Hacked links: December 13, 2020

Our sun is getting a little annoying these days, and has rewarded us with the best screensaver image ever taken. The ultra-detailed photo of Sunspot was actually Daniel K in January. The Inoy, taken by the Solar Telescope, is a 4-meter instrument with optical optics that can image the wavelength visible to the sun from near infrared and resolve surface details down to 20. Km The photo, with a distinct “Sa Sa Ron’s Eye” look, shows the huge convection cells around the dark sunspot; Animation with animation shows the motion of a plasma with annoying lines of magnetic flux creating a sunspot. It’s interesting to watch, and it’s even more interesting to like the technology that has captured it.

GitHub Universe 2020 had an interesting discussion about maintaining open-source software software projects that are worth watching. They focused on the challenges that YouTube-DL maintainers keep the tool running, and the impact of their efforts on the people and groups that rely on it. To illustrate this point, they cited a researcher with Human Rights Watch, who relied on YouTube-DL in his work, and made it clear that open-source tools such as YouTube-DL play a role in taking into account all API changes that are constantly breaking down. Maintainers that more serious.

Speaking of GitHub, here’s an awesome and interesting new tool: Depix, password de-pixelizer. Developer Sipke Mellema noticed that his company often used pixelization to obscure passwords in documentation and wondered if it could undo the process. He wrote an article describing the pixelation process using a linear filter and attack method, including creating a D-Bruisen sequence in the same font, D-text size, and colors as the original document and feeding it a screenshot. Pixelated password in the tool. We suspect it will only work for a subset of hidden passwords, but it is still clever.

‘Advent is the season for alend lenders and people at QEMU have posted them. Open each of the 24 doors on the calendar and you will be given a downloadable QEMU disk image that implements something entertaining. Minesweeper, a ray tracer that fits the boot loader, and of course the game Life F Life. Day 3 GW-Basic image caught our eye – bringing back some memories.

For anyone who has ever seen a Pixar movie and wondered how all those animations really work, here is a great lesson in creating art with math. The video belongs to Inigo Quilles and is one of the basics of rendering images using SDF or sign-in distance functions. At first, it looked like it was going to be a bit like drawing an owl, but how amazing each of its math descriptions and an element of animation is is another formula. In addition, there is a real-time rendering tool where you can observe and edit the code. Alas, my changes only made things worse, but it was still fun and instructive to play. Check out the video after the break!