, current affairs, and frankly whatever I feel like covering. Show notes can be found at - chrischinchilla.com/podcast

Cool Tech!

In February, shit hit the fan in the usual way: An old tweet resurfaced. Brantly Millegan, director of operations at Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a web3 business, had written the following in May 2016: “Homosexual acts are evil. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. Abortion is murder.

In a few minutes, electronic music will start pulsing, stuffed animals will be flung through the air, women will emerge spinning Technicolor hula hoops, and a mechanical bull will rev into action, bucking off one delighted rider after another.

Yes… I know I pronounce the name wrong 🤦‍♂️ And yes… I know I am using the wrong plugin until about 12 minutes in, but I think it still works 🤞 😅. Grazie provides intelligent grammar checks, completion, and writing assistance for natural language text in IntelliJ-based IDEs. It checks text in code comments, commit messages, and text files, such as Markdown, XML, AsciiDoc, and so on. Will it convince me to switch from my customised setup in Visual Studio Code? Join me and see!

Valeriya Ionan, a deputy minister at Ukraine’s Ministry for Digital Transformation, was breastfeeding her two-month-old son Mars when the first explosions boomed over Kyiv in the early hours of February 24. “I didn’t get at first what was happening,” she says.

Like many people, Aeden felt helpless when Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. He was a 23-year-old based in the UK with no connection to the country, but he was good at open-source intelligence gathering, which involves scouring the web to collect publicly available data. 

I speak with the team behind Hasty Docs, a tool that aims to keep documentation and code changes in sync by allowing you to link lines together.

Russia’s disconnection from the online services of the West has been as abrupt and complete as its disconnection from real-world global trade routes. Facebook has been blocked entirely by Russian authorities, while Twitter is almost completely cut off.

In early January, Google sent an email notifying me that I’d used up 76 percent of my account’s free storage space—the 15 gigabytes shared across Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive.

Gaming

Grievance is an interactive story about power. The limits of power, its corrosive nature, and the damage that power inflicts, deliberate or otherwise, on all those without it. Join me as I follow the lives of three characters as their paths cross and untangle over the course of the story.

And Finally…

The view from my writing retreat window in Valetta, Malta