Weekly Digest #88

Weekly Dev Blog
3 min readAug 15, 2022

Articles

How to select a device configuration for site speed tests

  • Network Latency — how long does a network round trip between browser and server take?
  • Network Bandwidth — how much data can be transferred per second?
  • CPU Throttling — is the processor slowed down to simulate a mobile device?
  • Test Location — where in the world is the test run from?
  • Screen size — are you testing the mobile site or the desktop site?

Testing with a low-end device is a good way to identify potential performance optimizations.

It’s difficult to get lab metrics to match Core Web Vitals field data, but picking settings that are a bit worse than what’s typical for your users usually gets you close enough.

How can you be fooled by the U+202E trick?

A common technique, used by malicious attackers to fool their victims, is using the Unicode special character U+202E known as an annulment from right to left to make the malicious file appears as a PDF document instead of a potentially dangerous executable file.

make documentfdp.exe appear to be documentexe.pdf

Tutorials

Web Scraping with Python: Everything you need to know (2022)

  • Manually opening a socket and sending the HTTP Request
  • urllib3 & LXML
  • Requests & BeautifulSoup
  • Web Crawling Frameworks
  • Headless browsing

Pixar in a Box, a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs

Tools

ImHex A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers, Programmers and people who value their retinas when working at 3 AM.

koreader, An ebook reader application supporting PDF, DjVu, EPUB, FB2 and many more formats, running on Cervantes, Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook and Android devices

Off-topic

Why Hollywood Will Never Look the Same Again on Film: LEDs Hit the Streets of LA & NY

Why Do We Get Old, and Can Aging Be Reversed?