xiaomai

Netbooks were actually great. I loved mine. It had 11 hours of battery life (this was around 2007 or 2008 when typical pc laptops were getting 2-4 hours). A lot of my classmates liked their netbooks too. The ultrabook is also fantastic, but much more expensive (I'm typing this on a $2000 ultrabook, my netbook was $200).

I've been hoping someone packages nylas for it. I've been meaning to look into how to do this.

Mercurial had a more familiar, but much worse interface than git.

More familiar because it was essentially subversions interface made suitable for a dvcs.

Worse for lacking (or requiring plugins for) features like the index, commit amending, rebasing, lightweight branches, etc.

Mozilla shutting down Persona was one of my biggest internet-related disappointments this year. It seemed like the perfect OpenID replacement (that might actually get used by normal people). Bring it back please!

Nintendo released one of these back during the original tamagatchi craze. It had a pedometer built in, so you needed to exercise to feed your Pokemon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Pikachu

I have the chromecast and the Fire stick. I love my chromecast, I impuse bought the fire stick when it first came out and was selling for really cheap.

I like the fire stick because my kids can use it (they don't have devices to control the chromecast with). I don't like basically everything else about it:

- poor app selection (everything I've ever wanted to use (except Amazon Prime) works on my Chromecast, the Fire stick is only good for Amazon/Netflix content (there's a few other things out there, but not enough to matter). - poor playback: once it gets going, the fire stick is fine, but when it first starts streaming stuff it tends to stutter. This drives me crazy.

fwiw, I actually use Firefox (I say that because I assume most of the complainers don't) and was thinking of making my own reading-list service, but Firefox integrating with Pocket saved me the trouble. I use the integration many times a day and it's great. Not sure why this gets so much negative attention (it's not like it's spying on you if you don't use it).

It's a real shame chrome moved away from GTK. Aura is probably fine for many use cases but it does weird stuff on multi-monitor setups (drawing artifacts and windows jumping around).

Nix is awesome. The last time I ran it stuff like gnome-shell wasn't packaged, which made it hard to use for a desktop (they did have a number of window managers packaged though).

That's the hardest part about nix right now (the lack of packaged software). It is pretty easy to write your own packages for basic software though (and the Nix project is good about taking pull requests).

Looks like gnome3 is packaged now, I'll have to give it another shot: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/modules/s...

That is a clever fake interview quote, but the whole notion that hg's "easier" interface should have made it won misses the point. hg's interface is more familiar (especially since we were mostly all coming from subversion at the time). Git won because it's workflow is so much better than mercurial's. Light-weight branches are better than hg branches (I know they have bookmarks now but I don't recall if they had them back then). The index is a fantastic idea that makes writing clean commits easy (I think the comparable hg option at the time was mercurial queues which are much more cumbersome to work with imo). Rebase is functionality that hg didn't include out of the box. Being able to edit commits in git is something I greatly appreciate for fixing typos and stuff.

tl;dr: the interface of mercurial may be more straightforward, but git won because it allowed people to work better.

GNOME has pretty great screen reader support built in (I think this was work that Sun did before Oracle bought them). The native apps have good screen reader support in my experience, unfortunately, support for the web is lacking (a lot of the new ARIA stuff is unsupported or broken).

Chromium can use Chrome's flash. Unfortunately, it's not distributed separately from Chrome. This is how Arch LInux pulls it out: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ch/chromium-pepper-flash/...

This is great, I always remove the metadata from files before sharing them (why don't the social networks don't do this for you?). This is how I do it at the command-line:

    cp files-to-strip /tmp/foo
    exiv2 rm /tmp/foo/*

Wow, I have fond memories of using WindowMaker. I was really excited to see some recent development with new featuers this past summer (http://windowmaker.org/news.php). I spent a few days with it, I was surprised at some of the defaults. For instance, click to raise isn't enabled by default. That's probably how I used it all those years ago. Anyway, I agree it's lovely. The main things I was missing were modern looking applets (but the Wolfenstein-face CPU monitor is classic), and also better compositor integration (for stuff like expose-style window switching).

Zuckerberg's Chinese does sound pretty awful right now (although his listening comprehension looked much better), but it doesn't seem right to compare him to individuals that are fully immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment (probably for a many years). Also learning Chinese to speak to your wife's family isn't a gimmick.

Even if you keep it up to date there is frequent (relative to other distros) manual action required before running updates. An example from a few days ago: https://www.archlinux.org/news/java-users-manual-interventio... .

This is the sort of thing I expect my package manager to do for me.

That said, I like the rolling model so I use arch. I wish I could find a better rolling distro to choose.

KDE doesn't do a ton of stuff that many (most?) people care about like handle add/removing displays frequently. Accessibility is pretty good in GNOME (but not in KDE) which makes it a better default option too. Also most of the desktop plumbing (freedesktop.org stuff) seems to start in GNOME and works better there.

The great thing about gnome-shell is you can have it however you want:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/

Those were good days, I remember buying the boxed version of WP8 (with Tux on the cover) from CompUSA.

I wish this would have gone more in depth in his experience with colemak and vim. I've considered switching keyboard layouts in the past, but applications with lots of keyboard shortcuts (like vim) make it seem too difficult.

What's the implication of being on the same bus? More CPU usage for ethernet?

> Ember just seems to have been marketed much better than Batman was, which is no surprise, Yehuda is good at doing that.

I don't think this is fair. We use Ember at work, although I wish we used React. We started out on Backbone and it was miserable. Ember has gotten popular because it and Angular were seen as the successors to Backbone for a long time. Ember is designed in a much more thoughtful (and I think better) way than Angular.

Yehuda has done a lot of good work on Rails, Bundler, jQuery. That probably helps sell people on his projects. I wouldn't chalk it up to marketing.

Looks like there is an encrypt module that uses AES-128: http://camlistore.org/pkg/blobserver/encrypt/. The modules are composable so you could encrypt your remote replicas of the main store (or hopefully all of them?)

arrays don't do that, but map() does. Normally in js you can just ignore arguments you don't care about, but it does lead to surprises like this one.

Have you expounded on your feelings about OpenVPN anywhere? It's my go-to vpn solution so I would love to hear about what I should be using instead (I don't think this is an option since it's only for connecting 2 computers (afaict)).

I use it on Linux and it works really well too (at least it does with Ubuntu's font rendering or Infinality).

I was going to replace my first-gen Thinkpad Carbon with the newer model (wanted the hi-res screen and better battery life), but this keyboard is a complete dealbreaker. Like the author, I am distressed at the removal of the caps-lock key (I remap mine). The ~/` key move is plain weird (it was bad enough when they moved print screen down there (I kept accidentally taking screenshots)). Lenovo, please fix your keyboard!

I was under the impression that Tahoe-LAFS doesn't work offline. Is that not the case?

Hey! It sounds like you're describing ori [1]. Be sure to read the paper [2] because the website is a bit sparse on info. It's still young but the syncing, cheap snapshots, auto backups, etc. have been really nice. (it's only encrypted over transport though, I wish it were encrypted locally too).

1: http://ori.scs.stanford.edu/ 2: http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2522721&ftid=1403940&dwn...

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems:

1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.)

2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's. Do you remap everything to be more vi-ish for each mode that you use? I guess that is fine but the transition just seems daunting.