rusty__

They've probably run in to a similar issue to Apple whereby they've found their consumer-grade "phone auntie susan once a week" offerings don't stand up to the needs of everyone working remotely needing screen sharing, hot seating in and out all day long chats.

We're using MS Teams and it seems to be pretty great for us (team of about 15), we use Skype to contact the remaining 20ish more junior staff who don't need Teams licenses just to be able to keep in touch with their work and keep the face to face communication going.

My pages page is down.

Excellent post! I've never heard of readable.com before. What a fantastic resource.

I have a few various things I'm trying to achieve in 2020.

- Reduce meat consumption significantly. I do enjoy meat and cooking dishes like slow roasted meats but I started eating beyond meat/fake meats in 2019 and loved them. In a couple of dishes I literally couldnt tell the difference. I think when things get to the point where they taste as good/better than the product they're intended to replace, why not embrace them? I still like meat and am not seeking to become fully vegetarian but will definitely cut down to just 1-2 times a week, high quality butcher/organic meat and reduce my impact on the planet in some small way.

- Go completely cashless. I was just about there in achieving this in a couple of months in 2019. It's not a hugely difficult challenge but I think it's a fun one to try and it's very doable these days. Starting Jan 1st I'm going to see how far I can make it without holding real money.

- Take more 3-4 day weekends and travel more. I live in a city with great public transport and don't own a car so it can be tough to travel without thinking you have to take 2+ weeks off from work, but renting a car for a weekend is trivially cheap if you plan ahead a little bit (<$100 including gas).

- The usuals of trying to get fit, lose a few pounds, more regular gym. Need to find some way of making the gym fun as I really don't have any interest in it even though I know it's good for me.

- Make more music. I'm really getting in to Ableton and Maschine and whilst I'm really 'level 1' at the moment I enjoy it loads and want to dedicate 2-3 nights a week to just making tunes, it's very relaxing and it's great to be doing something that's more actively producing something rather than passively consuming yet more netflix, HBO etc.

I've used wetransfer for files up to 2GB (https://wetransfer.com). If you need more they have a very reasonable $12/mo pro plan that gives up to 20GB per transfer and options for password protection etc.

I'd love to try paragliding one day!

As we enter the winter months taking up a couple more hobbies and making sure every evening is filled with an enriching activity (even if that's tv!) is a goal for me coming up.

I think planning for an early retirement and more luxurious travel later in life is a good target and locking up money is something I am already doing and I guess feels like 'spending' money that way.

Yeh I think the potential of a spiral is real and I'm conscious of that. I've never really donated at all but that is something I want to look at doing if it can really make a difference.

early retirement is definitely on my radar. But I do love my job and if I 'had' to I would be happy doing it all the way in to my 60s I'm sure. Who knows what the future holds that far out obviously.

I do put money away in to investments like WealthSimple and a couple of Vanguard funds. I slightly worry passive investing is a bit lazy and won't return what everyone expects it to in the short-medium term so research some smaller cap investments.

Exactly this, but it's also why, whilst we should all be conscious of what we're doing to the planet, I'm not so despondent about our future and population endlessly spiraling out of control. It's been shown that once a country achieves a GDP of somewhere around $6-7k they begin to take a bigger interest in issues like climate change, more efficient energy sources and population control more seriously (China is about there now; India, Indonesia, Thailand and other large population Asian countries are getting there pretty quickly). As a planet with finite resources in terms of food and energy we can support a global population of about 10-11 billion. If it's becoming such that once societies advance to a level of development we see in places like S Korea and Japan that population begins to balance out or even slightly decrease, is that such a bad thing?

I find the concept of having to have someone pump gas for you (by law) another strange example of a pointless job, I'm quite capable of pumping my own gas.

i'm very impressed with reality capture (https://www.capturingreality.com) - I'm a VFX artist and we've used this software on all manner of occasions and it's always come up trumps. From standard modeling reconstruction from stills photos to recreating a cliff/hillside from moving footage for matchmoving a sequence shot in that location because our lidar scan turned out to be junk (inaccurate and full of holes). We've also used it to generate an animated 3d mesh from an actor performing lines we shot on 4 cameras that we were able to track on to another animated mesh and reproject textures from that. Very very good software. Expensive but great results.

Just want to point out that as a user reading that blog on a 12" laptop screen, that page is a UI disgrace. The suggested articles popped up covering the lower 1/3 of the screen and the top bar popped down to cover the top 1/3 of the screen any time I hinted at an up scroll which on a laptop trackpad is extremely common. This left me with 1/3 of the screen to actually read the content of this post. Terrible design google, you can do much better than that.

Maybe when it comes back to Canada they can do something about their ridiculous Canadian pricing system where the same product for a Canadian shipment is charged more in USD than a US shipment. 'Free Shipping' though (-__-)

Ah wow, I just want to let you know Pharaoh is easily one of my favorite games of all time, it's a genre of games I love and a period of history i'm fascinated by, thank you for making it. I'd also sunk hundreds of hours in to it in my youth, would love to play it again!

I think this is really nice :)

Nice UI and UX, lightweight and straightforward, will try it out for a bit!