cknight

I ask this as someone whose most recent project is bathed in a deep blue background, while posting on a site that is comfortably orange.

It'll never make money, but it has been a good project for me to modernise my web development skills which had gone rusty over the preceding decade. I also took the opportunity to learn NGINX and a few other things that I hadn't really been exposed to beforehand.

Going to the expense of making a large offshore solar farm which is useless for half the day doesn't seem like as good an investment, even if all the other technical and weather issues were OK.

You're right about the cashiers though, they're super quick.

The good thing about the card is that you hand it over, and while the reader is talking to the bank you have a few seconds to continue packing your bags. I've simply found it flows better with card every time, as long as you remember which checkout has the dicky card reader that needs 3 tries.

It's still a far cry from home (Australia) where I hadn't needed cash on hand in quite a long time, but it in terms of convenience it's not a big deal. it certainly beats France where cheques are still in extremely frequent use vs. wire transfers.

In Australia we have houses built with sizeable gaps to allow the frames to warp with the heat, while also allowing air to easily flow in and out of the building. Windows are single-glazed. Exactly what you don't want in a German house, in other words.

In Germany the houses are heat traps and the focus has largely been to conserve energy in winter time (and rightfully so). I've had doors here which stop closing smoothly in the summer because of the slightest warping, the gaps are so tiny. Houses are often air-tight, and the external walls are half a meter thick due to the hefty insulation. All windows are at least double-glazed, one place I've stayed was triple.

New German builds using the Passivhaus specification are generally pretty good as they have constant machine-generated airflow at a set temperature, but as far as I am aware, this specification can only be built new - it's not possible (within reasonable cost) to retrofit an older house to the new specifications. For those, air conditioning seems the only reasonable option moving forward.

As a same-sex couple who aren't married we also have some challenges most couples won't face. France, like the USA, does not recognise civil unions or anything other than a marriage when it comes to immigration. You're either married or single in their view. While for the USA, I remember we simply could not migrate there as a couple, the French at least acknowledged our situation and said I could have a visitor's visa and then get married once settled there with my visitor visa validated to become a residence permit (duration: 1 year).

The catch with the visitor visa however is that I had to fund my own health insurance (I found some expat insurance with Allianz which the French consulate said was acceptable) and also had to swear in a written statement that I would not seek gainful employment in France. It's hardly ideal.

My partner is a scientist, and because he was offered a research position at Lyon's university, he was given an expedited residence permit process. He went to OFII (immigration office) to confirm his residence permit about 3 weeks upon arrival in the country, and was exempted from all medical checks. His health insurance was provided using the French social security system. That last part took a while, but otherwise for him it was smooth as butter. I don't see why France couldn't apply this system to promising tech talent from abroad.

Now, for me the immigration process on arrival meant waiting 3 months for a letter from OFII for an appointment, which I couldn't make. That meant another 3 month wait, followed by medical checks including an X-ray, a talking-down-to by some immigration officials surprised that I hadn't learnt much of the language, and then a stamp on my visa. Now both residents, we could have applied for marriage at this stage, but we actually left for Germany just 2 weeks later - in France there is a one month cool-down period between marriage application and ceremony, so the timing wasn't possible. In any case, I would rather have a real wedding back home when it's finally legalised, rather than over here in Europe. No-one could really come...

Before I discovered Compte Nickel we had a hell of a time trying to get a bank account. We had an "attestation" from the university's housing board that we had an apartment reserved for us, but the bank first told us it was older than 3 months so no longer valid. Upon getting a new one the bank then said an attestation wasn't good enough anyway and we needed a rental contract to open an account.

We were staying in an AirBnB for our first month in Lyon and while the first two weeks looking around were pleasant enough, trying to organise long term accommodation and a way to get paid was super stressful. The university accommodation ended up being woefully inadequate so we cancelled that before we set foot in the place. Thanks to Compte Nickel and my partner's willingness to just pay a real estate company to find us an apartment, we got things sorted with mere days to spare before the AirBnB time was up, and things would have really gone haywire.

In France we made friends with a Finnish couple, an American couple, and a Finnish/French couple. 2/3 were also academics, and as married couples would have had much smoother immigration processes than ours. Despite this, all three planned to leave shortly after we did. None of us really liked it there. Lyon's suburbs are particularly filthy but even if I was in a smaller, prettier town I can't imagine being able to last very long.

I won't go in to details (unless someone asks) but one thing that I want to share is a great option for expats needing a French bank account quickly. It's called Compte Nickel: a fairly new (at the time) startup that is essentially a small bank-like system which requires only a French mailing address, a passport, €20, and a visit to a participating newsagent.

That gets you a bank account with the required RIB so you can get your salary paid, use ATMs, make online payments, and the like. It comes with a Mastercard debit card which the newsagent hands you upon setup in-store. The account has some limits on transactions to prevent laundering but nothing we found a hindrance. It costs €20 a year. If anyone is having issues getting a French bank account just so they can get on their feet, it will be of use to you:

https://compte-nickel.fr

We've since moved back to Germany, which was a huge relief. Being able to just email the local immigration office to give some info or agree on an appointment time... unthinkable in France.

With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.

Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.

(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)

Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.

Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.

I am similarly sensitive to caffeine and also bought some rather pricey but comfy earplugs to silence my other half's incessant and irritating need to breathe.

While my current life circumstances don't allow for it, I am looking forward to the near future when I can sleep in my own room again, in a house quiet enough to not need ear plugs, and with a regular enough working schedule to make the routine easier (plus wearing me out a bit more each day).

The Sydney Opera House was likewise ambitious, iconic, stupidly expensive, and with famously bad acoustics. They are only now, decades later, being fixed for a hefty price: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-11/sydney-opera-house-con...

So, I am not surprised you'd never see these anywhere outside of a generally sunny climate. Space is also a factor - the average yard size in Australia is far larger than that of the UK, though it is shrinking in the major cities.

The handle certainly helps to prevent head injuries when mowing the lawn around them. I've hurt myself a few times after forgetting to wind ours back up.

I am less sure why, for many of the other examples in the list, the router can't just receive updates from ASUS/Trend Micro without sending user data abroad. Maintaining a local list of common software and popular services is not that onerous for such a device. People with less common software are not likely, as you said, to be who they are targeting.

As I understand the article, the current EULA means I have to give access to my data to a third party if I want my router to receive some useful information (say, mapping) from them. This is information which they could just give my router anyway, without needing my data, in many of the cases for which the EULA is required.

What is the exit strategy for a Cloudflare Orbit-using vendor? If said vendor has shipped a million IoT devices which all answer only to Cloudflare-proxied requests, what do I do if Cloudflare suddenly ceases operations one day? These devices aren't likely to all be in the hands of technical end users. Even with a short notice, it could be difficult to update all the devices in time.

Of course the vendor themselves may be far more likely to go out of business than Cloudflare, but in such a case there won't be any further device updates to worry about. This on the other hand adds yet another point of failure in to the mix.

I can't help but feel that if I was a vendor with a bit of extra money to throw at security, I should throw it at ensuring better practices on my end rather than a service.

This is a double-edged sword. The increased capabilities of my laptop and smartphone (having human-friendly input and output) are what makes upgrading them so easy. The simplicity of a lightbulb, lacking a monitor and keyboard, is what makes updating it relatively difficult for a non-technical person, and this is on top of Cloudflare's fair (IMHO) opinion that consumers also don't even think to update such an apparently simple device.

I agree with you, of course, that IoT security should work better outside of the consumer's hands entirely, but I think Cloudflare has targeted an existing market opportunity fairly well with this announcement.

I have a suspicion though, that any vendor who cares enough to use this new service will also likely be better at security than other IoT vendors anyway. At that level, I can't criticise such a defense-in-depth approach, but if Cloudflare ever stops operating, it won't be pretty.

If the media starts trying to pass off complete non-events (like the Facebook mention in particular) as ethical failures, then it's going to make it increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise.

I can't help but feel that environmental issues also put a nail in the coffin of her philosophy, but to be fair, it wasn't a big deal back in her time. Atlas Shrugged made no mention of the negative externalities of any of the businesses being run, from steel mills to mining and oil. As soon as a business's externalities impact others, moral issues are raised.

For those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged: amongst the group of protagonists in the book, the granting of favours or donations is clearly outlined as immoral, as per Rand's philosophy. All goods and services are to be traded for fair value.

Objectivism touches on a few things, some pretty mundane. But the most controversial aspect of it would be this part:

"that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism".

It's been a while since I read Atlas Shrugged now, but as I recall, she essentially sees the role of government as being limited to the defense of both the society and the individual from external threats (so, military and justice systems, respectively). Everything else has its place in the market.

I was thinking about ditching the platform before making a rather abrupt decision to move to the other side of the world for a couple of years. That couple of years has turned in to 5 and counting, and it's really come in to its own.

I've got a fairly heavily curated feed after I stopped following a bunch of people and pages, so I don't really feel like anything is being shoved in my face any more than other places I frequent online.

It works. It's asynchronous so the timezone difference doesn't get in the way, while still being a heap more useful than email. It definitely maintains connections that I'd struggle to keep otherwise. Now, will I keep it once I return home? There's a good question.

Like others, I was somewhat concerned about the bloat - over half of my front page's total file size. But at about 250KB all up, I realised this was only around a tenth of what the average website throws at people these days. https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-webpage-now-size-origi...