_l4jh

Anecdotal story time. We have a family villa in Spain about an hour and a half south of Alicante. We just got back from two weeks there like we do every year. The heat and humidity this time was the first time it was too much so that we didn’t enjoy our time there. We’ve had this place 21 years.

Yes it’s Spain and it’s always hot which is why we bought it but this year was something else. The mix of both very high temps (higher than usual for July) and much higher humidity just made it very uncomfortable. We don’t usually need the AC on in July but we had to run it every night this time to be able to sleep.

Even the pool wasn’t refreshing as it was a constant 33C whereas it is usually around 28-30.

On the Wednesday night just gone we also had a heat burst. My first experience with such a thing and wow that was something else. It was like opening an oven door. The blast of scorching hot air in my face was almost suffocating.

Of course there have always been outlier days that have been too damn hot over the past two decades but this time it was the whole two weeks. Not just the odd day. I dread to think that it will be like in August which is when the temps usually hit their highest.

I’m a simple software guy I don’t pretend to know much about the climate but I listen and when thousands of scientists present data that shows average temps going up it makes me worry. If things continue like this some areas just won’t be reasonable to live or visit. They’re just not comfortable. You have to stay indoors as the sun roasts you in minutes and the humidity just makes you feel like crap constantly.

Even our neighbours who live there are talking of moving as it isn’t a nice place to live anymore. You feel trapped indoors with AC and do all you can to avoid going outside.

If these kinds of temperatures do continue to rise as predicted there is going to be a huge relocation of people to more liveable locations which is going to be a whole other problem.

I live in [redacted] where we have hot temperatures in the summer but we have pretty good humidity and it rarely feels “too hot”. I have AC but almost never need to use it unless it climbs to around 40C for a few consecutive days so I am used to pretty hot but I just did not enjoy Spain these past two weeks and was so glad to arrive home last night to 29C.

This comment is like someone snuck into my brain, took notes on how it operates and wrote it in a comment.

Damn.

Not sure if you will see this but on the chance you do I was hoping you could get in touch with me directly as I would really like to talk to someone on TRT to ask some questions. If possible could you drop me an email? You can email my username [redacated] at gmail. Many thanks!

No.

I don't like to be notified about anything non-critical. I take time in my day to check the 'threads' link at the top of Hacker News and spend the 10 seconds or so it takes me to see if anyone has replied to anything I posted over the past few days and if I feel it warrants a response.

If it does I pop a note in my to-do list along with a link to the comment in question and get around to it later.

The last thing I want is yet another ping to tell me someone replied to me on a social news site. One of the reasons I comment on Hacker News is that it doesn't poke me in the eye for every reply I may get.

Honestly if Hacker News were to add this feature I would disable it instantly or maybe just not bother interacting with the community if they did it in an invasive way that I cannot disable, although that is quite unlikely.

Quick edit: I didn't mean for the above to sound hostile to what you have made. Apologies if it comes across that way. I just feel very strongly about over-notifications in todays world. For those that want it hopefully they find your extension helpful!

Obviously this is just my personal experience but I just love the mentality of the [redacted].

Work life balance is one. They don't take shit from work and I love it. 2 hour lunch breaks are the norm here for example. The interesting thing is somehow the [redacted] are more productive vs our UK counterparts that work, on average, 7.2 hours more per week than we do. How does that work?!

The general family first attitude I love.

The weather is also a nice bonus. When I pick my kid up from school more often than not one of the other dads will suggest we go play boules (pétanque) for half an hour and just chat about life.

Oh neighbours randomly pop round with extra food or drink they had they thought we might like. I had a neighbour knock at the weekend as they had some Cheddar left over from a party the day before and they know I like Cheddar as a british person so figured I would want it more than they did lmao. Just silly things but it really brings a smile to my face.

Of course some of this is I am just fortunate to live in a nice area with nice people but I lived in a nice area with nice people in the UK too and unless I knew someone quite well they would never pop over with spare cheese, etc. I am sure I could have such an experience in the UK but my 35 years living there I never had it whereas it is just the norm here in [redacted], apparently.

Healthcare is absolutely fucking fantastic too. I had some health issues the past few years after slipping a disc in my low back. I had an MRI within a few days during the height of the pandemic with lockdown in effect. Saw the consultant 10 minutes after the MRI who started me on treatment and it was superb. I compare this to my cousin that needed an MRI for very severe migraines and had to wait 9 weeks for! Also I am always able to get an appointment with my GP the same day (or very worst the next day if I call after lunch for example). Compared to trying to get an appointment with my GP back in the UK it is just so damn easy. I used to get additional stress trying to book a GP appointment when I lived in [redacted].

I could go on but I should mention some not so great things too...

The education system needs reform. It isn't bad but it is dated. They need to move beyond rote memorisation of 500 year old poems every week and embrace a bit more modern technology but...

They have a weird almost fetish like attitude towards no screens for kids. Like I have witnessed teachers and others get giddy with excitement when talking about no screen time. It is very bizarre to me in a world where almost everyone uses a screen for work in some capacity.

Also deliveries here are the absolute worst. I dread having a package delivered by Colissimo or La Poste.

Honestly we only moved because of Brexit but we're very glad we did as it has been wonderful for our family. It was hard with the pandemic as travel was restricted but nobody had an easy time of it during the lockdowns so I can't fault anyone for that.

If you want to chat more feel free to drop me an email [redacted] forwards to my proper address just pop hacker news in the subject so it doesn't get swallowed :)

Edit: Sacré bleu! I almost forgot... I have a fantastic boulangerie just a few minutes walk from my house and that is true of pretty much every house we looked at. Honestly it is quite hard to find a house that doesn't have a boulangerie within a 5 minute walk. At least in all the places we looked which is just outside of [redacted].

I give it value.

Value is just some human made up currency after all. "Is it worth the time?" etc.

If I were to approach life with the mindset "well everyone I know is going to die some day and humanity will die out so what's the point?" I'm not going to have a very positive outlook to life.

But I figure I'm here. I get 90 years or so if I am lucky. I might as well enjoy them while this combination of atoms is me.

Are you talking about aligning the icons to the left or the whole taskbar?

We're talking about moving the whole taskbar to the left (or right) of the screen similar to how Ubuntu looks for example.

You used to be able to move the taskbar to any edge of the screen but that functionality was removed in Windows 11.

This functionality was removed in Windows 11 and as far as I know has not yet returned.

is a great option for casual VPN users who just want to unblock content

Honestly that is all you should ever use these VPN services for. Convenient access to blocked content (or flip to a different region to access alternative content).

Sure your own VPS running WireGuard or OpenVPN is better but that isn't as easy as just picking a different country on a pretty map in an app to get access to a show on BBC iPlayer or Netflix a second later.

Nord, Express, etc. are close to worthless from a privacy aspect but they're very convenient for watching blocked content and that is all anyone should use them for.

If you want/need privacy because you're on a network you don't trust (hotel, airport, whatever) then your own VPS and WireGuard are what you should be looking into. If you trust you home ISP and have decent bandwidth (both ways) you can easily run your own WireGuard server on pretty much anything from home and just connect into that so cost is pretty much zero.

Instagram is monetised to fuck. It’s 50% ads these days. Almost useless and they keep “tweaking” the time line algorithm so nothing is in chronological order and you see the same things again and again. Often from days ago.

WhatsApp is yet to be monetised but doing so is going to be tricky and messy. There are excellent alternatives with the same functionality for free such as Signal that while not a perfect drop in replacement are more than good enough.

If they fuck up WhatsApp they could lose their users very quickly. That’s the trouble with so many messaging platforms. WhatsApp is nothing “special”. I would argue the only “special” service is iMessage due to the exclusivity of iOS although that seems to be more of a US thing than elsewhere.

I think Facebook see they’re in a shit place with WhatsApp which is why they are yet to make any real changes despite owning them for years.

It is the only acquisition they have made that they haven't made any substantial changes to as I honestly think they don't know how to do so and as it is all tied to a persons cell number anyway migration is pretty painless.

People don't need to share a new username with anyone, just blast a message to all their friends with "Hey it's [redacted], I'm using $NewMessageApp now as WhatsApp got all weird with their changes". You get a few people to do that and people happily switch and the network effect takes over.

Most people are using multiple messaging services anyway so it isn't even switching just dropping.

Look at the hell they brought on with their last small change with the privacy policy. You had so much backlash to a small change that they pushed back the deadline and then dropped it altogether.

Imagine actual real monetisation. It would be the end of the service in the blink of an eye.

If you run a pi-hole create a config file in /etc/dnsmasq.d such as 02-archive.is.conf with the following

    server=/archive.is/8.8.8.8 
    server=/archive.is/8.8.4.4 
    server=/archive.li/8.8.8.8 
    server=/archive.li/8.8.4.4 
    server=/archive.to/8.8.8.8 
    server=/archive.to/8.8.4.4 
    server=/archive.today/8.8.8.8 
    server=/archive.today/8.8.4.4

This will resolve the common archive.is domains using Google's DNS service rather than 1.1.1.1 but everything else via 1.1.1.1 as normal.

I honestly don't understand Microsoft's plan with Windows 11.

6 years ago, with the release of Windows 10, it was all about "this is the last version of Windows!" and they went with the rolling release model. A little strange but they stuck with it for 6 years until suddenly this summer they announce Windows 11 and they went hard talking up how it was a huge change to Windows but in reality it isn't. At all.

It has a new visual layer sure but the applications are still the old Windows 10 (and so really the old Windows XP?) ones with that new look. They introduced a new store and support for additional stores such as the Amazon Android app store.

I guess what I am saying is I don't get why now they are calling it Windows 11? They could have just carried on calling it Windows 10. They have introduced big UI and feature changes in previous Windows 10 updates (perhaps not quite as big as the new taskbar and Explorer changes).

It is a free upgrade for Windows 10 license holders (consumer anyway, not sure how it works for Enterprise?).

It just all feels so rushed and messy and the end product is just not very good as we can clearly see here.

I don't want to hate on Windows, after all they have introduced some really interesting new things since Windows 10 initial release such as WSL. It is just there didn't appear to be a want or need for a Windows 11 and this rushed mess makes it look like Microsoft didn't (doesn't?) know what it is doing with Windows either. Shrug.

This was my experience with a ThinkPad last year. They could not do on-site (in home) service due to the [redacted] lockdown so I had to do mail-in. They even emailed a PDF with instructions on how to remove the drive.

Sadly this is not possible with a modern MacBook. When I have had to send a MacBook to Apple (or a service partner) for repair I was instructed to wipe the machine (along with ensuring I log out of iCloud to disable Activation Lock and disable Find My). While it is good to ensure my personal data is not compromised it isn't user friendly at all to have to wipe my whole machine for a battery replacement :(

Yes the tools were all open source. This was in 2004 and I just zipped up a compiled exe, the src directory and a license.txt (GPL2) and put it on my website. Similar to Nirsoft which is what inspired me.

The reason behind it being awkward was for half an hour the sales guy had talked up how they were the only company developing tools like this, etc, etc. How the 'big players like VMware don't care about these pain points admins have to deal with' or words to that effect (which was true and why I made the tools in the first place).

Then the moment he finished the sales pitch and I see these 'one of a kind tools' they have been developing I respond with "That's my tool, see..."

I believe the sales guy, at least, believed all the tools he was talking about were made in house. Open source wasn't a widely understood thing back then with Microsoft talking about Linux and open source being a "cancer" and such. Really knocked him off course as I guess he had never been in that situation before (I doubt many have?).

As for following up with the company. I did nothing. I was young and while I knew what they did was wrong (they literally removed my name, link to my website, etc. and put their company name but changed no functionality of the tools as far as I could see and certainly no source code was available!) I didn't have the confidence (or desire tbh) to chase up on some little tools I made to learn and make my life a little easier at work. The company disappeared (I don't know why) sometime around 2010 iirc.

I have a similar experience to this myself.

A long time ago (early 2000s) I wrote a handful of tools to ease physical to virtual (P2V) migration for Windows Server. I was a systems administrator in the UK working for a large American firm.

I wrote the tools in my own time and unlike in other countries my employer had no ownership of them, just to clear that up at the start. I did use these tools at work but never developed them on company time or resources. They were released as open source.

Fast forward 6 months and we had a meeting with a virtualisation consultancy trying to sell us some tools to assist in a wider P2V programme. We had a sales guy and a tech guy visit to show us their stuff. After half an hour of them talking up all they can offer the tech guy fired up a tool and I instantly recognised it was my tool but with some rebranding.

My manager looked at me slightly confused as he recognised it too. I let them continue for a few minutes to properly confirm my suspicions then mentioned that this tool was in fact a tool we already use. They were very confused until I loaded up my version on a remote system to show them.

Needless to say the rest of the presentation was extremely awkward. I believe these two gentlemen thought they were in fact their own tools developed in house. It turned out several of "their" tools were in fact rebranded versions of mine.

I would love to say there was some kind of exciting conclusion but in reality all that happened was they were clearly spooked by this as their/my tools were removed and never included again in their P2V toolkit.

I suspect the moment they left the meeting with us they called to report what happened and rather than risk me following up (not sure how I could do that to be perfectly honest, it was FOSS after all just not used the proper way) they decided it would be safer to just pull these non-critical tools. They were just "nice to haves" anyway.

My boss excitedly share the experience with the team and we had a good laugh about it and how the sales guy went from Mr Confident to stammering and stressed in a matter of seconds.

We never did buy their toolkit.

Even in Windows 10 you can still go to the "old style" (Windows 2000 days) settings screen and adjust for "best performance" which disables close to every UI enhancement Windows supports. Drop shadows on windows and desktop icons, drawing windows on resize (as you mentioned), taskbar animations, scrollbar animations and even small visual effects such as the subtle animations when you mouse over a control in a window.

Obviously not many people wish to disable everything but having the option to do so is great and something I wish macOS would let me do as there is way too much motion in macOS. Sure it was cute 15 years ago when the idea of a beautiful and fluid UI was impressive but in 2021 they annoy me or worse they make the whole system look crap when, for some reason, the animations lag.

Oh I know every single tweak out there, sadly many no longer work in Big Sur. But even before that you have not been able to fully disable every animation in macOS for as long as I can remember.

Oh how I wish I could do this on macOS. Yes there is a "reduce motion" setting but there is no remove motion setting and a whole bunch of animations remain most notably minimize/maximize of windows (I can at least change from the default Genie effect to Scale which is faster), opening an application it still "zooms" into the screen, etc.

I would happily pay for a third party app to nuke every single damn animation if I could but Apple make it impossible (or at least that is what is claimed).

And of course this doesn't even touch on how laggy resizing many applications on macOS is (yes even on the shiny new M1 models). The Microsoft Office suite, Chrome and a whole bunch of other applications are horrible when resizing. It isn't often an issue with Apple's applications for what that's worth.

I’m 36 and followed a similar path “retiring” a few years ago to be a stay at home dad. I missed out on my daughters early years due to being a workaholic and didn’t want to do the same with my son. I failed to realise when I was young I can earn more money but never more time and memories built from a phone video suck.

I enjoy spending time doing work on the house and since we moved to [redacted] in 2018 I do a few small volunteer jobs such as teaching IT, programming, and helping people improve their conversational English at coffee meet-ups or picnics in the park. Nothing special as I’m not properly trained but it keeps me active and social.

I should probably look at making some money from it but I also don’t really care and like how it’s something I want to do rather than have to do because money is involved.

I have been using Signal for two years now and I love it.

However I really, really hope they can work on a good backup and restore process as losing my message history because I have to reinstall the app on my desktop[1] or have to reset my phone is a horrible experience.

Just build an encrypted blob and zip it up and pop it on my iCloud or Google Drive or leave it local and let me deal with it but I need something. As my Signal use moves from just messages with friends and family to business contacts I need a reliable way to backup my messages!

[1] I should state I mean losing the desktop copy as it starts "fresh" and does not import any messages from the phone.

Edit: I should probably clarify I am talking about the iOS/macOS applications as these are what I use. iOS does have a migration feature but that doesn't help if your phone is lost/damaged. I need a proper backup and restore process as well as the ability to import messages from the phone to the desktop app.

I have had this monitor for ~18 months now and it is indeed a great monitor.

My only complaint is that 4K is "too low" at 27 inches when you scale at 2x (the default so it "looks like" 1080p).

If they release a 5K model I will buy it in a heartbeat.

Sadly the only 5K 27 inch monitor that is any good is the LG UltraFine which is ~€1400 so a lot more than I am willing to pay considering this 4K LG was €440 when I bought it.

I've been programming in C for twenty years now and K&R has a special place in my heart however I do not think it is the best book for a beginner to learn C.

If you're coming from COBOL and wanting to learn C (like the target audience at the time the book was written) ok perhaps it is a good book for you. But if you're coming from something like Python or Java or JavaScript (or even no language at all) there are better options such as K N King's A Modern Approach.

K&R is a fantastic book in its own right and I certainly think once you feel more comfortable with C it is a superb book to read and more importantly complete as many of the exercises as you can.

It is that I have seen too many people come from higher level languages or with no programming knowledge and find K&R frustrating due to its assumption the reader is already a programmer in some other (1970s) language with a fundamental understanding of some programming concepts.

The thing that really worked for me was I only ever buy in person with cash. I almost never use my debit card in person. This simple thing changed my relationship with what I buy. Obviously my mortgage and other monthly payments are direct debit but unless the purchase is several hundred Euros or more I will pay in cash.

I always have €200 in cash on me which is enough to cover me at least a week. Then whatever I have left over at the end of the week I roll over. So if I have €60 left I take out 140 and transfer the difference into a savings account. I have saved a shocking amount doing this. It may seem strange but budgeting myself 800 for the month and only using cash has really helped me appreciate how much the money is worth to me. The short of it is on pay day each month I transfer 800 to my "cash account", I transfer the exact amount I need to cover my bills into my "bills" account (I also have a "buffer" of 100 in this account as a 'just in case its more than I calculated'). Everything else goes into savings. Everything.

Obviously some things fall outside the 800 cash allocation for example I bought a new coat a few weeks ago which was €230. I tried it on in store but bought it online as there was a discount I couldn't use in store annoyingly. However I have a separate budget allocation for key clothing items like coats and boots which I generally replace every other year. However I don't bother with multiple savings accounts anymore. I never found I benefited from the added complexity. If in a month or two I ruin my coat and have to buy a new one unexpectedly I will just take 230 from my savings rather than juggle things around.

I should say though that all of our expenses come from a single salary. Every month my wifes automatically goes into savings. Generally we never need to touch it. This is great for many obvious reasons but it also helps us (well me!) feel less guilty when I suggest we buy something we don't really need such as an OLED TV we got a few months ago.

Qt for Android has always looked pretty good but I never see it used. Could someone link a few real-world apps developed with Qt for Android?

MPC-HC is a superb media player but it is not surprising to see this happen. Interest in maintaining open source Windows applications written in C/Win32/C++/MFC is going to keep dropping as there are not as many people with the skills or motivation to do it. Especially for something as complex as a media player.

Even on the Linux side I have seen a drop in the number of full blown media players being developed, they are mostly front ends to things like mpv and mplayer.

A video I like to send friends asking about how to understanding x86 assembly is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOyaJXpAYZQ

I think the video maker does a good job of mapping a simple C program to its disassembly.

Of course the OS choice is up to you :) I could/should have said "slap Linux on it" but as I pretty much only use Ubuntu on my personal computers I write Ubuntu out of habit now. Fedora is a fine choice as well. Just don't stick Arch or Gentoo on it unless you also include your phone number for support ;)

Look into recycling it to somebody who could use a computer. Maybe it is someone down on their luck or struggling to survive and can't find a way forward or an elderly person or just a kid who could do with their own computer.

Slap Ubuntu on it and pay it forward. If you gift it to somebody looking to use it for more than Facebook then stick some free ebooks for Python or such on it.

It is easy to think "but everyone has access to a computer" and while that is mostly true having your own computer is very different from access to one.

My father is a teacher and has recycled three laptops (and a desktop a long time ago) to kids living on the poverty line. I know at least one was very grateful as I got a lovely thank you letter from them.

Books I have read so can personally recommend are (in no particular order)

    Programming in C
    C Primer Plus
    K&R (obviously)
    21st Century C
    Modern C (also mentioned in this post)
    Understanding and Using Pointers in C