/dev/nikc/blog

For a personal project, I looked into the magical world of how to sync work from two or more peers on a single item, without anyone losing their work.

Thankfully, Neil Fraser has published a paper on Diff Strategies, Fuzzy Patching, and indeed Differential Synchronization. Even more thankfully, Google has open sourced a diff-match-patch library (ported to several popular programming languages) that does all the heavy lifting for you.

Most likely my personal project will never be finished to a point where it would be made public, but since I found this stuff interesting, I just thought I’d put this out there for others to enjoy.

Kun kahdeksan vuotta sitten muutin Helsinkiin, blogiskene oli suomessa voimissaan. Huippuaikaa kesti kai muutaman hienon ja miitintäyteisen vuoden, jonka jälkeen iski ähky ja inflaatio. Blogeja alkoi syntyä enemmän kuin koskaan, mutta laadukas sisältö muuttui entistä vaikeammin löydettäväksi.

Siitä se ajatus heräsi, kun lomallelähtökaljaa olin ryystämässä. Kun heinäsuovasta on niin kovin vaikeaa löytää neulaa, kenties kädestä pitävä opas olisi vastaus.

Inspiroituneena kasasin kesäloman aikana JustNytin. Palvelua on nyt beta-testattu parisen viikkoa ja toimii riittävän hyvin noustakseen varjoista.

Jos innostuit, lähde mukaan: levitä sanaa, ilmoittaudu kuraattoriksi.

I have a problem: the internet. Or rather the vast amount of interesting content being published versus the time and energy I have to consume it. I’ll read an article here, bookmark an article there, but mostly I just open stuff in tabs in order to “read them later.” And I know I’m not alone.

Currently, I have too many bookmarks to count both locally and in various cloud services, but more importantly around 80 tabs across 9 windows open. More importantly because those tabs and windows each use up a chunk of the finite RAM memory in my computer. As a result of this my computer almost constantly feels sluggish.

Now, I know the right course of action would be to address my behaviour. But who does the right thing?

In lieu of improving my judgment on what’s truly worth my time and attention, I instead found a tool to help me with the immediate symptom: The Great Suspender.

The Great Suspender suspends a tab after a set timeout, unless it matches a white list, or on demand. Individual tabs or all tabs in a window can later be restored as needed.

What I really need is a plugin that will simply close unattended tabs after a period of time. Because, even though I really do revisit some of those postponed articles, many are just waiting to be bookmarked and forgotten about forever. Perhaps I’ll add it to my ever growing list of hobby projects…