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I’ve tried twice to make the move to VS Code and keep coming back to Emacs. I would often be overwhelmed by my obsession to tweak things (ADHD..) but switching to Doom Emacs and sticking to the standard config helped with that. Learning some Elisp to write custom functions and embracing org-mode has made it near impossible to switch to another editor now.

This looks great and I’ll definitely give it a spin when I get a chance. What I’d really like though is the ability to save the pages locally, I often revisit bookmarks from years ago only to find that the page no longer exists.

For what it’s worth I was a longtime KeepassXC user. Switched to Bitwarden to have easier shared passwords between myself and partner/family however I’m now moving back to KeepassXC. I support Bitwarden fully however the app itself is just so badly designed. The UI is dreadful (both the website and desktop app) and I find it very frustrating to use. The whole layered concept of folders and inability to have tags is a nightmare when you have a large collection of passwords. The iOS app seems to quit unexpectedly after opening as well. I’m just very underwhelmed with what I was hoping would be a nice alternative to having to sync my Keepass database everywhere.

On the KeepassXC side of things I’ve had zero issues with the app itself (using it on Linux, OSX and Windows) and I use Strongbox on iOS which is one of the very few apps I’m happy to pay for to support the developer, it’s so much more polished than Bitwarden.

Fedora on home desktop, Fedora on work Thinkpad. I’ve also got an M1 MacBook Air that I’m probably going to replace with a Framework laptop soon and run Fedora on that too. It’s just rock solid and any issues I do encounter I can easily fix myself. OSX on the other hand is an inconsistent mess that seems to get buggier with each release as of late.

I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.

Agreed. I often update (in Fedora) which causes Firefox to be restarted - never had any issues clicking the 'restart Firefox' button though which relaunches it and opens the last session, often opening dozens of older tabs without issue. Bizarre thing to complain about.

What you’re referring to is the TV license fee and you’re not obliged to pay for it at all, you can simply opt out as outlined in the various letters you’ll receive if you don’t pay for it. It’s a deeply flawed system that many disagree with, but to say the public is forced to pay it is false.

I’m intrigued, care to share more?

Exactly this. I have a big nostalgia for old school sysadmin ways of working, but just use Ansible. It’s beyond easy and can be as simple or complex as you like. I use containers on my home server (with podman) alongside a bunch of other services and it’s all just so clean and easy to maintain as a collection of roles and playbooks.

During Covid lockdown online food shopping in my area (UK) became increasingly difficult to book delivery slots as they would fill up as soon as they became available. For most people who either owned a car or lived nearby a supermarket this was probably just a mild inconvenience, however at the time I didn't have a car and the nearest store was miles away from my house. Writing a bunch of Python scripts to check for free delivery slots over several of the big supermarkets and then pinging me when one became available was a lifesaver (maybe a bit dramatic, but it helped me secure regular food deliveries without having to spend hours hitting the refresh button). I learned a lot in the process, the lengths at which some online stores go to try and deter automated scripts was quite interesting.

You’re cherry picking a subset of people there. I imagine some view it with a sort of mild indifference, but there are people who are concerned about their own privacy from both government and big tech. I generally disregard any sentence that starts with “most people..” because it usually can’t be backed up with sources.

I'd strongly recommend against a platform like Fiverr. I spent some time doing various odd DevOps and Linux jobs on there. I basically had to charge next to nothing for my services because the sheer amount of other people doing the same thing (probably to a very low standard). Despite this I thought building up my reviews would be a good way to increase my prices and still get work on there, which it was. Unfortunately the attitude of quite a large percentage of the people who hired me was just absurd. Difficult language barriers in many cases, endless disputes over deliverables, constantly changing requirements and even some cases blaming me for things completely out of my control. What I was hoping would eventually lead to a nice little side business of odd sysadmin type things just made me really stressed and frustrated and I realised why I work for a company where there's a barrier between me and the end user and their insane demands.

I have to disagree with this. I have endless issues switching the playback between my iPhone and HomePod, sometimes I’ll have to quit the app just to get the right device to play music. When I’m playing the song on my iPhone with playback on the HomePod it sometimes ‘forgets’ the HomePod is the playback device and using the controls on the iPhone to pause the song etc do nothing forcing me to use Siri to stop playback on the HomePod. Not to mention how useless Siri is when asking to play certain things (e.g. trying to play an album that has a song with the same name on it). I generally like the HomePod but the integration (and Siri in general) are massively lacking.

Infuriating is a bit of a stretch. A mild annoyance at most.

+1 for Strongbox, one of the few apps I’m happy to pay for.

Thanks for reminding me of this, really great read! For a similar feel there’s a good short story by China Miéville called The Ball Pit.

Oddly I’m still getting notifications for new mail but unable to download the content.

What different app developers? Isn’t pass basically a wrapper around GPG?

(and has been portrayed more negatively in the news media than any other living person)

Um, did you forget about his first wife?

There appears to be some heavy editing/removal of information going on with the Wikipedia page relating to her.

That's exactly what they're becoming though?

Not exactly. But, for me at least, reliability of my mail provider is just as important as them respecting my privacy. There are alternatives that I trust just as much as ProtonMail. For what it’s worth I’ve been a loyal customer since the beginning and have been more than supportive of them (I even own Proton merch..), but from a users perspective all I’ve seen recently is them pumping attention into new product releases as opposed to finishing currently half baked products or making their systems more resilient to downtime (which I’ve noticed a lot more of in the last 6 months than since the very beginning). It’s hard to turn a blind eye and continue supporting them.

As a paying user I feel that the reliability of their services in recent months has been completely unacceptable for me. That combined with the ridiculously slow rollout of new products (will calendar ever be fully released?) has now made me look at alternatives. I love the product itself and the idea behind it, but the amount of money I pay to host multiple domains for mail and for their VPN service is pretty absurd in itself and now I have to put up with these reliability issues too?

I’ve been using Monzo for around the same time and have had nothing but good things to say right up until they decided to start pushing their Premium/Plus accounts onto customers via in app ads. With all the rumours of them struggling to become profitable it’s made me consider a move to Starling, who seem to be in a better position in that regard.

I’ve been a very happy ProtonMail customer for a number of years now. My only complaint, like many other people, is the wait for these new products to be released. I’ve been using the new UI since it was released, however it’s still in beta (I can’t even remember what the old UI looks like at this point). I’ve tested their calendar which seems great, however still beta (with no mobile apps which make it fairly useless in my use case). I’m keen to try Drive too however I don’t want to get sucked into another tool that will likely be in beta for a long time to come.

I realise part of this is myself (and many others) being a bit too eager for them to release these products, however I do wish they’d focus their efforts on a single product and give it a short beta phase before full release as opposed to teasing various products that take forever to be released and not marked as beta.

Didn’t he give the information to journalists to make the decision about what needs to be redacted? Can you provide a source for the information that he endangered peoples lives?

Gmail -> ProtonMail free tier Google Maps -> Open Street Maps (although I personally use Ordnance Survey Maps) Google Docs -> I use LibreOffice because I don’t need the cloud functionality Google Calendar -> I currently use a Synology NAS to host my own but I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Proton Calendar

As a disclaimer to this I actually pay for ProtonMail and OSMaps because they’re products I use daily and feel that they deserve the money, however they do have free tiers and there are free alternatives to most Google software. I’d strongly suggest looking into de-Googling, there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to it.

There are plenty of free alternatives to Google that don’t rely on ads and respect your privacy.

The images don’t appear to scale correctly on mobile.

I’m all for Emacs tips and tricks, but this just seems unnecessary. Using find-file (C-x C-f) along with tab completion to open your .bashrc or whatever is literally several key strokes. Does anyone really edit their shell config that often to warrant binding it to a key to shave off several milliseconds?