polaco's comments

polaco | 3 years ago | on: TreeTalk London – Tree Map

There's also the Berlin Tree Register[1] mapping which looks like every public tree in the city.

And while we're at it, the city's official Geoportal Berlin[2] is a treasure trove of open geo data.

[1] https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=05c3f9d7dea6422b86e...

[2] https://fbinter.stadt-berlin.de/fb/index.jsp

polaco | 3 years ago | on: An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj ŽIžek

Herzog's famous take on nature, recorded on the set of Fitzcarrado in the Peruvian jungle, is just beautiful. I keep coming back to it. https://youtu.be/3xQyQnXrLb0

"Kinski says [the jungle] is full of erotic elements. It’s not so much erotic, but full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotic here. I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking, fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there’s a lot of misery, but it’s the same misery that’s all around us. The trees are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony. It’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It’s not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”

polaco | 3 years ago | on: The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

Incidentally, Apple just launched Apple Maps Look Around in Germany this summer. It has very good coverage, but you need an Apple device to access it (ugh).

Interestingly, I haven't seen any public discussion on it.

Apple also allows you to demand blurring of your house, but they do this globally.

polaco | 3 years ago | on: Hetzner Price Adjustment

First paragraph: "we are forced to increase the prices of many of our products by approximately 10%"

polaco | 4 years ago | on: Overview of alternative open source front-ends for popular internet platforms

Shout out to the open source Android app Street Complete, which shows you a map indicating missing OSM data points and lets you easily contribute (opening hours, road surfaces, house numbers etc.)

Available in the Play Store and on F-Droid. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.westnordost... https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplet...

Edit: Vinnl beat me to it. I need to refresh more often :)

polaco | 7 years ago | on: My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror (2018)

It's also still a great read and has held up well, imho.

polaco | 10 years ago | on: TTIP explained: The secretive US-EU treaty that undermines democracy

Don't forget the sales tax. Pretty hard to avoid that.

polaco | 11 years ago | on: What one may find in robots.txt

Yes. This need to be emphasized: Disallowing URLs in robots.txt will not necessarily exclude them from search results. Search engines will still find those pages if they are linked to or mentioned somewhere else.

The search result will consist only of the URL, and the snippet will say "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

Use the noindex tag, folks. Also, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to remove URLs from Google's index.

Ref.: https://yoast.com/prevent-site-being-indexed/

polaco | 14 years ago | on: Cloudnumbers - running your app in the cloud in 5 minutes

love it