ProtonMail by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the very few encrypted emails... beauty. And they also have an encrypted password manager!!! Using this is a must as of 2023 basically. The only missing thing now is to find a fully open source alternative!!!
Sure, search capabilities have to be somewhat limited: proton.me/blog/engineering-message-content-search
techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-address-of-french-activist-after-order-by-swiss-authorities/ you've fucking got to use Tor Browser with it if you want your IP to remain hidden, learn that...
Are daily notifications without a recovery email possible? www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/yjau8f/allow_daily_email_notifications_without_having_a/ OK, they do work actually.
The lack of Gmail dot trick is tragic however, and you have to pay for multiple aliases. But you can however create separate inboxes with the same cell phone verification however.
Iterative pre-order by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is the easiest one to do iteratively:
  • pop and visit
  • push right to stack
  • push left to stack
grep by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
If you are a programmer, grep becomes a verb: "to grep" means "to search text files", much like "to Google" means "to search random stuff online".
Also known as: Quantitative PCR (qPCR).
Like PCR, but the amplification machine measures the concentration of DNA at each step.
This describes one possible concentration detection method with fluorescent molecules that only become fluorescent when the DNA is double stranded (SYBR Green)
Video 1.
Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) - Quantitative PCR (qPCR) by Applied Biological Materials (2016)
Source.
This allows you to predict the exact initial concentration by extrapolating the exponential curve backwards.
TODO: vs non-real-time PCR. Why can't you just divide by 2 for every heating step to reach back the original concentration? Likely the reaction reach saturation at an unknown step.
TODO: vs non-real-time PCR in medical diagnostics: do you really need to know concentration for diagnostics? Isn't it enough to know if the virus is present or not?
Isothermal means "at fixed temperature".
This is to contrast with the more well established polymerase chain reaction, which requires heating and cooling the sample several times.
The obvious advantage of isothermal methods is that their machinery can be simpler and cheaper, and the process can happen faster, since you don't have to do through heating and cooling cycles.
gnuplot by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Tends to be Ciro Santilli's first attempt for quick and dirty graphing: github.com/cirosantilli/gnuplot-cheat.
domain-specific language. When it get the jobs done, it is in 3 lines and it feels great.
When it doesn't, you Google for an hours, and then you give up in frustration, and fall back to Matplotlib.
Suikoden by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This game (1 or 2, can't remember) made an impression on Ciro Santilli for some reason.
Only many many years after playing it, after Ciro started getting more interested, did he learn that it was actually an adaptation of the Chinese mega-classic Water Margin.
"Suikoden" is the actual Japenese transliteration for the Chinese name of the original Water Margin novel.
The game puts great emphasis on the concept of the 108 Stars of Destiny, which never left Ciro's mind: making 108 allies, the main collectible of the game, allows you to make a more powerful alliance, and unlock better endings.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact