Hacker News Reader

polyfatheron 1Password: Standalone / Local Vault Option Gone?

I use Pass on both the desktop and Android and have done for a few years now. It works really, really well. I couldn't imagine using anything else at this point.

The only "issue" I've had is formatting my phone, but forgetting to first back up the GPG key I used. The solution is just to create a new key and (from my desktop) reencrypt all the passes. It's not hard, but it does take about 10 minutes.

polyfatheron Kill Instant Messaging

One of the issues with using the phone is that it's so difficult to record phonecalls and store them in a way that makes them useful for future reference.

With instant messaging, you can usually at least do simple searches for phrases you remembered from the conversation. With recording phone calls, you need to remember the approximate date that you had the chat and then skip through one or more audio files to try and find the information you're after.

It's not great.

polyfatheron Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

Thanks for this. For most of my life I thought it was a sort-of acronym for "CANada Oil, Low Acid" (as it's lower in acid than other rapeseed oils). Your etymology is the correct one.

polyfatheron The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter

I believe Twin Peaks' intro is actually the longest in TV history. It's a real whopper.

polyfatheron Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

For the curious, the quotation is from the amazing 1999 PC game, "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri."

This game was a treasure trove of thought-provoking quotations, many of which can be found on WikiQuote. [1]

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri

polyfatheron New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

The following command can be handy for one-off sessions. It won't interfere with your already-running instance of Firefox and uses a random profile in /tmp (which you can still monkey with if needed).

  firefox -no-remote -profile $(mktemp -d)

polyfatheron So Long, Macbook. Hello Again, Linux

I have to agree. I was never a big fan of laptops before, but I've really come to enjoy my 6th gen X1. The keyboard is surprisingly nice (for a laptop) and the battery lasts long enough to not annoy me when I'm on the move.

The fingerprint reader doesn't work though, not that I know what I would use one for.

polyfatheron CLEAVE – Ergonomic Mechanical Keyboard

I have to agree. This situation has been bothering me for quite some time. In the last 8-10 years (who's counting), I've gone through four Matias ErgoPros. Their rate of failure is much higher than I'd expect for a mechanical keyboard, but I've yet to find a better board (despite the build issues and sticky keys problem).

I've looked and looked, but haven't yet any better boards to suite my simplish criteria:

a) Mechanical b) Split (and not fixed) c) Full-ish key layout

At least when you have a stack of ErgoPros, you can start mixing and matching the working halves.