Hackday Links: December 13, 2020

These days our sun is getting a little faster and more rewarding for us The best screensaver ever taken. An incredibly detailed photo of a sunspot was actually taken by Daniel K. in January. Taken with the Inoue Solar Telescope, the 4 meter instrument with adaptive optics is capable of capturing the sun at near-infrared to visible wavelengths and resolving surface details up to 20 km. The photo shows the largest convection cells around a dark sunspot, with a distinctive “sun’s eye” appearance; The accompanying animation shows the movement of plasmas with tortured lines of magnetic flux to create a sunspot. It’s fascinating to watch, and more interesting about the technology that captures it.

With the dust surrounding GitHub’s new YouTube-DL DCMA downgrade in mind in the open source community, GitHub Universe 2020 was Interesting discussion about maintaining open source software projects Worth to see it. They focused on the challenges that YouTube-DL maintainers face in implementing the tool, and the impact their effort will have on the people and groups they rely on. To underline that point, they had a researcher with Human Rights Watch who made it very clear that his work depended on YouTube-DL, and that he continued to have all the API changes that constantly break open source tools like YouTube-DL. Caregivers are very important.

Speaking of GitHub, here is a scary and attractive new tool: Dipix, Password D-Pixelizer. Developer Chipke Mellema noticed that his company was using pixelization to hide passwords in documents, and wondered if he could override this process. He wrote an article Describes the pixelization process using a linear box filter and his method of attacking it, including creating the de Bruyne sequence as the original document in the same font, text size and color, and injecting its screenshot and pixelated password into the tool. . We suspect this will only work for subgroups of obscure passwords, but it is still very clever.

‘Season for Advent Calendars, and People at QEMU have posted their post. Open each of the 24 doors in the calendar and you will be rewarded with a downloadable QEMU disk image, which activates something fun. Minesweeper, a ray tracer suitable for a boot loader, and of course Conway’s Game of Life. Day 3 GW-BASIC film caught our eye – brings back some memories.

For anyone who has seen a picture of a picture and wondered how that animation really works, here A great lesson in creating art with math. The video was written by Inigo Quiles, and goes through the basics of rendering images using remarking SDFs or signed remote functions. At first, it seemed like it was going to be a little bit Owl drawing, But his descriptions of mathematics and how each element of the animation is another formula is fascinating. What’s more, there is Real-time rendering tool There you can review and edit the code. Alas, my changes made things worse, but it was still fun and playful. Watch the video after the break!