ShinyCyril

I'm working my way through the show after having just finished the first book. I found the crew of the Rocinante to be fairly generic characters in the book, but at least they were likeable. In the screen adaptation, I find the constant conflict among the crew a little grating at times – Amos and Holden aren't particularly likeable. Miller seems like a much more interesting character, and I think he is played well in the series (I will have to look up the actor who plays his part...).

The dialogue seems quite hard to understand – it falls victim to the typical mumbled, gravely voices that seem to be present in many American shows and films.

Right, it's why I don't trust these services myself. To be fair, while I say that Google Photos almost wiped his photo collection out, we didn't actually realise that sync had been enabled in the first place. I guess in a funny kind of way it saved his photo collection (otherwise it would have been toast when we reset the device to get past the lock), even if it did make it painstakingly frustrating to retrieve them again.

I did. I got a couple of random low-res thumbnails (they were just generic enough that I wasn't sure if they were actually original photos, or Google samples), and that was it – the rest were mysteriously missing.

They were clearly there on the server somewhere, but something was causing them not to be shown on the web, or the latest version of the Google Photos app.

I don't fully understand the underlying cause, so take this with a pinch of salt... but my girlfriend's father's photo collection almost got wiped out by Google Photos.

After being locked out of his Samsung tablet (supposedly it set itself a lockscreen out of the blue), I checked whether it had backed his photos up on Google Photos, but nothing there... After resetting it (it seems Samsung removed the ability to reset the lockscreen password via your Google account) I assumed that the photos were lost. However upon opening the app we rejoiced when they started appearing. Shortly afterwards, the Google Photos app popped up a message stating that an upgrade was required, after which all of the photos had disappeared again.

The workaround was to reset the tablet, open up Google Photos, wait until the photos had synced and then disconnect from the internet as soon as possible to prevent Google Photos from trying to update itself (the message couldn't be dismissed). My hunch was that the version of Google Photos that shipped with the tablet was very old and they have long-since updated the format for storing photos, hence why they wouldn't show up online?

It does not. I really hope they add the feature soon – in the meantime I use gpg on the commandline.

I've been tempted to add the support in myself, however I do not have any experience with the elementary codebase or Vala, so a cryptographic system would be a very poor choice for a first project!

I have not used ProtonMail myself so I can't help you there I'm afraid.

While I use Fastmail with my own domain, it is not self-hosted. My MX records point to Fastmail's servers.

Bingo. I don't care for the comments or any of the 'related' clickbait videos.

I didn't miss anything when I left Gmail, but I imagine it depends a lot on how you use email. I switched to Fastmail on my own domain and actually prefer the webmail interface over Gmail.

I mainly use IMAP via Mail.app on my laptop and phone, Pantheon Mail (formerly Geary) on my desktop. I use PGP wherever I can. I haven't received any spam at all yet, so I can't comment on how their spam filters compare to Gmail. I maintain a zero inbox – important stuff gets archived, and everything else is deleted. This means that I don't miss Gmail's search feature as hardly keep any emails. Obviously your mileage may vary here. They also support CalDAV and CardDAV – so all of my notes, contacts, calendar items etc. are synced across my devices.

I've moved from Google completely, and for the most part, I don't really miss them all that much.

- Search -> DuckDuckGo (I do miss Google here – DDG's search results pale in comparison)

- Gmail -> Fastmail

- Maps -> Citymapper and Apple Maps

- Chrome -> Safari on macOS, Firefox on everything else (my experience with FF is a bit 'meh' – it was incredibly laggy on my work laptop, but runs great on my desktop)

I will have to check this out when I get the chance. I was deeply saddened when YouTube killed their "Feather beta" feature which presented a super-minimal version of the site with the intention of reducing load times on slower internet connections.

There's some discussion about it on the /r/analog subreddit, including a test scan, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/analog/comments/5d4s2c/google_relea...

A friend and I implemented a similar interface for picking a place to eat with your partner / friend. We felt the Tinder-style interaction led to a really nice UX, but didn't gain any traction. It's good to see this interaction being applied to areas other than dating!

FWIW, Thailand is the perfect place to fly into and just make things up as you go. Everything is super-cheap, and there are minibuses and trains which can be booked a day before (and probably even on the day) which can get you anywhere you need to go for practically nothing.

If you haven't done much travelling before then it can be a bit of a culture shock, but is so forgiving if you make mistakes because everything is so cheap.

Forgive my ignorance - what implications does this have? Would Evolution run as some kind of daemon, and Geary just add the presentation layer on top?

I've been considering whether a mirrorless would be a good fit for me for some time. I recently set out backpacking and ditched my DSLR for a much smaller 35mm rangefinder. While there are times where I think "I wish I had my DSLR so I could use <lens X>", I've been getting by just fine. Similarly a friend just came back from a trip to South America and Australia on which he took a small Sony point-and-shoot (with very nice results).

Ultimately it's the person behind the camera which makes most difference, but I must say I've been tempted to sell my DSLR and replace it with an entry / prosumer mirrorless simply for the size.

I also own a 5S. While I can't say it's as fast as the day I bought it (I got it second-hand with iOS 9 loaded), it's certainly faster than the 3GS it replaced! The 3GS in turn, was a replacement for my Motorola Milestone (Droid in the US) which, despite being released the same year, received a grand total of one major OS updates and then was dropped.

Ah interesting, I didn't realise they had an office in London. Are there any engineering vacancies at the moment?

Where do you work? There seems to be a significant lack of hardware jobs in London.

While we're on the subject of tech jobs in London... does anyone work with FPGAs?

It depends if you are willing to give up luxuries or not. My girlfriend and I rent a cosy, but modern studio apartment in East London for about ~£800 p/m. Obviously that money would get you a lot more in most other places in the world, but if you are in finance (or a similarly-paying job) then it's really not a push. It takes me about 50 minutes to cycle to my job in central London - it keeps me fit, and saves an awful lot of money that would otherwise be spent being packed into the tube like sardines for a similarly long, but significantly less pleasant journey.

I tried doing this the other day, hoping that I would finally be able to get a working OSX setup on my desktop (have made several attempts with no success at getting it working bare-metal on my Z600). Sadly it just ended with more kernel panics, something I was hoping would be avoided as I got the impression from some sources that QEMU was a more straightforward solution than trying to run it on bare-metal.

Having said that, I've been getting more and more frustrated with OSX (had a great experience with Leopard on a PowerBook G4, and my 2013 MacBook Air is easily the best laptop I've owned, however personally I don't care for the direction that they are taking OSX these days), and ended up using it as an excuse to update to the latest version of elementary OS, which certainly isn't without its teething problems.

Hardware acceleration can be done using PCI passthrough to pass your graphics card on to the guest OS. IOMMU and VFIO are two terms I commonly see associated with this, but having never done it myself I am not sure what the difference between them is - perhaps someone can chime in?

I absolutely loved the design too. Simple, readable, but still striking.

For those outside of the US the link (https://www.amnesty.org/en/get-involved/take-action/Edward-S...) does not work. Anyone know what the correct link should be?

Slightly off-topic, but IRC discussions don't come up too regularly.

What channels / networks are people hanging out in?

I mainly lurk on ##re and ##security on Freenode.

Aircraft broadcast ADS-B signals which contain tracking information, which is used by live flight trackers to map out each flight in real-time. The problem is that there are large blind spots when aircraft go over oceans due to the lack of receivers, so this is intended to increase coverage.

The SSL certificate on your site is invalid - thought you might like to know.

It worries me how it's suddenly become acceptable to have 1MB+ pages (6.2MB in this case).

YNAB still updates their 'classic' desktop version, which also has a nice mobile app to accompany it.

For me it was when I started buying hardware stuff second-hand. It made me realise that very few people actually need as much processing power as they say they do. I used to subscribe to PC-building communities where people would drop a couple of hundred pounds extra on an i7 for a gaming rig because they also did 'video editing'. If you actually produce videos and need to do transcoding / rendering on a deadline then fine - but I suspect the majority are simply editing their gaming captures together to upload to YouTube. Of course it's great to have hobbies and I'm not going to tell anyone how to spend their money, but personally I think that it's an unnecessary cost if you just want it to transcode game captures when you could leave a much cheaper i5 running overnight instead (or buy a Xeon).

My workstation (FPGA development, programming, and a little gaming every now and then) was an ex-business unit. My 2013 MacBook Air belonged to an ex-student wanting to upgrade (can't think why - I don't even remember the specs myself because it runs as smooth as butter and I've never had reason to check otherwise!). Same with my phone - I bought a friend's old iPhone 3GS years ago. This year I've finally had to retire it because it was no longer reliable and I need it to get into my house (another story). My audio setup consists of a pair of vintage bookshelf speakers a friend picked up from a car-boot sale for a tenner, and my amp was gifted to me years ago by an old teacher (one new transistor and it was good to go)!

The bottom line is that buying second-hand made me realise that the extra bit of performance isn't worth the significantly higher asking price. I no longer care about small aesthetic imperfections like scuffs and scratches provided it doesn't break functionality (like a scratch on a lens for example).

Figure out what you really need your equipment to do for you then do your research and pick up something used. Be satisfied when it gets you 90% of the way, and you'll start to wonder why you ever lusted after shiny new things! At least that worked for me.

I can't comment for the ThinkPad 13, but I've been really disappointed with the quality of Lenovo's recent ThinkPad offerings. I used to have a 1st Gen X1 Carbon Touch and I swapped it for a MacBook Air after a year. Terrible battery life, shockingly bad display (other than the low resolution and poor colours, they placed some kind of protective film over the top which made everything a bit blurry). Screen wobbled, fan spun up way more than necessary (I don't think I've ever noticed the fan on my MacBook spinning up).

Before that I had an IBM ThinkPad X40 which I absolutely loved - it was a solid little machine. A friend of mine just had a fan go in his X230, and another friend had a T430 with a defective touchpad. Of course every laptop will have some failures, but it seems that the build quality on the newer models really isn't up to the same level it used to be.

I would heartily recommend looking into purchasing a second-hand ThinkPad. If you're taking it in to uni regularly then probably the smaller X210 or X220 would be a good fit.