Fogus: Things and Stuff of 2024
blog.fogus.me
blog.fogus.me
try: Boox Go 10.3 tablet
Agree. Avoid reMarkable™. Hostile to the community and better options are out there or on the way including Boox, Onyx and the new Daylight Computer.
https://daylightcomputer.com/product
https://www.zdnet.com/article/best-note-taking-tablet/
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adopt: Blank Spaces app
No need to pay money on ios. Clear off all the icons and when you need something swipe down in the middle of the screen and open search or swipe over to the alphabetical listing. Windows Phone was way ahead of its time on this one.
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assess: TypeScript – What does it buy me over JS?
This one is a little bit flame bait... at the cost of a build step you get a much more reasonable development experience for JS targets with reliable types. The problem is smart people want to flex their brain a lot more than their restraint (where are my grug brains at?) and type astronauting makes the experience much worse. As with all things there is a balance however TS should be "Adopt".
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hold: Zig – This looks like a dead-end for me
I keep looking at Zig and playing with it but I am so productive with Go and Python for things that need to be fast enough Zig doesn't have much that I need. However Mitchell Hashimoto is using it to great success for his new MacOS terminal emulator which makes me think I just haven't tried using it in the appropriate domain... maybe a raytracer is in my future.
I say this as someone who has not purchased one, but is considering it.
I used to be a reMarkable owner (until I lost it :( ) and I agree that the devices are very user-friendly in terms of hackability and ability to use it long after the company itself is gone. Getting SSH access by flicking a toggle in the settings sounds like the opposite of "hostile to the community".
Searching for this I could find only a single example from 4 years ago where they sent a C&D to remarkable-explorer.com. Aside from the copyright issues, this site seemed to be using non-public APIs and asking the user to enter authorization tokens directly on it. I don't have all the facts but I'm not surprised this would be problematic.
I heard boox was very not gpl comiant too
As a long time member of the so-called "community" I have never once felt hostility from the company. Quite the opposite in fact.
> > assess: TypeScript – What does it buy me over JS?
> This one is a little bit flame bait
This is disingenuous and entirely unfair. The author very clearly indicated they wanted to assess whether it is beneficial for their own individual purposes. There was no intent to generalize and purport upon its general utility.
I've not done much frontend work, but I'm not sure ClojureScript aficionados would generally feel that TS has much benefit over JS when CLJS is in the picture as well. Salt your JS to your own taste imo
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/1evdt9p/c...
They even finally released the A5 X2!
* I can comfortably read any PDF; I don't think the font is too tiny. This is the main reason I bought it for.
* Android means great data support, I can open any format and I can even install the kindle app and read the books I purchased there.
* Using the pen seems nice enough, I started doing some annotations although I didn't buy this device for that.
* Nice way to sort of "airdrop" files from devices on the same network
The bad:
* I am a bit unhappy with the battery life; I hope I will tune it at some point.
* the screen is a little dark, so the "frontlight" needs to be on more often than a black and white e-ink device
The weird:
* the built-in AI assistant is trained in the PRC and has quite interesting opinions on current events and recent history.
> * the screen is a little dark, so the "frontlight" needs to be on more often than a black and white e-ink device
This is why I ultimately decided to go for a Boox Note Air 3 (sad they discontinued the B&W line). Apart from the lack of support for Boox firmware version 4, all the upsides apply without any of the downsides.
- You need strong performance, your choices are:
* C: nope, unless it's super simple library-type code, must integrate as easily as possible with everything C compatible
* C++: unless you have ecosystem lock-in, avoid this mess, stuck in an evolutionary rut where they can't undo bad decisions and keep adding more complexity (mostly good stuff, but total complexity too high)
* Zig: better than C & fully compatible with it
* Rust: ecosystem tailwinds, bit better safety than Zig, steeper learning curve and uglier code
* Go: ok but GC probably means not the best perf
* Java: JIT means it can handily beat non-painstakingly hand-optimized C code in some particular cases (requires a lot of wisdom to choose this for perf)
* something that will incur a lot of pain in some other way like Fortran, Forth or Ada
* C: ez
* Zig/C++: harder but still ez, need to write some wrappers when using features nont in C
If anyone was going to manage recursive, fractal, nerd sniping, it would be fogus, of course.
P.S. I used to do a lot of Clojure, and definitely appreciate your work on it!
Happy to discuss further if anyone has any thoughts.
Thanks. I figured, but boy, does this annoy me. Google, for example, refuses to show me the weather without location permission. I am perfectly capable of telling it where I want to see the weather, but it will not allow me to see any weather without a location permission. (Usually I think Samsung screws up their design decisions relative to Google, but they do get this one right.)
Similarly, it seems to me, a launcher does not need to share my location with a third party to request weather. It can simply request weather in, say, a ZIP code, and then, if it must, refine the results it presents to me based on my location. (Or, better, there must be some way for it to delegate weather requests to a weather app of my choice, and let the weather app figure out my location through whatever mechanism I have already approved for that app.)