The Internet Is Dead, Isn’t It?
Lately I keep feeling that the internet has become a worse place. Not necessarily louder or slower, but emptier in the places where people used to be visible. Ten or fifteen years ago I could move through small personal blogs, read along in forums, disagree in comments and learn something almost by accident. It was a web made of many small voices. They were not always clever or pleasant, but they were recognisably human.
I remember evenings when I found a post about a problem, followed the comments and came away with a better solution. I wrote things myself, asked questions, corrected mistakes and linked to other sites. I still write about things such as my GitHub backup with Gickup and Forgejo or local AI in my homelab. A post used to be the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. Today I am much more likely to […]
Regular users of my blog should already be familiar with “Google Suggest”. Those can skip ahead to the section “Wildcard operator in Google Suggest”, for all others here is the quick start. Google Suggest is the name of the Google functionality that is responsible for suggesting possible search queries while you are typing your search query. For example, if you type “What are the most popular”, Google will suggest “What are the most popular sports in Australia”. The suggestions, in turn, are based on the one hand on the user’s own Google search profile and on the other hand on the most frequent search queries currently sent to Google by other users.
In the past, there were more and more – the websites on which a specific action was allowed to run only X times a day. Today, it’s more like geo-blocking – locking out certain users based on their country of origin. However, both variants are based on the same technique: the evaluation of the IP address. In the first case, accesses from an IP address are counted (in addition to cookies) – in the second case, a database is used to evaluate where in the world the user behind a specific IP address is staying. Both locks can often be bypassed by changing the IP address.
To develop my programs and web applications I mainly use two editors/IDEs. For the former I use the wonderful Visual Studio, and for the latter – Sublime Text, the editor that I cannot do without ever since I first discovered it. If you still don’t know what Sublime Text is, you should download the free unlimited demo version. I bet a few among you will switch to it from your editors!