morog

The extreme heat generated by my 4yr old latitude is great for heating the office in winter...not so much in summer. Solid laptop otherwise, no complaints &runs Linux fine except for the usual sleep problems.

Looking to replace it with a 17" looks like the Precision range is the way to go... hopefully the business lines have kept up standards. Any other 17" laptops that are recommended? Not sure how anyone codes on a 13" (without an external screen)

Active tech scene particularly around Cape Town, the waterfront & Stellenbosch. Plenty makers, hackers & digital nomads. If you're looking for the outdoor life, MTB & hiking checkout Greyton, 2hrs from Cape Town. Just connected to the fibre network with speeds of 500mbps available. Beautiful mountains, lots of well priced restaurants&pubs. There's a Google engineer, an AWS product manager and plenty designers, coders and nomads in the village. Just won South Africa's Dorp (town) of the year. Ye olde England charm with warm sunny weather and super chilled locals.

Had 2 Swedish people visiting Cape Town over winter, they said it was the coldest winter of their lives...the houses have no insulation, windows &doors drafty. Average house temperature indoors approx 10-15celcius.

>Russians at large know perfectly well that their media is censored and the government is corrupt. They just don't care.

How does it get to this point? I live in a country with a fairly corrupt government with a free media(South Africa) and most people rank corruption as the biggest problem facing SA after crime. ..the big government projects to create jobs have failed due to above corruption & a low skill workforce. Plenty natural resources being dug out but instead of oligarchs we have Anglo American &other multinational mining companies taking most the profit&on ward processing.

But for the general population to really not care about censorship,war&corrupt government, surely these are basic values we take for granted as humans? &So long as we have encryption, tor & VPNs at our disposal, citizens of all nations can transcend the self serving narrative pushed by governments.

'All we need to do is keep on talking' (encrypted) great Pink Floyd track btw .

The in-laws bought us a Facebook portal to keep in touch with the grandkids. It is kept unplugged and in a drawer except for when in use. We only use it for WhatsApp calling and it is an impressive device, excellent voice quality and tracking camera for the price.I'm just annoyed it doesn't work with jitsi...or zoom or Google meet/hangouts. Same problem as this zoom device, what happens if you need to join a WhatsApp call or something else...surely it's feasible to build a dedicated video calling device on Android that is multi platform at this price point.

I've been using Brave for this reason too on desktop. I installed opera for the first time in years last week, very nicely surprised. Fast, chrome based browser. The extension bar on the left is a useful add-on. I'll be removing Brave after this news and be using Firefox mainly, with opera as my 2nd browser.

Great thread! have found some gems.

My contribution...for the past year and a half I have tried to write a post every 2 weeks mostly related to permaculture & my experiments in going self-sufficient, keeping chickens & growing food.

I needed something in my life that wasn't maintaining legacy enterprise systems or being in front of a screen...check it out if you're into that kind of thing.

https://www.thegreendirectory.net/category/blog

genuine question - what do you mean by smart people? High IQ? Deep knowledge about mankind's place in the Universe / natural order? or their ability to maximise their own personal happiness over their lifetime? If the last point, then personal experience would suggest that having kids makes you happier person (once they are sleeping through the night)YMMV

Calories are meaningless https://www.1843magazine.com/features/death-of-the-calorie

I've been running Ubuntu on my Latitude 6650 since new a couple years back. Unfortunately due to my company moving to Office365 fully, its no longer viable for a daily driver - mostly due to no support for Teams (except for a crappy broken web interface), Outlook & OneDrive.

Always had Windows available in Virtualbox, but its definitely slower & had endless audio issues with conferencing (you don't want to be the guy who always has sound problems)

Now switched to Windows 10 on a dual boot - which is much easier on the fan, laptop not running nearly as hot as switching between the GPU & onboard graphics is seamless. Despite decades of Linux experience (servers & desktop) I could never get Prime working properly to switch to onboard graphics when needed...wasted days of my life on this.

Despite this Ubuntu 19.04 has big improvements in driver support & if it wasn't for Office, I would have gladly stayed on Linux.

Now its Kali in Virtualbox for me which is almost as good as running natively.

Windows has better toolbar management, mouseovers & switching between apps. Also since Ubuntu moved back to Gnome, switching between Virtualbox VMs has been buggy (display driver issues no doubt)

Linux has a better file browsers (windows explorer hasn't changed in a decade, no tabs & looks terrible) & much better terminal options.

I'll miss Linux as my daily OS, but I guess MS has its grip tightly on most organizations balls these days.

multi-account containers work fine for me after update, but also broke when the addon-apocalyse happened. I did have a fresh profile setup on 66 though for my new laptop.

Unfortunately if you're a long way from ddg servers it's many seconds longer than Google to load, making it a poor proposition in many parts of the world (southern Africa for example)

I make heirloom yogurt from organic milk from a local dairy farmer, currently about 50 litres a week & increasing fast. Turns out real yogurt is real popular these days. Doesn't exactly pay the bills yet, but it's delicious!

Hulled hemp seed sells for about £10 for 200g in my local organic shop. Then there's oil which by many measures is healthier than olive oil.

Apart from food and CBD, hemp is generally more environmentally friendly than cotton and grows in a far wider range of climates and is softer than the fibres you mentioned.

Then there are cosmetics, hempcrete, animal feed, bioplastics, etc...

Not sure why the downvotes, I thought the exact same thing

In South Africa we have a similar concept of time, 'now' means in 15 minutes to a half hour, 'now now' can mean anything from 15 minutes to 3 hours, 'just now' can mean anything from a few hours to a few days. A meeting scheduled for 12 will unlikely have anyone in the room at 12. In contrast to our Swiss business partners where a meeting at 12 will start within 15 seconds of 12 - I've learnt to keep a calendar with reminders since working with the Swiss.

Arriving within the first hour of a party start time means you are volunteering to prepare food, make a fire and move chairs. Never go hungry to a braai (barbecue) as lunch will be eaten at 6pm and dinner around midnight!

38. Eveyone spent 4 months inside their grandmother (as an egg inside their mothers fetus)

A Debian derivative it may be, but as the server OS with the biggest market share, and also the most widely used Linux desktop distribution, it's hardly 'yet another'

This sound very familiar, the software development company I work for uses at least 10 different platforms internally across Linux, Windows & Unix...SQL server, mysql & oracle dbs. 10yr old PHP customer support systems, 8 yr old jboss & tomcat servers with deserialization vulnerabilities at every turn, .NET V3 testing tools, mixed up with a sprinkling of modern platforms all talking to each other through rest, direct DB connections, microservices & a hearty dose of black magic. Management ignores vulnerability reports due to mostly non-technical backgrounds. Most documentation is at least 3yrs old, when 80% of dev team sacked & outsourced to India. Mostly keeping the lights on now during an acquisition...can't wait to debrief the new owners. Have acquired some great experience in investigating technical debt in the process which will hopefully be useful in the future.

I for one am quite excited about app maker. Finally a CRUD tool that links to just about any data source (including spreadsheets), does not require desktop software, generates properly responsive applications, needs no maintenance or upgrades to be secure and will presumably be compatible with Google forms.