antonyh

I switched bank in the UK due to enforced app use, from Starling to Nationwide. They use a card reader to issue codes, so I can still use the web. I see this as a much of a must-have as physical bank branches with real cashier services.

I popped open a WD 'My Passport' drive, 4TB. It's exactly that - no SATA connection at all, only a USB on a custom board. I should have guessed this, it really is too short to have much in the way of other electronics. Thanks for confirming about the larger models, it's always good to know where we can source spares in an emergency. Top tip about NVMe - I would never have guessed this was an option.

The big ones with a separate power brick, I've not looked inside the smaller USB-powered ones. My interest was in the >8Gb desktop drives. I'd imagine they're the same deal, but hard to say from the outside. I did have a part of one at one point, a USB-to-SATA circuit board that was useful for adhoc connecting 2.5" drives, but I can't recall if that came from an prebuilt or an old BYOD enclosure.

I have a old WD small one that's kinda faulty (plugged it in then put it down heavily, it's not been right since), I should pop it open just to see what's inside, but it's older than the USBC models so could easily have changed. In any case, I don't think AI is eating the stock of slow laptop HDDs, so I'm not sure there's any need to buy these just for shucking.

Admittedly I've not been tracking price, only availability, and only in the size I might need.

I've shucked WD MyBook drives, just a plain SATA inside. I guess that it's cheaper to have a stock drive and a cheap SATA-USB adaptor in a shell than do custom electronics. I've not heard of any that are otherwise, but I've only done a few. I suppose it's possible that they could solder them in or have custom electronics but I would have thought that rare. It's frequently discussed on Reddit too, so there's plenty of folk doing this.

Maybe shucking USB HDDs is the short-term answer.

I read it as both, but UK suppliers have stock of various SATA HDDs available in large and small sizes. It's hard to say if prices will rocket or availability decline, or both. I don't normally advocate panic-buying, but if it's needed now is the time. I have one NAS spare on hand, I don't want or need a drawer full of them, but it'll be a royal pain if I do and can't get parts.

Competent is not the same as good. I can do the very basic things I need in Sheets, but the moment it needs more than =A1+B2 then it's uphill all the way. I also don't know how performant it is with larger datasets. I use Libre Office instead and despite the horrible UI it's been speedy and accurate. Desktop Excel is still king of the spreadsheets.

As for Slides, it's pure junk compared to the Keynote, but iCloud has it's own problems so I use this offline-only.

With the web version of Word 365 or whatever it's called, we've had so many problems syncing with OneDrive and sharing and whether it's showing the right version of the document that I'd be happy to never see it again, but their foothold in education means I'm forced to deal with it and provide technical support.

I don't think the world needs another protocol, we need to leverage the ones we have. This space (text-based real-time messaging with media attachments) is feature complete, there's nothing left to add. The remaining value-adds are exactly that; optional extensions for productivities suites and integrating SaaS tools. Pricing and Privacy are another two concerns, and personally for the latter I'd like human chat to be as far away from AI as possible.

I use Google Chat, only because my clients use it. Network effects matter. Personally I think it's terrible, but I wasn't a fan of Slack either but I'm not entirely sure why as it's pretty much just sending text. Maybe the opportunity to innovate in this space is UI/UX, and performance/reliability (Signal has been slow/flaky recently for us).

This is fantastic. As an absolute beginner in the language I've added to my list of learning resources for Gaeilge. I've tried to find a better scan of the book online, but it's not anywhere - there's some Máiréad Ní Ghráda on archive.org but this one is missing.

It also looks like the PDF in the repo is just the first 20 pages, it would be worthwhile scanning the whole thing cleanly and uploading to preserve this important work.

Only in a system where the buyer sets the price.

I use Sonatype Nexus OSS, it works fine.

Then they are fools. I left a one-star review and uninstalled it.

Apple News+ is so bad, it's literally unusable. Unfortunately I can't unsubscribe without paying MORE. I use all the other services on a family subscription except this one, but if I remove it the total cost goes up. I hate that I'm supporting something that is this bad, and the quantity of ads is the main factor - not only am I a paying customer, it's still filled with the worst kind of promoted 'content'.

Sounds really clean and simple, combined with classic developer diligence and hard effort to get it built right. Thanks for sharing.

Trust it to proxy artifacts from the web? Yes I think so.

Trust it not to leak credentials? No, that's something that is never taken for granted.

Trust it to hold a full history of uploaded binaries? That depends on the value of the releases. For incubator work, or web projects, or even Appstore apps where it's released to those stores to manage, maybe there should be enough trust. I just wouldn't use it for code where I want access to many stable versions, and I wouldn't put it publicly on the web either - not that I would do so with Sonatype Nexus without vendor support and many safeguards. I think it'll earn trust over time, once folk are convinced to use it for real workloads.

There's a lot of forms of trust.

I've not done enough Rust to truly know, but it looks reasonable from looking at the tests, a few models, some implementation code.

It doesn't use the 'unsafe' keyword anywhere, but that's not necessarily an indicator. Uses unsafe-libyaml which is like what it sounds (a hacky port of libyaml) but is no longer maintained (archived on GH in March 2024), and may have better choices. An SBOM would highlight these dependencies better than me doing random searches through the code.

I'm not sure I'd have put a default in the OIDC callback to localhost, that's about the only thing I've seen in a quick 5-minute skim through. I do like the comments and the lack of emojis :-)

I too would like to know the process, if OP is willing to share.

I appreciate the honesty about using Claude and the time it took to build this, and it shows how things can look when guided by someone who knows what they are doing.

On the other hand, it also shows that it took three weeks, so why should I use this instead of building a custom toolchain myself that is optimised for what I need and actually use? Trimming away the 45+ formats to the 5 or so that matter to my project. It raises the question - is 'enterprise' software doomed in favour of a proliferation of custom built services where everybody has something unique, or is the real value in the 'support' packages and SLAs? Will devs adopt this and put 'Artifact Keeper' on their CV, or will they put 'built an artifact toolchain with Claude'?

But then again, kudos to you for building something that can (and probably should) eat the lunch of the enterprise-grade tools that are simply unaffordable to small business, individual contractors, and underfunded teams. Truth be told, I'm not going to build my own, so this is certainly something I want to put in a sandbox and try out, and also this is inspirational and may finally convince me that I should give Claude a fair go if it's capable of being guided to create high quality output.

I tried Boox (Note Air 3 Colour) but it wouldn't run the one 'android' app I needed - O'Reilly bookshelf. Returned it and got an iPad instead. Seemed ok but only half supports apps. I didn't have it long enough to suffer pen accuracy or general performance, but the colours were muddy.

Obsidian has a paid subscription sync service and is free but not open source software.

Joplin has a paid subscription sync service and is free and open source software.

It's a different business model, but it's possible.

I've heard of Hurd, but never felt tempted to try it. That could be an interesting option.

All I want is init scripts and X11, but the horizons are shrinking. I've already compromised with systemd, and I don't like it. I see BSD in my future, or at least a linux distro from the list here https://nosystemd.org/ - probably Gentoo. Nothing to stop me, absolutely nothing at all. I just need a few days free to backup/wipe/reinstall/reconfigure/restore_data and I'll be good. Better make that a few weeks. Maybe on my next machine build. It's not easy, but I build machines for long term use.

As for Linux from Scratch - This is something that's been on my radar, but without the part I'm truly interested in (learning more about SysV) then I'm less inclined to bother. I don't buy the reason of Gnome/KDE - isn't LfS all about the basics of the distro than building a fully fledged system? If it's the foundation for the other courses, but it still feels weak that it's so guided by a future GUI requirement for systemd when it's talking about building web servers and the like in a 500Mb or less as the motivation.

I was kind of hoping this would let me have ads that I get paid for.

One would hope code reviews could pick up these deceptions, but then again they would spot the use of forbidden functions too albeit much later in the dev cycle than is optimal. Breaking the build early is a solid idea, before it's even committed to source control. No different to applying PMD, CPD, Checkstyle, eslint, yamllint, other linters, but with a custom rule. I really want to use this pattern, there's semi-deprecated code in so many codebases.

For more control and to close that loophole, it could be possible to put annotations/comments in the code to `/* ignore this line */` in the same way that eslint does? Or have a config that lists how many uses in each file, instead of one-per-project?? There's always refinements, but I'm sure that for many projects the simplicity of one counter is more than enough, unless you have devious developers.

Amazon UK is the only reliable source of Pentel Energel 0.7 Green rollerball pens. For everything else, there's other places.

Any other car company would create an S / X MkII.

I'm outside the US, and boycotting Amazon for anything I can get elsewhere (which turns out isn't everything, but best efforts and all that). The shift towards AI is either a very bad thing (as per Microslop and the raft of recent articles about quality dropping), or just a cheap excuse to replace expensive staff with cheaper people.

Alternatively they may be using AI in HR as part of the decision making, and it's made the determination that these folk can go "because of AI" based on past firings and performance since then.

The only tools pinning me to Windows were photo editing apps (Capture One, Adobe), and some music apps (Reason, a whole bunch of other apps) that I barely used. Cut over to Debian about 4 years ago when my laptop started having thermal issues and Covid encouraged me to buy a tower desktop machine. Haven't looked back, it's been so much more productive. The strange and toxic-to-me design choices in the Win11 UI helped motivate the rapid transition.

The only thing that's caused any issue is power management, I'm fairly sure it's not optimal, but it's still better than Win11. That's purely down to lack of effort on my part, and basically setting it for max performance because it's not important to me for a desktop machine. Everything (and I mean everything - sound, video, wifi, bluetooth) else is 100% out of the box working on mid-range commodity hardware, albeit with excessive RAM for my needs. Some of it is a bit clumsy looking in places, but it did look weird on Windows too with some of the apps.

When I did have trouble, it was not like I could get support from Microsoft as the community forum is a joke, but with Linux at least I stand a fighting chance of working around any potential problems.

Is there anything on Windows I miss? No.

Is there anything on Mac that I miss? Yes, there's a few things that I like about MacOS (pre-glass) but I have a MacBook Air for those which is good for occasional use but not as a daily driver.

It should have been an option, even dumb old CSV if it needed structured data. I didn't bother trying to natively ship and used promtail instead, to get it into Loki, so I could query via Grafana.

Wow what an idea, that would work so well and give me a trivial way to build apps to do alerts, monitoring, shipping to remotes, and whatnot in virtually any language.