Posts by AJ MacLeod 532 posts • joined 11 May 2006
The problem is that many of us use swiping to type nowadays as it can be vastly quicker than pecking at individual non-keys, and virtually none of the open source options support this.
I've been trying to use AnySoftKeyboard for the past month or two which does, but sadly it's pretty rubbish compared to Gboard etc - inefficient enough possibly to force me back to being spied on by Gboard again.
It's a great distro for running on bare metal (particularly for servers) - no systemd, very reliable, no bloat, wide range of packages. It really reminds me of the olden days in all the good ways and it's my default for servers bare metal and virtual unless specific requirements preclude it.
It was only "nerds and geeks" who knew they could alt-F4 to get out of their application on Windows 8 - ordinary users were utterly stumped when, having clicked on a tile to launch an "app", they found themselves drowning in an endless, bottomless full-screen ocean with no apparent way of getting out again.
Such users were of course too stupid to figure out that all they had to do was perform the correct magic wand wave gesture with the mouse cursor in the invisible magic area actually outside the screen to conjure up the "charms bar"
I've used some pretty weird UIs on Linux over the decades but never one so confusing or illogical as Windows 8...
I set one of these up for a customer a while back, and found it immensely annoying for several reasons. Firstly, the extra screen is basically useless; it's ridiculously too small vertically and it's at a very awkward angle - you'd end up with RSI in your neck from looking up and down if you actually tried to use it for something.
Secondly, the touchpad; as I'm right-handed the location was fine for me but as it's abnormally narrow (it's portrait rather than square or landscape shaped) the buttons are not where you'd expect them to be. I spent the whole time trying to left-click with the right cursor key and wondering why it wasn't doing anything. To make it work you really need to have your thumb curled awkwardly under the rest of your hand to reach down to where the button actually lives - extremely uncomfortable. Sure you can use tap-to-click (and I normally do) but somehow on this laptop that felt less natural than trying to click with the button.
In summary, a completely pointless expensive gimmick. Far better would be a laptop with one sensibly shaped screen rather than two letterboxes of varying sizes.
Edit: I've just enlarged the main picture to see this model is very slightly different in that it doesn't have physical buttons for the touchpad... doesn't really change the main issue though.
The tracing part has been a colossal waste of time and money right from the beginning. By the time I ended up on the government's radar as having tested positive I was already on day 7 of symptoms (and had isolated from day one anyway.) There was zero point in either locating or telling anyone I'd been in contact with a week previously as by now they either had the virus or they hadn't... all that would be gained would be a bit of unnecessary anxiety and for the government an insight into my movements and contacts.
Needless to say I didn't return the calls from the contact tracers, and those who I'd visited in the period before becoming symptomatic (including an elderly lady on immunosuppressants) thankfully hadn't picked it up from me anyway.
Yes, I'd rather my browser (which is open source and sandboxed to a reasonable extent) handle this traffic, rather than granting their known to be dodgy software carte blanche access to my entire PC. I'd rather not use Zoom at all of course (and generally don't), but one doesn't always have much option.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at the many ludicrously sanctimonious people like ShadowSystems who completely refuse to comprehend the clear fact that being fully vaccinated and boosted DOES NOT STOP YOU FROM CATCHING OR SPREADING COVID, particularly the variant now most widespread. Sure, _your_ symptoms may be less severe, but that's about it.
For what it's worth, my father in law has just had a long-awaited operation cancelled... hospital too full of selfish unvaccinated Covid patients you ask? No, turns out that his recent Pfizer booster has caused his blood pressure to soar to insanely dangerous levels after a decently long lifetime of not having any health issues whatsoever. One in a million side effect perhaps? We know two others nearby who have had exactly the same problem arise after the same vaccination.
_You_ can stick whatever potentially deadly substances you like into your own body, just shut up and let others decide what they will do... it's frankly none of your business.
I must say that for the first time ever, earlier this year I actually got to speak to a knowledgeable and helpful Google support employee who fixed an incredibly frustrating chicken-and-egg merrygoround problem related to Google Apps/Workspace/whatever they're calling it today.
I admit I was utterly astounded, and this may be the only known instance of it... but it definitely happened.
I think we actually mostly agree. My main problem is with the way data from these studies is reported, even within their own abstracts and conclusions, never mind the spin (and in some cases, outright and deliberate lies) governments put on them afterwards.
I am quite familiar with writing and publishing scientific papers from a previous career and am all too aware that published "science" is not the untainted non-political gospel truth that many wish to believe. There are some red flags that I've seen all too frequently in my browsing of the literature on C19, including; brazenly comparing best cases for the "desired outcome" set against worst cases for the opposite; making authoritative sounding statements where the error bars are so huge as to negate any real conclusion; excessive use of estimates and then later treating these as good hard data; and so on.
I will reiterate - I am not questioning that vaccines reduce symptoms for most people, I am not saying they are overall a bad thing; I am saying that the more I see data being distorted, and politicians making serious restrictions on liberty and the right to manage one's on body based on illogical and self-contradictory reasoning, the more suspicious I become.
Really? I think you mean that vaccinated people are less likely to experience symptoms than unvaccinated people. Also, your point about vaccinated people "recovering sooner" is spurious - infectiousness is not directly related to symptoms at all, hence the ten day isolation period regardless of how well or otherwise the individual might feel.
From personal experience... I (unvaccinated) recently had C19, infected by a double-vaccinated person who didn't realise they had it. My symptoms, pretty mild, lasted one night and one morning... I was no more or less infectious than the fully vaccinated person I caught it from except that I was better able to realise I was infected than they were.
I am not in general anti-vaccine (I was going to attend the one local drop-in session in the summer until I realised they'd advertised it barely a few hours beforehand and it was already over.) However, the amount of vaccine hysteria and nasty, insidious society-splitting pressure from governments; the outright lies and ridiculous attempts by academia to twist and distort their own findings regarding vaccine efficacy has made me glad I haven't had it and I certainly won't be getting it now unless by force.
I have never put Wayland into the same category as systemd (few things are that bad)... on the other hand it claims to solve problems I don't have and after all these years completely fails to do the basics that X has done for decades. My original tentative optimism about it has waned - I don't think we'd be missing much if it went and quietly died in a corner somewhere now.
Arcan looks much more interesting...
Without in any way detracting from your central point of the immense usefulness of remote X... RDP is actually not just for MS operating systems, there are servers and clients for *nix as well.
In fact, given the death of FreeNX I might end up having to use XRDP in production as a replacement - it actually seems to work very well. Feels kind of wrong though!
Sorry to disagree but this is important - Clubs, Penguins etc are not biscuits, they're clearly chocolate bars (albeit with varying amounts of biscuit inside.)
Also - my love of gritty, fibrous wholemeal foods notwithstanding, Hob-nobs are like chocolate digestives made when the factory have run out of flour and are down to sweeping the yard for ingredients!
Surprised the (admittedly brief) article didn't mention the actually really good Z88. I rescued my late father's Z88 (box, printer interface, manual, PSU and all) from a house fire this year, must get a moment to power (nearly wrote fire, oops) it up again.
Such a useful format and machine that some folk are still using them for practical tasks even today...
In WindowMaker I have one close button top right and a "minimise" button top left. If I want to do something more than that I just right-click the titlebar and choose from the many options there. Even then I normally use keyboard shortcuts to close and minimise... I have been bitten so many times by the close button being next to maximise elsewhere.
My biggest "accidental closure" bugbear is with my wife's chromebook which has a touchscreen and hardly any screen bezel... I inevitably close whatever's open as I open the lid!
in my /etc/portage/package.mask
#Kill Poettering's evil infections
sys-apps/systemd
sys-fs/udev
sys-auth/consolekit
sys-auth/polkit
sys-fs/udisks
A few years ago I had to "get involved" with polkit on a different system and the experience made me determined to rid all my own systems of it.
Thankfully card payments are much easier now that the market is flooded with options like SumUp, Zettle etc.
The likes of WorldPay have been fleecing businesses for far too long... pay ridiculous sums up front for the terminal (which you then still have to return after the contract ends!), pay every month whether you take payments or not, pay a large chunk of the transaction value, handle all the PCI compliance stuff etc etc.
We only switched to SumUp a few months ago but so far it's been a night and day difference... even their most expensive terminal with data SIM was about 1/3 of the cost of the WorldPay one we had, no standing charges, only ongoing cost is the very reasonable percentage of each transaction. Refunds etc are free, payment comes through to bank pretty quickly too.
I have to say I totally agree. I used then maintained a SUN network in the late 90s/early 2000s and Solaris was frankly horrible to work with. All the new machines bought after I took over were bog standard PCs running Linux which vastly outperformed the SUNs despite being a tiny fraction of the cost - not to mention being far easier to keep updated and having a much more pleasant userland. They ran both our own Fortran based CFD code and the commercial CFD software we previously used on Solaris.
What really surprised me was that our code ran faster on the Ultra10 running Linux compared to the same machine running Solaris. I did like the aesthetic though, and some of those monitors were nice.
Precisely! In between browsing The Register tonight I've been taking bookings, updating servers and VMs, responding to email and rolling out firmware upgrades to dozens of wireless access points. From my Chromebook, as it's late and I don't fancy being in my office right now... all of the above are done either in a browser or via SSH in a terminal - both of which are provided by ChromeOS.
Could I do my IT work with ONLY my Chromebook? Probably not. But considering that bought this device quite a few years ago as what some people call my "sofa laptop" I've done a huge amount of work using it - the several laptops I have specifically for work are hardly ever powered up, this one is so convenient.
I happened to notice LastPass was pre-installed on a new HP laptop I set up yesterday... anything that's part of the pre-installed bloatware package is seriously suspect in my view!
Personally I only really trust "pass" (passwordstore.org) as I can understand what it's doing. It's also minimalist and the most convenient password manager I've ever used. For situations where multiple people need to share password stores or widespread sync is required, bitwarden_rs seems to work well - I've never really felt comfortable with other people hosting my most sensitive data and self-hosting really isn't difficult.
Nice to see Matrix getting some coverage - unlike Signal you can run your own server / network quite easily, and you can also choose to have it mesh with the wider Matrix world or stay entirely standalone.
Their focus on interoperability is a very important aspect, one which gives me hope that Matrix might just survive and expand...
"I can only imagine the whole concept was dreamed up by 6 year olds with no clue about computing to share cat videos with other 6 year olds."
Not so many years ago Dropbox actually worked very well indeed. I'd guess that was because it was still mainly a company run by people who knew what they were doing (i.e. not marketers, managers or financial "wizards")
In the past four or five years maybe everything has changed - forcing the use of one particular filesystem on Linux was the screaming siren that told me the company really was on the way out.
Another thing was the way they treated resellers (including me) outside the US - we ended up being fobbed off onto Ingram Micro and from there on it has been one long sorry mess of random invoices for random amounts and total loss of clarity on access to customer Dropbox accounts.
More than one employee seems a rather silly requirement in my view...
The Pi has been a very useful device for commercial installations though, I've been using them for all kinds of embedded applications since they became available they've been extremely reliable (around 1% failure rate - probably caused by PSUs rather than the devices themselves)
Arduino is great and very reliable too, but the Pi being a proper linux box just makes so many network related tasks familiar and easy.
"The decline of the USA in a nutshell."
To me your whole post of semi-coherent irrelevant rubbish is symptomatic of a mental illness at best. Shouldn't you be happily looking forward to the great new future shortly to be ushered in by your favoured political saviour? Oh no... Trump is already getting the blame for Biden's screwups pre-emptively!
(For the record I am neither American nor do I have any particular attachment to any political party anywhere.)
"(certainly I don't know of any obligation on BT to power your DSL in an emergency, only phone lines for 999 calls)."
I'm not sure whether that's not an obligation any more, or whether they are just ignoring it - but I do know that BT are now fitting FTTP to domesic properties with no battery backup at all...
"Even though, intrinsically, SMS and RCS also require you to use your phone number as your account identifier?"
Yes... RCS is a better SMS (roughly as good as BBM was for years) but if we're to replace these "legacy" methods of communication it'd be far better to replace them completely and not be tied to outmoded things like phone numbers or servers owned by one or more big corporations (there's no option for self-hosted Signal as far as I could see?)
In the meantime, for the bulk of my contacts I'll just continue to use SMS (and RCS where the recipient's device supports it) because it's there and more-or-less works for now.
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