Plurrrr

Find what JavaScript variables are leaking

Detecting variables that are mistakenly or unknowingly added to the global scope can be helpful to debug your apps and avoid naming collisions. The more a web app and its dependencies grow, the more having a good understanding of what’s happening in the global scope becomes important (e.g., to ensure multiple libraries — or even multiple apps! — can coexist on the page without global name collisions).

Source: Find what JavaScript variables are leaking into the global scope, an article by Matteo Mazzarolo.

• javascript

The temptation of writing shell scripts, illustrated

It's an article of faith in many quarters that you shouldn't write anything much as a shell script and should instead use a proper programming language. I generally agree with this in theory, but recently I went through a great experience of why this doesn't necessarily work out for me in practice, as I wrote (and then rewrote) a shell script that really should be a program in, say, Python.

Source: The temptation of writing shell scripts, illustrated, an article by Chris Siebenmann.

• shell

Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 from .deb (not from snap)

It is now widely known that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) ships Firefox as a snap, but some people (like me) may prefer installing it from .deb packages to retain control over upgrades or to keep extensions working.

Source: Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 from .deb (not from snap).

• firefox

Extracting WhatsApp messages from an iOS backup

I was recently exploring how to get a local backup of WhatsApp messages from my iPhone. I switched from Android to iOS in the past and lost all of my WhatsApp messages. I wanted to make sure that if I switched again from iOS to Android I don’t lose any messages. I don’t really care if I can import the messages in WhatsApp. I just don’t want to lose all of the important information I have in my chats. I don’t have any immediate plans for switching (if ever) but it seemed like a fun challenge and so I started surveying the available tools and how they work.

This was mostly a learning exercise for me regarding how Apple stores iOS backups and how I can selectively extract information and data from one. My target was to have a local copy of WhatsApp messages that I can read and search through locally. It would be doubly awesome if I can move the messages to an Android device but, as I mentioned before, that wasn’t my main aim.

Source: Extracting WhatsApp messages from an iOS backup, an article by Yasoob Khalid.

• ios
• backup

The Final Twist: OK

In the evening I finished The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver. I liked the previous 2 books in the Colter Shaw series more, especially the first one.

• book
• crime fiction