Last week Apple announced their new Macbook Pro laptops.

Their great innovation (a “game-changer” in their words) was a sliver of a touch screen above the keyboard which is able to show touchable context-specific buttons. They’ve dubbed this the TouchBar. Although the OLED technology is certainly pretty, one could almost hear the enormously disappointed collective “MEH” uttered by millions of users and suddenly erstwhile Apple fans world-wide.

Was Apple, in the form of the Phil Schiller really trying to sell this? By the way, if you represent Apple, a company traditionally known for its great design sensibilities, should you not spend just a little more money to dress a little better than the couture equivalent of an old Lada? Suit up man!

Summary: RFC 3676 format=flowed is an elegant and backwards-compatible method to have plaintext emails reflowed on (mobile) devices that support this feature. Although this standard has been around for more than 10 years, and Thunderbird 45.3.0 reports supporting it, it only does so on non-quoted text. Most unfortunately, it wraps quoted text incorrectly, disabling reflowing on receiving devices, resulting in embarrassingly ugly email rendering.

What is RFC 3676 format=flowed?

Half of the people on the internet are of less than average intelligence. This is especially evident in discussions around format=flowed. To exacerbate matters, participants in most cases have not taken the time to actually read through RFC 3676 (go on, click the link!) and instead prefer to argue on the basis of their very strong emotions and opinions around text wrapping.

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Well hello friends! In this here,the one hundred and eleventh edition of the Weekly Head Voices, I present a personal view of selected events that took place in the time between Monday, July 25 and Sunday, August 14 of 2016.

Post summary: HackerNews FastMail to Gmail retrospective (WARNING NERD CONTENT), Craft Beer tips, Swift Playgrounds (teach your kids to code!) and a tiny bit of backyard philosophy at the end.

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In 2013, when it became clear, primarily through Edward Snowden’s heroic actions, that the level of snooping by the US and other governments was far greater than any of us would have thought, I moved all of my data out of the US and of course blogged about it (that blog post has been read almost 70000 times; I think for many people this is an important issue).

This included migrating 60000 emails away from my beloved GMail (I got my GMail invite from The Vogon Poet on August 24, 2004. At that time, you could only get GMail by invitation. It was pretty exciting! (I have emails from before 2004, back to ‘93 or ‘94, but those are in a backup archive somewhere.)) to the little Synology DS213j standing next to my desk at the time.  This was all well and good behind the stable Dutch 100 Mbit/s down / 10 Mbit/s up cable connection I had, but when we decided to move back to South Africa, where home internet is a few years behind The Netherlands, I ended up having to pay for a virtual private server in Cape Town (to keep latency between me and my mail server manageable) and having to admin my own dovecot IMAP and postfix SMTP server.

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This update contains carefully selected thought bubbles from the time span between Earth date Wednesday July 20 and Sunday July 24, 2016.

Actually, the majority of this post is taken up by my Poor Man’s Bitcoin Explanation. If you’re not a nerd and/or you don’t have any interest in fabulous new virtual currencies that manage to work around a whole constellation of systems and rules put in place by governments the world over (STICK IT TO THE MAN BY THE POWER OF MATH!!), just skip over the next section.

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• From now on, I would like to limit WHVs to bullets (really) or to named sections, to ease reading. DOWN WITH WALLS OF TEXT!
• After a multi-year, completely coincidental, break from medical imaging, I am back to The Real Business since the start of July. I am super excited about the plans we’re cooking up and executing. I can obviously not say too much, unless beer is involved, or you hang around here for muuuuuch longer. I think I am allowed to mention digital pathology and machine learning and beer.
• Last week we road-tripped up the East Coast to St Francis Bay, via Oudtshoorn and the Cango Caves.
  • Pro tip: When road tripping with more than 0 (zero) children (babies count double; sick babies +5 hit points), and you have to stay overnight somewhere, invest extra in the biggest suite you (or your children’s college fund) can afford.
  • On the beach in St Francis Bay (right in the middle of winter, you still seem to get these lovely balmy beach days), it seemed that everybody was surfing. Whole families, with the mom, the dad, all the kids, and grandma and grandpa, were all on various sizes of surfboards in the sea catching some waves.
  • Here’s a photo from the furthest point on what I call “Not The Ugliest Jogging Route in The World” (in St Francis Bay):

• Last night I accidentally discovered that I can pinpoint the exact weekend and location when and where I first tasted my favourite trappist beer (EVER), namely Rochefort #8. It’s all written up in this 2003 post.
• When Google send me an email this weekend asking me exactly how I would like them to use my email (yes, a few months ago I migrated my mail empire back to Google because my self-hosting experiment had started to cost me time and money) to show me custom advertisements, I was reminded that I do actually find the machine learning models they’re building about me quite creepy, and that perhaps I would prefer not also handing them 12 years of emails to make their models more accurate. There and then I migrated said 12 years of emails from GMail to FastMail. So far I’m really impressed by the product, mostly due to the speed and the user experience of the web-app. There might be a more detailed post in the near future, let me know if you’re interested.
• Most surprising and interesting (to me) new scientific discovery of the week: A team of scientists at Northeastern University in Boston have shown that one of the many kinds of bacteria living in your stomach eats exclusively GABA, a really important brain chemical (neurotransmitter) that plays a role in keeping you calm. Based on this and other work, it looks like the bacteria in your tummy, also known as your gastrointestinal microbiota, besides being crucially important to your digestive system and your general survival, probably also play quite an important role in your psyche. I find this slightly mind-blowing.

Have a great week kids, I hope to see you on the other side.

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WARNING on 2020-02-24: webfaction has been bought by godaddy and will soon close down. I have recently moved out and am now keeping all of my Let’s Encrypt certificates up to date with the official certbot tool.

WARNING: High levels of NERD ahead.

I started using CloudFlare’s free tier on this blog, before Let’s Encrypt burst onto the scene, mostly for their universal SSL. However, as joepie91 recently pointed out, this means that by design, CloudFlare has to decrypt all SSL traffic, and then re-encrypt it to send it to your original site with its self-signed or generic certificate (in my case). Apart from this, CloudFlare is a bit of overkill for this low-traffic site.

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I was reminded that future me really enjoys having written these things. (Present me knows about extrapolation.)

Actually present me also enjoys this, but creating sufficient amounts of time to do so is often challenging. I have most recently convinced myself that I should see this as practice so that I will later be able to write really entertaining posts in minimal time. Until then my two readers, I hope to compensate with edification.

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That’s how the African sun sets in Mpumalanga.

… and this is more or less what it looks like when a cheetah decides to grace you with its presence. We had it all to ourselves (this is quite unusual in the Kruger National Park with an animal of this level of celebrity) and were able to follow it until it wandered further away from the road, probably on the lookout for some dinner.

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Well hello everyone! I missed you, but due to reasons (read on…), this is the first time I’ve been able to get around to a weekly head voices.

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