onosendai

I'm incredibly saddened by his passing away, even if it was expected given the recent decline of his health.

I'm not going to touch on his films, which are all special and definitely worth watching, but if anyone who didn't know him wants a primer on his complex, sometimes surreal, but I think ultimately endearing personality, then this is a nice introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqZpi8zAqe0

The first Eco-Drives came out in the mid 90s. If you look around you'll find quite a few reports from people who bought the very first ones, and which are still ticking away virtually maintenance-free for 25+ years and counting. My own, a dive watch with around 10 years, which has actually been used for its stated purpose, is also still problem-free and with zero maintenance so far.

The only thing you need to be mindful of with Eco-Drives is that you can't let it lose all charge. It can keep functioning in complete darkness for around 6 months, according to the specs, but if you do this enough times the battery will lose the ability to hold charge and will need to be replaced, and there are plenty of reports to this effect. If you're not planning on wearing it, just leave it somewhere that it can get natural light, instead of a drawer, and you should be good.

While mechanical watches are undoubtedly cool and elegant, they're not perfect timekeepers, and when they do need maintenance it's not something trivial which you can perform yourself. For my day-to-day watch I'll take an accurate quartz movement with virtually zero maintenance any day. In other words an Eco-Drive, or something similar.

I've been using dnf to continuously upgrade my Fedora installation between 24 and 28, and it's worked pretty much flawlessly.

It's gotten to the point that system upgrades are as boring as the regular stream of updates that you receive daily, the only difference being that every 6 months you get more updates than usual being pushed.

Remember when the first real tool you had to perform system upgrades on Fedora was called FedUp? It was quite amazing, not to mention unexpected, seeing Fedora go from being one of the worst distros to upgrade to one of the best.

They do acknowledge the source of the font:

"Hack has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and includes the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects."

It's a bit disingenuous though. I'd call Hack a straight copy of Deja Vu Sans Mono, with a few very minor tweaks. On Linux using the TTF fonts I can't even see a difference in line height:

http://i.imgur.com/wxTr0at.png

http://i.imgur.com/OO1bJFE.png

The only glyphs I can tell which are slightly different are 'i', '0' and '_'.

You can listen to Jean Shepherd himself tell the story of the "I, Libertine" hoax during a radio show here: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/06/the-i-libertine.html It's 40 min long, but well worth it and hilariously funny. I've always been fascinated by this story, it speaks volumes of the world we live in and how people are easily influenced and manipulated.

It seems both NoScript and AdBlock Plus have become really permissive as of late regarding their whitelists. While ABP is a bit shady with their 'acceptable ads' deals, I believe in NoScript's case it's probably due to not wanting to break things too badly for less technically minded users.

Regardless, I've replaced both extensions with uBlock Origin. While UB in default deny mode is not as fine grained as NS, it does the job and doesn't compromise on default whitelists at the expense of a little breakage (gorhill is very adamant on this point).

I've also noticed that I retain information much better when I'm actually writing it down on paper, than when I take quick notes on a laptop. I don't know the cognitive basis for this, but I suspect that it has something to do with it being a much 'slower' medium to register information in. Somehow your brain is forced to focus on the information that's at hand, instead of immediately trying to skip ahead to what's coming up next.

I don't use moleskines though, they're way overpriced for the poor quality paper they offer (i.e. it's not fountain pen friendly, which is what I usually use). Spiral notebooks are much cheaper, practical and usually provide better quality paper.

> Are services shuting down at greater rates that in the past decade?

Probably not, but the model has shifted and there's a greater offering of services nowadays. Given the choice available and all the niches covered, it's very easy to start using one of them and coming to rely on it for some facet of your life/work, only to have it shut down with little prior notice and leaving you out to dry.

The parent's point is that if you use locally running software without any dependencies on external services you're much more secure in the event you need to migrate away from them, since you can do it at your own pace and with much more control over the entire process. Also, if you're using FOSS, it makes it less likely the support will just cease since, if there's enough interest, someone else (even you) can carry it forward.

> especially since Google (and many other cloud providers) don't provide any kind of easy client-side encryption options

That's like wishing printer manufacturers would provide an easy way to refill their ink cartridges. It will never happen because no company will knowingly undermine its own business model.

Google's (and others') model is to access and mine as much of your own personal data as possible, so the idea that you're in sole control of it is anathema to their stated mission.

It used to be that one was generally pretty well aware of exactly what data was handed over when using their services, since the interaction with them was carried out in a limited, well understood manner (browser window, gmail/search site). Since they now control the entire stack from the hardware up to the services, and for the most part the workings of the entire system are opaque, it's very easy to leak data you never intended to, which compounds nicely for them (and unfortunately for you) with their goal.

So, in short, your data will never be safe if you hand it over to someone whose goal is to monetize it by being able to read it.

As far as quick 'n dirty solutions go, if you're not overly concerned with security, you can always use "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" to serve all the files on the current directory over HTTP.

I also recall that KDE had a panel applet that pretty much did the same thing on the 3.x days (not sure it's been ported to 4.x)

I second this. I've been using youtube-dl for years and it's essential for viewing video content on your terms.

A little know fact that no one seems to mention about this tool is that, the name notwithstanding, it also supports many other sites besides Youtube (use --list-extractors for a full list, currently 108!)

> people easily forget all their personal ethics when someone in authority (whether their boss or the police) tells them to do something.

I don't know whether you're aware of this or not, but you just described a famous experiment which essentially arrived at the same conclusion. It's worth a read for those not familiar with it.

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

This is a collection of quick shell recipes, so in that context it's perfectly acceptable. Besides, there are some environments where you can't just install packages willy-nilly, even if they're present on the repositories.

The quick 'n dirty recipe to test the disk write speed isn't ideal, since there's the buffer cache which significantly skews the results. A much better way would be:

> sync && time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M count=10000 && sync"

Then just divide 10000 (or whatever value you choose) by the number of seconds elapsed and you should get a much closer approximation of the sequential write speed, taking into account completely flushing the buffer to disk.