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This is pretty standard in the UK these days, most debit cards are Visa/Mastercard - 10 years ago most debit cards were Maestro or Visa Electron, although I still didn't have much difficulty getting a Visa debit card for travelling.

I found it very odd when I was in Germany that this wasn't the case, Visa/Mastercard were entirely considered credit cards, and debit cards used some entirely different system. I couldn't use my debit card to pay for a Berlin subway ticket, as the machines only took German bank cards.

I hear of Revolut more in the context of using it as a service for sending money internationally, but I know plenty of people who use Monzo for day to day banking (although most also still have an account with a normal bank).

It doesn't surprise me that more people have used Revolut at some point, but I would still expect that Monzo has more active users.

Edit: This is in the UK, I understand Monzo isn't quite as well known elsewhere.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...

As much as bloatware is awful and Google could probably have some better rules on this, Google itself doesn't ship bloatware on it's own phones. I guess it depends on your definition of bloatware, but YouTube isn't exactly bloatware on the same level as the junk that comes installed on most third party phones, and it can be uninstalled - a lot of third party bloatware is installed as a system app and can't be deleted.

If people don't like junk pre-installed on their Samsung phones or by Verizon, they should probably complain to them, or stop buying those phones. There are plenty of brands with stock Android that don't come with pre-installed junk.

Are the AirPods actually good headphones? Personally I don't consider the basic Apple headphones that come with iPhones to be either good audio quality or comfortable design, and the AirPods look identcal aside from the lack of wires (but I've never used them).

I can sort of understand spending $200 on really good quality, comfortable headphones, though I wouldn't myself - if only because I'll inevitably break or lose them after a few months, even more of an issue with these wireless headphones. But if they don't check either of those boxes, I can't fathom why they're so popular, aside from Apple marketing.

Wine has come a long way in the last few years, in large part thanks to DXVK (translates DX11 to Vulkan) and Valve funding and pulling together a few Wine related projects. The vast majority of offline Windows games run well on Linux these days, even a lot of high end AAA games often run well on launch day with a relatively minor hit to performance.

Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti-cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye, which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.

This looks pretty great, while the AWS CLI is very comprehensive, I always struggle to remember which flags are needed for each command, and it's not very consistent.

One thing I've not been able to work out with bash-my-aws yet was how to easily switch between regions and accounts. I noticed you can use `region` on it's own to set the current default region, but I'm often working with multiple regions, and it'd be a pain to have to run `region us-west-1` separately each time I want to use a different region. I couldn't see a way to just specify a region for a given command (eg how you'd do `aws get-instances --region us-west-1`). I guess you could do this with the environment variable `AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-1 instances` but that's a bit verbose.

Similarly with AWS accounts, I use multiple AWS accounts, which are accessed with different access keys, which are defined as profiles in my ~/.aws/config. Normally I'd use these with the AWS CLI like `aws ec2 get-instances --profile production`, I couldn't see any way in the docs to use or set this?

I could see it being used for specific usage handheld devices. For example where I work, we sell train tickets and ship cheap Android phones with an app installed for tain conductors to scan the ticket barcodes. Something like this could be done with some "generic cheap Linux device with a touchscreen and mobile connection" locked down to a custom built app.

Not sure if that ends up being cost effective considering how cheap you can get low-end Android phones these days, and how easy it is to find Android developers, but I'm sure there are some applications along those lines that would be well suited for the equivalent of "a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen and smaller form factor".

Not really, among "normal" banks. This does seem to be the case with the new "challenger" banks like Monzo and Starling, which are all "mobile first" and are basically impossible to use if you don't have an Android/iPhone. But every regular bank in the UK has a website with online banking, often with more functionality than the apps, but maybe this is different in other countries - online banking in the UK has been commonplace since before mobile apps were really a thing.

So a few things to note on this:

This isn't an entirely new idea. BT was privatised in the 1980s, and before that had been run as a government department, and later as part of the Post Office, a public company but still under the control of the Government. At that early stage, the UK had some of the best internet infrastructure in the world, and had plans to roll out FTTH. Then Thatcher became PM, privatised BT, cancelled the fibre rollout plans, and encouraged more competition in the hopes that would improve investment. Well, 30 years later and we still have < 10% FTTH coverage. (Source: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...)

Internet infrastructure is in weird state here. Thanks to BT's legacy as a public/nationalised company, they still own the vast majority of infrastructure and cables. This was sort of spun out into a separate company (Openreach) to BT the ISP, but they are widely considered inefficient and disinterested in improving the infrastructure, and they're still a subsidiary of BT. In theory this move was to increase competition, but it hasn't done a lot. There's only one major ISP (Virgin) that truly competes with BT, built their own infrastructure, and ran their own cables, almost every other ISP just leases the lines from Openreach and sells their own services on top of that.

I tend to agree that nationalising Openreach (the infrastructure and cables) is a good idea, to increase internet speeds and coverage across the country - rural areas tend to have very slow speeds as it's not in the interests of BT and Virgin to improve the infrastructure for a handful of customers in that area. I'm not so convinced that providing free high speed fibre internet connections to everyone is a necessity or a good use of government money. I feel like nationalising Openreach but keeping the existing model of ISPs building services on top of the infrastructure makes sense, and public infrastructure would reducing the costs of leasing those lines, a saving that could hopefully be passed on to customers. I'm not sure how this would affect companies like Virgin who do own their own infrastructure though, would they then be competing with the government?

There's of course a privacy concern to the government owning the internet infrastructure too. While the UK government has already had some pretty draconian policies, and they can force ISPs to comply, they've struggled to implement some of their more "ambitious" censorship policies, in part due to it being difficult to get all of the ISPs to come to an agreement on how to implement them. If the government owns the infrastructure, it's easier for them to implement surveillance and censorship at a lower level, harder to circumvent with VPNs and the like. Internet surveillance and censorship are generally policies of the Conservative party, rather than the Labour party who are proposing this, so I don't think there's any malicious intent with this proposal, but if a left wing government nationalises the internet this year, what's to stop a right wing government of the future using this new found control to implement stronger surveillance/censorship in 5 years?

All in all, I'm on the fence about this policy, although I do think some steps in this direction would be positive. And if you've been paying any attention to British politics in the last few years, you'd know there's even more complexities that what I mentioned here.

I always saw Brave as "not chrome, and not as much of a change as Firefox"

It seems more like "Chrome, with some plugins" than anything else. It's a shame really, I like the concept of the BAT project, I'd be interested in using it as a plugin for Firefox, but I'm not interested enough to switch browsers and lose all the features and plugins I'm used to in Firefox.

Fingerprints were never supposed to replace passwords, they're more analogous to usernames.

I like fingerprint scanner as a quick way to unlock my phone, it's at least more secure than the 4 digit passcodes or patterns I used before that, and more convenient than that or face recognition. But I wouldn't want to use fingerprint to replace entering a password for making payments or accessing any secure data.

It essentially is just a Steam box. It's all Linux based, and they're supposedly not building any sort of console UI or launcher for it. Install Steam, launch big picture mode, and it's basically the same as any other SteamOS box.

If they'd actually positioned it as a low cost SteamOS box which can run a decent amount of PC games for cheaper than most PCs, they might have at least have a niche market for it. If they some integration with SteamOS to launch an Atari emulator and they'd have some extra selling point. But it's basically just a small low-powered Linux PC that might get a few exclusive deals.

A couple of articles I saw suggested that what's left of Atari only has 3-10 employees.

As a small form factor PC capable of playing some games, it's a pretty good value offering. But that's only really appealing to tinkerers and hobbyists who want to set these things up to their liking.

I have a Linux PC hooked up to a TV in the living room for exactly these purposes (video/streaming and light gaming), thrown together from old parts and a bit of a mess to use. So a £300 device that does the same thing holds some appeal, even moreso if it had a developer behind it pushing some games on the platform, and making a good software experience. But it's not that, it's basically the same as that clunky PC I have in the living room running Linux, capable of playing games if you launch Steam or streaming whatever works in a browser.

I'm not their target audience though, and if I was then it'd be a pretty narrow niche to target.

It's amazing how much you can get away with when you have a recognised brand. They've combined the worst of over optimistic/under prepared kickstarters, with the worst of big corporation penny pinching. And yet just because people know the name Atari, they got millions of dollars in pre-orders, and even got Walmart and Best Buy to sell their (non-existent) device.

Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui... is another article I read about this which I was basing some of my comments on - they apparently are planning on just releasing it running a generic Linux distro without any sort of console UI/ games launcher, and without any particular support for streaming platforms aside from a web browser.

Yeah, that person is just wrong. Interesting that they identify that way though. I have friends in Jersey, which holds the same status as the Isle of Mann, and they're very insistent on not being part of the UK, but that they are British (as well as Jersey native). They like being independent but being strongly connected to the UK.

"The USA as the only nation in the world with true free speech protections"

Is this accurate? Legally, I understand that free speech is protected in the US constitution. I'm sure it's not the only country in the world with free speech laws, but I don't know how the specifics compare.

Culturally, the US seems less tolerant of free speech than plenty of other places in the world. Obviously China is orders of magnitude worse, both culturally and legally speaking.

Had a Nokia 7 Plus for the same reasons, but unfortunately some other hardware issues meant that it only lasted a year and a half, then the USB port stopped working. Seems to be a common issue.

Switched to a Pixel 3a XL after that, which is kind of disappointing since it's a very similar phone for a higher price (and without microSD unfortunately), but there really aren't a whole lot of options for headphone jacked phones these days, especially once you start adding in other requirements like good battery and stock Android.

"Nokia"/HMD have promise, it was mostly a great phone but with some significant issues, I'll be holding out on buying another of their phones until they've improved their quality control.

Not really relevant. Obviously you want fast I/O for your OS storage, but for external storage that's mostly going to be used for music, videos, and images, it really doesn't matter how fast it is.

For email, designed like it's the 90s is a good thing, in my opinion. Thunderbird could do with a bit of polish, sure, but it has every option under the sun. I tried Geary once, it looked shiny, but the interface was far too basic.

It's not all about revenue. Ubuntu has generally had the reputation as the most user friendly and easy to use flavour of Linux for years now. Not always justifiably, and they've made some questionable decisions lately, but it's still been the obvious recommendation for new Linux users, and the one people are most likely to have heard of. A pretty large percentage of technically minded desktop PC users (eg, those most likely to install Linux) are going to care somewhat about gaming.

If someone asks the question "what distro should I use for gaming on Linux", the answer is usually "any is fine, but Ubuntu's probably the safest option". With this decision, the answer becomes "literally anything but Ubuntu". Ubuntu became popular because of good sentiment and word of mouth. And the same geeks trying out Ubuntu on their laptops are the ones who end up making the decisions on what distro their company should use on their servers/VMs too.

I don't know how much general popularity really helps them, maybe it really is irrelevant, and if everyone stopped using it on desktop tomorrow they'd still retain their popularity in server/cloud. But I feel like the only reason they became popular on servers is because they're popular on desktop. There aren't many reasons to use Ubuntu over RHEL or some variant on servers, except that more people will go "oh yeah, I've used Ubuntu before, I know how to use apt".

I hope to god Deliveroo takes some of Amazon's customer service tips/experience.

My experience of Amazon and Deliveroo's customer service has been pretty similar. I don't get to talk to a human, but if I do raise an issue (late delivery from Amazon, missing items from a Deliveroo order) I fairly quickly get a response apologising for it and giving me some free credit.

Interesting points about the way they handle restaurants though. I've noticed a few of the ones that you describe, that are not actually real restaurants. Since Deliveroo is useless at showing reviews and ratings, I'll usually search for places online before I order from there, if I haven't heard of them. A bunch of the takeaways on Deliveroo in my area all have the same address, an industrial estate - as you say, by a train track, probably in a metal shipping container.

I've not had bad expeirences with those "restaurants" to be fair, but it does highlight that Deliveroo is cheating the system and hiding how they actually do things. I hadn't considered the hygiene aspect, that is worrying that they can get away with selling food without the usually required safety/hygiene levels.

It's interesting that Deliveroo has beaten Amazon at their own game in the UK. Amazon Restaurants was a thing for a while as their answer to Deliveroo, but it didn't take off. I think it still exists, but last time I checked there were about 5 restaurants available in my area, compared to 50+ on Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Deliveroo's tactics really don't feel that far removed from Amazon's though.

Yeah, Android One is a bit of a joke really. I got a Nokia 7 Plus on the promise that it would have fast updates, be bug free, and not contain any OEM modifications. None of those have really been true. Admittedly, updates are still a bit faster than the likes of Samsung and other big OEMs, but the process has shown that it's not as simple as Google rolling out the updates.

OEMs still make changes to it, and it still seems dependent on carriers pushing through the changes - despite buying a SIM free phone, I waited 2 months longer for updates, which seemed to be the case with everyone on the same network in the UK.

It's far from bug free, with a few updates in the last few months introducing new bugs. Again, it shows that this isn't an update coming directly from Google, it is at least in some part developed and tweaked by OEMs. In this particular case, the process showed that HMD/Nokia is severely lacking in development and QA expertise, as there have been ongoing issues for months with no fix.

They also introduced their own battery optimisation software a few months ago, which massively changed how the phone handled multitasking and background applications (effectively, it killed them all). And then this news that they're sending unencrypted identifiable information to a third party? These things shouldn't be possible if Android One did what it claimed.

I avoid OEMs like Samsung because of all the bloat and junk that they add on top of Android, but Android One is clearly not a solution to that. I would still prefer it in theory in the alternatives, but I'll do more research next time - if a company doesn't have a proven track record, then Android One isn't going to solve that.

One minor point - Nokia the company isn't involved in the Nokia Android phones. HMD is just a small company that licenses the brand. Admittedly, a small company that was founded by ex-Nokia folk and based across the road from Nokia's HQ, but it's evidently not a company with Nokia's resources or much of their expertise.

Exactly, and this is why it's an important development. But the article starts out by saying it's allowing "applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release." which is sort of missing the point - this isn't about about buying a phone and laptop from them so that you can use their software on both, but an important step on Linux for handheld devices.

Good to see that Gnome are involved in this themselves too, and it's not some Purism fork of Gnome.

That's cool, and it's good to see work going on in more fundamental building blocks of Linux like Gnome to support mobile and reactive UIs. I always felt like this was the biggest blocker to using a Linux system on handheld devices - having a good ecosystem of open source projects that work for that, and having the ability to pick your own desktop environment and components rather than having to have an "all in one" solution equivalent to Android. Admittedly I know that isn't a killer feature for average users - they do want the all in one solution. But having these things available makes it easier for a company like Purism to build a product using existing software.

It feels like this announcement is missing a step though. What can we do with this? Does this allow plugging your phone into a monitor and then running your phone apps in larger windows (eg, the opposite of what's shown in the videos). The idea of having the same programs running on your phone and laptop is nice in theory, but I'm quite happy with my own custom Linux setup on my laptop, I don't want to install PureOS on there.

Of course, much more work will need to be done in other programs to support this. The Gnome Web example looks really slick, and it's great to see this sort of 'responsive design' applied to native application interfaces - Android took a step backwards in this regard. But on desktop I'd rather use Firefox, and they have entirely separate builds for desktop and mobile. I wonder if Mozilla have any plans to support this?

That looks great, but very different to what I've seen from playing around a bit with Qt.

Are you using some open source theme or components there, or is it very custom built? I felt that Qt Quick Controls 2 felt far too mobile focused when I tried it out, and looked/felt very out of place in a desktop application, but I guess if you're customizing it heavily then that's less of an issue.

I notice you're only providing a Windows download despite Qt being cross platform. Are there any blockers or issues in building the same app for Mac/Linux, or is that just not something you've looked at. I guess the latter since it's for a game, but just interested since I've seen a lot of comments in the past about difficulties making Qt apps run consistently across different platforms.

Are you using QML and JavaScript for all of the application code, or just using that for the UI and handling the main logic from C++ or other language bindings?

Any thoughts on the Qt/QML approach compared to Electron?

PyQt5 is GPL licensed. Not expensive, but perhaps not suitable for your closed source project. There is also a commercial license available, probably that is expensive.

PySide2 is LGPL licensed, so more likely to be suitable for you, since it can be used without having to provide the source of your application.

Both libraries serve the same purpose of providing Qt5 bindings for Python in slightly different ways. PySide2 has become officially supported by Qt recently, and has generally been the preferred option for closed source development due to the licensing.

You can also use Qt from Python using PyQt or PySide, which is officially supported as of recently - https://www.qt.io/qt-for-python

There are also Qt bindings for a bunch of other languages, but Python seems to be the best supported after C++

That's quite a drawback. I don't mind supporting some creators and YouTubers through Patreon or YouTube membershops because $5/month isn't all that much. But if I had to make a decision to spend $60 to support them that much for the year, I doubt I would do that for most. Some charge $50-$100/month on Patreon for certain benefits too, I doubt many would be willing to pay $1000 up front for that for a year.

I'm surprised this is a payment processor limitation. I thought Stripe supported automatic recurring payments?

"3D" phones seem to be making a comeback lately, if only in niche brands - see RED and Rokit. They claim to have made huge advances on 3D screens since the Evo era, and I imagine higher resolution and refresh rate would help.but reviews are that it's still pretty disappointing. Even if the effect was perfect I'm not sure it's something I'd care for on a phone.