Posts by AJ MacLeod 672 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2006
and take this opportunity to get out of the awful Kindle prison. Buy a decent e-reader which doesn't require any on-line setup (Pocketbook for one, Kobo?), buy your e-books from wherever you like and manage them with whatever software you find best.
E-readers in general are extremely long-lived for tech items, it's insanity to be at the "mercy" of any corporation regarding your continued use of your own property.
My Pixel 9a is my only phone and was purchased specifically to run GrapheneOS (knowing I could fall back to standard Android if it was a disaster.) It's been a breath of fresh air and everything other than one bank app has worked for me (the Starling app works fine which is the important one for me)... I already self-host pretty much everything (email/matrix/paperless etc) so generally use open source apps from f-droid.
The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get clear of Google's spying was not at all lost on me!
Totally agree - a reverse proxy and LetsEncrypt are basically essential for a system like this and make self-hosting on a single IP address viable. I must admit I've never heard of FreedomBox before even though I use Debian as a base for quite a few servers (prefer Alpine generally but sometimes that's just a bit too minimalist.)
I have no reason to trust you on this as we've been using it for a couple of years and are very happy with it (within the scope of our expectations, as above.) You'd have to be quite a lot more specific to make me concerned (and also, when the alternative is being beholden to Microsoft or Google, Nextcloud would have to have a truly awful downside to make me reconsider.)
"Power too cheap to meter" was also associated with nuclear power here in the 1950s - relating to the experimental (but still somehow guaranteed to be ultra-safe ) fast breeder reactor built at Dounreay, coincidentally about as far it possibly could be from London...
The current situation is about as unfair as it possibly could be; the Highlands in particular has been industrialised with gigantic wind farms and the connected infrastructure - just today I had to wait at a road block as yet another gigantic turbine blade was being transported - and yet we pay even higher rates for our electricity than those even farther south in Scotland. This is "justified" by the fact that we're supposedly in a remote area (but remote only for electricity going one direction obviously!)
I used to purchase a lot from Ebuyer, but once Amazon started to offer Prime delivery that was the end. The Prime subscription (at that time delivery only) probably paid for itself in just two orders - Ebuyer being one of those who insist that the entire northern half of Scotland is not UK mainland and accordingly charged ludicrous amounts for delivery.
I used screen for several years (including the serial capabilities) and can't quite recall what persuaded me to switch to tmux - possibly the much reduced attack surface. Either way tmux is invaluable for me and I often connect in to my main PC from my phone (using termux) or laptops. I have used more modern alternatives including Zellij but am not convinced by them. A particular annoyance in Zellij is that you can save your session (groups of tabs and the commands run in them) but more often than not it won't work after you update to a more recent version.
Zellij is much better at self-documenting/ hand holding, though a very quick web search will tell you how to accomplish those commands in tmux or screen that you only use once in a blue moon and hence always forget the keys for.
The FF container tabs thing works very well and is probably FF's best feature in my opinion. So convenient when your job(s) involves wearing multiple hats or you have to regularly log in to the same website as several different people. Or even just limiting the amount of data mining certain websites do.
I'm surprised, to say the least... which OS is this on? How many tabs? I'm no fan of Mozilla Corp but use Firefox on numerous machines and can't recall the last time it didn't automatically restore all tabs on startup. In fact on the PC I'm typing on now I have a cron job to kill Firefox each evening (hardly necessary but saves memory bloat etc) and it starts up again each morning perfectly. I appear to have 48 tabs open at the moment, in case that's relevant.
I would be willing to bet that if they fired the entire top tier of management and spent those salaries on hiring some decent developers to address long standing bugs and user feature requests both Mozilla and Firefox would be in a far better state. Those at the top of all these big corporations are nothing more than leeches, parasites contributing nothing of value but draining away the valuable lifeblood.
But I had calls yesterday from desperate people for whom this update ruined their day. I'm all for options, particularly when installing from scratch, but when someone has a working application they are used to the layout of it's at the very least extremely bad manners to randomly muck that about without any warning or their consent.
Personally I hope never to have to live without notmuch again so until TB can handle notmuch as a backend I'll stick with neomutt and aerc
I'm sure someone else out there is genuinely using one still older, but the one I'm typing this on is dated 02-10-1986 (part 1390136). I quite like the look of some of those expensive mechanical keyboards that have a volume knob at the top corner but there's no way I'd sacrifice my buckling springs for one.
My dad used to use Cherry keyboards and I could never really see the attraction - they certainly made clicky noises but for me were not any improvement over a decent membrane keyboard. When I first dragged this Model M out of the shed (only a few years ago actually, to see what all the fuss was about) I was instantly converted. I genuinely make fewer typing mistakes and the buckling spring sort of catapults your fingers back to where they need to be - hard to describe, but feels just right. I don't share my office so noise doesn't matter (though I do often get comments from people I'm on the phone to if I'm typing in the background!)
Was that one of those Lenovo keyboards that has a kind of pen shelf at the top and blue-grey function / enter keys by any chance? I was so impressed with one on a PC I was setting up for someone else that I went out and bought one myself and used it for quite a few years. That style of keyboard was eventually replaced by the very worst PC keyboard I've ever had the misfortune of using (and that's saying something.) A significant percentage of the replacement model had faulty keys right out of the box, usually around the left shift area.
Not odd at all, it's just that far too many people have got used to the idea that stabbing at a greasy little hard-to-hold slab of easily broken glass is an acceptable user interface.
On Linux scrcpy does what you want with an Android phone (mine has to be plugged in via USB but I believe others can be connected via WiFi.) Doesn't require any extra software on the phone.
Rustdesk should also work (and probably more easily) - I've only used it with the phone as a client rather than the desktop but I'm sure it works both ways.
I fairly often link my phone to my PC - wouldn't use any MS provided software for it though. Scrcpy lets me copy/paste between my Linux desktop and the phone, and use my rather nice keyboard to type longer messages on my phone (which for some reason seems to be lacking an AT keyboard socket.)
Oh yes... anyone with any knowledge of the IT industry. I am the one of world's greatest sceptics of all things "smart" but the need to improve our home's heating setup was too great to ignore any longer and I "smartened" it at the end of last year.
Obviously all proprietary systems like Nest were out of the question, no components were permitted if they required any kind of proprietary app or 3rd party server to operate.
Our combi boiler is 25 years old and was run off a basic programmer/timer with only two on/off periods and separate controls for hot water and heating - no thermostat other than the basic wax ones on rads.
The old programmer was replaced by a Shelly relay, with two big physical buttons to turn on/off heating and hot water manually if desired (buttons have LEDs in them to indicate state, regardless of how it was triggered.)
The radiator valves were replaced with the inexpensive but decent Sonoff TRVZB valves; room temp/humidity sensing nearly all by the ubiquitous, dirt cheap and reliable LYWSD03MMC devices (flashed with a custom firmware to remove the need for any stupid proprietary stuff.)
All of the above is tied together by Home Assistant running the BetterThermostat addon which means it can be controlled by phone with the app, or any device with a web browser. A simple script turns on the boiler if one or more rooms needs heat and turns it off a few minutes after no room needs heat. The boiler runs far less than it ever did and yet every room in the house is at an appropriate temperature at all times - all of it is accessible from anywhere (through my own VPN) if required, but none of it requires any third party service and even if home assistant became inoperable for some reason we can still manually turn the heating on and off.
Have you seen how many flaws have been found in Netgear devices? DrayTek are clearly not perfect but there's a reason the vast majority of SMEs I've dealt with use their routers and it's not price. "Vibes" are really not a good way of choosing IT equipment where the important stuff is invisible... I've nothing in particular against Netgear, if I only have the budget for bargain basement stuff I will use it but there's no way I'd use one of their routers over a DrayTek.
Seems a bit of an over-reaction in my view. Every manufacturer has vulnerabilities show up now and then but DrayTek release plenty of firmware upgrades even for pretty old routers and which in my long experience have rarely introduced new problems. I did recently switch to a router running OpenWRT at home (it's Mikrotik hardware but RouterOS is diabolically irritating in places and they seem particularly bad at introducing new problems with firmware upgrades.)
I love OpenWRT, the flexibility is incredible and "unattended sysupgrades" bring the upgrade procedure more in line with what I'm used to, but even there I was left with no PoE output after the last firmware upgrade. I don't see myself boycotting DrayTek any time soon, their upgrade processes are as good and as reliable as I've seen - which really matters when you might be several hours away from the physical device.
While I agree completely with the sentiment, this appears not to be about the "outlook" iOS app but the "outlook" mail service itself even using the default iOS mail app. Why anyone continues to use Microsoft for anything email related I have no idea - of all the major providers they seem to be easily the worst for reliability.
They exist for the same reason that nobody really prints books as small as a normal phone screen. Also, they exist because most people who read books don't like their batteries running out every second chapter. Also they exist because staring at a bright backlit screen is very uncomfortable after a while.
Until last year I did the same - Nook Simple Touch, bought ridiculously cheap when they were dumping their stock here. It started to literally fall apart last year though, the rubberised plastic over the "buttons" has started to crack and fall out so I bought a Pocketbook Era to replace it. The Era is lovely, but the Nook is still entertaining my daughter who reads books faster than I can download them!
Amazon have lost my e-book business for good - I fairly often bought books on Amazon to download and read on my Nook / Era, but no chance now. I never trusted them enough to buy a Kindle and I suppose they've just proved me right.
To be fair, LibreOffice is just a recent descendent of StarOffice. I don't often use an office suite but have had to use LO quite frequently over the past week and it's impressed me with how well it has rendered Excel, Word and even WordPerfect documents other people have been sending me. I have used it fairly infrequently since the Star Office days and it's one of the few pieces of software which has genuinely improved over that timeframe.
I stopped bothering with HP servers when they decided that firmware updates would only be available to people with a current warranty... that might or might not be the case now but I'm never going to bother to check.
Mind you, even back then it wasn't worth the stress of messing with HP's website, I just emailed my requirements to a reseller who came up with the goods.
Funnily enough one of my more dramatic (OK, terrifying) UPS failures was also with a big Dell branded APC rackmount UPS... those have some very large capacitors in them which make very loud noises when they are unhappy. When you're the only one in the building (and it's not your building and you can't get to the main power switch without leaning over the exploding UPS) it's even more exciting!
I do have some experience of bigger Riello UPS - not sure on capacity off-hand but they're the big floor standing units on castors (with a train of big batteries on castors too). Had a couple of them fail too (in a non-exciting manner) but to be fair they're working in a pretty warm and not particularly dry environment.
For all that, the most scary for me was the much smaller 1500VA APC I previously had looking after my PC... I noticed a weird acid kind of smell when I came through the door one morning, eventually traced it to the UPS which was too hot to touch for more than a split second. Somehow I managed to rip the cables out and literally threw it out the door before it set fire to anything; the batteries had been boiled to death and were swollen enough to have become one with the case of the UPS.
I haven't a lot of confidence in these devices for some reason!
I realise the scale is slightly different but I got sick of UPS self-destructing a couple of years ago and switched to my own cobbled together setups.
My office is powered through a Victron inverter with szeable LifePo4 batteries and a couple of decent solar panels; it runs everything in the office off the solar if enough sun, failing which it uses the grid or seamlessly switches to battery power if there's a power cut (I have the heaters on smart switches which turn them off when the grid drops out).
The internet feed is from a different building so it has its own even more cobbled-together (but reliable) arrangement; another 12v LifePo4 battery which feeds the ONT via a buck converter and also the router (and from there a WAP) through a 12v to 48v PoE injector. The battery is permanently connected to a Victron smart charger which is set to keep the battery at "float", when the power goes off everything just carries on running from the battery and when the power comes back the charger automatically brings the battery back to the correct charge.
I'm very happy to be rid of very expensive and yet unreliable UPS with hopeless run times and prone-to-cooking lead acid batteries...
If the online systems worked properly I wouldn't have had to phone them at all. Completing my tax return a few weeks ago I realised their calculation was wrong - it didn't take into account marriage allowance and so was claiming I owed them ~£250. After trying the utterly useless chatbot service I resorted to the phone; after being on hold for an interminable period (more than an hour anyway) I did get through to someone who was helpful, ran the calculations and agreed with me that their figures were wrong.
The solution? Submit the tax return with correct figures but wrong calculation and wait. "The system" should detect that it's wrong, recalculate and send a letter with the correctly calculated value!
By a strange coincidence said letter just arrived an hour ago. Imagine how much time and money would have been saved if the online system simply did the calculation correctly in the first place - over an hour of my time on the phone and researching online; the whole conversation with the HMRC guy, the printing and postage of the letter - all completely avoidable.
