jmcphers

Is this still true? I am a Flickr Pro user and the few times I've let my subscription lapse, I recall that I could only see my most recent 200 uploaded photos until I paid up again. They didn't delete them, for sure! But they were inaccessible.

It's because Apple does not allow Firefox to install an actual browser on iOS. Firefox on iOS is just a skinned version of WebKit/Safari. See 2.5.6:

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#per...

I have used this for almost 10 years now. It's pretty barebones but it seems like the usable lifetime of commercial password managers is 4-5 years before they get enshittified, bought, discontinued, price-jacked, or otherwise made unsuitable for use. "pass" just keeps working.

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled.

What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".

Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.

I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

I own the Pebble 2 Duo and the answer is "almost none". It basically just tells you how long you were still/not moving much in the evening, as you'd expect. It's a pretty good proxy for what time you went to bed and got up, and that's about it. It can't actually tell if you're asleep.

There are also (currently) no sleep metrics on app itself; you can only see them on the watch, which doesn't show much besides the sleep duration and an abstract representation showing where you might have woken up in the night.

Microsoft was successfully sued by the EU for creating vendor lockin with their proprietary file formats. It is for this reason that the "X" formats (docx, pptx, etc.) are "open" and thoroughly "documented", e.g.:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...

However, the formats are incredibly complicated, because they evolved from earlier formats that represented nearly the entire in-memory state of the editing software. To a first order of approximation, the .doc format _was_ Microsoft Word.

Source: I worked at Microsoft during this time period and helped document the XLSX format.

It really is, I wish there were a version of the Time 2 that had a BW screen. I did manage to snag one of the Pebble 2 Duos before they sold out and I love it. The contrast and reflectivity is unbeatable.

Eric has made it clear that the Pebble 2 Duo was always going to be a limited run because it was made mostly of leftover components and there's no reasonable path towards making new copies of those components.

Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more.

https://ericmigi.com/blog/how-to-build-a-smartwatch-software...

I was bummed to see recently that Amazfit has stopped making watches with reflective displays! They're all OLED now just like everyone else's.

I used a super-cheap Chinese smartwatch (Amazfit Bip S) for years and recently switched to the Pebble. The Bip's battery lasted forever and it did check a lot of feature boxes, but overall it was clunky to use and not in any way hackable.

I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.

There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.

A simple test for aphantasia that I gave my kids when they asked about it is to picture an apple with three blue dots on it. Once you have it, describe where the dots are on the apple.

Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.

I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.

The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.

I don't have a source for this, but I believe the term Microserfs was not minted by Coupland and predates his work.

(I worked at Microsoft from 2004 - 2013)

I had to use public chargers for a while when my house was being worked on and it was pretty miserable. They were frequently broken, and lines were common.

The real problem with public charger lines is that there is no social protocol for them yet. At a gas station, it is fine to pull up behind a car currently fueling to indicate that you would like to fuel at the pump next. Charging stations, however, are not built with pull-through spots. There's no place to form a queue at all, so people park nearby, circle, and sometimes snipe a spot when it isn't their turn (because who can tell whose turn it is?).

Another good place to get DRM free music is 7Digital! That's my go-to place when Bandcamp doesn't have it. Their prices are often a lot better than the sites that cater to audiophiles, though you can still buy high-res FLAC there if that's your thing.

https://us.7digital.com/

I read for pleasure every day and watch very few movies, but on an airplane I often wind up watching a movie. I think it's because it helps distract my senses from the grubby discomfort of modern air travel (people packed in tightly, loud jet engines, etc.), and because in my everyday life I'm always obligated to consider others' preferences for a film -- the airplane is one of the only places I can watch something I'd actually choose for myself.

Buying an album from e.g. Bandcamp is a better way to support a band than streaming their music on Spotify by literal orders of magnitude: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

These days I listen to virtually all of my music from a Plex server containing all the music I've bought over the last few decades of my life. They have an app called Plexamp that brings almost all of the conveniences of Spotify to your local music collection (searching, streaming, offline downloads, smart playlists, auto artist mixes, etc.)

On the first Friday of every month (sometimes, but not always, "Bandcamp Friday") I buy a few more albums for the collection. I wind up spending more on music monthly than I would for a Spotify subscription, but not by a whole lot.

I'm delighted to see that they don't make you get the biggest phone in order to get the best cameras. I've been using Pixels since the Pixel 3 and always feel like I'm making compromises in the camera department in order to get a phone that will actually fit in my hand/pocket.

An adjacent feature we're considering for that is respecting Quarto's plot dimensions when rendering to our own Plots pane:

https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/3676

Inline plots are pretty challenging, especially in source mode since (so far) Positron mostly lets the Monaco editor surface do its thing. In visual mode, we've already got our own custom webview so there's an easier onramp.

It is among our most upvoted feature requests! It is under consideration. Inline output has proven to be a pretty divisive feature; a sizable proportion of users don't like input output at all and consider it a misfeature in RStudio. See e.g. https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/5280

Out of curiosity, do you prefer source or visual mode when working with inline Quarto output?

You can follow the Positron feature request over here: https://github.com/posit-dev/positron/issues/5640

It's a higher-level construct. LSP and DAP are both used by Positron! But they're a pretty small subset of everything you actually want to do with a language. For example:

- discover all the interpreters on the system for the language (e.g. 'find me all the Pythons')

- start an interpreter session for the language

- run a fragment of code in the language and return the result

- get all the variables in the current interpreter session for the language

- view data defined in a particular variable

etc.

We generally try not to invent new protocols; in addition to LSP and DAP, we use Jupyter messages and kernels for most of the above. Positron only has custom protocols/APIs for the bits that are outside the purview of existing protocols.

It is true. Some things you can't build in extensions for VS Code are:

- core services (Positron's core language system is an API, and R and Python are extensions) - native panes (you can contribute webview panes but they're slow!) - toolbars for other panels, or global toolbars - modal dialogs or any UI other than notifications and quick-pick lists - custom layouts

At a higher level, Positron is a platform that contains data science tools for _other_ extensions to use, and doesn't make sense as an extension itself. The R and Python extensions are the first two we built, but the platform is extensible to other languages.

Positron has a setting that restores (most) RStudio keybindings, so your muscle memory should (mostly) transfer:

https://positron.posit.co/migrate-rstudio-keybindings.html

I'm surprised more hasn't been made of the difference in screen resolution between this device and other Pebbles (and even the "new" Pebble 2 Duo). Old watchfaces and apps are not going to render without black borders, and given the niche market and limited run of this new model, it doesn't seem likely to attract much in the way of developer attention, so a healthy marketplace of new faces/apps may not surface.

If I could design _my_ dream watch (to borrow Eric's phrase), I'd put a larger version of the black and white MIP display in Time 2's case -- not more pixels, just bigger and easier to read.

Same, Bip S over here. The battery life is starting to really go downhill, so I checked Amazfit and was sad to discover that they appear to have abandoned transflective watches entirely. :-( I pre-ordered one the cheaper Pebble.

You can in fact get something "pretty close" to Positron by adding and configuring a whole bunch of VS Code extensions, adjusting the layout, etc. However it's fiddly and time-consuming work (and quite challenging for novice users); the resulting UX can be pretty disjointed, too.

Positron provides a batteries-included experience that lets you work with Python and R out of the box; it's easier to get started, everything's already set up for data work, and the tools all work together smoothly. At least, that's the goal. :-)

(disclaimer - I work on Positron)

Positron inherits many ideas from RStudio, but is a separate project with an intentionally different set of tradeoffs; it gains multi-language/multi-session support, better configuration/extensibility, etc. but at the expense of RStudio's simplicity and support for many R-only workflows.

We're still investing in RStudio and while the products have some overlap there's no attempt to convert people from one to the other.

(I work at Posit on both of these products)

Support isn't built-in, but there is a third party extension that many folks have used successfully. https://open-vsx.org/extension/kv9898/open-remote-wsl

VS Code's complexity is due in large part to its extensibility. It has the biggest, most robust extension API of any modern editor. Extensions don't get to run on the main/UI thread but run in a separate process that communicates with the main window over RPCs. This necessitates a lot of plumbing and layered generics but makes the main UI fast/stable and was a key innovation over other editors at the time (cough Atom cough).

The API is so good that a lot of core VS Code behavior (e.g. Github integration, support for lots of languages) is implemented in the form of built-in extensions.

It is possible to get 80% of VS Code's functionality with 10-20% of the code if you just bake everything into one monolith, but this has been tried repeatedly and it keeps failing in part because the extension ecosystem and attendant network effects form a wide moat.

(disclaimer - I work on Positron)

I own a Kia EV6 and am generally happy with it (especially compared to most peoples' experiences with their EVs), but most of this is true.

The only one that really drives me nuts is the lane-keeping feature, which cannot even follow clearly marked lanes in broad daylight. I don't know that I've ever had it go for more than 15s without disengaging on its own, and forget following even a gentle curve.