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chrizel

397 karma · joined May 20, 2011

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chrizel··on Why are German numbers backwards?
German here... I hate how we say numbers. Even after 36 years I still have problems with it. If I have to dictate phone numbers I'm saying each digit separately because everything else is just confusing and very often leads to swapped numbers on the other end. (sadly, most Germans say phone numbers as sets of two, and not as single digits) It just makes no sense and I very much prefer English, it is much more logical.

Some people have founded the association "Zwanzigeins" (look it up, they have a web site) where they try to push for another way of saying numbers in German and teaching them at school. But even they admit that the chances are very slim we change the way we say numbers.

chrizel··on uBlock Origin review
Hm, ok - maybe it's because I'm also using Pi-hole in my network.
chrizel··on uBlock Origin review
Vanilla Safari on iOS 15 beta with tracking prevention activated gets 98% - not bad!
chrizel··on uBlock Origin review
The Brave browser on iOS gets around 90% interestingly.
chrizel··on For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
Checked it again. You are right about this - if I define it as 'connect-src 'self' wss://<domain>' it works - not without the 'wss://', which I tried last week. Thanks for the nudge. At least we have a workaround.
chrizel··on For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
Speaking about Safari bugs I got concerned with lately: you cannot use Content-Security-Policy if you use web sockets with Safari: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201591

I don’t understand why this doesn’t get more attention.

It is just infuriating if you can’t use a security feature, just because some browser doesn’t follow the specs correctly. Oh well, time repeats itself just like with IE.

And just for a moment we thought we are behind all of this.

chrizel··on Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
See https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/iOS+app and https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Android+app for your sync options.
chrizel··on Ask HN: Have you found a good desk chair?
https://youtu.be/x-aeDaHIEbY

That’s a very popular YouTube video with tips on what to look out for when buying an used Aeron.

chrizel··on Data portability, the forgotten right of GDPR
Yes, I don't understand why this is not handled on the browser level. Back then in the 90s browsers asked the user for every web page that wanted to store a cookie. The situation we have now is not much worse.

But now every web page (at least in the EU) makes some kind of ugly popover and many of them try to convince you to accept all tracking with some kind of dark patterns of UI design.

I don't understand why we won't stop all this nonsense and build this stuff into web browsers as opt-in or opt-out (let the user decide) and therefore ensure that the UI is always the same without any dark patterns.

chrizel··on Running Nomad for a Home Server
I myself would love to see more usage of HCL... after writing a lot of Terraform configurations, it feels so much nicer for me than any JSON or YAML/Helm configuration I have written to this day. We should agree on some kind of HCL-based industry standard and leave all these workarounds via JSON/YAML behind us... e.g. doing Helm logic with these Go templates just looks like a step backwards after writing Terraform HCL code for the last 2-3 years.

I understand JSON as a simple interchange format between systems, and is here to stay, but I don't understand all this YAML stuff, with all its quirks, from the K8s/DevOps people, when we have the much nicer HCL...

For anyone not used to HCL: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

chrizel··on Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk
Apple just didn't adapt the old IBM PC legacy BIOS after switching to Intel in 2005. [1] Instead, they adapted Intel's EFI [2] which is meant to replace the legacy BIOS. Now you could argue why Apple didn't provide legacy BIOS support like other motherboard manufacturers do today. [3] But I think it conforms to Apple's thinking to not adapt old or unnecessary technology in the first place, and fairly quickly dropping support for older technology. This can be seen in Apple's hardware decisions by being one of the first companies to use USB in the first iMac in the late 90s, dropping disk drives and other ports, etc. and in their software decisions by dropping old APIs or 32-bit fairly quickly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectu...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

3: Well, they added BIOS compatibility later, to allow booting OSes like Windows, but what's missing is some fancy GUI around it - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectu...

chrizel··on An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools
Related answer from one of the developers: https://www.quora.com/Phabricator/Phabricator-Why-is-the-Bro...

But yeah... even I find the names difficult to handle and remember, even after using Phabricator for more than 4 years now. Nevertheless, it is a great piece of software, especially the code review process is top-notch.

chrizel··on Show HN: A new way of ORM in Java
> Just embed the SQL statement in a string.

This makes sense for simple software, but jOOQ generates DB specific SQL queries depending on your DB dialect. E.g. we have a big product which supports nearly all big databases and jOOQ abstracts away the DB specific stuff wonderfully.

chrizel··on LWN pays $300 for a well-written article from new authors
Agreed! I'm also an LWN subscriber, even when I'm checking LWN just occasionally. I support their high quality content, which is so much missing on the internet of today.

Ben, just wanted to say that I especially liked your articles and it pushed me to resubscribe to LWN again. I like the topics you write about, because they really interest me. Good job! I really like AWK, Lua, Go and everything around it, so I'm looking forward to more articles from you.

chrizel··on Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs
In the “Platforms State of the Union” video, which gets a little bit more technical, 30 minutes in, they are explicitly mentioning the ARM version of Debian Linux and show it off. So yes, we are talking about virtualization of an ARM system here.
chrizel··on The 2020 iPhone SE
On the older iPhones, the home buttons got problems after a couple of years. My old iPhone 4 had this problem. They got unreliable in registering being pushed. I think that’s also the reason it makes sense to not be an actual hardware button. Less moving parts makes it more reliable and it’s more likely to work after many years.
chrizel··on Things Markdown got wrong
Oh sorry, you are right - I‘ve mixed up ANSI with ISO... thanks for the correction!
chrizel··on Things Markdown got wrong
Interesting. But we have to be clear here: It‘s not only about QWERTZ vs QWERTY. Many countries still have ISO keyboard layout: a tall return key and the left shift key is short (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY). The US keyboard is different: the return key is wide and not tall, and the left shift key is also wider. If you once got used to the US layout, it‘s annoying to use an ISO layout, because your pinkies have to move a little larger distance to hit return and left shift, if you know what I mean. :-)
chrizel··on Things Markdown got wrong
Really? So it‘s real US and not some kind of ISO English?

Yeah, I‘ve seen that Dell for example sells US BTO options in the Netherlands, but in the past (when I considered an XPS 13), dell.nl didn‘t ship to Germany. But obviously the times have changed, and it‘s much easier today to get US keyboards than 10 or 20 years ago.

chrizel··on Things Markdown got wrong
Yes, most people learn and use QWERTZ. In your typical electronics store, you will only find QWERTZ keyboards and notebooks. If you want QWERTY, you have only one option, you have to buy it on the internet. But even on the internet the typical Logitech keyboard for example is hard to find in US-QWERTY in Germany/Europe, because most merchants don‘t have them on stock. In the past, I‘ve even imported US keyboards from the US, because they were and are hard to find here.

It gets even more difficult for notebooks: Any notebook you can buy here in Germany has QWERTZ. Want a notebook with US layout, because you are a developer? Your only options are BTO options from Apple or Lenovo. But even there, you have to be cautious: Dell for example will sell you „English“ keyboard layout notebooks as BTO option, but you won‘t get the real US layout (with a wide return and wide left shift key), but some kind of „International English“ ISO layout with a tall return key and a short left shift key... Lenovo has an „English“ option and thankfully you will get a keyboard layout that really resembles the US layout (but with an Euro key).

Only Apple really gives you „US“ as BTO option, and you really get the real US layout. Funny story, I wrote an e-mail to Apple, over ten years ago, when they didn‘t have US layouts as BTO option in Germany... I think it changed something, because one or two years later, Apple changed it, and you will get real US layouts ever since on their online store.

chrizel··on Things Markdown got wrong
It’s very easy on the US keyboard: the key for ticks is under the escape key, no shift needed, just hit this single key.

I’m German myself, but I use the US keyboard layout for more than 15 years now, because it is so much easier to type things like this... especially in tech. (And also keys for [, ], { and } are much better placed in the US layout)

chrizel··on Kubernetes 1.18
Also read this book last month and it gave me a nice overview. But when doing all the examples you notice, that even with the updated second edition from the end of 2019, many of them are outdated. Not a big problem to solve, just small differences, but then you realize that Kubernetes is a fast moving target. A book about technology will always have this problem, but the K8s space seems to move especially fast currently.

Now I’m also more leaning towards the official docs as a recommendation, because they should always be more up to date... nevertheless, “Kubernetes: Up and Running” took my fear off this (at first) complex architecture. In the end, K8s is not that difficult to understand and the involved building blocks make sense, after you get the hang of it.

By the way, Microsoft is giving away “Kubernetes: Up and Running” second edition for free currently: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/kubernetes-up-an...

chrizel··on Mark Text: Simple and Elegant Markdown Editor Focused on Speed and Usability
You should check out Mark Text (which is the main topic of this thread) - Mark Text can open folders and it looks very similar to VSCode. In the settings you can even say "open this folder by default, if I open Mark Text"... this looks like it would make quiet a nice and easy note taking solution.
chrizel··on Ask HN: How comfortable do you feel using cloud-based password managers?
There is also a command line application: https://support.1password.com/command-line-getting-started/
chrizel··on Ask HN: Are there any good SwiftUI tutorials yet?
Paul Hudson has some material about SwiftUI here: https://www.hackingwithswift.com/quick-start/swiftui/
chrizel··on Turnover Hits Apple’s Famed Industrial Design Team
Me too. I like the keyboard and the feeling. But after 1.5 years now I get stuck keys from time to time, and this is just bad for a computer of this price range. It is good if you do not have any problems, but sooner or later everyone will get problems - it is a ticking bomb.
chrizel··on A proposal to move Gnome to GitLab
Yeah, we use Phabricator since last September. Before that we tried GitLab EE trial for a month.

GitLab was ok but in retrospect the forking model with merge requests was cumbersome in our corporate environment. The way Phabricator works makes much more sense and the "arc" tool manages all the complex stuff like feature branch handling with automatic master rebase and branch deletion etc.

Phabricator has an excellent code review workflow... far superior to what GitLab offered back in September.

Sure, Phabricator internally uses patch sets and you have to install and use an additional tool "arc". But git without any additional tooling support just doesn't give you a nice code review experience IMHO. "arc" is filling the gap. And you have to know just two commands: "arc diff" to create a new code review or update an existing one and "arc land" do merge an accepted code review into master. The rest is vanilla git.

I highly suggest anyone to try Phabricator and its code review feature. Great, pragmatic open source software.

chrizel··on My Hackintosh Hardware Spec
If you want the latest and greatest of everything, you could use Arch Linux.

Git today in many ways could be seen as fundamental component of many tools. Many packaging and build tools use it to fetch data. (like homebrew, plugin systems for many text editors etc.)

Also, the git version of your distribution IS relevant because other packages depend on it. For example, on my Ubuntu system the git package is a dependency of over 170 other packages. If you could install a newer version, a lot of these other packages might break.

The recommended way of installing git on macOS is via Apples git variant by installing Xcode which also requires root privileges btw.

chrizel··on KeepassXC – A cross-platform community fork of KeepassX
How can this be set in iOS 10? I can only find the option to disable cellular for apps.
chrizel··on Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop for Development
I installed Docker today on a fresh macOS installation and was very delighted to find out that VirtualBox is no longer required. The latest official Docker version for Mac uses HyperKit, also based on xhyve.
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