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mcjiggerlog

2,524 karma · joined January 28, 2014

mail: hn at tomjwatson.com

x.com/tom_j_watson

github.com/tom-james-watson

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mcjiggerlog··on The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated
That's exactly the problem - they do not tell you why you were terminated.
mcjiggerlog··on The Linux Experiments YouTube channel has been terminated
The Linux Experiment is probably my favourite linux-focussed YouTube channel. Nick has been doing absolutely fantastic work and his channel being permanently deleted would be an absolute travesty and a clear mistake. He is producing high quality, thoughtful, inoffensive content. Here's to hoping the channel is rightly reinstated ASAP, along with an apology and explanation from Google.

Also, if you don't know the channel and want to check out his videos, you can still watch them on Odysee - https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment.

mcjiggerlog··on Psst: Fast Spotify client with native GUI, without Electron, built in Rust
For linux there is a snap of the app available, which is a lot easier than building it from source: https://snapcraft.io/psst-gui
mcjiggerlog··on Incident with GitHub Actions, API Requests, Git Operations, Issues and more
Yup definitely more than just webhooks - I can't perform basic git operations like push.
mcjiggerlog··on Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend
In the thread:

> 9/ Interestingly, Tran never trademarked "Sriracha" (he did trademark the green cap and rooster, though).

mcjiggerlog··on Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?
€38-78k is a high salary in Europe. Net median income in Spain is $27k.

Regardless, in the US net median income is $37k. I think maybe you're living in a bubble if you don't understand how people live on that kind of money. Also, don't be surprised by how big of a factor lifestyle inflation is. Your average Joe in Spain is not dropping $60k on a new truck.

mcjiggerlog··on Ask HN: Please Dark Mode for HN
Same, it's pretty great. Unfortunately it's suffering from some bitrot and the internal browser usually works for only about 50% of the articles.
mcjiggerlog··on Zellij – A Terminal Workspace and Multiplexer
Anecdata:

I don't want to tile all my windows, only terminals, so I'm not interested in tiling WM.

I also jump between OSs and appreciate being able to have the same terminal multiplexing behaviour on both linux and macOS, without needing to learn the keyboard shortcuts and idiosyncrasies of two different GUI terminal multiplexers.

As another commenter pointed out, being able to multiplex in the exact same way for remote sessions is a massive bonus.

Lastly, tmux has a lot of features and customization and once you learn those you really come to appreciate them. Tmux can also look really quite nice, it doesn't need to look as boring as it does out of the box: https://i.imgur.com/MgUx0U2.png.

mcjiggerlog··on Tracking the WhatsApp habits of random smartphones
It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a hypothetical scenario. Person is writing to their partner but receiving no reply, however they can see that their partner has been online for the past 30 minutes. Person is convinced that their partner is talking to that one guy from the gym.

I have definitely been called out for being online but not replying, so I can easily imagine how that can end up becoming a big drama in some relationships.

mcjiggerlog··on Screw it, I’ll host it myself
Yeah, https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync.

There's a decent guide here: https://ubuntu.com/blog/safely-backup-google-photos.

I run this every night on a raspberry pi, syncing them to my local NAS which is in turn backed up to cloud storage.

mcjiggerlog··on Brits head home to avoid being deported as illegals in Spain
Schadenfreude seems to be the prevailing take in these kinds of threads, but as a Brit living in Spain I can tell you that the people in the article are not representative of most Brits in Spain. There are plenty of young Brits living in cities around Spain; it's not all just pensioners in the costas.

The vast vast majority voted against Brexit and are devastated, if not surprised, by how it has played out.

Luckily, getting residency was fairly straightforward, with the requirements basically being that you live and work / are retired in Spain.

The hardest part though is knowing that further generations are not able to exercise the same freedoms that we were able to. So many unlived experiences, friendships, marriages, children. That truly is the greatest shame of all.

mcjiggerlog··on I no longer trust The Great Suspender
I also have some extensions with users in the tens of thousands and can corroborate all of this. Out of curiosity I strung one "buyer" along to see how much they would offer and they quoted $0.20 per user. With the amount of money being thrown about, as sad as it is, it's no surprise that some devs end up selling out their users.

In my opinion extensions have to be one of the worst sources of spyware these days. I am now extremely conservative with what extensions I use, and definitely would only use extensions from open source projects or companies that I trust.

Something needs to change. As long as extensions have such weak sandboxing along with such poor app review, Google/Mozilla etc will keep willingly shipping spyware unbeknownst to their users.

At least some mechanism of creating and verifying reproducible builds would go a long way.

mcjiggerlog··on The Great Suspender: New maintainer is probably malicious
Nothing. I own a few extensions with users in the tens of thousands and receive so many emails from people/business trying to buy out the extensions for "monetization".

This is a huge issue and Google is doing absolutely nothing to address it.

mcjiggerlog··on Maps.me is gone, and we must bring it back
The international version of this is Windy Maps - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.seznam.wind.... I highly recommend it - excellent for outdoors / hiking, tracking route etc. Also has a very polished UI.
mcjiggerlog··on Moving from Macbook to Linux
I'm not sure what distro or desktop environment you're running, but integer scaling has worked perfectly on gnome, kde and others for years now. So 200% scaling of a 4k resolution should look exactly the same as unscaled 1080p, just sharper. No performance issues, no glitches, no inconsistencies.

The jankiness of scaling on Linux is when you want to do fractional scaling.

mcjiggerlog··on Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions
Wow ok, surprised that they are unmetered! Surely that can't scale? What is an estimate £ cost in electricity for filling an average battery?
mcjiggerlog··on Britain to ban new petrol cars and vans by 2030 on road to net zero emissions
How do these public charging stations work in terms of payment? Do you have to activate it using a credit/debit card first and then just leave it plugged in?
mcjiggerlog··on Reasons to prefer Linux over Windows (2014)
I have this exactly same problem - Chromium, Firefox, Electron - and it's apparently an unfixed bug in the nvidia drivers. For me it only started a few months ago. I'm on Ubuntu 20.10 and it's still a problem.
mcjiggerlog··on Don't use third party auth to sign in
Creator of the extension here. It actually does work on Android, it's just not in the (very short) list of allowed extensions yet.

There is a workaround to add custom addons, though: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issu...

mcjiggerlog··on Introducing the next generation of Mac
My base model macbook pro from 2014 had 8GB of RAM. So, yeah, they've been selling laptops with the same base amount of RAM for at least 6 or 7 years.
mcjiggerlog··on U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord
Electricity generation is responsible for only 27% of US greenhouse gas emissions - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis....

If we are serious about tackling climate change then we need to decarbonize these other sectors by moving them off of fossil fuels and onto clean electricity. We are going to need to generate a lot more energy, not less.

mcjiggerlog··on No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981
Lower yields = more land use to meet demand = more deforestation and loss of wilderness and biodiversity. Maximising yields is definitely something we want to do if we are interested in saving this planet.
mcjiggerlog··on Monospace: A JavaScript demo in 1021 bytes, winner of the demo competition
Jesus I should have read this comment first.

It completely locked up Firefox on Ubuntu 20.04, rendering a frame and making a single beep sound about once per second. Had to close the browser and force kill some processes to get the TTS to stop.

mcjiggerlog··on Microsoft is not rebasing Windows to Linux
Just to add to this, non-integer (AKA fractional) scaling also works substantially worse on gnome for me than in windows. It even is hidden behind a switch with a warning that it "May increase power usage, lower speed, or reduce display sharpness". I can confirm all three.

Given pretty much all laptop screens manufactured these days look best with about 125%-150% scaling, this is a pretty big issue.

mcjiggerlog··on Frugality Is Non-Linear (2019)
I think FIRE/frugal mentality would simply argue for making your own latte at 1/30th the cost of the Starbucks one, not completely foregoing all pleasures.
mcjiggerlog··on Britain’s CO2 Emissions Have Fallen to Levels Last Seen in 1890 (2018)
No worse than a coal burning plant is not exactly a high bar for being good for your health.
mcjiggerlog··on BitTorrent v2
Given how vocal anti-snap people are, I just wanted to provide a voice in favour of snap. It's always my preferred method of install for anything not in the default archives.
mcjiggerlog··on Reddit gets its app to 50m Play Store downloads
Link: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
mcjiggerlog··on Data from Chernobyl and Fukushima provide answers about the risks of nuclear
Not sure I've seen a HN post before where so many people in the comments have clearly not read the article. Not even the summary of key points right at the top.

The piece is not anti-nuclear.

Also, risk is not binary. Finding out the true risk of something does not mean it's high risk and therefore negative. You can assess the risk of something and conclude that the risk is low and generally overblown, which is the point of the article.

mcjiggerlog··on Three quarters of people in the UK now do at least some online grocery shopping
It says the numbers are based on a poll, not on their customer data.
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