keypress

Stopped in the UK due to BSE, and not being able to audit ingredients.

I wonder if cockcroach protein powder would bypass brain wasting disease and other nasties.

Side issue, at some point (probably still are) they were selling downloadable DRM content (not noticed with Sounds), of shows you have already paid for. I'm still bitter about their digital archive project that they wasted so much money on. License fee funded content should be liberated. I know licensing is difficult when it comes to partnerships, but it highlights another broken part of the license fee. Their archives would be really useful to liberate. I've succombed in the past to buying DVDs of series. And the quality is really poor. So I've already paid twice. The BBC is quite good value for money but the license fee makes me sick, especially when they comercially are exploiting it.

The radio shows used to be downloadable without the songs due to license constraints. I'm guessing Sounds allows them via some kind of DRM to include music, but even at 28 days they time-out for me within the app a little too fast.

Opting out is a hassle.

I have the GA speaker version of the podcast player. And navigating, bookmarking and selection is horrible. To the point, I've abandoned it. I do listen to BBC radio streams, but most of this content, if the songs are available from other on-tap on-line services is a waste of a good format. I'd rather more podcasts, and playlists. There isn't much need for the live element. Or having 24hr radio.

Probably is a drive from the BBC itself into a closed DRM platform. Their BBC Sounds app is woeful. License fee payers are treated like complete dirt. Being charged multiple times for the same content. It's about time the BBC just became a subscription service. Older content should just be left on Torrents, and be available for re-sampling. They are absolute cretins.

Oh I've totally got an Internet problem regarding my laptop. So understand how that could translate to a mobile. Mine is just a little less conspicuous. I can type relatively easily on a keyboard after many years, whereas the barrier to text entry on a mobile is far higher for me. I think that's part of it. I notice my passivity more on the mobile. Or perhaps I think I'm more busy on the laptop. Whereas probably both are equally futile.

That's not to say that I don't waste oodles of time on my personal computer. I certainly have some addiction there. I've lost months to what amounts to not a lot through computer use.

That's interesting, I'm similar. I've just gotten my first smartphone. Weirdly I'm not that drawn to it. It feels a bit too passive for me compared to my laptop. And it's just too large and clunky. Used it twice for walks/maps so far. Which is the biggest draw for me. Many people around me are stuck in their phones. I do find reading on the laptop difficult, and thought the better screen on the smartphone might be easier. But my brain still doesn't like it compared to e-paper. Not drawn to any apps yet, and the thought of trying to key a message into it fills me with horror. Charging is a pain. Years back I'd have loved these modern incarnations, the tech is pretty great, even modern Android is usable and quite slick. Perhaps watching my partner pick up the phone every few minutes every night has been enough to put me off. I'll likely switch back to my old Nokia I think.

Sound support? I still have various sound issues on Debian, to the point I just can't be bothered to sort it out. It kind of works.

I'd get annoyed with many sealed offerings with soldered hardware. It's not just Chromebooks.

My partner has an Acer £250 Chromebook and their work machine is a £1000 HP, I bought a £140 Lenovo, and the build quality of the HP and Lenovo is on par. The case and screen on the ACER is better than both. The battery is quite poor on the HP, but compared to the other machines it has a better CPU - so could explain it. I'm not saying machines are much of a much-ness, but sometimes more money doesn't buy you better quality. There are HP lines that start from £200 - £1000, and they have the same cases but different flavours of memory and CPUs, I doubt there is much between them in build quality.

There's lots of mileage building on top of pre-built platforms. I know many people who are doing very well, who can barely cope with hosting their sites or write code, but can work and skin other systems.

I'm partially encouraged by this. It's great that a small business is in a position to build their own site.

I do use tags with firefox, but I juggle chromium, opera and other browsers and systems.

Certainly alarming to see. Mine build up, I keep them for a few weeks, bookmark a few, and burn the lot periodically - which suggests I shouldn't have bothered with them in the first place.

My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data wrangle.

I have decided I'm just going to write a system where I paste the address/or use a bookmarklet, and insist on small text or context and/or the ability to tag and group. But it must be a simple and cross-browser/system.

The most annoying thing about bookmark managers is presentation.

I can't really comment about what other's care about and use the web for. I've never met anyone that even uses Instagram!

I still like the idea of a peer to peer web, with something like hosting in your own browser. This could be a great alternative fallback network with distributed DNS. Most phones are capable. Energy, speed and security are concerns, but in cracking them you'd probably make the web a better place.

Badly worded, I'm not chasing after new and US releases. I do watch films and I do follow the news, though not that obsessively. And while the UK press will flag Trump's exploits and major disasters, the US doesn't get that much of a look-in. We are an island nation and quite blind beyond our waters. The information is there to find, but it's not thrust in our faces. Heck my niece has more interest in Korean popular culture than the US. People generally are only concerned for their own back yards (HN has a blatant US bias, perhaps unsurprisingly as it was born there).

No, totally honest. Not interested in movies.

Not that true in myopic UK. We know your president, and big news events. I can't even list one US box office movie from this year.

Yeah I still use it. I never used a messaging app post gtalk. So many different platforms, it just became a nightmare.

I am still after a lovely opensource cross-platform simple distributed secure messaging and video platform.

I'd read that Allo was being abandoned for Messages. And I'd never heard of Duo until this post. Very confused naming and products at Google. I was trying to get my head around the differences between Play Music and Youtube Music yesterday - a case in point.

But there are many rewards to wrapping these products up. MS did well with their little tabbed UIs and checkboxes. It felt more like a mixing desk, easier than say discovering and typing command line options.

I don't think people have a 'this should be hard to use mentality'. I've been with programmers and designers who have had not one idea about designing the interface. They are fine cloning, but not at innovating. And frequently the UI is just born out of cluelessness. Or with websites, the design constraints sometimes override the ergonomics, or even kill code orthognalness.

Then there should be a push for anonymous open data sets.

Aside: FOSS UIs may stink, but I've never really understood this. As the UI should be the easy bit. That said most web sites, browsers and even the desktop still has quite a poor interface. Remarkable given the technological options.

How about a self cleaning toilet?

Not the biggest fan of 8 series, but the best thing about it was some of the energy optimisations - as they were going to target mobile. The kernel hibernation is good, for quicker start up. But sadly that's at the expense of hibernating proper.

8.1 brought back things like the closing button on metro apps, and some other fudging, to make it a bit more Win 7, and it just felt like even more of an abomination. The control panel/metro settings mixed UI - is the thing that killed Windows for me. In Windows 10, I can't find anything setting wise particularly easily. And on a recent new laptop start up, I cringed at all the options that I had to turn off, and at the apps I tried to remove.

My poor old computer got stuck on that release. I'll look at it in a more positive light now.

I've a good 'decent' friend, who had to take a shit on the station platform. Because there was no other option available at the time. Some people can not hold their bowels. I'm sure he'd have surrendered to the station toilets if they were open. UK trains and stations frequently have shut or out of order toilets. I've foolishly hung on, thinking the train will be an option, only to discover it's a no can do. I'll go alfresco every time given the opportunity these days.

Seriously. I can barely hold a piss with age.

The silly thing is, that in it's very basic form, if you divide liquid and solid wastes at the point of exit, solid waste composts easily and readily, with some carbon additives and air. It is very low tech. Not so good in flood prone areas (without additional acre), and one has to be environmentally aware to say the least. But education is a winner here. I'm tied into a shitty contract with a plant owner that is operating illegally. And I've looked at alternatives, but the simplest really is just a bucket that is carried out to the garden. Posh compost toilets are just buckets in chambers that are well ventilated. If you have the space, you can incorporate the chambers into the house and preferably have some ability to rotate. Otherwise it's a case of emptying in a rodent proof heap. You can always compost twice. At least you can then use the waste. Rather than having to pump out sludge that may contain other household contaminants.