hs86

If crypto mining on their systems becomes profitable for us, why would they continue renting out their servers? Instead, they could cease their operations and become full-time miners themselves.

Their pricing seems to rely on customers that don't maximize power consumption and hardware wear all the time, and I can fully understand if they ban specific use-cases like this from their hardware.

Here is a recent comment from Dropbox engineers about the state of tracing tooling on Linux compared to Windows: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/boosting-dropbox-upload-...

Is their assessment correct? If so, how comes that we got DTrace in 2019 and now eBPF ported to Windows? Are they trying to consolidate all tooling into one platform?

For the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Having a system-wide package manager where nearly all libraries are dynamically linked also has its drawbacks.

A seemingly minor update might cause a huge cascade of dependency updates which causes common Linux distributions to tend to one of these two extreme solutions: Either fix all packages in place and freeze their version numbers or just "give up" and update everything all the time. Both solutions feel like compromises to me.

Other end-user OSes don't act like this. On Android/iOS/macOS/Windows, I can have the latest 3rd party software without having to deal with intrusive updates to the OS infrastructure all the time. The BSDs handle this better, and maybe something like Ubuntu LTS + Nix on top of it might be a way around this.

I reinstalled it recently because the whatever-coins associated with my account were worth more than €500.

The app itself and their GitHub repo feel abandoned, so I wouldn't be surprised if they announce its discontinuation.

They managed to increase the distance the mouse cursor has to travel to open the app drawer. The worst case would be to move the cursor to the upper left and then to the bottom right.

Does Red Hat monitor the mouse travel distance to measure "employee productivity," or how did they end up with this design?

They just shipped a performance-related change: https://www.notion.so/blog/faster-page-load-navigation

It is also mentioned on today's changelog: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...

This very release features a new mode [0] with reduced memory consumption. It probably still gets undercut by Gogs/Gitea, but it may be enough to run GitLab on a cheaper VPS tier than before.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/02/22/gitlab-13-9-rel...

Just this week, I uninstalled all my desktop mail clients: no more Thunderbird, MailMate, or eM Client.

Fastmail's web app feels faster, uses fewer resources, and has the same UI on all of my computers.

Instead of redirecting all other accounts into Fastmail, it has a simple UI to setup fetching-from and sending-as from other mail providers, and with using my own domain, it does not feel like a lock-in.

This week I canceled Dropbox, and on my Windows PC, I moved ~500 GiB from my Dropbox folder over to the Google Drive File Stream volume.

I barely noticed any CPU usage from GDFS, and Dropbox.exe was also somewhat reasonable, but the fans of the MacBook Air next to me started screaming.

There is something wrong with their Mac client, and with GDFS, the old MBA remains quieter, and the battery life improved as well.

For me, it is also a superior alternative to Tree Style Tab on Firefox. It has better keyboard shortcuts, and drag and drop support of tabs or entire subtrees is more reliable than TST.

Unloading entire subtrees and restoring them on other computers is also a nice feature that I don't want to miss anymore.

The extension is closed source, and its dev sometimes needs a few weeks for important fixes, but it is still one of my most favorite browser extensions out there.

If you use Chrome, this might help: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/12/04/chrome-omnibox-will...

For GSuite/Workspace this needs to be enabled by an admin: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9121487?hl=en

It does not look good for the Electron port [1].

These ports will be removed soon due to their Python 2 dependency, and the available versions are not supported anymore [2].

[1] https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=electron&search=...

[2] https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/support

There is 1. the political aspect of creating an incentive for vendors to inline their drivers and 2. the technical aspect of not having to provide a stable ABI for kernel drivers.

About 2: I have no idea how difficult this is. Microsoft makes it look easy, but on the other hand, Apple is about to remove any 3rd party code out of their kernel.

About 1: I believe that this hurts more than it helps. Expecting nVidia to move their OS-agnostic codebase into the Linux kernel sounds like a massive effort with no real benefit for them. That seems unlikely to happen. With, for example, OpenZFS, this might be possible if Oracle relicenses their last open-source version. Still, I don't see the Android OEMs budging on their stance of releasing binary blobs alongside their SoCs.

Android is currently the largest install base of Linux kernels across the world, and the lack of a stable ABI means that none of these devices can run the latest and greatest Linux version ever during their lifetime. It is easy to shove all the blame over to Qualcomm, Mediathek, etc. but we also have to see it as a failure of Linux as a platform.

Not every participant of a platform will always play nice, and these kinds of issues could all be solved by providing a stable ABI.

They have a nice landing page: https://raindrop.io/

I am unsure between this and Pinboard.in.

Raindrop certainly looks better, but Pinboard seems to have better integrations across other services. Those permanent archives are nice to have, but it does not feel that permanent without a local copy and a perceived bus-factor of 1 on both of them.

I requested an Archive Backup in my Pinboard settings, but I am still waiting for a download link three weeks later.

Thankfully, those bookmarks.html exports and imports seem to be very reliable across different bookmarking services.

Why does (GNU/)Linux handle memory pressure so much worse compared to macOS and Windows? I can allocate like 50% more than my physical RAM on these systems, and the performance does not tank thanks to swapping to an SSD.

Is this a trade-off between optimizing for latency vs. optimizing for throughput, and Linux chose the latter?

I showed this once to a non-techie friend, and they were excited to use it. My little demo covered the difference between F and Shift+F to show how it is case sensitive, and I navigated through multiple pages without using a mouse. I assured them that they don't need to learn all of its commands, and they can open a cheat sheet on any page just by typing a question mark.

This non-disruptive introduction into Vimium made me think about my old Firefox setup. Back in the XUL days, I was hoarding dozens of add-ons that altered the Firefox UI to the extent that others could not use my browser anymore. They would click on a link and wonder why it is not working while my browser would amass many new tabs at a customized, designated place. The browser worked as I intended, but the extent of my customizations made it unusable for regular Firefox users.

Therefore I think that these new, more limited extension APIs offer an overall better experience for end-users. Maintaining usability for "regular users" should be the upper bound for the amount of customization an extension API provides. If it goes beyond that, it seems to get out of control.

Why do most gaming products look like an edgy 13-year-old has designed them? This trend goes from useless RGB coolers on RAM modules to tuning software for mainboards with a UI that is essentially a fancy bitmap with random interactive elements spread throughout for the user to figure out. (Basically Winamp but worse)

The most ergonomic mice are usually from one of these gaming companies, so it is difficult to avoid them. But their drivers are over-stylized bloatware, and their useless colored LEDs are covered by my hand once I start using the device.

With the declining repairability of MacBooks (and other slim notebooks), I always have to think about this Pokémon comic:

https://images7.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED127/56473bf64a6...

There is a lot of feature overlap between these note-taking apps, but I always find one or two missing critical features. It seems like most apps try to be a one-size-fits-all solution, and they fail in doing so.

My new approach uses dedicated apps for each use case. I am trying Raindrop.io (or Pinboard.in) as web clippers / persistent bookmark managers, I am using Todoist to organize (and gamify) my tasks, and I use VSCode for general note-taking. Especially VSCode, with its vast extension marketplace, seems to be a balanced solution for customizing the note-taking experience. I can pick my preferred Markdown extension with LaTeX math support and add additional comfort features like TabNine or Grammarly for a better writing experience than whatever these one-size-fits-all solutions such as Evernote or Notion can offer.

Better link: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110228...

What is going on with Outlook for Windows? For years, it froze its entire UI whenever there was some network lag on the IMAP server, and the recent improvements for Outlook strangely focus only on their Mac, web, and mobile versions. Does the Windows version still have a future? It seems to be stuck in some maintenance limbo.

We tagged along with the deprecations of the last years (32 bit, kernel extensions, OpenGL), and right before the big payoff, our Macs fell out of support. :)

Do people with unsupported macOS versions still need to modify each patch release or can they update their macOS X.Y.Z to X.Y.(Z+1) without any additional tinkering?

Thanks for the name! Apparently, there were a bunch of tools with the same purpose: http://coolingsoftware.homepage.t-online.de/index.htm

When power-saving states for CPUs were still new and Windows support was still lacking, there was a 3rd party tool that would decrease the idle temperature of my Athlon XP by creating artificial load with a low process priority. It would basically replace the System Idle Process and put the CPU in some new P-state.

Is there some standard way in *nix/Windows to create artificial CPU load while actually not increasing the energy consumption at all?

I like to have the same UI for all of my email accounts and the idea of yet another email address that is tied to a very unique workflow seems undesirable to me.

This could have been interesting if I could use it with arbitrary IMAP/SMTP accounts, but I have no idea how well their additional features could be mapped back to ordinary IMAP folders.

As a mere mortal, I am more interested in their podcast than their products. :) Hopefully, they will produce more episodes in the future: https://oxide.computer/podcast/

iOS apps on the desktop and the switch from x86 to ARM have uncomfortable many parallels with Windows 8 / RT.

How is Apple's approach going to be different from Microsoft's? Will they keep backward compatibility? Will the CPU architecture really be a day and night difference or are our expectations too high due to the ubiquity of inflated Geekbench numbers?

This will either make or break the Mac as a platform and I feel like currently, any further investment would be a gamble.

One of his main complaints is "People who promote Linux, don't run Linux" and he specifically focuses on those who hold Linux-related talks at conferences on devices that don't run Linux on the desktop.

Can you look at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ and easily point out those companies, that have a crucial business stake on Linux on the desktop? I can't.

Most people, who are paid to work on Linux and its surrounding ecosystem, are working for companies that are interested on Linux on servers / the cloud and I don't think that it is fair to criticize them for not joining the idealistic movement of bringing Linux onto more desktops.