bxparks

Every 2 years I take Xfce (Xubuntu, Mint Xfce) for a test drive. It seems light and fast, I want to like it. Then every 2 years, I rediscover that the resize border on each window is 1px wide, which is completely unusable. When I google for a solution, the answer seems to be use Alt-Left-Mouse. I don't understand how that is a solution. I don't want to use 2 hands to resize a window.

Funny enough, I stopped reading the Register after a few attempts because I disliked its headlines and tone. "To each his own" I guess.

I think you are joking about "USB4.1 2x2 Gen 1 V2", but I can't tell. USB naming is messed up.

I used KDE back in the 2004-2007 time frame then switched to GNOME. Back then, I think GNOME was similar enough to KDE that I hardly noticed much difference. I haven't used KDE since then, but I take it for a spin every 2 years just to see what's going on:

* Ubuntu KDE (Kubuntu 22.04) is one of the few Ubuntu flavors (I think Lubuntu was the other one) that would not automatically scale the font for my 2560x1440 14" screen. So I literally could not read anything in the Installer. I had to peer through a magnifying glass to make it through the installer. Even after logging in, the fonts were so small, I had to keep using the magnifying glass to find the Display (or Monitors?) control panel to set that 175% or 200% option (or was it the 1600x900 screen size option).

* Some (most?) of the various desktop icons seem to be specified in raw pixels. For example, the task bar at the bottom was set to some pixel size which was impossible to read on my laptop screen.

* The KDE UI paradigm seemed familiar, like Windows XP or Windows 7. But the enormous number of configuration options seemed overwhelming for someone who doesn't use KDE all the time.

I normally spend most of my time in the Terminal window and the Firefox browser. I actually don't do a lot of stuff in the graphical desktop. So I want my desktop to be functional but stay mostly out of my way and not require too much configuring and maintenance. KDE always seemed a bit too high maintenance for me.

Would you believe that it took me 1-2 years to figure that out? I swiped that little arrow awkwardly with my mouse for 1-2 years, before I accidentally hit a key to get that login screen. I think the issue was that I'm sitting in front of a graphical user interface, which to me means using a mouse. It never occurred to me that I had to hit a key on a keyboard to get a login screen on a graphical user interface.

I think that's when I cursed at GNOME, blew it away, and installed MATE.

I used to use GNOME for many years, mostly because it was the default on Ubuntu. Now it's one of my least favorite desktops, I'll use almost anything else. I got frustrated at the seemingly random, user-hostile, backwards-incompatible changes from one version to the next. From my rough memory:

* The desktop icons and click-and-drag shortcuts got removed a few years ago. This is a GUI workflow that I've been using on Windows, MacOS, Atari OS, Amiga OS, going back to the 1980s. Gone.

* They somehow obscured the sleep (or was it the shutdown) button in one version, so that I couldn't find it anymore. I think I had to search the internets for this basic functionality.

* I think one version of Ubuntu GNOME obscured the login screen. I installed it, saw no login screen, clicked everywhere, but nothing happened. Just stared at a desktop wallpaper. If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

* I think there is still no image preview in their file explorer. I don't know, I don't use it anymore.

These days, I use Ubuntu MATE or Mint MATE, and occasionally drop into Mint Cinnamon to check if they squashed enough little UI bugs for me to use as daily driver. (For example, in the latest Mint Cinnamon, I set my Terminal to 161 columns. But Cinnamon would open the window at Full Screen instead. Oops, back to Mint MATE.)

Two small things I would love to see changed with the current calendar, but will never happen:

* February deserves to have more days, so that every month has either 30 or 31 days. Taking away 1 day from August and January, and giving them to Feb would do it. In leap years, Feb can have 31 days.

* The year ought to start on March 1st. So that September regains its place as the 7th month, October the 8th month, November the 9th month, and December the 10th month. Because that's what "Sept", "Oct", "Nov", and "Dec" mean.

I haven't used Thunderbird in 10-20 years. Why does Thunderbird allow you do that, but not Gmail? My personal Gmail account has ~350 folders (labels) and ~300 filter rules. One of my previous work GSuite accounts had probably 1000-2000 labels and filters.

I migrated from Outlook to Gmail, and I found that I could process 2-4X the amount of emails as I could on Outlook. The key feature for me was the vi-key bindings in Gmail.

Even more confusing, the time printed by our computers may appear to be UTC, but is probably POSIX (or Unix) time. It is very close to UTC but ignores leap seconds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

During a positive leap second, the POSIX second repeats itself (an alternative mental model could be that the given POSIX-second lasts 2 UTC-seconds). During a negative leap second, the given POSIX-second disappears (or alternatively, the given POSIX-second lasts 0 UTC-seconds).

On my Ubuntu box, the `date +%s` command prints the number of POSIX seconds since 1970-01-01, not the number of UTC seconds since 1970-01-01. To get the number of UTC seconds, we must add the number of intervening leap seconds since 1970-01-01.

I get a headache every time I have to think about this.

> All native Linux filesystems (except ext4) are case sensitive about filenames which utterly confuses most users. This wonderful peculiarity doesn't have any sensible rationale. Less than 0.01% of users in the Linux world depend on this feature.

Lots of useful tidbits in this article, but I would disagree with the above.

1) The Unicode rules for converting lowercase to uppercase, then back to lowercase, are so convoluted, that normal developers or end-users cannot fully understand them. If I recall, the round-trip is impossible in some cases because information is lost in the conversion.

2) I have seen at least 2 occasions where one of my coworkers changed the case of a directory name on a MacOS (case-INsensitive as I discovered), pushed the changes to the remote server (GitLab or GitHub), which then proceeded to corrupt their git project badly. They had to blow away their local git repo and re-clone the project to recover. I never quite understood what happened, but I recall having to fix some stuff on my Linux box, which didn't have the case-folding problem.

I think if a file name looks different (because of case), it should be treated as being different. But I'm probably in the minority.

I have tried learning FreeBSD occasionally, mostly for nostalgia because I learned Unix on BSD 4.3 (or 4.4?) on MicroVaxes many years ago. But I get stuck on some very basic things:

- My wifi card doesn't work. The installer recognizes it, but the driver doesn't work.

- The console terminal defaults to 80x25, I don't know how to resize it.

- I can't figure out how to start X Windows.

- If I run it in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), the network bridging doesn't work so my FreeBSD instance has no internet access.

It's probably my fault, I'm sure it's in the docs somewhere. But it probably means that I'm not the target audience for FreeBSD, since I don't have the time and patience to figure out the most basic things.

> I seldom reboot since linux hibernate got good

Hmm, I have not owned a computer that can hibernate in Linux since about the early 2000's. Every 3-4 years, I try to activate hibernate on one of my computers using the latest Ubuntu distribution, and have failed every time.

What is that replacement? java.util.logging?

Just want to thank everyone who responded with suggestions. I think it's amusing that there seems to be at least 5 different solutions to this problem: pyenv, nox, tox, asdf, docker.

What is the best way for an author of a Python package to develop and test on multiple versions of Python (e.g. 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10), and be able to switch easily among the various Python versions? Every time I try to research this, I get lost in the chaos of Python packaging and environments.

Currently I do a `pip3 install -e .`, which uses the default Python provided by the OS. Then I hope that my continuous integration matrix catches any problems in the other Python versions.

The Li-Ion battery on the Klein TI250 is not replaceable as far as I can tell. It will be e-waste within 3-5 years. Same with all the FLIR cameras that I came across. The few models with replaceable batteries at my price range were the Fluke VT02/VT04A (4xAA) and VT04 (an 18650 with a custom connector unfortunately). So I went with the Fluke, even though the FLIRs seemed to have better specs.

Before yesterday, I would have said Cloudflare. But after (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31573854) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353), I'm planning to transfer out of Cloudflare. Probably Namecheap or Porkbun.

I recently transferred my domains from Google to Cloudflare precisely to avoid being terminated by Google's false-positive AI. Now Cloudflare is pulling the same stunt? Is there anything you can say to reassure your customers? Or do we need to find another registrar?

Similar to the software industry, politicians don't get elected for maintaining old bridges. They get elected by building new bridges.

The problem with using a burner phone is that you could be assigned a phone number that has been blacklisted due to its abuse by a previous owner. Then Google terminates your account as soon as you use the banned number.

I'll be an armchair economist and throw out my ideas for why this is happening:

* Dramatic increase of inequality in the last 40 years means that wealthiest buyers are determining the price of the entire housing inventory. I know too many people with multiple houses. Related to this, the global slosh of foreign capital looking to launder their money, or park their money in tangible assets.

* Perverse incentives in the US tax code. Stepped-up Cost Basis means that aging Baby Boomers are highly incentivized to never sell their homes. After their death, their beneficiaries receive a huge tax benefit.

* Many of the economically productive areas of the country have zoning laws which restrict new housing development, which cause scarcity, which drive up the value of existing houses for the benefit of existing homeowners.

* There has been almost no productivity increase in the construction industry in the last several decades. Due to their inefficiency, the industry is incentivized towards expensive, higher-profit houses, instead of producing higher volume, lower-cost houses.

This Miracle Kitchen would be my Kitchen-from-Hell. Every unnecessary moving part is something that needs to be maintained, and is something that will eventually break and will need to be repaired or replaced.

When I moved into my current house, I found many screws holding the hinges of the kitchen cabinet doors were loose and needed to be tightened. One hinge had become completely disconnected because its screws had stripped from the side board. The previous owners had not performed the most basic maintenance of just tightening some screws. I suspect that a motorized cupboard with motors, gears, rails, and rollers would be a maintenance nightmare. A sink that moves up and down means plumbing pipes that move, which gives me images of water leaking slowly behind the cabinet and destroying the subfloor.

I went through this ritual almost every time:

    $ java --version
    Unrecognized option: --version
    $ java -v
    Unrecognized option: -v
    $ java -version
    openjdk version "1.8.0_312"

Looks like this was fixed in JDK 11.

But Java isn't as sadistic as Go lang:

    $ go --version
    [scrolls off screen]
    $ go --version | less
    [scrolls off screen]
    $ go --version 2>&1 | less
    [search for 'version' command]
    $ go version
    go version go1.17.2 linux/amd64

Not just Docs, it's Google Drive that I find hard to replace (Docs, Sheets, Draw, Slide, etc). The recent debacle with Legacy GSuite motivated me to pay for a Microsoft 365 account, and create a sync of my Google Drive to OneDrive, converting the proprietary Google format into Office format. Then I do a 3-2-1 backup of the OneDrive files. (Backing up the local Google Drive folder is no good, because all you get is a stub of the Google proprietary files.)

Then I moved most of my other Google services (e.g. Domains, Gmail, Calendar, Search, Chrome) off to other companies and products (e.g. Cloudflare, Fastmail, DDG, Firefox). I figure that every interaction with Google proportionally increases the probability that my account will be terminated. So I moved off Google to protect my Google Drive, which seems ironic.

The last Google service that I need to move off is Google Voice. I haven't done a lot of research on this yet. If anyone knows of a good alternative that provides SMS-to-email forwarding, I'd be interested.

Cloudflare Domain Registrar. They sell at-cost, so $9.95/year for a .com/.net domain. But don't use your gmail account as the admin account.

For email forwarding, Cloudflare Email Routing looks promising. I'm just about to give it a try. It's currently in beta though.

I agree, very easy to use. Prices are pretty good, but not the cheapest. But the most important question is: What happens when they ban your account? You will lose your domains.

Congrats to the Google engineers who made this happen. But I transferred my domains out a few months ago because I will never win against the Google AI.

I used the 16-character App Password. It requires 2FA to be enabled though.

I don't think anyone at Google is incentivized to fix this. Because fixing it will probably increase fraud, decrease revenue, and increase operational costs.

I think the only realistic path to fix this is through Federal legislation that gives new rights to users of online services. Google will fix this, only if it is legally forced to fix it.

The second possibility might be through a class action lawsuit of some kind. But I think the current Supreme Court is ideologically hostile to giving power to human beings over mega-corporations, so I don't see that going anywhere.

The third possibility might be a consumer led migration away from Google that hurts their bottom line and forces them to deal with it. But the number of people who are willing to do this is probably minuscule, so I don't think this will happen.

The ATtiny85 is nice, with 8kB flash, 512 bytes RAM & EEPROM, 5-6 GPIO pins, they are just enough to do something interesting. But I don't use the ATtiny85 as much as I want to, because flashing requires a separate programmer hardware. It's enough friction to get in the way of rapid software iteration. I once made the mistake of inserting the ATtiny85 upside down into the programmer, and it promptly cooked it dead. Lesson learned.

* Never ever use Google SSO. If Google locks you out, there is no recourse and you lose everything.

* Use your own domain, but don't use Google Domains as the registrar. If Google locks you out, you use everything.

* Don't use Gmail as the admin account of your domain registrar. If Google locks you out, you lose everything. But don't use your own domain email as the admin account of your domain either. It's ok to forward to your Gmail account, as long as you can access the other email account when Google locks you out.

* Don't use Gmail as the contact address of your credit card on your domain registrar. If Google locks you out, you will miss notifications of payment problems.

* Backup your Gmail, Google Drive, Photos, Calendar, Contacts, etc. to somewhere else. I recently purchased a Microsoft 365 account for this purpose, $70/year for 1 TB of storage. Ironically Google is making me spend money on other providers because of Google's complete lack of customer support and their rapidly degrading level of trust.