Findings and thingies

Unfortunately, they can also leak our sensitive data, consume our limited bandwidth, drain our batteries, and, in one case, expose links in chats that are supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. Among the worst offenders, according to research published on Monday, were messengers from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Line.

Nicht wirklich überraschend, dass Dinge aus dem Hause Facebook ganz vorne dabei sind, wenn es um Privacy Verletzungen geht.

Quelle: Study shows which messengers leak your data, drain your battery, and more | Ars Technica

Quite an interesting read on the current state of a Covid19 vaccine development.

Will a vaccine stop Covid? - UnHerd

Originally found this here: Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: "»But it absolutely will not be: we get a vaccine in December and we’re out of this by February. The light is real, but the tunnel it’s at the end of is still pretty long.«" / Twitter

Creating/changing Linux files in your Appdata folder from Windows will likely result in data corruption and/or damage your Linux environment requiring you to uninstall & reinstall your distro!

Do not change Linux files using Windows apps and tools | Windows Command Line

TIL that timestamp of Microsoft SQL Server is not a date or time data type but only a deprecated synonym for rowversion.

The Transact-SQL rowversion data type is not a date or time data type. timestamp is a deprecated synonym for rowversion.

Source: Date and Time Data Types and Functions - SQL Server (Transact-SQL) | Microsoft Docs

But rowversion doesn't preserve date or time either.

Is a data type that exposes automatically generated, unique binary numbers within a database. rowversion is generally used as a mechanism for version-stamping table rows. The storage size is 8 bytes. The rowversion data type is just an incrementing number and does not preserve a date or a time.

Source: rowversion (Transact-SQL) - SQL Server | Microsoft Docs

This year's Microsoft Ignite was only a virtual event due to the well known circumstances we are all facing right now. From what I've read so far it was a great event. I didn't watch any session yet because I'm on holiday right now.

To get a summary of all news announced at Ignite 2020 one can always look at the so called book of news provided by Microsoft.

Ignite 2020 Book of News

Definitely need to look at this for two reasons. 1) I tried to setup this for my personal use some time ago and did not get a grip on and 2) almost everything that Kristian Köhntopp (@isotopp) / Twitter writes is a good read.

Importing account statements and building a data warehouse | Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp

If you're using your Windows 10 PC for non gaming purposes you probably don't want to have the XBox apps on your device. The following gist provides instructions on how to remove them.

How to Remove the Xbox Game Bar with Powershell on Windows 10

Only the manual steps and a following reboot removed the apps finally.

Don't microwave your sponges!

Then, they will reproduce and occupy the vacant real estate of the dead. And your sponge will just be stinkier and nastier and you may come to regret having not just tossed it, suggests a study published last month in Scientific Reports.

Source: Cleaning a Dirty Sponge Only Helps Its Worst Bacteria, Study Says - The New York Times

There is a new kid in town. AVIF seems to been a worthy successor for JPEG. Chome as of version 85 does support it of the box and FireFox also supports but requires some fiddling in the about-settings. More details can be found here:

AVIF has landed - JakeArchibald.com

There is no command available for creating a file and the parent directories in one step. Nevertheless you can help yourself with a simple bash script. Just add the following snippet to your ~/.bashrc.

mktouch() { mkdir -p $(dirname $1) && touch $1; }

Afterwards you can run this command like this: mktouch /home/demo/newdirectory/newfile1.txt

Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/305850 -> Comments