darrmit

I love the idea of System76 and Coreboot and keep checking in on them every few months but the story seems to remain the same - horrible battery life. I can’t see dropping over 1k on a laptop that barely lasts 4 hours out of the box.

I really love the idea of a Linux phone but my big concern is that of stability. I spent many years running Android/F-Droid trying to find a balance between usability/stability and privacy and ultimately just ended up on iOS. I depend on my phone for critical things: GPS, photo taking/backup, etc. so the margin for experimentation (and error) is pretty thin.

This seems to be common with the product teams I’ve interfaced with. Good intentions, but bad prioritization and little incentive to do anything other than cater to the big revenue drivers.

“The bottom line, as Drum points out, is that “even moderately high levels of lead exposure are associated with aggressivity, impulsivity, ADHD, and lower IQ. And right there, you’ve practically defined the profile of a violent young offender.” [0]

Have never heard of this research/correlation, but pretty interesting how it holds across models.

[0] https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

It’s not just the keyboard, either. I’ve been buying Macs since they switched to Intel in 2006 and the most recent MacBook Pros are the most problematic I’ve ever had.

- Bluetooth seems to be fundamentally flawed at a hardware level. AirPods, Plantronics, doesn’t matter. It just randomly connects and disconnects as it pleases.

- USB-C dongles are a minefield of poor functionality

However, I’ve run Linux off and on since 2007 and Windows for 20+ years and I still wouldn’t give up macOS as my daily driver. Even with the issues above it still has an excellent display, I like the keyboard (waiting to start having issues), and the battery life is the best I’ve ever had.

I’m glad to hear desktop Linux works for some people, but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose or b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update.

For years I ran 2 1080 27's - one portrait, one landscape - off of my MacBook Pro. Last year I decided to try a 28 inch 4K at work, which led to purchasing a 30 inch 4k at home. I also purchased a laptop stand so I can put the laptop off to the side and stow Slack or Spotify over there.

For me, the higher resolution on a single wide screen makes me far more efficient. I can tile 4 windows or 2 side by side and, as others have indicated, not be turning my head constantly. Plus, when using the dual 27s I still naturally tended to push lesser used apps over to the monitor not directly in front of me, so the single ultrawide and laptop stand was not much of an adjustment workflow-wise, but was a huge boost in productivity for me.

YMMV of course, but I've seen a lot of benefit going the ultrawide route.

This is accurate. If you have a substantial Windows Server / SQL etc. spend via an Enterprise Agreement then MSFT will essentially give away their cloud services to you. I’ve seen crazy 90+ percent discounts on Azure and Office 365.

Still doesn’t change the fact that Azure isn’t a great platform to use, though.

I made the jump to CleanBrowsing a few months ago from OpenDNS because OpenDNS caches records really aggressively and was just generally stagnant in terms of feature set. I've been really happy with performance and privacy.

I configured DNScrypt on Tomato and I also use Tomato to redirect all DNS requests so it can't be bypassed by simply re-pointing DNS. VPN obviously bypasses it.

https://cleanbrowsing.org/how-it-works

I think there’s an element of truth in this - you should fight to stay relevant and constantly measure yourself against where you want to go. However, I don’t think tenure is something to avoid, and I certainly don’t think interviewing three times a year for jobs you have no intention to take is a good spend of your time or the interviewer’s.

If you’re that concerned about saying relevant, you’d be far better served to keep up with industry trends and certifications/skill sets/training g/open source projects.

Couldn’t agree more. I hung out on forums most of my teenage years and still have friends I talk to today nearly 20 years later. I think it was easy to make friends that way because everyone there had a baseline of common interests.

I did CIS too so I could avoid math but now find myself regretting it. I always enjoyed math but my middle school teachers were more concerned about yearbook planning than teaching and I always suffered from that.

I’ve actually recently started exploring Linear Algebra on my own. So seeing this list is helpful, as I’d like to explore Calculus too.

I agree with your point, though. My courses in Economics and Accounting have proven valuable to my career so far.

One of the biggest differences in my mind between the Internet described in the article and the social networks of today (at least for me) is the forums and IRC channels I frequented were filled with people who genuinely enjoyed talking to one another and even cared for one another. I still have friends 15 years later that I’ve never met and so many great memories. I can’t say the same for FB or Twitter.

And the “heart of a sysadmin” statement hit so close to home.

I have dealt with this off and on for years. My relationship with my smartphone has always been love/hate. I actually even did go to a dumphone for several months and enjoyed the disconnect, but the lack of maps and a camera ultimately sent me back to the smartphone.

Now I try to swap SIMs over to a dumbphone for vacation every summer and go to remote places for other trips where there just isn't any cellular service. Nothing like being so disconnected you have to walk 15 minutes to the nearest landline phone.

Edit: I am curious, as an engineer, what others are doing from an on-call perspective when it comes to no smartphone. PagerDuty handles SMS alerts nicely and I'm starting to explore Slack/IFTTT. Hangouts is a big missing piece. There are just a few things like that where I'm concerned about being too disconnected.

Wasn’t aware of these, but just solidifies my move away from 1PW.

I’ve used all of the alternatives and each has pros and cons. I’ve settled on Bitwarden at the moment but may end up moving back to KeePass (again) to gain control of my data. I’ve had to refer to KeePass backups months down the road when I accidentally deleted or didn’t store a password. Feels good to have that control.

The mobile experience lacks polish on iOS with KeePass but the control and security might end up winning out for me.

I ditched 1Password because their Windows app is a catastrophe and their forcing users off to their sync service was really badly handled.

Perhaps I could have clarified better, but I was speaking to the various nasty security issues they’ve had mainly.

I also find their apps to be ugly as sin, but that’s a personal preference.

I can’t figure out why LastPass is still so popular. Ease of use since it’s completely browser based? They were early to market? I don’t get it.

So many better designed, more secure options out there. KeePass, Bitwarden, or 1Password to name a few.

I'm sure this might be an unpopular opinion here, but my experience has been that when you do normal business collaboration - WebEx, etc. - in Linux, you spend more time fighting to make things work than you do actually working. Chrome and the proliferation of webapps has helped this somewhat, but it always ends up being something.

Scott Lowe did a pretty interesting series of blog posts [1] on it and ultimately ended up back on a Mac because it just killed his productivity and called it "death by a thousand cuts". This mirrors my experience. I want to be on Linux and there's a lot to love, but it's just not..stable? evolved? polished? (not sure what the right word is) enough to be a daily driver for most non-development oriented people.

[1] https://blog.scottlowe.org/2017/10/25/linux-migration-wrap-u...

Mozilla must believe that privacy conscious users make up a small percentage of their user base. There's no other explanation for moves like this and their "differential privacy" fiasco from August.

Between that, broken U2F support in FF57, and pages that are broken in FF but work fine in Chrome (I assume due to devs catering to the huge market share) it's becoming increasingly difficult to stick with Firefox.

Love Fastmail - been a happy customer for several years now. Also look forward to the Advent blog posts every year.

With the Unifi line it doesn't matter how easy the terminal is since the config gets overwritten by the controller on each re-provision. So not only do you get to figure out what config works via terminal, you also get to insert it into the config via JSON and find the right way to provision it.

It's certainly not rocket science, but I don't know too many junior sysadmins who could do it without hours of research and pain. Whereas making a change on an EdgeRouter is more legacy - find, apply, save. Done.

Unifi gear is great until you need something that the UI can’t do and figure out you’ve got to load a custom JSON config file from the controller. Their support is also atrociously bad.

The Unifi product is getting better, but I sometimes wish I had gone with their EdgeRouter line instead of Unifi for routing and switching.

I would say it’s certainly good enough for home, but I’d hesitate to use it in a lab environment where configs might get a little more unique.

Interesting. I've seen it work natively on Fastmail, and recently even Google, but the add-on itself wouldn't work in FF57. Maybe it will soon.

I went ahead and paid the 10 bucks for a subscription and was able to get everything setup with a FIDO U2F YubiKey in under 10 minutes. The 1PIF import was flawless.

The only complaint I have is it appears the FIDO support is limited in Firefox, but I believe that's a Firefox issue based on what I've seen in other applications.

Wow this actually looks really promising. I’ve used KeePass off and on over the years but always defaulted back to 1Password because of the browser plugins and mobile experience. I even tried Pass but it was just too painful to setup and maintain and I don’t have the know how to get my data out of it if I really commit.

This is open source, has browser plugins, and supports 2FA. And it’s less than 1/3 the price of the 1PW subscription.

Thanks for sharing.

I'm patiently waiting for improved profile support and better Chrome add-on support before I can abandon Chrome entirely.

Been running Firefox for my personal browsing almost exclusively for years (with the occasional Chrome use) but I still can't ditch Chrome for work because of a few add-ons that don't work in Firefox - mainly Mixmax.

Thanks for this. Was waiting patiently for the push this week after getting tired of Nightly builds.

I tried DDG several times over the years before finally sticking with it about 2 years ago. Now it feels weird to go back to Google because I've gotten used to using some of the bangs.

I love DDG and what they stand for, and I'll gladly trade the creepy personalized results for the more organic results I get there.

I too am from the extreme eastern part of the Piedmont (Wayne/Johnston) and we always said "drink" to indicate something other than water or tea. A Coke is a Coke.

Even prior to the leak it seemed (to me) like it would be hard to improve on the 6s/7, and the keynote confirmed it.

From wireless charging to FaceID it just feels like a bunch of incremental, gimmick-y changes.