FoomFries

My work laptop is the same, and I’ve never thought to look into productivity tools. Any other recommendations you find worth mentioning to those of us not in the know? Those three look excellent.

Been enjoying my HD3 for a couple years. Great pair of speakers.

So you can’t sell a physical console game without the console? This seems to follow similar logic.

Until I need some software which is abandoned and depends on this version which is used on an internal network and thus I’m less concerned about its vulnerabilities.

Suffice to say there’s always a case for its use. I think it should be made clearer when you end up using a vulnerable library, but I think they should remain available.

I think for this and for photos it’s more the idea of imperfection. That patina, wabi-sabi or other entropic term gives an emotional response I don’t find in digital. I’m not looking for lossless digital I can’t really discern, which DAC basket to put my eggs in, or if the latest digital remaster just demolishes the loudness delta. I have, but these days I want a more tactile experience. I’m looking for the experience which surrounds the music or photo. And when I didn’t take that picture or record that music, it feels more ‘real’ when I can vicariously feel the experience involved.

Anecdotally, I went on a trip with some friends recently and everyone took their phones while one person took a manual camera. Everyone uploaded to a shared album at the end, and the pictures which paint the picture of the weekend to me are the ones shot by the amateur which are often a bit out of focus compared to the hyper accurate self-stabilizing self-focusing technology.

Perhaps it’s the romantic in all of us.

More relatable perhaps is the idea of charisma. If I’m interviewing a technically skilled person who is a bull in a China shop when it comes to personality, it doesn’t matter what they create - they’re breaking the team with their oblivious nature.

If people will actively seeking other teams because of a new member’s personality, it’s something you can bet will be looked for look for in an interview.

What we are entitled to do, what is polite to do and what we can do for clickthroughs are three different things. Coming to conclusions on partial information may as well be jumping to them in many circumstances. The ideal approach would be to add a disclaimer of where the fact to supposition transitions, and if the conclusion is sensible at least source similar cases.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck. Or a duck robot, or my kid running around with my phone again imitating a duck while watching duck YouTube videos.

Whatever the conclusion, state facts but don’t state conclusions as facts.

Most of the time scrollbars should be designed away. Unless the experience is moving at an undetermined rate to fly past the desired content multiple times, there are better tools. Page keys, scroll wheels (and all of the synonymous gesture experiences), search, collapsing and expanding content, etc.

The bar seems to be more familiarity and less functionality to me.

I would love to hear some resources for improving. Separating the chaff from the wheat on resources is always difficult for the layman, similar to learning an instrument for the first time. Most things I find on improving writing is related to fiction, and other areas of improvement seem unnecessarily anecdotal or story driven.

But then you have a case where the officer will try and use what you said against you. So, even if it wasn’t knowingly in truth, in practice it will be up to you to defend that truth. Whereas silence saves you the hassle.

Trivialities in logistics and their impact on you as a person are two different things. If I added 500ms of latency to a keyboard (ssh, a bunch of VPNs, etc) I imagine a janitor would say ‘it’s a trivial part of your job, you’re getting paid for it.’ Yet that would cause many developers to pull their hair out.

It seems odd to me that people don’t fly with earplugs or white noise generating sources (headphones, etc). Stranger still that a pilot would forego these conveniences.

Magnetic force falls off pretty quickly - a phone case can cause enough of a difference to make that force lackluster. Apparently, it seems, enough to put magnets in the case itself to better maintain that force.

Additionally, it looks like the goal is to let your phone be held vertically, while attached only to the magnet. This makes sense for car mounts, where you may want to mount your GPS via magnet and charge it simultaneously.

I recently ordered an illustrated novel with a rather heavy paperweight - Amazon shipped it in weakly padded envelopes and the corners were banged up. I even bothered to contact their customer service to ship it with better packaging, to no avail on the replacement item.

I then ordered 10 of the damn things, to see what the packaging would do. 4 came in one box, 3 came in another, and 3 came in individual poorly padded envelopes. The ones in boxes had insufficiently inflated plastic bags, and only 2 books out the entire 12 ordered (original, replacement, and the 10) were what Amazon defines as 'New' upon arrival, though all were shipped as 'New'.

Definitely a frustrating experience.

Edit: I returned all but the one showing the least damage, and received a full refund after some time.

I'm curious how you arrived at some of these conclusions.

- Sluggish UI -> I've never experienced this in the last three years of using my 2017 MBP.

- Inadequate package manager -> Somewhat nebulous, most package managers on Linux are available on Unix.

- Slow and large updates -> I honestly don't pay much attention as I have updates install automatically while I'm sleeping, but what size differences have you noticed?

- Slow boot to work -> Never experienced this, boot is less than a minute regularly.

- Can't have a minimal desktop -> Beyond hiding all icons and the dock, what more are you looking for?

- High memory usage of base system -> Never seen this come close to the main applications I use on a daily basis. What quantified results are you receiving to notice this?

I find the trick is to do maintenance while doing meaningful (as described by the powers that be) work. So when a new feature or bug fix is asked for, add another 15% to the time required, and clean up the code base a bit.

The knee-jerk, which rarely works, is to demand time to refactor everything or ignore everything until it breaks irreparably.

I think in your case, simplifying a script by a dozen lines a week or so could have been done without taking away "points". Abandoning the status quo and committing too much time will inevitably be looked down on in most industries, however.