Interesting Things #30 — Amiga 500

Hi,

This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff.

Happy reading!

#tech

Upgrading an Amiga 500 for today (Sept 2021) — I bought one on eBay and decided to upgrade it with modern parts. (hn)

How Two Interns Are Helping Secure Millions of Lines of Code — How do we find security vulnerabilities at Slack? (hn)

These Robots Follow You to Learn Where to Go — Burro makes carts that help growers of trees and vineyards with harvests. Meanwhile, the maker of Vespa scooters wants to carry your groceries. (hn)

Impressions of the Framework Laptop — My thoughts on the Framework Laptop’s hardware. (hn)

The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes — The bots convincingly and effortlessly help hackers break into Coinbase, Amazon, PayPal, and bank accounts. (hn)

Malware found in coa and rc, two npm packages with 23M weekly downloads — Both packages were compromised around the same time and were the result of attackers gaining access to a package developer’s account. (hn)

MirChecker: Detecting Bugs in Rust Programs via Static Analysis [pdf] — Fully automated bug detection by performing static analysis on Rust’s Mid-level Intermediate Representation (MIR). (hn)

The future of personal computing looks just like an M1 Mac — While you may not be using a Mac, your next PC might start to look like one on the inside. (hn)

Everybody loves Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W — We take a look at what you all make of our new board so far. (hn)

The tale of a single register value — It’s not every day that you get to debug what may well be a packet of death. It was certainly the first time for me. (hn)

#work

Quitters Get Raises — “Quitters” earned higher percentage wage gains than those who stayed in their existing jobs. (hn)

#business

Galaxy Brain Is Moving! — A few errant observations about newsletterdom. (hn)

Why it’s OK to abandon your side projects 😉 — When you say ‘no’ to something, you’re usually saying ‘yes’ to something else that matters more at the moment. (hn)

#science

Sponge Genes Hint at the Origins of Neurons and Other Cells — A new study reveals some possibly ancient connections between the nervous, immune and digestive systems. (hn)

Hate broccoli and cauliflower? Your microbiome might be partially to blame — Lots of sulfuric volatiles in saliva correlated with kids' dislike of these veggies. (hn)

Bilingualism Comes Naturally to Our Brains — The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages. (hn)

Quantum Sensor Breakthrough Paves Way For GPS-Free Navigation — The main problem wasn’t weird subatomic physics. It was finding a simpler way to maintain a vacuum. (hn)

NASA Rover Has Found Previously Unknown Organic Molecules on Mars — Using a new on-board experiment, NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered traces of previously undetected organic molecules on Mars. (hn)

Inti Tanager: Colorful New Species of Bird Discovered in South America — The Inti tanager is so different in appearance and genetics that the ornithologists also described a new genus just for it. (hn)

#life

A different type of scam — In order to withdraw the money, they must first give some money to the actors. (hn)

Non-Cognitive Skills For Educational Attainment Suggest Benefits Of Mental Illness Genes — Do some of the genes for some mental illnesses have compensatory benefits? (hn)

How to maintain a healthy brain — Adopt these lifestyle changes and you will not only sharpen your mind today but also reduce your risk of dementia later on. (hn)

A Guide for Beginners in Neurohacking: Cheat Codes to Obtain Ridiculous Brainpower — Five fundamental neuro hacks that could make an amazing difference in your brainpower. (hn)

A 14-year-old won a prestigious award for his discoveries on ‘antiprime’ numbers — The program he created can calculate antiprime numbers, which are highly divisible numbers with more than 1,000 digits. (hn)

#random

Man donated his body to science; company sold $500 tickets to his dissection — The widow learned of the dissection from a news reporter. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng