walton_simons

2 yıl öncediscuss

I really love this. It makes me feel weirdly nostalgic, even though I've never been to California, or indeed the US. As a tech-obsessed teenager in the 90s, some of the older companies here felt almost mythical at the time. Plus lots of California generally would show up in so much pop culture, films, music videos and so on, and the sort of vintage-y vibe I'm getting here feels really reminiscent of that.

walton_simons

4 yıl öncediscuss

One of my personal rules for life is that wherever possible I avoid businesses which are big enough to have call centres, especially if those call centres are in another country. Obviously that's impossible for a lot of things, but I try. The small local ISP I use, for example, is totally worth the additional cost. I can call them, and there's no "press 6 for support, your call is important to us" nonsense. A couple of rings, and I'm stright through to an expert who has the knowledge and authority to fix my problem right away.

walton_simons

4 yıl öncediscuss

I do music production as a hobby, and I definitely see this. You can get a lot of plugins these days that will do all sorts of auto generation for you — chord progressions, melodies, stylistic aspects, variations, and so on, and a lot of them are incredibly high quality.

Each to their own of course, and if I was on the clock and doing this for money I think I'd love to be able to click a button and create an authentic-sounding Motown bassline or whatever, but for me... while it does sound great, and somewhat depressingly is almost certainly better than what I could create by myself, I find it quite an empty and unsatisfying way of working. I loved it at the start — look how fast I can make a track! — but I've been slowly moving away from this sort of thing, and I'm back to having more fun as a result.

walton_simons

4 yıl öncediscuss

I experienced something very similar to this when I had a kid. As you say, minor, but still noticeable. Like I was having to make constant small corrections to my balance. It worried me a bit at the time, although in retrospect I'm convinced it was caused by sleep deprivation. I wasn't getting more than a few (broken) hours a night for many months. It went away as things started to settle down a bit.

walton_simons

4 yıl öncediscuss

Speaking as a self-taught "programmer" who never got far beyond the rudiments (basic scripting and automation is about as far as I go), I find stuff like this utterly mindblowing. I'm aware that sorting and maze generation algorithms exist of course, but it's magic to me. I don't understand them at all, and seeing them visualised like this, in such an appealing way, is incredible.

walton_simons

4 yıl öncediscuss

My favourite instance of this is the Brabham BT46B, which used fans to suck the car down onto the track. Not cheating by any means — they never tried to hide it — but nevertheless a very creative interpretation of the rules!

https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/articles/single-seaters/f...

walton_simons

4 yıl öncediscuss

I don't jump start my brain. I drink a lot of coffee and feel grumpy. I have a toddler, so this happens every day. I've always hated getting up early in the morning, and nothing I've ever tried has made it better. Left to my own devices, I'll gravitate towards going to bed around 4am, and getting up at around 11. The times in my life where I've been able to do this for an extended period are when I've felt most rested and energetic.

I know this can sound like a sort of edgy teenager thing to say, but I just prefer the night. From about 9pm onwards, my mind is absolutely buzzing with energy. Most of my learning, throughout my whole life, has taken place at night. I feel like my brain doesn't work properly until at least lunchtime, so wherever I can, I arrange to do easy stuff in the morning. Responding to emails, any light admin, nothing that needs too much focus.

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

For what little it's worth from a random internet person, I agree with you 100%. I do it the same way as you, with the database stored on Dropbox, and an offline key file. I just can't make myself trust an online service for this stuff, as irrational as that may be.

Even if KeePass turned out to have some expoloitable vulnerabilities, it's still running solely on my machine, and I don't allow it to connect to the internet at all. I suppose yes, if someone breaks into my computer I could be in trouble, but if they can do that, they can just steal my session cookies anyway, password manager or not.

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

Mine too. I think it's great. So many quality of life improvements. For starters, all the tab handling options. Being able to specify where new tabs open, and where you go when you close a tab. Tab stacks are amazing — five minutes after learning how they work, I was already wondering how I'd managed for so long without them. Being able to tile multiple tabs in the same window. The list goes on and on. The neat, compact interface. The sidebar that gives you a searchable list of closed tabs. Smaller things, like being able to see the entire URL in the address bar again.

There are a few rough edges here and there, and it certainly doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome, but I highly recommend it nevertheless, especially to those who get frustrated with the main players removing more and more features with each new version.

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

Does he care about anyone but himself? Does he have children or grandchildren? Nephews or nieces? Does he care about their safety and welfare, and want them to have good lives?

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

This has been my pet theory for a while. What if the actual great filter for an intelligent species is the difficulty of escaping your home planet _before_ you've consumed all of its resources? I will — naturally — have a human-centric view of this, but it does seem like a very hard thing to do, given the physical and technical challenges of getting out of the gravity well, and actually surviving for extended periods in the harshness of space. Not to mention the travel time of getting anywhere worthwhile!

It seems pretty clear to me now that we're not going to make it. We need to cut global emissions by 15% a year, every year, starting in 2020[1]. As a species, we aren't capable of the kind of global organisation and foresight it will take to achieve this. I'll suspect we'll continue hurtling headlong towards the edge of the cliff (although there's a good chance we're already over it, and currently hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote) until there's a war over the last dwindling resources, or a simultaneous worldwide failure of food production.

I've wondered a few times that if we were to go back in time to the start of human civilisation, knowing what we know now, would we be able to direct our energies more appropriately, and make it off earth in sufficient numbers to enable us to become a spacefaring species? Then I remember that science predicted all of this back in the 19th century[2]. We did nothing then, and we're doing nothing now. Alok Sharma says it's a catastrophe, but "also insisted the UK could carry on with fossil-fuel projects."[3] We're in real trouble.

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263... [2] https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/were-on-...

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

This brings back some great memories. I learned so much from the HOWTOs, and I think they played a big part in getting me my first proper tech job. I just had to sit and figure it out, and the process of persevering through the mistakes and dead ends ultimately gave me a level of confidence around computers and technology in general which has been incredibly useful in work and in life.

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

Also consider this script if you're reinstalling Windows.

The fact that it needs to exist in the first place is itself a bit of an indictment of Windows 10, but running this during the Windows installation process will give you a nice, clean, non-animated desktop and start menu, with all of the shovelware and ads neatly excised and the privacy settings set to sensible values (admittedly for certain values of sensible, given that you can't disable all of the telemetry in most versions):

https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4378-windows-1...

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

Shoutout to some excellent software for ebook wrangling.

The first is the "Standard Ebooks"[1] toolset, which is a suite of Python scripts to create, process, and build ebooks in all common formats. The results on the Standard Ebooks site speak for themselves. They're impeccable in every way, and far better than many big name, commercially produced efforts.

GitHub: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools

How to use: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...

The second is Sigil, which is a great editor if you prefer to work with a GUI:

GitHub: https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil

Homepage: https://sigil-ebook.com/about/

[1] https://standardebooks.org/

walton_simons

5 yıl öncediscuss

My thoughts exactly. And even this seems to be getting harder. I keep reading about "smart" TVs which barely function if they're not allowed to phone home, and IOT devices which query their own hardcoded DNS servers, ignoring whatever your DHCP server has told them to do.

I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing more and more of these things with built in cellular modems which can't be disabled. Makes me want to start stockpiling older technology in order to prepare for a time when every single available lightbulb, washing machine, TV, or vacuum cleaner has to be online all the time and controlled by some privacy destroying app.

I'm only half joking when I say that I can imagine a future where something purely mechanical is considered the height of luxury. Look at this! A door lock with a metal key which doesn't log and transmit the comings and goings of your family and friends. Incredible! If only we could afford such a thing, but there are only a few artisans left in the world who can make them...

walton_simons

6 yıl öncediscuss

I've done this. Mine has been in aeroplane mode since the day I got it. I seem to remember having to allow it to connect to Amazon once when I first took it out of the box, but since then, no network connectivity at all, and zero problems as a result. It's been great.

I download the ebooks themselves using the Kindle application on my computer (if I'm using Amazon to get them, which I don't always), and then use Calibre to manage/import/convert/strip DRM from them. I don't need the sync functionality, or to be able to look things up on the internet (not being able to do that is a feature as far as I'm concerned!). I just want text on a page. I like the "e-reader" experience, and I have no desire to read books on a phone or tablet. I have one Kindle, and it comes with me if I think I'm going to have the opportunity to read when I'm out of the house.

Of course, if you're using Amazon to get your books they'll still build a profile of your reading habits, but there's something about tracking the exact parts of a book I'm reading, the bits I might linger on or reread, which feels extra intrusive to me, and which I categorically don't want.

walton_simons

6 yıl öncediscuss

Honestly it's reassuring to read this. I do want to understand IPv6 better and I think I am slowly getting to grips with how it all fits together, but the details regularly make me feel as though I need to throw out a lot of what I think I know about networking, and rebuild my entire mental model from the ground up.

walton_simons

6 yıl öncediscuss

Yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. Lots of additional overhead and work, and — again, speaking as a home user — no apparent benefits for dealing with it all.

I get all the concerns about CGNAT and so on, but that's something for the ISP to figure out. If I get a message one day saying that my connection speed is about to drop 30% because of my insistence on IPv4, I will of course react!

The question for me is not, "why would I block it?" but instead, "why would I enable it?". There needs to be a reason, and right now I'm not seeing it.

walton_simons

6 yıl öncediscuss

My ISP supports IPv6, and while I can understand why a large organisation would want to use it (especially given the increasing cost and scarcity of IPv4 blocks), I'm still yet to be persuaded of its benefits for home users. I admit that I only have a very cursory understanding of how it works, and perhaps I'm just stuck in my ways, but the scale and complexity seems so extreme compared to IPv4, with no compensating advantages that I can see. So all my devices become globally routable. And? I can already do everything I want and need to do with a single IPv4 address and NAT.

Even just working out what IPv6 devices are on my network and who they're communicating with seems very difficult given the giant address space. I'm slightly ashamed to admit this (feels very anti progress!), but I've blocked all the IPv6 traffic on my home LAN. Devices can still talk to each other, but no IPv6 packets are allowed out to the internet. Everything still works fine. My firewall blocks a few hundred MB per day of IPv6 traffic, and I have no idea what any of it is.

Very happy to be told why I shouldn't do this though.

walton_simons

7 yıl öncediscuss

I've also become completely overwhelmed by the amount of "set and forget" auto-recurring subscriptions that exist now, and it's simply led to me opting out of almost all of them. It's not even the monetary amounts, which tend to be fairly small, but more the cognitive load of keeping track of payment dates, amounts, and (especially) cancellation terms. I just can't be bothered to deal with it all, so I don't. If I was to put a number on it, I'd say five monthly subscriptions is as many as I'd be prepared to have at any one time. That would have to cover everything—news, entertainment, charitable donations, and so on.

For video streaming, for instance, I subscribe to Netflix only. If something isn't on Netflix, I just won't see it, and I can live with that. I already have access to more than I can watch anyway. Should I find something better, I'll stop my Netflix subscription before switching to the new thing.

If the service is harder to cancel than it is to subscribe, I'll pass irrespective of how good it looks (no, I'm not prepared to call you on the phone to cancel when subscribing took three clicks). I won't subscribe to software at all. Let me buy it outright. If it's a monthly subscription or nothing, I'll pick nothing.

Perhaps I'm showing my age by saying this, but I'd be more interested in subscribing to your magazine or service if you send me an annual invoice, which I'll happily pay in one explicitly non-recurring payment, like a bank transfer. Then after a year or whatever the subscription period is, I'll make a decision about whether it's still worth it to me. If I'm considering actually subscribing to something, it won't be on a whim, and I'll already know whether or not I like it enough to pay, so signing up for an extended period is fine. Same with charities. Let me send you money once a year, and don't pressure me into signing up to a monthly payment plan, and I'll be much more prepared to do so.

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