I'm incredibly saddened by his passing away, even if it was expected given the recent decline of his health.
I'm not going to touch on his films, which are all special and definitely worth watching, but if anyone who didn't know him wants a primer on his complex, sometimes surreal, but I think ultimately endearing personality, then this is a nice introduction:
The first Eco-Drives came out in the mid 90s. If you look around you'll find quite a few reports from people who bought the very first ones, and which are still ticking away virtually maintenance-free for 25+ years and counting. My own, a dive watch with around 10 years, which has actually been used for its stated purpose, is also still problem-free and with zero maintenance so far.
The only thing you need to be mindful of with Eco-Drives is that you can't let it lose all charge. It can keep functioning in complete darkness for around 6 months, according to the specs, but if you do this enough times the battery will lose the ability to hold charge and will need to be replaced, and there are plenty of reports to this effect. If you're not planning on wearing it, just leave it somewhere that it can get natural light, instead of a drawer, and you should be good.
While mechanical watches are undoubtedly cool and elegant, they're not perfect timekeepers, and when they do need maintenance it's not something trivial which you can perform yourself. For my day-to-day watch I'll take an accurate quartz movement with virtually zero maintenance any day. In other words an Eco-Drive, or something similar.
I've been using dnf to continuously upgrade my Fedora installation between 24 and 28, and it's worked pretty much flawlessly.
It's gotten to the point that system upgrades are as boring as the regular stream of updates that you receive daily, the only difference being that every 6 months you get more updates than usual being pushed.
Remember when the first real tool you had to perform system upgrades on Fedora was called FedUp? It was quite amazing, not to mention unexpected, seeing Fedora go from being one of the worst distros to upgrade to one of the best.
"Hack has deep roots in the libre, open source typeface community and includes the contributions of the Bitstream Vera & DejaVu projects."
It's a bit disingenuous though. I'd call Hack a straight copy of Deja Vu Sans Mono, with a few very minor tweaks. On Linux using the TTF fonts I can't even see a difference in line height:
Aside from '_', 'i', '0', many of the changes are so minuscule that it feels more like a change for the sake of change. Some however are nice, like the parenthesis placement, cleaner 'r'.
One thing I really don't like is the change to a serif-style comma. They've probably argued that it improves readability, and prefer that over typeface consistency.
They should emphasize more the previous work they are using, otherwise they might come across as ... hacks.
I'll probably stick with inconsolata though. But good job, nonetheless.
> Some however are nice, like the parenthesis placement
I see the parentheses as problematic on their own. When I read the functions that don't have any arguments, it looks like they have one space character within the parentheses!
Thanks for combining these images. The red square was really clever for peripheral vision identification of the image.
I agree with a lot of what you said here. Weirdly, they went sans-serif with the 'i' and serif with the comma. I'm personally a fan of commas, semicolons, and quotations having the same visual flavor and the Hack changes went farther from that.
To turn the conversation to a slightly different direction:
this is a great case study of the kind of effects branding can have. Dejavu sans mono, an otherwise boring and established font, especially for those using Linux, somehow just seemed something sexy and exciting because it's a newly released, specially made font called Hack, it's a font that represents a very fundamental paradigm shift in how fonts have been, the seamless legibility this font offers is unprecedented. This font is finally the one thing that will enable you to code better than you could ever before. You can't wait to try it out, can you. Go ahead, take it out for a spin. Set your terminal to use Hack, open up vim, and write up a helloworld.c program. You won't believe it -- it'll all come out beautifully and without effort, you'll find the code writing itself through you.
Copyright infringement != plagiarism. They're not violating the copyright because they abide by the terms of the license.
They're also not plagiarising because they clearly cite its original source. They even go so far as to say "deeply rooted in" which seems to me like a euphamism for "virtually identical to".
The point here isn't that it's illegal or immoral, just kind of uninteresting.
You can listen to Jean Shepherd himself tell the story of the "I, Libertine" hoax during a radio show here: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/06/the-i-libertine.html It's 40 min long, but well worth it and hilariously funny. I've always been fascinated by this story, it speaks volumes of the world we live in and how people are easily influenced and manipulated.
Hundreds of his shows from the 50s through to the 70s are archived at archive.org—so many in fact that I was able to locate the very first show I ever listened to as a kid decades ago. I hadn't heard the episode since its original broadcast but I recognized it immediately which indicates how vividly he can tell a story.
A couple of particularly good ones that I remember:
It seems both NoScript and AdBlock Plus have become really permissive as of late regarding their whitelists. While ABP is a bit shady with their 'acceptable ads' deals, I believe in NoScript's case it's probably due to not wanting to break things too badly for less technically minded users.
Regardless, I've replaced both extensions with uBlock Origin. While UB in default deny mode is not as fine grained as NS, it does the job and doesn't compromise on default whitelists at the expense of a little breakage (gorhill is very adamant on this point).
I did the same, but with ublock origin in advanced mode and umatrix, which gives me even more control on what request goes where.
This is probably overkill for the average person, but after so many years of using noscript+requestpolicy I am used to sites being broken by default and having to fix them if needed, to me this is an acceptable tradeoff for the increased security.
The only exception to this rule for me is when I order something on a website, in that case I find it too risky to run with tight blocking (due to redirections to the payment site and so on) and just run a completely default firefox in its own vm that I snapshot before and revert to after.
Why was this downvoted? I'm always interested in current perspectives on best practices in browser security. I don't know whether onosendai's description https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9795193 is correct, but, even if it isn't, a rebuttal would be more helpful (to me and to onosendai both) than a silent downvote.
NoScript's feature set goes way beyond just selectively blocking scripts based on domain, so nothing in the uBlock family is really a replacement for NoScript, just a replacement for NoScript's most basic feature.
My approach was to start by combining SomeoneWhoCares' and MVPS' hosts files with `uniq`, which rendered such browser addons largely, though not entirely, unnecessary. The down side is you can only do that on machines where you have root access.
Hosts files only work for redirecting known bad actors down the memory hole. A noscript style blocker is needed to catch malicious js from new sources not tracked in a hosts database.
I've also noticed that I retain information much better when I'm actually writing it down on paper, than when I take quick notes on a laptop. I don't know the cognitive basis for this, but I suspect that it has something to do with it being a much 'slower' medium to register information in. Somehow your brain is forced to focus on the information that's at hand, instead of immediately trying to skip ahead to what's coming up next.
I don't use moleskines though, they're way overpriced for the poor quality paper they offer (i.e. it's not fountain pen friendly, which is what I usually use). Spiral notebooks are much cheaper, practical and usually provide better quality paper.
> Are services shuting down at greater rates that in the past decade?
Probably not, but the model has shifted and there's a greater offering of services nowadays. Given the choice available and all the niches covered, it's very easy to start using one of them and coming to rely on it for some facet of your life/work, only to have it shut down with little prior notice and leaving you out to dry.
The parent's point is that if you use locally running software without any dependencies on external services you're much more secure in the event you need to migrate away from them, since you can do it at your own pace and with much more control over the entire process. Also, if you're using FOSS, it makes it less likely the support will just cease since, if there's enough interest, someone else (even you) can carry it forward.
> especially since Google (and many other cloud providers) don't provide any kind of easy client-side encryption options
That's like wishing printer manufacturers would provide an easy way to refill their ink cartridges. It will never happen because no company will knowingly undermine its own business model.
Google's (and others') model is to access and mine as much of your own personal data as possible, so the idea that you're in sole control of it is anathema to their stated mission.
It used to be that one was generally pretty well aware of exactly what data was handed over when using their services, since the interaction with them was carried out in a limited, well understood manner (browser window, gmail/search site). Since they now control the entire stack from the hardware up to the services, and for the most part the workings of the entire system are opaque, it's very easy to leak data you never intended to, which compounds nicely for them (and unfortunately for you) with their goal.
So, in short, your data will never be safe if you hand it over to someone whose goal is to monetize it by being able to read it.
As far as quick 'n dirty solutions go, if you're not overly concerned with security, you can always use "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" to serve all the files on the current directory over HTTP.
I also recall that KDE had a panel applet that pretty much did the same thing on the 3.x days (not sure it's been ported to 4.x)
Do not forget that this solution is inherently mono-threaded and does not benefits from a proper concurrency model like node.js for example (which is also mono-threaded by "design" but provide non blocking IO).
So for big files with multiple downloaders, it can be sometimes not as good as you want it to be.
I'm not going to touch on his films, which are all special and definitely worth watching, but if anyone who didn't know him wants a primer on his complex, sometimes surreal, but I think ultimately endearing personality, then this is a nice introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqZpi8zAqe0