💭 Thoughts

Gone are the days (at least almost) when we lived under the tyranny of the feared American Standard Code for Information Interchange, perhaps better known by its acronym ASCII. The world has (again, largely) changed to the much revered Unicode, but all is not well in encoding paradise.

When I first set this up, I wanted to have an idea of whether anyone was actually tuning in (spoiler alert: most people aren’t), so I set up Google Analytics on my site.

The Goal As I described in the post 🔏 Privacy for Non-Fanatics , I have recently been on a budget-friendly quest to claw back at least some of my privacy from the ever-expanding silicon giants.

Having recently switched over a fair portion of my tech setup to more ethical and/or open source solutions, which often tend to care more about the wishes of the communities that surround them than their commericial counterparts, I have amassed a great big wishlist of things I hope to see in the products I have been using.

If you’re anything like me, you been meaning to up your privacy-game as some sort of futile protest against our benevolent data overlords. It turns out, however, that the services they provide - often for free - are awfully convenient and crucially don’t require much maintainence or effort from their users.

With COVID-19 being at the top of everyone’s mind, I decided to poke around with some of the data floating around the internet. It seems that the Johns Hopkins University data-set is among the most used sources.

## Background As part of my undergraduate studies I recently had to write a formal report on the exciting topic of mechanical resonance after having collected data from the transient and steady state responses of a oscillating torsional pendulum.