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janscon Volkswagen has given a name to its pain, and it is ‘software’

I bought an ID.4 Pro Performance just before the summer and after about 15.000km I can say that the software is not great at all. I could perfectly live with the delays, sometimes it takes many seconds for something to happen after pressing on an item on the screen, but there are many other problems.

I am no longer able to log into the car with my We Connect account. No error message after login, but the car keeps on telling me that I have to log in. However, I still can control charging with the We Connect app using the same account and I can drive, so who cares?

The speech recognition (which could solve the non-button issue) often triggers when listening to music on the radio. It mostly doesn't trigger when I want it to saying "Hello, ID". Pressing the right place on the steering wheel (not a button I can feel without looking at it) seems the best option to trigger speech recognition. When it's first activated, the only thing that sometimes works is turning on heat in the drivers seat. Gives me a nice and comfy feeling. Other than that, we don't communicate.

The ID.Drive Travel Assist sees lots of traffic signs that aren't there. At the most extreme, I was driving 100km/h on an open road. Suddenly the car "saw" a 30km/h sign that wasn't there and started braking. On my daily commute, I have to drive a road at 40km/h for some kilometers. Travel assist keeps on insisting that there are lots of 30km/h and 50km/h speed limit signs. Day after day. My uneducated guess is that crossing roads with other speed limits are triggering speed changes. IDK. Sometimes the travel assist does not work at all - no matter how many speed limit signs I pass nothing happens until restarting the car. So I more feel like being the assistants assistant.

I am still not able to use the "buttons" for turning on the wind shield or rear window heating without taking my eyes from the road (not part of the touch screen, they're located at the left side of the steering wheel). Guess I never will be.

The navigation is ok. Mostly works without ending up in a blocked road. Not always the smartest choice of way. Keeps my brain cells activated, I like making my own decisions anyway. Also, shows me logos ("ads"?) for McDonalds, Burger King, Esso, Shell and other sights on the road. Easy to see the places I want to avoid.

Charging mostly works. Hooray!

I've concluded that using the screen while driving is distracting anyway (so I wish there was not screen at all - except for maybe navigation and radio). When traveling alone, I mostly don't use the screen. When traveling with others, I outsource adjustments.

Would I buy the same car again? Not sure. Battery range is fine. Besides the software, I really enjoy driving it. From a usability point of view, I prefer driving my old e-Golf.

janscon The semantic web is dead – Long live the semantic web

The semantic web is dead. Long live Topic maps [1] ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_map

janscon Gophie – modern gopher client for Windows, Mac, Linux

Added some commits to my gopher/gemini client written in rust an hour ago: https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher

janscon Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

RabbitMQ. It just works.

janscon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://jan.bio

My virtual playground since 2002. Not a lot of content, changed the domain name a couple of years ago. Currently written in emacs org-mode and post-processed with Zola.

janscon CSS's !important was added because of laws about font size for some text

I always thought of important as the sudo of styling.

janscon How and why I stopped buying new laptops

I did the same thing. Bought a refurbished Thinkpad X250 and installed FreeBSD on it. Now it use it as my main development machine. I haven't look back since.

janscon Bombadillo: a non-web browser

Inspired by Bombadillo, I created ncgopher (https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher) which supports both gemini and gopher. It is ncurses-based, and I tried to give it a Borland Turbo Vision-like UI with menus and dialogs. Works on most systems and has packages for Arch and NixOS.

janscon A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web

I wrote an ncurses-based gemini and gopher client a while ago: https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher I really like the gemini protocol because of its simplicity and its text-based nature. Spending most days in a terminal, text consumption is so much easier with a gemini client then e.g. lynx for webpages (which won't work 99% of the time).

janscon Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)

If you prefer a terminal-based browser, there is also ncgopher at https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher. Despite its name, it also has support for gemini browsing, though it still is work in progress. That said, Castor is great!

Disclaimer: I'm the author of ncgopher.

janscon Show HN: A first project in Rust – in-memory order book

Two examples: The application has two main components, a controller and a struct containing the ui implementation. Callbacks in the cursive library are called with a reference to Cursive, but I had a hard time figuring out how to pass the controller to the callback. In the end I decided to use a message channel (mpsc::Receiver and mpsc::Sender) to let the two components communicate. After some struggling I saw that cursive has a function to set user data which is accessible inside the callbacks. So I pass the channels through userdats. Not sure if this is the best architecture. I never managed to pass a reference to the controller to the ui callbacks. The Compiler complained about undefined lifetime of the reference, though I knew that both outlive the application runtime.

A similar situation occurred in the asynchronous communication with gopher servers. I use a thread to fetch a resource from another server while keeping the ui responsive. Passing the result from the thread back did not work out in the beginning.

I don’t think the idioms are so different in Rust, but when passing data between components, threads and the like, you have to be very specific in your code, using Arcs, RwLocks, Mutexes, etc.

On the bright sight, when the code compiles, it usually worked as intended. Using C or C++, there would be more race conditions, null pointer exceptions and more.

janscon Show HN: A first project in Rust – in-memory order book

Heh, I also released my first project in Rust yesterday. An ncurses gopher client. I probably missed many patterns and idioms as well. Starting with Rust is quite hard, even as an experienced developer. I spent hours "fighting" the compiler. Code available at https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher/

janscon Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)

My homepage is https://jan.bio. Not much content here, but some more on my gopher hole. Gopher seems to have a renaissance these days. Browsing gopher is a nice activity to relax after work as a web developer. No tracking, no javascript, no ads, no images, no web fonts. Just content.

janscon Ask HN: Full-on machine learning for 2020, what are the best resources?

I'm not affiliated with humblebundle in any way, and this was a genuine question. I know that the packt books are not best quality, but if one these books is a good introduction to practical ML, I would consider it a good deal. In my opinion much better than googling algorithms and tutorials and visiting 10s or 100s of sites full of ads and ad trackers to find a suitable algorithm for a given problem. Reading an EPUB on my daily commute sounds much better and works offline.

janscon Ask HN: Full-on machine learning for 2020, what are the best resources?

Humblebundle has a bundle of machine learning books right now: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/python-machine-learning-p... I'm considering buying this bundle. Any of these books you would recommend?

janscon Cool but obscure X11 tools

I used XFontSel two days ago to find a font for my StumpWM mode line. Still works like a charm.

Also, I miss XFig on the list. Still growing strong! The last release is from May 2018. I use it occasionally to create diagrams for presentations.

janscon What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

Interesting post. I’ve been dealing with RSI on and off for the past 5 years. Natural keyboard, standing desk, reducing keyboard use in my free time, lots of breaks, almost no hobby activity, stretching and exercises helped, but the pain keeps coming back after while.

Any suggestions for Linux-based tools?

janscon MAKERphone – an educational DIY mobile phone

This reminds me of http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mellis/cellphone/ . I wonder how long the 600 mAh battery lasts...

janscon Ask HN: What tools do you use to manage your life?

PC:

- org-mode for meeting notes, ideas, todo-lists, agenda

- ledger for personal finances

- pass for password management

Mobile:

- Note Crypt Pro for tracking ideas on the run

- OpenScale for weight tracking

- Wunderlist for sharing shopping lists with my wife

edit: formatting

janscon Fairphone 2: world's first modular phone goes on sale

Seems like you're a lucky guy. My current iPhone 4s is falling apart. One of the speakers doesn't work, battery lasts only half a day, and the power off button is broken. And I guess there won't be any software updates after the current iOS release.

janscon Fairphone 2: world's first modular phone goes on sale

I disagree (Disclaimer: I'm one of the early backers). The current trend in mobile phones is towards more closed systems. Components are glued together, and often it's not often possible for a user to even change a battery. That's what I would call a big monster.

The Fairphone is the first phone to get a 10/10 repairability score from ifixit. Though there could be more components, it's definitely a step in the right direction. The whole point is to a able to use that phone for 4-5 years. If one part breaks (touchscreen, battery), you can replace that part yourself. If a better camera becomes available, I can choose to update just the camera instead of buying a new phone. Cheaper for me as a user and better for the environment.

janscon Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client

So do I. offlineimap for syncing mails with my IMAP server at fastmail and mu4e for reading mails. Search is superfast, but I miss a better handling of spam mails. Thunderbird is really good at sorting out spam once you've trained the spam filter.

janscon Switching from OS X to FreeBSD – Both Desktop and Laptop

Yesterday, I spent some hours exporting my roughly 45.000 photos in my iPhoto library to a folder structure sorted by year and event. The tool I used is called Phoshare (https://code.google.com/p/phoshare/). The site says its no longer supported, but even with the latest OSX and iPhoto versions it seems to do the trick. I was able to convert faces to exif meta tags containing the persons name. Otherwise I did not have a lot of metadata in iPhoto. Now I'm heading over to digiKam or maybe some other tool outside the walled garden.

For my iTunes library, I first used beets (http://beets.radbox.org/) to fix the metadata of my music files, and now cmus (https://cmus.github.io/) as a music player. As an alternative music player I'm considering EMMS (https://www.gnu.org/software/emms/).

I don't know about alternatives to iPhone syncing. My iPhone died last week, and I'm waiting for my Fairphone to arrive in a couple of weeks.

janscon Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

Interesting. I used both Evernote and DEVONthink on OS X before. Now, I'm storing all my notes in plain text org-files on my Dropbox - but without version control. Do you share your git-repos via Dropbox or somethink like that? Or do you have a git server somewhere else?

janscon Evernote cuts 47 employees and shuts down 3 offices

I use DEVONthink too for the same reason. The only thing DEVONthink lacks is cross-platform support. It's a pity that it's not available on Linux or Android.

janscon Even the LastPass Will Be Stolen

I used 1password before, but several times I lost access to all my passwords after upgrading the software. On the bright side, I was always able to restore access to it by manually downloading 1password and reinstalling 1password. Besides, 1password does not officially support Linux. That's why I wanted to try Lastpass. I also find the yubikey support interesting.

Well, I guess, it's time to reinstall keepass2 again.

janscon Ask HN: Is RSS still worth the time?

I went from Google Reader to Feedly, and I'm quite happy.

janscon KeePass – questionable security

Where did you get that information?

janscon Show HN: Universal Pause Button

Yeah! Like the boss key in Leisure Suit Larry: http://www.mobygames.com/game/leisure-suit-larry-goes-lookin... Now THAT is a job ad ;-)

janscon MemSQL Launches Unlimited Community Edition

  > While you are free to use Community for your projects,
  > MemSQL does not support or endorse using it in production.

(http://blog.memsql.com/memsql-community-edition/)

Ehhh. Do they mean that the Community Edition is only usable for development?