• A see-through docky-cloney thing from Orico.  (PC Perspective)
  
  I need one of these.  I have tons of old bare disk drives I could use to dump backups onto, and a dock is a lot more convenient than swapping them in and out of external cases.  So I might pick up this exact model.
  
  
  
• California tech companies have responded predictably to California's new privacy laws by fucking everything up.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  And in related news:
  
  
  
  
  And also:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Format Python code with YAPF.  (GitHub)
  
  Or - bear with me - use PyCharm and just hit Ctrl-Alt-L.
  
  
  
• Polymath is a markup language for everything.
  
  Unfortunately it's the bastard offspring of Forth and Lisp.
  
  
  
• Singapore accounts for half of all takedown notices for Netflix.  (ZDNet)
  
  Just a reminder that the First Amendment is a precious thing and some people need to be tarred and feathered, such as, for example, Congress:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The key difference between Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is that Bradbury realised the government would not need to enforce censorship.
  
  
  The people would do it themselves, and they would be insufferably smug about it.
  
  In short, he predicted Twitter.
  
  
  
• A solar cell that works at night?  (Inverse)
  
  The summary makes no sense at all - the author seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that solar cells are thermocouples - but maybe the original paper does.
  
  
  
• Why is Birds of Prey bombing at the box office?  (CinemaBlend)
  
  Because the director chose a non-canonical grouping of a second-tier story for an ultra-violent R-rated girl-power wokegasm and there just aren't that many purple-haired college students, no matter how things may appear on Tumblr.
  
  
  
• Be evil.  (Silicon Valley)
  
  Google has transformed into Big Brother so clumsily that it was impossible not to notice.  If you're going to take over the world and turn us all into mind slaves, can you at least be subtle about it?
  
  
  
• Almost every major website tracks your mouse movement.  (Medium)
  
  We did this at my day job after we launched our new app.  What the software is doing is letting you attach a replay of the user's session to a bug report.  When you're a small company with a complex web app this is seriously magical.
  
  
  
• And did those dates, in ancient time, grow upon Britain's mountains green?  (Science Alert)
  
  No, probably not.  But researchers found enough seeds of an ancient and extinct variety of date palm that they've been able to grow six new trees - that show clear signs of selective breeding by Bronze Age civilisation.
  
  
  
• What exactly went wrong with the voting software at the Democratic Iowa Caucus?  (Rolling Stone)
  
  Everything.  Exactly.
  
  Look, it's Rolling Stone, but apparently Rolling Stone has found the keys to the time machine and rediscovered some of its relevance:

  Democrats went on to systematically rat-fuck every group in their tent: labor, the poor, minorities, soldiers, criminal defendants, students, homeowners, media consumers, environmentalists, civil libertarians, pensioners — everyone but donors.

  They didn’t just fail to defend groups, but built monuments to their betrayal.

  I don't know of any other even vaguely mainstream media outlet that would print that today.
  
  
  
  

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