firmgently

I use an app I made for myself:

[link redacted]

The main downside is probably that it doesn't automatically share data between devices, but it's fine for me as I just use it on my main work PC.

It can save/load data to files so I have an `inotifywait` script watching my Downloads folder. When I save/download a file from the app it automatically gets backed up to cloud storage.

I'm not sure how usable it might be for people. I've made a start on hints/instructions but that part of it is pretty threadbare as I've not got around to sharing it with others yet.

This is my favourite https://www.bobrosslipsum.com/

A fork of gedit 2 (for anyone interested in such trivia)

I often search for the etymology of words. I used to overthink it when trying to find the right search terms but eventually realised that "[word] etymology" gives pretty much perfect results every time ('vaccine etymology' gave the answer on Google and DuckDuckGo without even needing to click any links).

Just mentioning this for other people who like looking up words. And yes it's obvious... unless you're one of those people who sometimes overthinks search terms.

This isn't the right comparison to make.

As you mentioned, Linux runs on hardware made by hundreds/thousands of different uncoordinated manufacturers. Mac OS runs on a very narrow range of hardware built by the same manufacturer that makes the software. Linux is a very different project to Mac OS.

So take the best examples of Linux machines and compare those with Macbooks. So if eg. Dell XPSes or modern ThinkPad X series have solved the sleep problem consistently then it's fair to compare those with Macbooks.

Of course this doesn't help those people who have trouble with sleep on Linux and hopefully it will get better... but comparing a broad elastic OS running on a vast mess of thousands of different devices with an OS designed specifically for a small range of tightly controlled hardware isn't reasonable. It would make more sense if there were no good examples of decent Linux machines, but this isn't the case.

It's complementary, which is a different word and has a very specific meaning when it comes to colour theory (a colour's complement is the colour directly opposite it on a colour wheel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementary_colors

This probably refers to TTL, which can be easily changed to disguise the 'hop' from your device to your phone... but Deep Packet Inspection is apparently commonly used nowadays too. To get around that you need to be encrypting with a VPN or similar setup.

This is my simplistic understanding of the state of play based on the last time I looked into it but as mentioned above it's easy to Google.

I don't know much about figma but you can save .fig files from the browser app to your hard drive (I just did it to check).

I'm not sure if any other apps can make use of .fig files so you may well still be tied to the app in that sense but you can at least own/archive your working files.

I moved to a 10.1" display as a winter (low power) necessity. There's more sun now so I have enough power for my larger laptop but am not using it, I prefer the ergonomics of my current setup.

My tablet is on an arm suspended at eye height about 15-20cm away from my face. At the same time I can have my ThinkPad BlueTooth keyboard+trackpoint in an ergonomically sound position (not possible to do both of these things solely with a laptop due to the keyboard and display being tied together).

I had a 15.6" laptop display and a ruler within reach so I just measured... at 35-40cm away from my face the visible area of the 15.6" screen is occluded by the visible area of the tablet screen at 15-20 cm away. The aspect ratios are different (my preferred 16:10/1920x1200 on the tablet vs 16:9/1920x1080 on the laptop lcd) but this is roughly correct. Admittedly 35-40cm is probably a little further away than most people have their laptop screen but it's in the ballpark.

I've had setups with multiple/larger monitors in the past. It's hard to compare properly as so much has changed for me. I move towards spending more and more of my time in the terminal and have learned to make good use of tmux for workspace management (and i3 workspaces when I'm using a WM). I don't miss the multiple/larger monitors (but am not suggesting anybody should be the same as me).

I can say that this is my favourite of my personally-owned setups ever, for its lightness, silence, low power usage and minimal space requirements. These requirements of mine are very specific of course but you asked for a subjective measure. I am very happy (and on a 10.1" screen)!

Next time I upgrade I'll be looking for a nice rootable tablet... possibly something x86 which can run linux so I can get VMs to work. I think I'm done with laptops.

[ To repeat stuff I've mentioned here before but which might help make sense of the above:

+ the 'display' is an Android tablet running termux (as it's the fastest and nicest terminal I could find)

+ I just use termux for its terminal and work in Debian Stretch via Linux Deploy

+ Termux is very good on its own but in my experience the best armhf packages are on Debian. I'm comparing to termux and Arch which are all I have experience with - they are both great but I've found some packages to be either missing or had problems due to termux's clang vs gcc... or that Arch uses Armv7 binaries whereas my tablet seems happier with Debian's Armhf in some cases. I specifically had trouble getting a working binary for Chromium which is essential for me as I need the developer tools but achieved it on Debian.

+ I run Debian GUI apps via local XSDL server and/or VNC

+ So far the only thing I've been unable to achieve is VMWare emulation of X86 OSes but as I don't have an X86 CPU in here I can't be surprised about that ]

Banks do it under fractional reserve banking.

"Lord Adair Turner, formerly the UK's chief financial regulator, said "Banks do not, as too many textbooks still suggest, take deposits of existing money from savers and lend it out to borrowers: they create credit and money ex nihilo* – extending a loan to the borrower and simultaneously crediting the borrower’s money account"." [0]

* hilarious use of Latin to make 'out of nothing' sound authoritative

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Reading these comments I feel obliged to mention the Android app 'DriveDroid' which lets you store multiple disk images on your phone and then acts as a bootable USB disk. I've got GParted, CloneZilla, Alpine, Debian etc live disks always in my pocket. All I need is a micro-usb cable (which most modern homes seem to have laying around) to boot into various OSs and tools.

No affiliation, I just think it's a cool free app and it's proven very handy for me loads of times.

"disproving commonly accepted things is a way to become a superstar in the scientific field"

It doesn't necessarily follow that people will gamble grant money on the off-chance that you might turn out to be that superstar.

I use mbasic and can reply to comments on posts.

I just checked the details and (for example) I click under the post: "2 scratches 'pon wood" (sorry I have language set to Pirate but it's the equivalent of "2 comments").

This takes me to a page showing the post, comments beneath, and a text field for me to reply into.

So it's there, just check the various links under each post to see what's available. Actually I've yet to find anything that I can't do on mbasic. I've thought something was missing several times (turning off notifications for specific groups springs to mind) but always found a way to do it eventually. It's often a hideous UX but I like how ugly mbasic is, it's FB without the sugar so you can taste how bitter it really is :) (for anybody wanting to say something like "if it's so horrible why do you still use it", it's something I do reluctantly because I have a few geographically distant friends who I like to keep in contact with and who always message me through FB)

There is no dark side of the moon, it's a misnomer - there's a far side from earth's point of view, but it isn't dark or blocked from the sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_side_of_the_Moon

On my phone in Brave/Chrome I use desktop mode and old.reddit.com which is fine in terms of usability (completely agree that default Reddit mobile is a user-hostile embarrassment).

If I do something bad to a person I say sorry and it means "I'm sorry I did something bad to you".

If something that's out of my control happens to someone I might say sorry and mean "I'm sorry a bad thing happened to you".

I'm British and find that sometimes I think similarly to another person who is British, and at other times I think differently to another person who is British. It's wild.

pioneered I believe by ThinkPads in 2003 http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Active_Protection_System

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/ https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

I feel like this makes it sound worse than it is. I run El Capitan in a VM on a 6 year old ThinkPad with a 3rd-gen i5 and it's fine. I use Safari with developer tools to debug web stuff and I've not noticed any unpleasantness. I don't use iMessage so maybe it's particularly graphics-intensive or depends on a lot of GPU acceleration (would seem strange in a chat app). Video chat might be affected I suppose? Anyway it may well be worth trying so I didn't want people to be unduly put off.

I think the problem with it (as with a lot of science) is that control is very difficult. The more you want a controlled experiment, the more abstract and unrealistic you have to be. Eg. (completely made-up illustration) eggs might be good for you if you eat a lot of tomatoes, bad for you if you don't eat a lot of tomatoes, better if you eat tomatoes a couple of hours before the eggs rather than afterwards. Maybe if you have curly hair the rules are reversed... but not if it's red curly hair.

To get any consistency in results you have to control things to a point of being unrealistic, and then the results aren't very useful because nobody's real diet and genetic makeup fits with the fake abstract setting of the experiment.

Then results get simplified and abstracted even more to make easily understandable conclusions... like maybe for 78% of people cacao is good, but for 0.3% of people it doubles the risk of stroke (although this bit doesn't get studied because it wasn't in the initial hypothesis). Results are reduced to "cacao is good for you"... but you might not part of the 78%. Maybe you're in the 0.3%.

I'm not trying to say that science is useless, just that applying it isn't as simple as people like to make out (and a lot of people don't want to accept that life may not be as methodical and predictable as they want it to be). Nuance is too hard.

It seems weird to suggest that tofu is less processed than butter. I suppose if you're buying the most high-end expensive tofu it might be a bit better but from what I know of how it's made I don't find it very appealing.

I'd say it's a lot easier to make butter in your kitchen than it is tofu.

There's a really good book about the food industry called "Eat Your Heart Out" by Felicity Lawrence. I already thought tofu was a plasticky non-food but that book put me off it for life.

Something I heard about recently was businesses offering to buy accounts from legit users, priced based on how old the account is and % rating. Obviously that's something that could be abused by a scammer (buy trustworthy account and sell as many empty laptop boxes as you can before you get closed down).

I think it was ads popping up on FB asking to buy eBay accounts that made me aware of it but can't find anything right now on a quick Google search.

A couple of days ago I saw some tablets being sold for about 1/10th of their normal price by a seller with an old account and good feedback. But looking into it more I found that their only current sales listings were duplicates of the same tablet offer, and looking at past feedback it was mainly buys rather than sells and usually for household items and stuff that seemed personal rather than business related. Not exactly conclusive but it smelt funny enough that I didn't risk a purchase (I realise lots of people will just say that the low price makes it obvious, too good to be true means it isn't true etc... my own life experience has shown otherwise and I've probably had some bargains that those people would have missed out on).

I just tried to find the listing again and it seems to have disappeared - I feel it might have been a scam.

I enjoy using eBay as a buyer, been using it for 10 years and hundreds of purchases, only sold a few times but it's always been ok for me. There have been a few hiccoughs but I've always found some kind of resolution in the end. If the purchase is even slightly significant I check the seller's feedback out carefully. Really I think that's all that needs to be done but some people either don't know this, can't be bothered to, or don't want to spend their time in that way.

"a long aisle with all the bread London had to offer." - to be fair it sounds like that's what a single shop had to offer. But it is true that the majority of bread sold in the UK is terrible (made cheaply following the Chorleywood process as mentioned in a sibling comment). The bread in your picture looks like some kind of pumpernickel or rye - most supermarkets have that - the German ones (Lidl/Aldi) do for sure.

London isn't culturally homogenised (although certain central parts are a bit, especially the touristy areas). You can find all kinds of exotic and amazing foods in London - in part because there are many many different immigrant communities scattered around the various boroughs. But you aren't going to find them in one day, or in a supermarket or shopping mall, so it's not a quick or easy thing for someone on a short visit. Even living there for years a lot of people end up getting intimate with what's available in 2 or 3 boroughs and miss out on everything else.

Two suggestions were made:

1. Run GeekBench back to back (realistic: a prolonged workload... which would show the Mac as being worse)

2. Working in a freezer (completely unrealistic situation... which would make the Mac seem better).

Only one suggestion gets passed on to the video author. Science (Apple flavour).

I read it as "of the moon in the article"

Voyager 1 is already going about 17km/s. With no atmosphere or gravity to fight against you can keep accelerating as long as you have power.

On my Android tablet I run Debian in chroot. Full LAMP, i3wm, choice of terminal emulators, Vim, git, real Firefox, real Chromium.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard with a trackpoint built in (alternatives with trackpads are available for people who prefer those). Or a Bluetooth mouse of course. I recently bought a Thinkpad Bluetooth keyboard so interface-wise, once I start X I'm basically on a Thinkpad.

In the winter when I have to get by on small amounts of electricity (all solar powered here) I use my tablet almost exclusively and earn money with it.

I use a bendy arm with a clamp to hold the tablet at a good ergonomic height and closer to my face. In a pinch when power is really low I actually do the same with my Android phone with all the same software, which works surprisingly well at 1920x1080. It ends up filling a similar proportion of my view to a 15" laptop (at the laptop's normal working distance) - although then it's only a few inches away from my eyes when using the phone (shortest focusing distance I can do) so wouldn't be healthy long term.

I can plug in my DSLR via a USBOTG dongle and grab photos from it. Or use a MicroSD in the camera via a full-size adaptor, then slot the MicroSD directly into the tablet. Then I can edit directly from RAW in Snapseed.

The biggest shortcoming is that I can't use Photoshop as I have an ARM processor. The armhf Debian distribution and packages are amazing and almost everything is there. WINE works but it would need some x86 binaries to run Photoshop, that just don't exist because it's ARM.

Artflow in Android is great, as is Snapseed and PhotoEditor (for resizing and basic image adjustments, including batch mode etc). I can run GIMP and Inkflow in Debian but after 20 years using Photoshop they don't come close for me. So when I really have to use Photoshop I have to save up some juice and fire up the laptop.

This is all on a 5-year old Sony Xperia Tablet Z. It was good for its time but nowadays there are faster machines with more RAM available. I'm looking forward to when I can justify an upgrade (this is a great tablet in many ways, I have lots of things I need to spend money on and I have been adjusting my work/life balance a lot in recent years so don't earn much).

I'm no Google fanboy, for me Apple/Google are just different flavours of very horrible. The difference with Android gear is that the potential is there to use it the way I want - it's possible (and not even that hard). I can root, I can use a pointing device, as opposed to Apple's approach.

I see that as a kind of figure-of-8 movement... when my friend and I visited India we decided that it was a cross between a nod and a shake ie. ambiguous yes/no, non-committal

I don't know how to calculate amounts of caffeine but regarding the differing psychoactive effects, Googling 'tea stimulants' will get you lots of info... seems the main other stimulants in tea besides caffeine are theobromine (as found in cacao/chocolate) and theophylline.

This is subjective and as old/unsettled an argument as vim vs emacs or spaces vs tabs - although what you're saying is true for you there are many people who argue the opposite. I must have spent at least a day's worth of hours over the years reading long threads with people debating over which is 'correct', 'safer', 'healthier' etc: dark on light or light on dark. People are different. Having a preference is normal but framing it as assistive tech is too much as there are people out there who feel a strain looking at light text on a dark background.

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