Ctrl blog

Scaleway seems too good to be true

The French virtual private (VPS) hosting provider Scaleway looks damned impressive offering four dedicated ARM processor cores and 2 GB of RAM for 3 Euro per…

DNSLink and IPNS availability survey

I’ve examined the top one million websites (according to Alexa Internet) to find out how many of them announce availability on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)…

Contour Diabetes app and Next One glucose meter with Samsung S8

Contour Diabetes app, Bluetooth, and why diabetics can’t have nice things

I thought my new Contour Next One glucose meter with a companion phone app would work like a modern connected fitness tracker and give me convenient…

Why we need the distributed web

The distributed web seeks to make peer-to-peer content distribution the new default. This should help make the web topology more democratic and resilient to nature and…

Not getting much done with Microsoft To-Do

Microsoft To-Do is a nice looking multi-platform task manager built around a workflow that I’ve found helpful for prioritizing and completing tasks. It has just the…

Giving people a choice about Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) versus the web

The decentralized nature of the web, as it is, is under serious threat from initiatives like the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project spearheaded by Google. Search…

Combating article theft by delaying RSS feeds

For the last four years, Ctrl blog’s syndication feed (“RSS”) subscribers have received early-access to most articles as an incentive to subscribe. This program is now…

Micorosft Windows license sticker sheet (samples)

Cheapo Windows licenses openly sold as “pirate keys” on Amazon.ca

I’ve unintentionally referred people towards purchasing pirate license activation keys for Windows 10 through Amazon in Canada. I’d like to explain exactly how this happened.