“Internationalization” is, roughly speaking, geek-speak for the process of supporting multiple languages on a website. For a company doing business in multiple countries, it needs to be done - otherwise you’ll risk losing the attention of people who don’t speak your development team’s native language. There are standards defined that specify what language to serve a website in to a particular user. So why do some of the world’s biggest sites get it wrong? Let’s take a tour of the landscape.

Road engineers in Costa Rica do not worry about snow and ice. Whereas highway builders in the US might dynamite a chunk of a mountain to provide a road that maintains a reasonable gradient as it climbs, the road engineers of the tropics are happy to run straight upslope if there’s no good alternative. Asphalt was laid surprisingly recently on some relatively important routes; the Costanera, for example, which is the coastal “highway” that connects Jaco to Paso Canoas at the Panamanian border, was only paved in the early 2000s. Old timer gringos talk of having to ford rivers in their trusty land cruisers in the bad old days of the late 90s, with teams of oxen standing by at either side of the river crossing to pull cars up the banks and back to the bumpy dirt roads.

People Love Institutions

Institutions are comforting and predictable. They bring some measure of order to the world, even when that order is rife with inefficiency. When we moved to Costa Rica, one of the surprising differences that we encountered was that there is no postal delivery service. Because there’s no postal service, there was never any need for mailing addresses, and so houses and businesses are often referenced by landmark. I shit you not, we visited a freight importer’s office whose address was “200 meters west of the Firestone”.

It’s fine!

We bought used cars when we moved to Costa Rica. There’s significant import tax on pretty much everything down here, meaning that it’s expensive to bring your car from the states, and also that the price of new vehicles is significantly marked up. I opted for a Toyota FJ - the secondary roads can get quite washed out during rainy season, and I wanted a reliable vehicle that could get me anywhere. Unfortunately, due to the cheery agreeableness of the tico agent we’d hired to help us find and vet used cars, and our wide-eyed gringo-in-a-new-country naivety, we’d missed that the FJ was both under-vetted and over-abused, which came to light only on the drive home when the dashboard illuminated in a sea of orange. In fact I’d been so sleep deprived (due to a fairly arduous move, which included our four dogs) during the purchase that I hadn’t even realized that this was a private party purchase rather than a purchase from a used car dealer (we’d conducted the transaction in the forecourt of what turned out to be a car wash, but that I’d taken to be a dealership), so there wasn’t even a warranty.

Bubblewrap is the sandboxing technology behind Flatpak. It uses Linux namespaces to isolate processes from the rest of your system - limiting filesystem access, network capabilities, and more. It’s powerful stuff. The problem is that actually using it requires memorizing dozens of flags and getting the incantation exactly right. One wrong flag and your sandbox either doesn’t work or is too restrictive to be useful.

bui is an attempt to fix this. It’s beta, but it’s simple - it mainly just generates a bubblewrap command based on your choices and, if you’re happy, runs it. You can save working configurations as profiles and create “managed sandboxes” that permanently sandbox applications with a wrapper script. It also supports optional network filtering via pasta and, if configured, a lightweight DNS proxy.

Bubblewrap is the sandboxing technology behind Flatpak. It uses Linux namespaces to isolate processes from the rest of your system - limiting filesystem access, network capabilities, and more. It’s powerful stuff. The problem is that actually using it requires memorizing dozens of flags and getting the incantation exactly right. One wrong flag and your sandbox either doesn’t work or is too restrictive to be useful.

bui is an attempt to fix this. It’s beta, but it’s simple - it mainly just generates a bubblewrap command based on your choices and, if you’re happy, runs it. You can save working configurations as profiles and create “managed sandboxes” that permanently sandbox applications with a wrapper script. It also supports optional network filtering via pasta and, if configured, a lightweight DNS proxy.

I bought a Unihertz Atom XL in early 2022, aiming to find a small phone with a long battery life. I wanted a phone that was less obvious in my pocket, was easier to hold and navigate with one hand, and, I hoped, would be a little more utilitarian and a little less addictive. There are almost no Android phones out there under 5", and so very quickly I ended up browsing Unihertz’s catalog, and I settled on the Atom XL. It sounded good on paper: small size, 3 day battery, 48MP back camera, rugged build quality, dual sim, and, bonus, it has a built in walkie-talkie! There are quite a few reviews of this phone out there, but all of them are from people who tried it for a couple of weeks at most, so I thought I’d post a review. Let’s just get this out of the way with, if you’re in a rush: unfortunately, you almost certainly should not buy this.

“Internationalization” is, roughly speaking, geek-speak for the process of supporting multiple languages on a website. For a company doing business in multiple countries, it needs to be done - otherwise you’ll risk losing the attention of people who don’t speak your development team’s native language. There are standards defined that specify what language to serve a website in to a particular user. So why do some of the world’s biggest sites get it wrong? Let’s take a tour of the landscape.

The internet is not as good as it used to be. Information is siloed into walled gardens like Facebook, Nextdoor, and so on. Google results are saturated with SEO spam. Wordpress is a mess that keeps on chugging through inertia; Medium, while clean, is behind a paywall; Reddit and Twitter are increasingly hiding their value behind registration and/or paywalls; Substack is fine if you want to be paid, but is yet another commercial enterprise that will take articles offline if and when it goes boom. Early easy-webpage-builders like Geocities highlight the issue of link-rot: when the money runs out, huge numbers of sites can disappear from the web.

When you search online for lists of recommended routers to run DD-WRT on, Asus comes up frequently, even in non-SEO-driven listicles. This is quite frustrating, because for the past few years Asus have blocked (most) third party firmware from being installed. When you try to upload firmware using the admin UI, you get a message that says roughly “for compliance reasons, we do not permit third party firmware”. That’s not entirely true though, as they do permit the third party Asus Merlin firmware to be installed; when I asked their tech support if they endorsed or recommended it, they said no, and told me to revert to stock firmware if I’d installed it (which I had, as an experiment.)

People Love Institutions

Institutions are comforting and predictable. They bring some measure of order to the world, even when that order is rife with inefficiency. When we moved to Costa Rica, one of the surprising differences that we encountered was that there is no postal delivery service. Because there’s no postal service, there was never any need for mailing addresses, and so houses and businesses are often referenced by landmark. I shit you not, we visited a freight importer’s office whose address was “200 meters west of the Firestone”.

Bubblewrap is the sandboxing technology behind Flatpak. It uses Linux namespaces to isolate processes from the rest of your system - limiting filesystem access, network capabilities, and more. It’s powerful stuff. The problem is that actually using it requires memorizing dozens of flags and getting the incantation exactly right. One wrong flag and your sandbox either doesn’t work or is too restrictive to be useful.

bui is an attempt to fix this. It’s beta, but it’s simple - it mainly just generates a bubblewrap command based on your choices and, if you’re happy, runs it. You can save working configurations as profiles and create “managed sandboxes” that permanently sandbox applications with a wrapper script. It also supports optional network filtering via pasta and, if configured, a lightweight DNS proxy.

Road engineers in Costa Rica do not worry about snow and ice. Whereas highway builders in the US might dynamite a chunk of a mountain to provide a road that maintains a reasonable gradient as it climbs, the road engineers of the tropics are happy to run straight upslope if there’s no good alternative. Asphalt was laid surprisingly recently on some relatively important routes; the Costanera, for example, which is the coastal “highway” that connects Jaco to Paso Canoas at the Panamanian border, was only paved in the early 2000s. Old timer gringos talk of having to ford rivers in their trusty land cruisers in the bad old days of the late 90s, with teams of oxen standing by at either side of the river crossing to pull cars up the banks and back to the bumpy dirt roads.

It’s fine!

We bought used cars when we moved to Costa Rica. There’s significant import tax on pretty much everything down here, meaning that it’s expensive to bring your car from the states, and also that the price of new vehicles is significantly marked up. I opted for a Toyota FJ - the secondary roads can get quite washed out during rainy season, and I wanted a reliable vehicle that could get me anywhere. Unfortunately, due to the cheery agreeableness of the tico agent we’d hired to help us find and vet used cars, and our wide-eyed gringo-in-a-new-country naivety, we’d missed that the FJ was both under-vetted and over-abused, which came to light only on the drive home when the dashboard illuminated in a sea of orange. In fact I’d been so sleep deprived (due to a fairly arduous move, which included our four dogs) during the purchase that I hadn’t even realized that this was a private party purchase rather than a purchase from a used car dealer (we’d conducted the transaction in the forecourt of what turned out to be a car wash, but that I’d taken to be a dealership), so there wasn’t even a warranty.