Hacker’s Tribute Vol. 72: Engineering a Better Climate!

Greetings, Coders and Opinion-Moulders!

The world is submerging into a world of fresh ideas, brave new frontiers, and rising sea levels. Some of us will measure up with the challenges and opportunities of climate change. Others will look to the past for insights from the legendary Floppy Disk. But all of us will need to abide by Google’s new guidelines. Meanwhile, celebrate the lunar calendar with JavaScript’s new API and be seen as your fake self in your next Zoom meeting.

When it’s time to get your feet wet – let’s make a splash!

Dan ‘the Man’ Kowalski

Editor-in-Chief, The Hacker’s Tribute

Talking Heads

Machine learning has done it again. This time, designing and re-creating head motions for video conferencing. That’s right – it’s possible to design a speaking human being for your next webinar using motion capture techniques. Take a deep breath for the official title, brought to you by the Nvidia Corporation. “One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing” is here. Like all machine-learning concoctions – it’s getting cleverer than ever.

Your Time, In-Time, and On-Time

It’s rare to hear JavaScript getting a bad rap, but their current date-time API isn’t exactly well-received. The ECMAScript proposal might offer some relief with their stage 3 ‘Temporal’ date-time API. Breeze through immutable objects, feel at ease with time zone support, new values to support time zones, plus non-Gregorian calendar support. Plurality is a founding principle of The Hacker’s Tribute, so we’re happy to know that our Chinese and Persian calendar-using friends will be undoubtedly thrilled!

Engineering a Better Climate!

The climate is shifting, and hackers, we need you. You, too, can take climate change head-on and steer our world in a positive direction. Read this post to get a vital snapshot of the tech sector’s future and where engineers will be needed most. From emerging technologies to programming, there’s a place for you in the not-too-distant future. Step up and be part of a better, only-mildly-warming dream world. Just don’t build your fantasy home by a coastline.

Full-on Floppy

Put down whatever it is you’re working on. Ground-breaking projects are stuck in the past, and it’s time to un-stick them! That’s right, we’re talking about reactivating your floppy disks. Looking to jump into the magic of a bygone era? Behold a floppy disk interface for the Raspberry Pi. Using custom PCB’s, the pins offer access through the Raspberry Pi 40 GPIO connection using SPI. Expect raw data and tangible results for a true blast from the past.

Googled to the Core

You can pop the champagne – Google has stopped prioritising the Accelerated Mobile Pages format. That means website owners can do away with building additional AMP pages. Instead, sites will bend to Google’s will in another manner. Core Web Vitals are standards to which your site must conform. Assess the implications as you wish. Some may be alarmed, whereas others are keen to ‘go with the flow.’ In either case, feel free to celebrate or ‘sayonara.’