Posts by Robigus 104 publicly visible posts • joined 12 May 2010
I run Collabora in a container on my Nextcloud instance. It works fine for my needs (spreadsheets mainly).
In a worst-case scenario, if the containers fall over I can rysnc the actual .ods over and edit it locally. It's haven't needed to, but it works OK.
There was some faff in its configuration initially, but if LibreOffice can simplify the installation and integration, they'll be on to a winner.
I realise that this may well be an unpopular opinion - I'm a Firefox user since v1 - but I dislike organisations joining social or political causes; whatever the cause may be or of whatever nature.
I wish everybody well, but to be quite frank, I don't want to be patronised or have to read about how wonderful organisations like to think they are - and we know this because they feel the need to tell us. Might this energy be put to better use being sublimated into the product's quality.
I've known enough people over the years who are brutally cycnical about the causes they espouse, but in public, they gush. I find it odd.
But, for all of that, I do like Firefox - uBlock Origin still works and I hope they can recover their mojo.
Despite never having had any Meta accounts, I have been told in the past "Didn't you get the [item]? I WhatsApp'd you."
I imagine somewhere there's a shadow account waiting to be activated and were it to be so, much pointless guff would pour forth.
It's good to be conciously apart from such things. The sort of people who say "Did you see on Facebook.." are generally the sort of people I'm already wary of.
I used to download Linux from the University of Helsinki FTP site onto a tawdry* of floppies, circa 1993. No desktop, but stable.
Recollections of Schrodingers Windows at the time were less stable. Simply by observing the desktop something would change in the kernel and it would turn to soup.
* That may, or may not, be the collective noun for floppy disks.
C/C++/Rust use less energy (when running as opposed to compiling) for the same unit of work than the higher level languages. I saw a table demonstrating where they consumed about 1/3 of the energy of C# and 1/75th that of Python - https://storage.googleapis.com/cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2018/05/3730357d-results-energy-time-and-memory-usage-screenshot-from-research-paper.png
I would have thought that on Microsoft's data-centre scale, this would be well worth doing. Going the Rust route, rather than the usual C++ will give them memory safety, (if they leave the guards in place)
Being a peasant, I couldn't afford the games to go with a bequeathed Atari. I wrote my own in (hand assembled) assembler (Hello girls!). The sprites were the full height of the screen, as I recall, and had to be painted in sections. It was a while ago, but it seemed surprisingly quick. Lateral movement was faster than vertical repaints.
The tape decks were ruinously expensive for this quarter of Four Yorkshiremen, so I soldered cables to the motherboard and ran a household tape deck that I'd been using on my ZX-81.
My cousin, on the other hand, was to The Manor born and had games-a-plenty, which were quite impressive. Wretched keyboard aside, a good machine, I felt.
Perhaps a system like 2024 spec vehicles in the EU/UK? Take your eyeballs away from where they are mandated to be (such as when overtaking a bicycle) and set off an alarm. You need this, because they say so.
Look away from adverts/leave the room and automatically crank the TV volume up to 11, so viewers at least have the audio pleasure of adverts whilst in the kitchen making a cuppa. Perhaps the phone in your pocket could mirror the adverts everywhere you go too.
Isn't our controlled future marvelous?
With respect to power consumption, it may not mean much to desktop users, but if new environmental regulations come into force, then it will mean something.
Business' marketing divisions will get wind of the lower consumption devices being implemented will be able to spin that "Hey, we really care about the environment.", just as they do whenever they're forced into complying with new regulations.
Anecdotal evidence shows that ARM cpus have a much lower power consumption that Intel on the same workload (look at the comparisons with M1 vs i9).
I would have thought that this fact alone is enough to get the data centre flingers positively vibrating with excitement.
I run it in a Docker container on an RPi4 at home and in an X86 VPS - Very effective. The clients for Android/iPhone/Linux and MacOS work well too.
Colleagues inform me that it was trivial on Windows too. Unless looking for particularly arcane use cases, what's not to like?*
* Rhetorical. Don't bother.
About 10 years ago I met with Manchester Police who wanted to see a mapping system I'd written. They told me a similar tale to that of your aquaintance. They indicated areas over a map where the policy was containment, and not to create any kind of crime-vacuum by removing a gang/family/Women's Institute* group.
* I made that up.
As a young spotty Herbert, I and my fellow Herberts would yell “Bagpipes!” when the loading noise changed on the loading screen. At that point, you knew that the monochrome image was about to be coloured. It was competitive. Call it too early and you’d receive a dead arm.
Like biblical numerologists looking for decipherable patterns, I would listen to the loading noise trying to discern the “meaning”.
One pre-pubescent Herbert mimicked the loading screeches and patterns into a cassette recorder to see if he could fool the machine. I recall the sum total was intermittent rolling blue and yellow lines around the screen edge.
Happy naïve days.
I don't have WhatsApp. I do have Signal.
Most of my family now have Signal. Those that don't can text me. Or ring.
Signal works fine on an e foundation phone. Firefox/Signal/Mail Client. That's all I need.
From the conversations I've had about privacy with friends - the general impression I get is that we like to talk about privacy and it's importance, but we are, in fact, prepared to do nothing about it. They'll keep their Facebook stuff (we can all find a reason why we "need" to). This won't change anything, but they're OK with that.
Fair enough. The joke icon was perhaps a too subtle indicator of not entirely pedantic intent.
I was referring to its original meaning (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) ). In a world of righteousness and relativism; anything can mean anything you want it too.
More importantly, other websites report that this laptop runs Linux very well.
You don't even need a Pi to run it; I run it as a docker container on an old Linux PC that acts as a the household file server.
I agree with other's sentiment expressed here that the web is almost unusable without these protections.
Surveillence Capitalism can't be smothered fast enough.
Frankly as it's an open source browser that doesn't belong to one of the unhealthily voyeuristic self-respect euthenising behemoths of a whitened-teeth "connect and share" dystopia, it gets my vote.
As I just wrote that I have visions of Richard Attenborough holding a mask over a victims face in "10 Rillington Place" saying "Just relax, relax. Connect and share, connect and share".
Multi-account containers are excellent.
I need a pint.
With more than 2 on the line, Skype has problems. But it's MS, so work think it must be used.
The new Skype, like WhatsApp, Allo and Facebook Messenger will use Signal's protocol, with Microsoft's added ... er ... magic.
So why not use Signal*? No slurping, open source, non-profit. As recommended by security nerds. Works a treat.
* I know, I know. Power, control, brand, the ability to read everything out of your phone and report to the Mothership etc
