Aloha,

In this week edition: Urban Music, VR Graffiti, How Honor affects our brain, Facebook inexorable decline, an origami simulator, and decentralization.

1. NAS Performs “The World Is Yours” with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center.
2. Honor as a cultural mindset affects cognition . Activating honor improve performances in hierarchical thinking, but not in tasks requiring nominal thinking. Honor is mentally spatially located upwards and to the right.
3. If, like me, you are into warm and soulful house music, you will dig the vibes of Seven Davis Jr. Boiler Room set. Sweet disco love songs mix by Dj Spinna.
4. Some impressive GIFs of VR graffiti using this very cool-looking video game available on Steam.
5. German court rules Facebook use of personal data illegal and Facebook might have lost around 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year..
6. A very cool Origami Simulator.
7. The decentralized future is coming and it will change our lives in more ways than the web did.

Thanks for reading!

Marc

P.S: You can receive this directly in your inbox. Drop me an email and I’ll send it to you every week.

Aloha,

In this week edition: Decentralization, Ambiant, Streaming and the responsible music fan dilemma, society as imagined by tech bros, facing alcoholism, futuristic jewelry, and animal maths. Enjoy!

1. The decentralization movement is well explained in this Guardian article: The punk rock internet – how DIY rebels are working to replace the tech giants.
2. Some dark electronic vibe by Sophia Loizou . I recommend you list to her excellent ambiant album from 2016.
3. How to be a responsible music fan? Damon Krukowski explains the problem with the current revenue model for independent music creators.
4. Is this the society we really want? A critic on the cashierless AmazonGo stores.
5. My name is David Flink, I’m a leader in tech, and I’m an alcoholic.
6. Nora Fok’s inspiring futuristic jewelry.
7. Humans have launched their heaviest rocket ever, deployed a car into orbit, and recovered two of three boosters. The car sound system will play David Bowie on loop.
8. Many animals can count, and some better than you.

Thanks for reading!

Marc

P.S: You can receive this directly in your inbox. Drop me an email and I’ll send it to you every week.

Aloha,

Here are some links I think are worth sharing. 

1. A fascinating introduction to Decentralized Identity. Could we record in an anonymous way all of human history with such a system?
2. De l’importance de la souveraineté technologique: Le siège de l’Union Africaine espionné par la Chine pendant 5 ans.
3. This week was all about Chassol’s magnificent ultrascores ,  Wooden Shjips’ psychedelic rock, and Canshaker Pi’s indie rock.
4. A portable DNA sequencer for less than 1000$. How many years until we can all get one and get our DNA analyzed at home?
5. If you are a freelancer, deciding what to charge a client is always difficult. HackerNews commentsare worth the read.
6. Patchwork,  a decentralized messaging and sharing app built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt.
7. Pursuing perfection is detrimental to you and your work.  Accept good enough, and show your work more often!

Thanks for reading!

Marc

P.S: You can receive this directly in your inbox. Drop me an email and I’ll send it to you every week.

Hey,

Here are some links I thought were worth sharing. I will post next issues on Friday.

1. If like me you struggle with focusing, you might be interested in Creative Boom‘s interview of Jocelyn de Kwant on mindfulness, simple living and the art of creative flow.
2. My friend Flore recommended me N.E.R.D.’s latest album and while I don’t love the entire album, there are some excellent tracks in it. You can also check out Flore’s Boiler Room set.
3. If dark hip-hop is more your thing, you might like Majin Blobfish – I Know You Need It.
4. Zeynep Tufekci on how Free Speech is being weaponized. Censorship is not about suppressing the message anymore, but making sure you access other messages instead.
5. Configuring nginx to serve a Symfony application under a subdirectory of another PHP application is non-trivial. Here is my solution.
6. We can trick A.I. specialized in vision with psychedelic looking patches. We need more and more of that kind of work.
7. Depuis quelques années, le pâté-croûte est devenu un art gastronomique reconnu.
8. Never get high on your own supply, or why Social Media bosses don’t use social media.
9. Deep learning is now used to generate fake porn with real celebrities and also, the Internet being Internet, putting Nicolas Cage where he doesn’t belong.
10. A fascinating read about how the Dutch provided intel about Russia’s interference in US elections.
11. How generative Music works.

Thanks for reading!

Marc

P.S: I you would like to receive this directly in your inbox, please drop me a mail and I’ll send it to you.

It is surprisingly non-trivial to configure Nginx to serve two different PHP applications on the same domain, one being in a logical subdirectory. 

I spent a few hours scouring the web and trying different things. I ended up with this configuration, thanks from a source (of which I lost track. Sorry!) 

The configuration file defines a server listening for server mysite.com on port 80. The WordPress application is located in /var/www/wordpress and the Symfony application is located in /var/www/symfony. 

When a browsers requests the http://mysite.com/subdirectory resource, the request is passed to the Symfony app. Otherwise, the request goes to the WordPress app. 

server {
	listen 80;
	listen [::]:80;

	server_name mysite.com;
	root /var/www/wordpress;
	index index.php app.php index.html;

	location /subdirectory {
		root $symfonyRoot;
		rewrite ^/subdirectory/(.*)$ /$1 break;
		try_files $uri @symfonyFront;
	}

	location / {
		try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
	}

	set $symfonyRoot /var/www/symfony/web;
	set $symfonyScript app.php;
   
  # This is for the Symfony application
	location @symfonyFront {
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
		include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
		fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $symfonyRoot/$symfonyScript;
		fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /subdirectory/$symfonyScript;
		fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI /subdirectory$uri?$args;
	}

  # This is for the wordpress app
	location ~ \.php {
		fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
		fastcgi_index index.php;
		fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
		fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
		fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
		fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $uri?$args;
		include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
	}
}

I also created a public gist with this configuration file.