Issue 105
Bizarro Devs is a curated collection of weird and wonderful things from all over the web.
🤴 FUNNY TIGER KING CASTINGS AND GREAT ANIMATIONS WITH CSS AND JS.
Heya,
In my continued quest for distraction, I have returned to the kitchen. Not only is this a great way to spend some time but it also helps me feel on top of trends. I shared one of my favorite cooking schools alongside a long list of the other internet things I found to keep me busy during this period. I strongly recommend Paul F Tompkins "Peanut Brittle" bit. He is one of the most underrated comedians in the world.
Also this week:
🎥 The problems with Zoom and please switch to a different platform.
🐅 Funny Joe Exotic: The Movie castings.
💫 Great animations with CSS animation-delay and GSAP.
🌍 NASA's best images of Earth.
Enjoy,
Chris.
📰 From the Newsroom
The things that kept me busy this week🕴️
Food I've decided to combine my two favorite things; food and father-son time. Of all the IG cooking classes I have sampled, Scran School is one of my favorites and not just because they cover pizza and pasta in the first two weeks. I found other cooking shows demanded ingredients I'd struggle to find in perfect circumstances. Scran School feels closer to my level of preparedness. With that being said, it did turn out to be too advanced for my son, but older kids might like it. My son did learn to stir and he enjoys it very much.
Board games 2.0 This list has a bunch of online games based on famous board games like Monopoly, Catan, Scattergories, and so on.
Exercise Blogilates has been adding full-length workout videos on YouTube for ten years. With this in mind, there is something for everyone in the archive. The barrier to entry is low, so you don't need to be a gym rat to get something out of them.
Quick hits for Slack Six comedians share their favorite routines from other comedians. The list includes Paul F Tompkins' "Peanut Brittle" which I can't recommend enough.
Getty Museum's Twitter thread challenging people to recreate famous artwork with household objects. Look for The Simpsons in Rome.
Learning Another bunch of free university courses from Open Learning.
For the kids Audible, Scholastic, Bloomsbury, and J.K. Rowling have teamed up to bring you Harry Potter at home. It has wizardy videos, articles, quizzes, and puzzles. Better yet, you can also listen to Stephen Fry read The Philosopher's Stone. Worth the price of entry right there.
A Zoom with (too much) view 🔍
Zoom's time to shine Zoom's daily active users has risen from 10 million to 200 million over the past few months as they provided a cheap and effective way for some businesses, governments, and schools to continue functioning. My wife is just one of the millions of teachers running classes via Zoom from the comfort of home.
Discomfort started to set in when people realized that Zoom was sending data to Facebook. This was not the first problem for Zoom who also had to patch a security issue for Mac users last year, but the new issues are far greater in both scope and potential for damage.
Meeting IDs are easy to guess and have been bruteforced as a new phenomenon called "Zoombombing" started to emerge. Online Meeting ID tools are proliferating across the web and Discord chats are popping up to help Zoombomber collaborate and strategize. People are using the screen share feature to share videos, a lot of porn, or just sitting in on meetings and hurling abuse.
The problem is widespread covering bad privacy, bad security, and bad configurations. Tighten up the meetings and you might be able to avoid some of the problems but the tracking and data selling remains part of the platform. Furthermore, meetings, some intensely private, are starting to appear online. It might take more than 90 days to fix the problems, so some users, like NY schools, are banning the platform altogether.
Is it time to switch? We added a warning to our article on web conferencing platforms but the other programs on the list might be worth considering. For a free, open-source option Jitsi has been getting good reviews.
theverge.com
⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month
Running a remote team is more than setting up a webcam and software. This webinar has great tips for helping your team adjust from both the technical and personal standpoints.
Working from home makes it harder to separate the work and the home bits. I have started using Time Cop to make sure my dual roles don't bleed into each other.
The best NASA images of Earth.
An AI-powered meme generator which covers all the classic memes. Some of them are genuinely funny.
All the WordPress news from the past month.
A list of the greatest pop stars from 1981 - 2019. An exhaustive list of popular music.
Some funny potential castings for the Joe Exotic movie; photoshopped for posterity.
A very nice GSAP animated poster.
Free illustrations of people of color for your projects.
Outro
That's the end of another week, thanks for reading.
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Have a great week guys,
Chris.
The rapid growth of Zoom during remote work and online learning was impressive, but these privacy and security concerns show how important it is for technology companies to scale responsibly. User trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. Even when I’m taking a break with https://sloperidergame.org/ , I appreciate platforms that put security first.