* Posts by antonyh

16 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2018

Logitech's Wave Keys tries to bend ergonomics without breaking tradition

antonyh

Re: Ergonomic ...

I was using dvorak on an MS Ergo 4000 with blacked out keys until recently, and still use it on my phone. I've since gone back to qwerty for work though, mostly because of Emacs bindings not quite making any sense in any other layout. If it wasn't for shortcuts, dvorak would be a superior layout for me personally with much improved typing speeds and better accuracy.

The Windows Phone keeps ringing but no one's home: Microsoft finally lets platform die

antonyh

Quite agree; the main apps keeping Win10 alive are the likes of Adobe CC. And conversely Apple; there's a lot of Mac-only apps that are highly prized.The Linux apps however... is there anything that's Linux-only and not on the other platforms.

As for mobile, I'd love an alternative to iOS. I'll never use Android again, I just don't trust it with confidentiality or security. The most viable option if I drop Apple is a feature phone.

Complete with keyboard and actual, literal, 'physical' escape key: Apple emits new 16" $2.4k+ MacBook Pro

antonyh

Re: Selective deafness

This.

I have a Dell XPS15 that was a full grand cheaper than the equivalent MacBook Pro, and yet has all the sockets (USB-A, SD card, and so on. It has a power light that I can see when it's closed. It has a battery status button. It's user-serviceable for upgrades. It has a high resolution screen with a wide colour gamut. Keyboard is ok, would like more travel not less (1mm is too shallow). It's way better value. Even if price wasn't a consideration, I'd still chose the Dell over the Apple machine.

OSX/MacOS is dead to me, it's not worth a £1000 extra per machine, and there's so little I want to run that doesn't have viable alternatives on Windows/Linux anyway that I don't miss it (there's just one app I miss, I'll cope).

Don't get me wrong, I still use my Macs, but they all date from 2008-2009 - Mac Pro from that era is still a beast of a machine and is only limited by virtue of being stuck on OSX 10.11. I still use PowerPC machines too. Modern Apple has lost it's mojo.

antonyh

Re: it might he a hipster thing to do

The same is mostly true of my XPS13 from 2015. No glue. Ram not replaceable sadly, but battery was simple to replace. Some models are better than others, but Apple are notorious for making it hard/improbable/impossible to repair. Pentalobe screws were the first step and it's become far worse since then.

Kiss my ASCII, Microsoft – we've got one million fewer daily active users than you, boasts Slack

antonyh
Meh

Personally, I don't like either. Neither of them do threads in a clean and accessible way.

Teams has a learning curve that's too steep for a comms tool, and some highly questionable UI design aspects ('read more'? really?)

Slack I find clumsy, poor performing, and also has some poor UI aspect (chats that vanish from the sidebar being my pet hate).

As for the alternatives...

Google Hangouts worked well enough, but doesn't do code blocks so is borderline useless. 20 seat limit on conf calls can be a pain.

Apple iMessages / Facetime is Apple only.

Jabber/XMPP/IRC would be too hard to bring on board most places, for less technical folk. No screensharing.

Email isn't collaborative enough and also can't share screen.

Skype has taken a very strange direction and is mostly unfit for anything other than one-to-one video.

Facebook Messenger? haha. No screensharing anyway.

It feels like there's room for a more polished and sophisticated chat/collab/video/voice/screenshare tool.

UK.gov's smart meter cost-benefit analysis for 2019 goes big on cost, easy on the benefits

antonyh

Re: SMETS2?

Surge pricing! Thanks, you've just added another fear to my list of reasons to avoid this crap.

antonyh

Changed suppliers

I dodged all of this by switching to a supplier that explicitly doesn't offer 'smart' meters. Bonus points for being green too.

I know it'll come eventually and I'll have no choice, but I got sick of letters from EDF and when BG rang and were insisting on fitting one I jumped ship. These gadgets are all downside and no upside as far as I can tell.

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

antonyh

exFAT, bleugh

Given my experience with exFat - formatting a device on Mac was unreadable on Windows, and vice versa - I avoid it at all costs. Not being able to read it on Linux was a bonus, a barrier stopping me from using this crap.

Add to that my Synology NAS wanting $3.99 for a driver (not an unreasonable amount) but needing me to create a login, add a payment card, etc, created another barrier for something that should be free anyway.

What the world needs is a free and open source, high performance, high reliability filesystem that can be used in embedded devices. It's not exFAT. Even the name makes me think of cooking by-products, disgusting.

Upgrade refuseniks, beware: Adobe snips away legacy versions of its Creative Cloud apps

antonyh

Re: There's always something missing from the competitors

I was under the impression selective blurring of parts of the image was possible with Adobe Camera Raw.

antonyh

Re: There's always something missing from the competitors

It was the line "be aware that should you use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties" in the article that led me to this conclusion.

antonyh

There's always something missing from the competitors

I doubt Adobe would pull these if it didn't have to for legal reasons, and the heavy handed nature is likely in self-defense.

As for the competitors, they all have something not-quite-right, and something missing. I've tried a wide bunch, and it ranges from lack of RAW support to tools that have been in CC for a very long time.

Example: Capture One. Expensive 'pro grade' tool. Love the software, but they don't support RAW from Olympus E-PL8, and they don't have any facility to blur sections of the image. If that's the best the competition can offer, then Adobe win hands down.

Backup your files with CrashPlan! Except this file type. No, not that one either. Try again...

antonyh

Re: Whatever happened to three copies ?

Part of the problem here is how long it takes to establish that offline copy. I used Crashplan for a long time, and it wasn't quick at uploading. I had multiple TB uploaded from domestic broadband. I'm not even sure it completely finished. My offline copy is now a bunch of HDD in a storage locker, and even then it doesn't cover everything because it's added to infrequently as well as running the risk of bitrot.

In 2019, backup is not a solved problem for non-enterprise users.

ood new, fanbys. Apple spds up n-str McBook latop kyboad rpairs, ccrding t hs leakd mmo

antonyh

Re: Change for the Red Dot

Mac does have some advantages. Don't underestimate the power of muscle memory and the placement & use of the cmd key instead of ctrl for many things, especially cut and paste.

But that's just a keyboard, and I could use a mac layout on windows if I really wanted. The OS is good, doesn't have some of the craziness that's in Windows. QA is lacking on both sides, but Apple are nowhere near as bad as Microsoft over the last year. HiDPI still doesn't work properly on Windows too, it's a lot better on Mac. Microsoft still don't have a multi-tab terminal/console app. Talking of apps, the MS 'app store' is a junkyard.

There are some softwares that are much loved and only on Mac - DevonTHINK, Sketch, Keynote, anything by Omni. The same goes for Windows, there are some great tools there too that aren't on Mac (can't think of one right now though). Pick one and run with it.

As for Linux, I can't run a large wedge of software on there including Adobe. Not that it would matter with a broken butterfly keyboard anyway. It was the keyboard and not the cost that led me away from Apple - I spent the same amount on a Windows machine (Dell XPS 15).

Apple is all about taking things away - USB A, MagSafe, F-Keys, replaceable parts, SD Card reader. All the things I want and need. Now they've taken quality from the keyboard. iOS 13 promises to be more desktop-like, so the end is coming for OSX/MacOS, and probably Intel-based devices too.

Expired cert... Really? #O2down meltdown shows we should fear bungles and bugs more than hackers

antonyh
Coat

Shurely you can't be Sirius?

Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical

antonyh

My Samsumg S7 Edge made itself user-hostile when I tried to turn off location tracking, popping up a message every few minutes trying to convince me to turn it back on.

Ethical? The bar set by the competition is so low that ants have to duck to go under it.

Redis has a license to kill: Open-source database maker takes some code proprietary

antonyh

There seems to be little discussion on the side-effect of this licence change: why would I start a project now with Redis when I can't use Modules commercially? Will the Redis licence change to include this?

The same applies to Neo4J which also has adopted this Commons Clause.

Not only does this add risk to any project that uses it, it now adds a security burden for those who cannot upgrade, and a likelihood that hosting services will shutter Redis support.

This is a toxic move to an ecosystem that provides little benefit. What irks me most though is that's ok to lean upon Ubuntu in their Docker instances, and Gnu in their buildchain; perhaps they would be kind enough to publish how they contribute to these organisations / projects?

It seems that RedisLabs is fine with taking from the OSS community, and yet restrict how some of Redis is used by removing a key freedom. Stop pretending this is open source. The Redis core is (for now at least) but not the modules with this clause.