TLDR 2021-10-08

A Wigner crystal is a honeycomb arrangement of electrons formed by slowing down electrons until they are significantly affected by the repulsion between their negative charges. The pattern is an arrangement that minimizes their total energy. A team of scientists has managed to image a Wigner crystal by adding a layer of graphene on top of the crystal and using a scanning tunneling microscope. The same graphene-based technique will enable STM studies of other interesting physical phenomena. An image of a Wigner crystal is available in the article.

Facebook Connectivity's Bombyx robot is designed to crawl along existing medium-voltage power lines and wrap fiber optic cables around them. Fiber optic cable allows for many benefits over metal cable, but exposure to the elements can cause them to break over time. Installing the cables underground is expensive, disruptive, and labor-intensive. Facebook plans for the robot to be able to install at least one kilometer of light and weather-resistant fiber optic cable every 90 minutes.

IPv6 was published in 1998 and ratified as a standard in 2017. It does more than just provide for a larger address space than IPv4. Many of the terms and protocols in IPv4 either radically changed or disappeared in IPv6. This article explains how IPv4 concepts work in IPv6, with a focus on home and small office networks. It aims for a practical understanding and is not a complete description of IPv6.

Sat is a WebAssembly compute module designed for maximum performance with a small footprint. It has no dependencies and can be run in a Docker container. Sat can create a mesh with other instances using local network discovery and websockets.

Unfollow Everything was a Chrome extension that helped Facebook users unfollow all their friends and pages on Facebook, resulting in an empty News Feed. The creator of the extension discovered that their Facebook use dramatically decreased after unfollowing everything. Unfollowing people and pages is not the same as unfriending them as you can still see what people are up to if you want to. After a few months, Facebook sent a cease and desist to the developer and deleted their Facebook and Instagram accounts. This experience highlights Facebook's anti-consumer behavior, showing how the platform acts to limit user choices.

Before Apple received its famous $150 million cash investment from Microsoft and Bill Gates, Steve Jobs had tried to cut a deal with Michael Dell and his PC company. The deal never went through due to Jobs' licensing scheme. Dell recently released a memoir that covers the story of how Jobs wanted Dell to license the Mac operating system and ship it on his PCs. This article tells the story of Jobs and Dell, how they met, and the relationship between their companies.