alwaysanon

Part of why working from home was soo effective for me at first is all the good will and camaraderie that I'd built up with my coworkers over many years - and vice versa. I imagine that if I had started a new role during the pandemic it'd have been quite different.

When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually.

So I think personally I need to have a day every week or two when you have a coffee/lunch/beer with people and get a chance to really have the small talk and put a face with the name. I also love huddling around a whiteboard for certain problems. Before Omicron I started going in one day a week and focusing it on the socialising and the meetings where in-person felt useful.

The catch with that is that it means 'work from home' can't be 'work from anywhere' - as everybody needs to be an occasionally commutable distance from the office for it to work. I also realise that it doesn't save the company money on the office if every team comes in the same day - so you might need a roster kind of thing to maximise the space. That sounds solvable to me though - enough so where it is my preference if we can make it work for 2022...

I'd love to now see Google follow suit for Android. They have air-cover now that Apple has done it.

And, if they don't, I hope Apple beats them up on how this is a unique feature of iPhone re: protecting your privacy - the value of which was just quantifiably proven by how much it impacted Facebook to block it.

I talked about this in a recent blog post on transitioning away from Docker Desktop - https://jason-umiker.medium.com/replacing-docker-desktop-wit...

This reminded me to re-check for the first time in a year or so which sites I frequent are now dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6. Surprisingly Hacker News is one of the few that isn't these days...

I am a solutions architect for one of the cloud providers. Pre-COVID, in-person meetings were the vast majority - and most were me travelling to the customer. While, often, that was a walk or Uber across the centre of town - it also, all too often, was getting on a plane for like a 1-2hr meeting.

So, what happens from here with my job has the added complexity of "will the customer both be in the office AND want me to visit them". In some cases customers have been in the office but they have banned anybody external from coming in. In others some of the staff are there but then some aren't - and so since some will be on VC anyway it is almost better for me to VC with them to ensure an equal experience. And, actually, I have found the more senior/tenured somebody technical at the customer is the more likely it is that they'll be the ones WFH and on the VC - with the more junior in the office - and so properly catering to the remote staff is usually the better call.

Our office was VERY open plan with staff jammed in like sardines with no assigned desks (we have lockers) and was designed to be a stop-over between customer site visits. So much so that they had to limit capacity at 50% with COVID to give people a bit of space between each other. And so, ultimately whether I can work from home is dependent on what the customers want - as going to our office and taking back-to-back VC calls in open plan is kind of dumb.

Before this last lockdown in Australia I was going in one day a week to have lunch & coffees & beers with my colleages - as I did miss that. The internal stuff. But one day a week was really enough for that as long as all the people who I wanted to hang out with standardised on the same day of the week.

I am not really sure which way it'll go. Will customers be in a big hurry for me to go to them - especially if it means I am on a plane of potentially infected people, get in a Uber and take it right into their office? As much as I do miss the magic that sometimes happens when everybody gathers around a whiteboard - I really hope not...

Speaking of that - I am surprised how a couple years into this the remote collaboration/whiteboarding stuff really hasn't improved. We all should have iPads with Apple Pencils and be able to get close-is to that in-person white boarding by now?

Wow - I hadn't even considered the Electron "app" angle! That is such a disaster re: memory on my Mac that I certainly don't want every app on the iPhone to become Electron. Apple has gotten away with comparatively lower memory on the iPhone than Android - and it makes sense this'd be a key reason why...

On Windows you can re-create this ‘magic’ pretty easily (on the WSL-less Mac its a bit harder). I wrote a blog post about it. https://jason-umiker.medium.com/replacing-docker-desktop-wit...

The issue that Google Pay has is that they don't block the bank apps from doing their own payments via the NFC hardware like Apple does. And, as such, the banks here in Australia all opt to do their own tap and pay (https://www.commbank.com.au/digital-banking/tap-and-pay.html) as they want to 'own' the experience.

They fought the good fight against Apple for awhile - not least of which that they didn't want to pay Apple a percentage of each transaction. But, they eventually all caved to Apple Pay as it was the only way to get it on iPhones which have a majority (56%) marketshare here and people were citing it as a reason why they were changing to the (usually smaller) banks that did offer it.

I am kind of glad they did as I really like the Apple Pay experience and trust the to get it right more than the bank's very hit-and-miss mobile app teams...

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/28/westpac-australian-bank...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/861532/australia-mobile-...

I am an American ex-pat living in Australia. I had been using TurboTax for the last decade and this year it kept messing up the forms for my foreign tax credit so they were getting rejected by the IRS. I tried heaps of things, phoned their support, etc. for a total of 5 rejected returns. Finally, in desperation, I went and tried H&R Block's online offering and put in the same numbers and it not only was less expensive AND had me paying less tax but the forms it created were actually accepted by the IRS when I e-filed. To add insult to injury I paid TurboTax for the bad return (I tried for awhile to get them to refund it with this anecdote but it proved impossible and not worth more time trying) AND they sent me a nagging email every week for months telling me my return has been rejected and I need to refile it.

This is why some of the rustbelt cities like the one I grew up in (Buffalo, NY) will have a resurgence at some point. They have affordable housing, good infrastructure bones (including green hydro power from Niagara Falls), are on one of the world's largest sources of fresh water in the Great Lakes and have direct flights to most cities you'd need to get to for work when required. While the few months of winter rather suck, it is easier to deal with a few months of winter than these 115 degree summer days the article talks about (heating, an extra layer or two of clothing, etc.). Buffalo also has being on the Canadian border and being an hour and a half from Toronto going for it. I moved to Sydney, Australia to be with my Aussie wife (who wants to stay here) but I see several of my friends who had moved away moving back to Buffalo to be around family and buying a house for cash under these remote work conditions - and if I was States-side I'd be considering it too...

I am in Australia and our government is almost all in on this vaccine. They bought a bit of the BioNTech/Pfizer for our front line people to get started but they bought the rights to make 50 million doses (enough for two for everyone here) of the AstraZeneca domestically in our own facilities rather than have to import it. So I've been watching this with intense interest - because likely this one will be the only option I am offered here while, based on the efficacy data, it looks like I want almost any other one more. But I suppose it is better than nothing? Also does anyone know if I take this one when it is offered can I also double up and take another (better?) one later?

This is my favourite article on this topic https://fractio.nl/2014/09/19/not-a-promotion-a-career-chang...

So I don't know for sure but my understanding is that what you pay for each service does not include any support cost. It just goes to the operations of the service. The support team/division is entirely funded by the support line-item in the bill.

I spent a whole summer in my early teens were my dad paid me to write a DBase IV database/app and to inventory all of their parts (he was a co-owner in a business that serviced CNC machine tools). When I'd get tired of DB 'coding' and data entry I'd go and count parts and write the data in a little notebook to later be entered. Of course it was all a waste because neither he nor the staff ever updated the database when things came and went and it quickly went out of date. I think I was 13 and it was my first introduction to computers being used for business reasons. I was soo over it by the end but now I look back at that summer fondly - I got to go to work with him every day and he took me to lunch and I actually went from a blank PC and copy of DBase to a functional thing myself. I think it put me on my path to computing career and success (next MS VisualBasic and MS Access then 'proper' CS at College etc.).

The way that support is paid for within AWS is roughly like the way that tipping works in the US at a restaurant. The cost of the 'food' doesn't include the cost of your server/support person. Everybody knows that and so you pay the server separately in the form of a tip - usually as a % of the bill.

I really rate Jack London as the great American novelist. I like the lessor known Sea Wolf the best of his but White Fang and The Call of the Wild really capture a sense of adventure and the history and vibe of that period of American expansion into the West.

This is only true for 4k monitors on MacOS - and I often run into non-4K monitors in my work hotdesking situation (though admittedly I mainly WFH at the moment). And Windows solved that not scaling elements by the same amount several years ago.

This is only true for 4k monitors with MacOS. Anything under that looks terrible these days as it won't offer the HiDPI modes on those.

Yep - all our screens at work are not 4K but 2K (1/2 being the ultra wide curved ones) and I find that the MacBooks look just awful on them as it doesn't see them as 'retina'. It was really strange at first as I always remembered Macs to have great font rendering when displays were even lower res than that but I can't stand how it looks on them. Having Windows scale to 150% on them just looks soo much better. I have a 4K 15" ThinkPad and a 4K 27" external at home and, even though they are the same resolution, they are such different sizes and I like to scale them differently to make things closer to the same size when I drag them back and forth - but only when docked. At other times I scale at a lower percentage to give me more realestate. With Windows I can do this on the fly these days without even logging off and everything looks great and 'just works'.

Credit where credit is due this is the one area where Windows is the best OS these days. It not only will do fractional scaling but it will do display independent fractional scaling - whack in the scaling percentage on each screen and in the recent versions of Windows 10 it works well and looks great and remembers your settings when you plug that monitor back in. It is perhaps THE thing along with WSL2 (now giving me a ‘real’ Ubuntu commandline as well as Docker/Kubernetes experience where disks are mounted on both sides and things work seamlessly via VS Code) that made me choose Windows over the Mac and Linux this time around.

I thought it was ex SYD but it looks like what Qantas was planning on doing was ex BNE.

https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/qantas-sets...

Speaking as somebody who has flown one regularly between Australia and the US I'll really miss them when they go. They were a much nicer, quieter, smoother experience than the 747 or 777 - though the 787 is almost as good and I guess that'll be the way forward...

I had hopes for a 787 from Sydney to Seattle and Chicago direct but I imagine that sort of expansion is likely off the cards for the foreseeable futute...

Cisco has set things up to protect against this by basically killing the secondhand martket.

I used to put up with Cisco's "you need to pay for ongoing support (SmartNet contracts) to get any updates/firmware - including for bug fixes and firmware upates for the modem etc." even for my home equipment when I had my CCNA and was still drinking the Kool-Aid trying to keep one foot in the Cisco ecosystem. And you couldn't buy used off eBay because they wouldn't sell you that SmartNet contract on it to get the updates/firmware.

I had a Cisco 877W modem/router/WiFi for ages back when I had DSL and, not only was it outrageously overpriced (I think I paid like $1000 for it), I also needed to buy SmartNet for it to get the firmware for the modem part of it to work properly with my ISP even new out of the box (Annex N support if I remember correctly).

TBH even if Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter stuff was the same price as Cisco I'd still buy it these days if it was my money instead because it is soo liberating to just be able to go to the website and download the firmware updates free forever. My EdgeRouter Lite was not only like 1/8th the cost of an equivilent Cisco but it is still getting free updates without even needing to register a login with them 5 years after I bought it and I haven't had a single problem with it in that time...

On the spyware part it can be all turned off. They give the Group Policy tools to do it to 'Enterprise Customers' but it is all there in the settings/registry and tools like this will flip it all off for you quickly and easily. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

To his comment about truly disabling Font Smoothing on Windows I think that, in addition to disabling ClearType, there is also a font smoothing setting to turn off as well. You can disable it by: * Open System in the Control Panel * Click on Advanced System settings * Go to the Advanced tab * Click on Settings button under Performance. * Uncheck the box for Smooth edges of screen font. * Click on Apply

My mobile carrier in Australia (Vodafone) was 100% Huawei for 4G and, similarly, has had to pivot away for 5G at great expense (it seems that the Huawei 5G was a cheaper upgrade to the existing kit they had). It has delayed them doing 5G for at least a year trying to make both the tech and commercials work to pivot. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/vodafone-signs-nok...

Not only has Linux and its software ecosystem gotten better (though I guess we have the browser-fication/Electron-ification of everything to thank for that - even MS Office in a browser is pretty good now!) but the hardware options have too.

I recently got a ThinkPad X1 Extreme which is their equiv of the 16" MBP. It has a nice 4k screen, NVIDIA 1650, 6 or 8 core processor, user replaceable 2 x RAM slots (up to 64GB) AND 2 x PCI-E SSD slots, replaceable battery (take a few screws out), better keyboard than the 'fixed' Apple one, real USB-A ports in addition to the 2 x thunderbolts, real HDMI port and an SD Card slot. And it isn't much thicker or heavier than the MBP. It works great with Ubuntu. The two together feel like the ultimate expression of freedom when coming from the Macbook Pro and OSX.

Containers and Kubernetes (via microk8s) run fast and natively rather than in a VM too.

There are three downsides though - the battery life is worse (5-6 hours - but it charges 0-80% in 1 hr and I have been stuck at home near an outlet so it hasn't been too bad), trackpad okay but not as good (though I am starting to prefer the TrackPoint nub while in a more typing mode anyway) and it ran a bit hot and fan-noisy until I repasted the CPU/GPU with Thermal Grizzly. But that it was so easy to take apart and do without voiding the (onsite next day!) warranty that I'll almost forgive it...

And, in retrospect, Boeing would have been WAY ahead financially, not to mention that hundreds of deaths would have been prevented, if they had just offered to subsidise the retraining if they bought the new plane...

The government can pay for the pilot retraining - which Boeing should have done in the first place.

It is funny - half of the real desire/need for containers comes back to these sorts of issue with both node and Python. And then they bring in their own different challenges.