debunn

As a hybrid macOS / Windows user (with 20+ years of Windows keyboard muscle memory), I found Karabiner Elements a godsend. You can import complex key modifications from community built scripts which will automatically remap things like Cmd+Tab to switch windows, as well as a number of other Windows hotkeys to MacOS equivalents (link below):

https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/?q=windows#windows...

Might I suggest https://www.prodigygame.com - it's a free-to-play online math game, where your child is a wizard that has to answer (age appropriate) math questions to gain magic to cast spells. Note: there is a paid subscription that allows your child to get access to more pets / faster experience gain, but is not required.

While this isn't a "do math to be able to unlock your device" type of game, it is fun to play and can be used as an earned screen-time requirement (or a "free screen-time" option!)

Disclaimer: I work for Prodigy as a Site Reliability Engineer, but my son (10) also enjoys playing the game!

I wonder if this reduction in videos on screen is a result of an experiment due to "The Paradox of Choice" / "Choice Overload"?

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-par...

The following is my personal experience being part of a collective bargaining union (OPSEU local 598), which encompassed a few hundred workers for Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, in Toronto Ontario, from 2007-2017. I worked in IT for the duration of my employment (although not all union members were IT - but a lot were.)

The good:

- An elected collective bargaining team negotiated for us every ~5 years, and came up with a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This allowed the members to express their desires for what they wanted (although not all requests were brought up in bargaining, and had to be agreed to to be ratified), which were generally listened to

- On-call compensation was set out as part of that agreement, and was the most generous I've experienced in my 25+ year career.

- Members could file grievances with the union regarding work conditions, or unfair treatment of the workers (I don't recall hearing of this ever happening, but there were processes in place for it)

- Health benefits were good, if not the best I've seen

- You could get two pay bumps per year, one that all union members got that was set aside in the CBA, and another moving you up a spot in your pay band (but only if you were not at the top of your salary band)

The bad:

- Union dues, while not huge, were yet another noticeable deduction from each pay

- When at the top of your salary band, you only got the one cost of living adjustment per year. There was no automatic way of moving to the next salary band

- Getting promoted means applying for internally posted positions (which all employees can apply for), and successfully being hired in to that position. This is the only way to move up salary bands, and you could only move up one pay slot in the new band (as they overlapped between bands). This really limited upwards career growth, and meant that leaving the company was the only way to get double-digit pay increases (or move in to management, which was outside the union)

- Our CBA strangely didn't cover / prevent layoffs of staff (although other union CBAs certainly do - so this is just my own experience), so I was one of the 100+ members that were laid off when a new VP decided to outsource a bunch of our roles to Tata Consultancy Services in India. There were provisions in place given my seniority that would have made a more junior union members have to be laid off in place of me (so I could take over their role instead), however I opted to take my severance package as I was ready to move on.

So to summarize - unions are definitely a mixed bag in my experience. I can appreciate the good they can do (and different CBAs will result in wildly different experiences), but from what I've personally seen, they generally function to treat all workers in a similar way: not rewarding the best, and not really punishing the worst.

TIL! Thanks for the link - all the demos / videos had me convinced this was just e-ink technology!

Any ideas what the screen refresh rate is going to be at this point? All the screenshots don't have time that includes seconds, and having a watch face that can update at least every second would be a requirement for me.

(I know e-ink displays can have fast refresh rates, like the 60Hz / fps Daylight computer - but that may not be cost effective / battery efficient here?)

Greenworks offers battery powered leaf blowers - might have been one of these? https://www.greenworkstools.com/collections/leaf-blowers

I came here to recommend the same! Mine's the thermal carafe version (so it doesn't have a hot plate) - so it's even more straightforward. Some selling points you didn't mention though:

- It has a 5 year warranty

- It's handmade in the Netherlands

- Replacement parts are available without too much effort

I work for an EdTech company called Prodigy Game ( https://www.prodigygame.com ) - we have Math and English adventure games that help students in grades 1 - 8 learn at school or at home. While I don't think this is a good substitute for teachers / is going to disrupt the entire education space, I think it is an excellent supplement to what is currently in place, and can really help kids want to learn outside of schools. I'd be happy to see more products grow in this space for sure!

I really like the Pilot G2 pens - they use a nice flowing ink and are available in larger 1.0mm and 0.7mm sizes. They are also pretty easy to find (Amazon has them, I'm sure other stores would as well), so you shouldn't have troubles picking a pack up!

I may be mistaken here, but I think Patrick may be referring to the library of Stripe Press published books, which are available internally (and externally, if purchased)?

https://press.stripe.com/

DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer / Cloud Architect / Systems Engineer / Application Developer

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada (UTC-4)

Remote: Yes (also experienced with working remotely)

Willing to Relocate: Possibly (after COVID, but would prefer remaining in Toronto)

Technologies: Windows, Linux, AWS, Docker, BASH, Ruby, Elasticsearch, Nginx, CI/CD, many others...

Résumé/CV: https://www.davebunn.com/resume.pdf or https://ca.linkedin.com/in/debunn

Email: debunn (at) yahoo (dot) com

I'm a veteran technology professional (20+ years), with experience in a variety of application development, systems administration and DevOps roles. I'm a quick study, an excellent problem solver, a great team player, and can help you plan and resolve your technical roadblocks.

DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer / Cloud Architect / Systems Engineer / Application Developer

Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada (UTC-4)

Remote: Yes (also experienced with working remotely)

Willing to Relocate: Possibly (after COVID, but would prefer remaining in Toronto)

Technologies: Windows, Linux, AWS, Docker, BASH, Ruby, Elasticsearch, Nginx, CI/CD, many others...

Résumé/CV: https://www.davebunn.com/resume.pdf or https://ca.linkedin.com/in/debunn

Email: debunn (at) yahoo (dot) com

I'm a veteran technology professional (20+ years), with experience in a variety of application development, systems administration and DevOps roles. I'm a quick study, an excellent problem solver, a great team player, and can help you plan and resolve your technical roadblocks.

Thanks - when you're primary on-call, how often do you receive alerts / pages that you have to action?

Thanks - that seems like a reasonable way to handle on call, and more in line with what I've seen as well. Appreciate the feedback!

Are the people in charge of fixing the underlying issues themselves on call?

Yes - although we're on call frequently enough, and tasked with other priorities when we're not - so progress is slow. I mentioned in another comment as well that the executive focus is to do pretty much whatever our customers want, so this generally results in lots of new problems by the time we fix older ones.

How about the people producing the changes that cause new issues?

They are responsible for fixing the code, but they can do so more during regular 9-5 type hours. They don't feel the same level of pain. I realise this is a problem, but thanks for suggesting it.

Thanks for the reply - this sounds like the right way to run an on call rotation!

Thanks - that's what I was expecting this to be like also - it's sadly not though. Appreciate the feedback!

Thanks for your reply - we do have some recurring types of issues, but I'd say it varies a fair bit. A lot of issues are customer support related (that require administrator access to fix), but there are a lot of system issues as well. All are deemed as items that need fixing after hours (even if I don't necessarily agree with that assessment.)

There are actions being taken to fix both the number of customer support cases as well as the systems issues - but progress is slow, and our appetite to implement all of our customer requested changes end up adding lots of new problems.

Thanks - of the 5-7 pages per week I was mentioning, all of these are things that are items that require me to manually action them. Lots are after hours customer support issues that require administration level access, others are systems issues tied to technical debt or legitimate problems that occur.

There is effort to try and resolve the underlying problems, and we do make some headway here - we just keep adding changes to satisfy customers which end up causing new issues. We're being told this will get better over time, but it's certainly not happening fast enough IMHO.

Again, thanks for the feedback and insight!

Thanks - I'm glad I got at least one reply of someone who's confirming that level of paging wasn't abnormally high to them.

When on primary on-call, we also are generally not expected to make progress on project work, although we don't have reviewing of all our incidents after our shift (generally just major ones.) I think there's definitely room for improvement here.

Thanks - we try to tune our alerts, and we have a lot that are self healing as well. The ones I've been mentioning are ones that we currently don't have automated solutions for, and require me to manually action them. Our management team is working on automating away the work, but the technical debt is going to take longer to fix. We get some flexibility to leave early / start late when alerts affect our shift as well, although it's not worth the cost to me personally.

Thanks - this is what I figured was closer to normal. I appreciate getting confirmation my experience is not as far off reality as I was being told!

Thanks - yeah, all of the 5-7 incidents I'm seeing are considered high priority and require action. We get lots of the noisy false system alarms too, but those don't require me to action them thankfully.

Thanks for the reply - I appreciate the insight and follow up questions.

The question you should be asking is: why am I being paged so often? Are they legitimate things that you need to respond to? If so, you should be fixing these issues so that they don't happen again.

This is mostly due to not having anyone else around to handle customer issues (which currently require manual intervention), however system issues are also pretty frequent here as well. Management is working on prioritizing the automation of the customer issues so that there are less of them in total, but system issues will likely be harder to resolve (we try to resolve them as they come up if possible, but many are more systemic to technical debt.)

So yes - I'm only including the events that are actionable and require breaking out the laptop - these generally vary from 15 minutes to 3 hours of support.

If the poster was from Canada, $30K is actually about right for a 2019 Touring trim level (it would be even more after taxes):

https://carcostcanada.com/Canada/Prices/2019-Honda-Civic_Sed...

Is your "Always show global auto-type entry selection dialog" option checked in the Options \ Advanced \ Auto-Type section? Mine is unchecked, and for sites / applications that only have one entry, it just enters it without showing a dialog...

I noticed the following comment in the article:

Encryption – Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.

Does anyone know if the existing i3 EC2 instances NVMe drives are also encrypted in this fashion? I can't find any articles stating this...

Thanks!

We've had a number of folks at work ask if their Android phone will be patched, so I thought it would be helpful to list the Android Open Source Project (aka: device operating system) versions that will be receiving the necessary patches [0]:

4.4.4, 5.0.2, 5.1.1, 6.0, 6.0.1, 7.0, 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 8.0

Note: it will likely take some time for your handset manufacturer to test and release the patch for your specific phone.

0: https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2017-09-01 (see CVE-2017-0781, 0782, 0783 and 0785)

I posted about the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the last "Who's Firing" thread - which was my employer. All of the 100+ of us affected by the outsourcing have been let go as of January 31st, with some already having lined up full time employment, others taking some time off, or some like myself who are actively exploring potential jobs.

If you're curious about the company, it won't fail - having $170B in investment assets means you can pay people to fix whatever is broken - but the Tata Consultancy folks who were hired to replace us are definitely having some problems taking over all of the responsibilities we have left behind. I forsee a great deal of pain in their near future, but I'm sure they'll be fine in a few years - and I honestly wish them well.

As for me - if anyone out there is looking for a remote (or Toronto based) 17+ year IT veteran, with a sys admin / web development / DevOps skillset - feel free to send me an e-mail at debunn at yahoo dot com.