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dstaley

2,116 karma · joined June 2, 2012

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dstaley··on Remote workstations for discerning artists
It's my understanding that RemoteFX is only available in Windows Server and Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.
dstaley··on Remote workstations for discerning artists
> But of course, doing that requires application level support, or at least low-level hooks into the desktop rendering system to extract video streams and treat them differently from everything else.

That's exactly what RDP does on Windows! I don't know the extent to which controls it supports rendering on the client, but the concept is that RDP is aware of things like text, buttons, title bars, etc., and is able to tell the client things like "draw a button at (20, 140)" instead of sending the raw pixel data. With enough engineering effort (and some standardization on the application UI side) I totally think Microsoft could make RDP the protocol of choice for virtual desktops.

dstaley··on Remote workstations for discerning artists
I was a little disappointed to see that there wasn't a discussion of how Netflix provides (or doesn't!) a high-fidelity visual experience. I imagine certain artists require fluid-motion and previews without visual artifacting, so I was hoping there was some discussion about how they provide that. I've used a handful of remote desktop systems, and I haven't found anything that's able to provide even a passable video watching experience. The issue I've run into is that the technology designed for low-latency video heavily utilizes compression, which falls apart when looking at text.

I really wish Microsoft would just throw a ton of money at making RDP an absolutely delightful experience. Last time I checked, RDP wasn't able to use your GPU at all unless you had a very specific, no-longer-maintained version of Windows 10 Pro (the Workstation variant).

dstaley··on Flutter 2
Check out Flutter Folio [1], built in partnership with Google. Right-click is actually disabled, so you can't even open the "Create account" link in a new tab, nor can I right click an input to autofill with my password manager. You can't inspect any image rendered to the canvas element. Furthermore, you also can't blur the form input (although that's probably application specific rather than Flutter's fault).

[1] https://www.flutterfolio.com/#/?

dstaley··on Flutter 2
As long as the old Google Pay app still does NFC payments, I'll keep using it.

I was also pretty salty that the new Google Pay app was marked as "early release" so you couldn't leave a review on the Google Play Store. That's fixed now though.

dstaley··on Flutter 2
I hope it's CanvasKit because if those interactions are also broken in the HTML renderer that's even worse!
dstaley··on Flutter 2
Flutter for Web feels like such a wild step backwards in terms of functionality that I'm not sure the benefits it brings are worth it. I just tried a few samples, and basic interactions like selecting text, saving images, and opening links in new tabs don't work. This is the result of rendering everything to a <canvas> element. I'm much more interested in a React Native style approach, which seems to provide a consistent set of components that work the same on mobile, desktop, and web.
dstaley··on 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed
This is what the right-click menu looks like in Firefox on macOS [1]. Compared to the right-click menu from Safari on the same machine [2], you can see several differences. The most notable one is that the Firefox menu is not theme-aware, rendering a light-themed context menu even though the OS is in dark mode. Next, the padding around the menu is incorrect compared to a native menu. It also looks like the font is maybe a different size. Finally, the drill-down arrow on the Firefox menu doesn't match the native one.

[1] https://ibb.co/0hRpSBB [2] https://ibb.co/wwhCypT

dstaley··on Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code
If you open your browser's network panel, you can see the secret sauce here: GitHub's API. Each time you open a file, the UI makes a request to GitHub's API for the content. That's why it's dramatically faster than cloning a repo; instead of pulling the entire history of the repo upfront, it dynamically requests only the files viewed.
dstaley··on Github1s – One second to read GitHub code with VS Code
The #1 reason I end up cloning a repo and opening it in VS Code is to perform search, so it's a bummer search doesn't work. I'd even give up on the "1s" bit if I could open a full-text searchable version of the repo.
dstaley··on What’s Wrong With The Honeywell Humidifier
As an owner of the Z27, I can confidently say that for most people, a 27in 1440p monitor is a better choice over a 4K monitor in the same size. You'd likely need to increase the render scale on a 4K monitor at that size, resulting in a lower effective resolution.
dstaley··on Chrome 89 Beta: advanced hardware interactions, web sharing on desktop
There currently is no public date for the deprecation of Manifest v2 extensions, so I think you'll be fine with uBlock Origin for a while to come.
dstaley··on Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
Firefox's engineers have done a remarkable job at trying to mimic the native context menu as much as possible, but it's not a 100% match (as evidenced by your discovery that it doesn't support dark mode). There have also been times over the past two decades where macOS updated something about the context menu that then make the Firefox one not match. The main point is that it really should just be a native menu; they shouldn't be spending time trying to make it match 100%.
dstaley··on Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
Pretty sure this bug is about the right-click menu.
dstaley··on Time to get excited about the growing Windows on ARM Ecosystem
Buying a device is currently the only legal option considering that Microsoft is only licensing Windows on ARM to OEMs. That being said you can find older Snapdragon 835 laptops on eBay and such for pretty cheap. I was able to buy one for $260 USD.
dstaley··on Time to get excited about the growing Windows on ARM Ecosystem
I'm going to disagree with ARM here: it's not quite yet time to get excited about Windows on ARM. The app support just isn't there yet, and the emulation is not nearly as good as the emulation on macOS. I've been tracking major app and development platform updates [1], and while there is forward momentum, all the pieces aren't quite there for many apps to offer ARM versions. Many Windows apps use Windows Presentation Framework, and ARM support isn't available yet (currently scheduled for the first half of next year). Apps like 1Password and Affinity Photo are waiting for that update to enable them to offer ARM versions.

Hopefully by the end of next year developers will have no excuse not to offer ARM versions.

[1] https://iswindowsonarmready.netlify.app/

dstaley··on Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)
I'm really curious in getting my hands on the Nokia N9, just to explore the UI and UX of Meego. Unfortunately the devices on eBay are going for prices outside of my budget since I suspect my exploration will last all of half an hour. I see a lot of refurbished models from China, so hopefully their prices drop over the next few years. I'm interested to see if Meego could have been the viable competitor that Windows Phone wasn't.
dstaley··on Cerulean: Experimental micro-blogging app for Matrix
Once built, the only frontend dependency is React. Most of those packages are tooling related to the build process.
dstaley··on Manifest V3 now available on M88 Beta
I just wanted to call out the ending of the blog post:

> The Chrome Web Store will start accepting Manifest V3 extensions mid-January when Chrome 88 reaches stable. While there is not an exact date for removing support for Manifest V2 extensions, developers can expect the migration period to last at least a year from when Manifest V3 lands in the stable channel.

This means that we'll have at least a year where Manifest V2 extensions will still work. Hopefully by the end of that period there will be a good selection of Manifest v3 compatible ad blockers.

dstaley··on Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license
To be honest I just wanted to see a more descriptive title specifically to avoid the tired, unproductive discussion of "what is open source".
dstaley··on Mapbox-gl-js is no longer under the 3-Clause BSD license
Could we change the title to more clearly reflect that this is a license change from a permissive to a restrictive licence? Maybe "Mapbox GL JS v2 no longer uses a permissive license"? I initially thought by the title that Mapbox had removed the library from GitHub completely.
dstaley··on Gitter now speaks Matrix
I truly hope that Matrix+Gitter becomes the defacto standard when it comes to chat for open source communities. I think Discord is a bit ahead in terms of UX and features, but Matrix is catching up fast. I noticed that Element recently added support for Communities, which is sort of like a Discord server!
dstaley··on Metal for IntelliJ Platform
I would have loved to have seen a Vulkan implementation combined with MoltenVK[1] for Metal compatibility instead of a direct Metal implementation. This means that Java will now have to maintain two separate graphics implementations.

[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

dstaley··on Police in Mississippi to Pilot a Program to Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras
I'd love to hear more about how this third-party company is somehow tapping into live feeds from Ring cameras without the involvement of Ring.
dstaley··on TailwindCSS v2.0
I've seen some incredible things built with Tailwinds, but it still hasn't clicked for me. It seems like you're learning a completely different language for styling and layout. I also have some gripes with optimization in that the suggested solution to eliminating unused CSS is to use a tool that finds classes in HTML files, which is a pretty rudimentary way to accomplish that. (However, I'm sure in more advanced codebases, particularly JavaScript ones, there's probably a better utility to use.)
dstaley··on Amazon RDS on Graviton2 Processors
PIOPS is the same price whether it's attached to an EC2 instance or an RDS instance.
dstaley··on Node.js 15.0
FWIW yarn v2 isn't affiliated with Facebook. The lead maintainer is a Datadog employee, but the project isn't at the mercy of any company.
dstaley··on Amazon RDS on Graviton2 Processors
Yup, it's about 1.8x for the instance sizes I checked.
dstaley··on Amazon RDS on Graviton2 Processors
I can't give you direct recommendations, but it does sound like you might have used Provisioned IOPS storage instead of General Purpose storage which is simply pay by the byte.

If you're willing to post a bit more details, I'm sure people could give you some more detailed options. You basically switched from a fully-managed database solution to a fully DIY solution, and I honestly think you might have just over provisioned the RDS instance. I'm willing to bet you can switch back to RDS and get all the benefits there while remaining within budget. You can get a 1-year reserved t3.medium RDS instance with 50 GB of storage for $40/month.

dstaley··on Amazon RDS on Graviton2 Processors
I'm interested in hearing what your setup was like that cost $1,000 that you could replicate on your own for just $50.
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