Posts by sdalton

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

Is it bad?

Is it bad that I knew what dilbert that would be without clicking on it?

Fitbit picks up Pebble, throws Pebble as far as it can into the sea

Bit worried

My girlfriend is a type-1 diabetic and uses a Dexcom sensor to monitor blood glucose. We have the Share app on our phones but it is far more convenient glancing down at the Pebble round on my wrist to monitor, as opposed to unlocking a phone and looking at it constantly. AFAIK the only other watch that works with it is an Apple watch, but I don't own any iDevices.

So this sale is worrying to me, especially with the apparently strip-n-integrate approach Fitbit are taking. I very much hope the community watchfaces continue to work and it doesn't turn into a brick. A quick glance at my wrist has on occasion kept loved ones out of the hospital. I love mechanical watches and on principle dislike the idea of a smartwatch, however I cannot deny the utility for edge cases - and this is where the pebble shines.

Small ISPs 'probably' won't receive data retention order following IP Bill

Re: Next steps

I'm not sure that needed the Joke Alert icon, tbh.

A British phone you're not embarrassed to carry? You heard that right

I'm going to stick my neck out here a bit (especially posting as a yank), but if you're going to go Chinese, why not go all in instead of hiding behind Eurobranding? (Not a dig at the Wileyfoxen per se, they look very reasonable).

I have a Huawei P8 Lite which I purchased for the equivalent of just under a hundred quid, and I'm struggling to see what people pay more to get.

- It has a very respectable screen

- Dual sim slots

- Micro SD on the second sim slot, but I rarely use it

- Huawei's EMUI seems to get some shit from westerners, but I quite like it (and it's had updates)

- Absolutely zero google services enabled

- Reasonably tough - it takes repeated falls onto hard floors (more since I realized I can get away with it)

- Awesome battery life, with reasonable disabling of gps (which should probably be left off anyways), I can coax a few days out of it without much worry.

Admittedly the battery is non-removable, but that seems to be very much par for the course these days (god I miss my old blackberries). My girlfriend has an iPhone 5s on a $200+/mo 'family plan' from Verizon, and I have a sub-hundred quid phone on a Tracfone plan for maybe $6/mo. I'm really having a hard time trying to justify the difference in price.

FWIW, the Wileyfox seems to be based on Xiaomi hardware, and that was one of my two finalists when I picked the P8. I don't think I would've been disappointed by either of them. It's probably long since time to drop the stigma of buying Chinese.

Lenovo downward dogs with Yoga BIOS update supporting Linux installs

Actually, I quite like lenovo. I have a Y570 or something or other (too lazy to check) that is one of my two main linux machines, and it works rather well out of the box with Debian Sid and Arch. The hardware is good, and funky raid issues aside, it seems to work well with linux (mine came with a 5400 rpm drive which was replaced with a small ssd). I do, however, have a strip of electrical tape covering the logo (but that's not exclusive to that machine, I just don't like branding).

I recommended one of their ideapads to my friend, and it's no old-school thinkpad, but it gets the job done and had pretty good specs for the money, plus one of the best laptop keyboards I've used (thinkpads excluded ofc). He's happy with it, after wiping w10 in favour of w7.

BAN the ROBOT WHORES, says robot whore expert: 'These AREN'T BARBIES'

Re: Ok, here goes

Sorry, we were busy with the Asimov jokes.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 3.18 as 3.17 wobbles

Re: Unknown source of kernel lock-ups?

With Windows, that is what the end-users get. With Linux, it has to go through the secondary stability concerns of the distro developers - who may well elect to use an older kernel. The difference being, no-one is shoving software with known stability concerns into the hands of millions of consumers - it's much more fragmented, like everything FOSS.

The Pirate Bay SUNK: It vanishes after Swedish data center raid

I was under the impression it was hosted in Germany now? I seem to remember from the documentary that they moved shortly after the LAST time Swedish police kicked down the doors and scored themselves some free servers to sell on ebay.

BOFH: SOOO... You want to sell us some antivirus software?

PDF-wise - SumatraPDF for the Windows boxes, Zathura for *nix. Job done. Dunno about the OS X crowd, never had cause to use one for more than 5 minutes.