I bought my Nexus 5X quite late (bit more than a year ago). This is my third Nexus phone - started with Nexus One, then Nexus 4, now this one).
I didn't expect to get much more than two years of core Android updates from it and it seems that's what I'm going to get.
I'm not disappointed by that - two years for a relatively low end phone (I paid AUD$450 for it new) isn't too bad. But I am massively disappointed by the fact that Google have erased the Nexus line and expect me to jump up to a top-tier phone - over twice as expensive - so that I can make sure I get the latest operating system updates reliably.
There's Android One but after reading their website I still can't figure out exactly what the hell it is. I think it's basically the latest version of Android but if you buy one of those phones, you're "guaranteed" to not get any of the usual vendor crap installed on top of it.
Of course it doesn't matter because I can't seem to buy them in Australia anyway without going through importers.
I feel like Google is missing a massive opportunity to have a Google-branded mid-range phone. But many of my friends were happy to shell out for the Pixel so maybe I'm just a grumpy cheapskate outlier:D
But giving the option to the user would be against their philosophy. Google needs to decide what goes into your calendar.
Settings -> Events from Gmail -> Uncheck 'Add automatically':D
I have loved that feature for the last few years as I've been doing a lot of travel for work (and pleasure) and have been dependent on the calendar to easily understand my travel windows more easily.
Great post and that book has been on my reading list for a while. Totally agree with everything you say and that it doesn't work for everyone. Some specific comments though:
1. In "knowledge work" as has become most of the work in the last 3 decades : one is not always the master of one's own calendar. Unforeseen tasks of variable priority keep popping up by the minute. It can be frustrating and can cause induced helplessness if one is forced to reschedule tasks multiple times.
For work I found it doesn't bother me. The biggest hassle is my partner and I have a shared calendar and stuff will go into it (e.g., "dinner with Bill"). Because she can't give me notifications for those events I often don't find out about them until close to the event, when it's too late to reschedule.
2. Context matters a lot. E.g. your stock of apples at home is low. Nothing urgent, but you need to get some in next 2-3 days if you are around farmer's market. With calendaring, you need to make a false urgency of needing to get apples "today". Even ignoring this false urgency, while appearing on the calendar when you are at work, is not only useless but actively pushes away the real things you can do at work.
I get your example but for me this would just go into my "shopping list" calendar thing in the notes. (I am personally looking forward to Android's "remind me when I'm at [place x]" voice feature working properly. I would use this a lot but I've tried it several times and it never seems to properly detect when I'm where I said I wanted the reminder.)
3. Calendar is difficult to review. You put your current girlfriend's dad's birthday on your calendar, say it is 10 months away. In 2 months , you break up with the girlfriend and that information is now not very useful, yet occupies an important slot in the calendar. You need to prune this "calendaring" of yours periodically, but calendar interfaces generally don't give much of an opportunity to review easily. Going through next 10 years of events is not easy - especially if most of your TODOs end up in the calendar.
I haven't run into this issue; certainly some calendar items 'expire' in usefulness and you might get notified about it, but in practice what I find is if something else comes up and I'm looking for a slot and an expired item grabs my attention. Deleting things like 10 years of birthdays is typically easy (at least in Google Cal) because it cleverly gives you the option to remove all future recurring events if you want to.
4. Calendars have no place for notes. So they solve only half the organization problem. Notes are pieces of information not relevant to any day in particular. With calendaring, you need to handle it separately.
I guess I keep notes elsewhere. I know some people that use Outlook calendar and they keep all their 'notes' in emails, and for a note that requires a calendar item, they can just drag the email from Outlook into the calendar and it turns it into a calendar item.
This is the one feature I would like in Gmail - 'turn this email into a calendar item'.
Yep, I've tried this as well. I found it tough because my mornings were often basically "disaster recovery from all this emergency that happened overnight", so I really struggled with finding a dedicated chunk of time in the morning. Definitely think this would work in different roles though.
I have tried a bunch of TODO lists of various types. There are tons of them and many of them are great pieces of software; marvels of design and user experience and technology.
But all of them have the same critical fault: they require you have discipline. If you don't have discipline they quickly turn from a handy list of all the things you need to do into an extensive catalogue of your failure to get anything done at all.
The thing that made the biggest difference to me was to stop listing things and start putting them into my calendar. Give them an actual slot in your life like any task you have to do at work.
Obviously this still requires the exact kind of discipline but I found it way easier to get things done - both at work and at home - if I'd already set aside a time to get things done. Plus all your time management and task management and TODOs are all in a single application.
It's not perfect but when I started putting my entire life into my calendar - 'extreme calendaring'! - I found that I was more effectively able to manage my time for the drudge tasks that otherwise I'd just put off inevitably. Of course you do end up 'snoozing' items, but if you get in the habit of this meaning 'move it to another free slot' it takes a lot of the boring overhead out of trying to figure out all the things you have left to do.
The downside is you end up feeling a little bit ruled by your phone and computer constantly telling you what to do. But I found this better than the constant background radiation of dread knowing all the things on my TODO list that I kept procrastinating about.
I love love love all the Culture novels but I agree with this. Consider Phlebas was his first Culture novel and it feels like a bit of a mishmash of ideas and action.
I can see why someone would want to make it a TV series because of the varied action components but I'd much rather see one of the other books made into a series; one with more Culture presence instead of a background force like it is in Phlebas.
Still - any step that gets more Culture in my face. Hopefully it's the first of many.
Nice one! Haven't heard of that before but it looks nice. I'm a bit paranoid about email so feel like I have to stick with an open source client for as long as I can.
If you're on Android & care about email I strongly recommend K-9 Mail.
It is an open source mail client which is more like Thunderbird (i.e., it downloads messages locally) than the Gmail app. So you can open it even when you have no Internet and know that the email it downloaded will actually be available.
I travel quite a bit and found this ability utterly indispensable after a few times where I had things like boarding passes, hotel registrations, etc in my Gmail and wasn't able to easily load them in the Gmail mobile app. I now have a "Travel" folder in my Gmail which I've set to always download all the contents, so I know when I go to a new city it will have anything I need into it, accessible when I get there, with or without Internet access.
Maybe it has changed in the last few years but not having access to email that I had previously downloaded (i.e., "viewed on the cloud", which I suspect is what mostly happens with the Gmail app) was a total dealbreaker.
Supports multiple accounts, IMAP & POP3, even PGP if you care about that. The only thing that doesn't work great is search - it only will search your locally downloaded mail - and even then it seems to be a bit flaky. In these cases I use the Gmail mobile web interface to find things.
K-9 is a mail client on mobile that works much more like old school nerds would expect!
HDR still fails for me semi regularly on my 5X:( it seems to happen if I try to do something with my phone while it's in processing state - I end up with a corrupt photo. I leave it turned off mostly but tried it again the other day for one photo, and only just noticed it didn't work.
It strikes me as almost madness to not believe that most of the opportunities in cryptocurrency trading are already in arbitrage because of the desperate people trying to make (and not lose) money - and that these opportunities are not being massively exploited by many already!
We had our Christmas lunch yesterday with about 20 family members. Four people had Apple watches and I have a Fitbit Ionic (which is mostly a fitness tracker with some smart watch features).
I think it will be a slow burn, but totally anecdotally I feel like I'm seeing more and more smart watches. At least 3 colleagues have them as well (all Android ones).
I'm surprised by how much value I get out of even the half assed smart watch features of my thing. Apple watch seems way better.
I bought a one way ticket home after four years abroad recently. It was super expensive. When I hit the "buy" button (after much agonising about the cost), I got a "generic error" on the website that indicated it didn't work - the whole process basically died. I tried again - same error. I tried a third time - and it worked. I assumed it was a temporary error that had cleared.
Of course, 15 minutes later I got three tickets (for the exact same flight) and was charged three times. I called them immediately and was told it was a "website glitch" (the manner in which they explained it to me made it sound like this was not an uncommon problem) and they'd refund me immediately (subject to usual credit card refund processing times).
Two weeks later I checked my credit card and saw I had been refunded - partially. Each refund was almost 10% short of the purchase price. Turns out I had been charged in AUD and refunded in GBP, and after currency conversion & credit card penalties I was out of pocket almost $300.
I called their support back & explained the problem. They blamed the bank first, so I called them to confirm, which they did. I called back and had a very polite conversation with a guy who told me they couldn't help me and I'd need to contact their Customer Care team via email because it was an unusual problem.
I did this. Waited two weeks for the (inevitable) response - we can't help with refunds, please call the phone team. Explained they'd sent me to them to no avail.
Gave up and went to the Twitter team. Had to explain the problem several times in stages to get through the usual checklist but eventually someone senior picked it up, realised it was a problem, and refunded me.
It's embarrassing that in 2017 large companies can basically be so incompetent that they can just put you into a support circle like this. There is absolutely no reason Twitter should exist as an emergency escape hatch for people stuck in that cycle, but I'm glad it does. I imagine once their traditional support load dries up because everyone gives up on it, they'll simply assume they can axe the whole department and then be totally surprised when their Twitter teams ask for more staff.
(I upgraded to v57 and downgraded a few days later because I couldn't live without my extensions. I'll have to try again later if/when the ecosystem has solidified a bit. )
The reasons you cite are why ad dollars for video pre-rolls are so great. If you have a bunch of popular video content, you will make more money because companies pay way way more to get in front of people like that.
But I think most people don't go very far to get rid of ads. My partner lives on Facebook and watches a lot of dumb videos (the source of several recent arguments and my inspiration for drastically scaling back my Facebook use); I am confident she would not bat an eye at a 2-5 second pre-roll ad.
I disabled autoplaying videos in my browser and just rarely watch video. In the event there is a pre-roll ad I just close the window immediately - I think starting to stream and closing before the content will send interesting metrics to publishers. But again I think it will just be lost in the noise of the hordes of people whose endorphins are triggered by cat videos.
I got the new Fitbit Ionic about two months ago - it's my first fitness tracker/smartwatch thing. Quick summary from my brief & first time experience:
Positives:
- battery life is great. I get probably 4-5 days, doing a tracked run every 2 days or so. The rest of the time it's doing pretty regular heartrate tracking. - heartrate tracker is great! never thought I'd care about it but it's really interesting looking at the data collected all day. Seems pretty accurate (comparing it at a high level to my dedicated Garmin chest-strap heart tracker). - regular reminders to get up and do a bit of walking I'm finding really helpful - easy to get stuck staring at screen for too many hours in a row. - has ~2GB of storage on the watch for music so you can stream directly to your Bluetooth headphones (see disadvantage below). - new release (last week) opens up a new "app store" so you can do things like manage your wireless lights (Philips Hue), get NYTimes headlines, etc (see disadvantage below). - smartwatch features are secondary to fitness but still pretty decent. Notifications seem to work OK with Android but not as well as they could. - Built in GPS is neat (see disadvantage below). - Screen is really nice quality! - Apparently it has a decent developer environment but I haven't checked yet; I want to tinker with it a bit. - Two physical buttons on the right you can customise the action for easily. - Supports something called Fitbit Pay which supposedly allows you to use it to pay for things - just not in my country (UK) yet. - Waterproof.
Disadvantages: - not a major OS (i.e., not Android or iOS) so no super native integration eith - notifications are not reliable enough. I'd estimate I lose 5-10% of notifications (i.e., my phone will go bing and I won't get the notification on the watch). Super annoying and frustrating. - putting music on the watch is a/complete/ shitshow. See this thread but the process is ludicrous and barely works (I could only get it working by pinging my watch constantly from my PC so it wouldn't drop the wifi connection). It's plugged into my computer with an actual wire; does it not have a data channel via the connection? Who knows. - Apps seem a bit awkward unreliable - Philips Hue for example gives me a "hmm, can't connect to your phone" type error a lot rendering it unusable. Weather app takes a little too long to start - although the new patch last week seems to have improved it. - GPS accuracy isn't super great. It's good enough for running but it shows me running across water and stuff. I suspect it has a low sample rate deliberately to save battery time. GPS also takes a while to lock on and never works until I'm outside, so I have to wait a few minutes before I can start exercise. - I find the band it comes with kinda uncomfortable - although honestly it might just be because I've been wearing this thing for two solid months because I like it so much:D - I find the automatic screen activation when I lift my watch up a bit flaky. Having to press a button when it doesn't automatically come on is really really annoying. It doesn't work well at all in non-normal situations (e.g., lying down). I would like the option to tweak this a lot. It also hilariously comes in when I'm in the shower - and the water triggers the touch screen, so things will happen randomly, like it will just open the weather app because water slid down the screen, sliding it to the left and then another drop landed right on the app. Kinda funny.
Yep great post. Completely agree. I am a DC fan over Marvel and I really wanted to love these new movies but I simply cannot.
I saw JL last weekend and I actually kind of enjoyed it from a broad strokes perspective. But as a DC movie meant to celebrate the characters I grew up with and love the most in any comic series (Batman & Superman - boring, I know!) it just didn't do it.
Comparing what DC have done to what Marvel as done shows such a striking difference I can't believe whoever is pulling the strings behind DC movies is allowing them to go on. Introducing not one but TWO "smaller" DC characters into JL with zero origin just seemed like a huge staggering mistake. I know of Aquaman but know nothing about his history. I barely have even heard of Cyborg guy. And throwing in a Flash - who is not the Flash from the TV series - I imagine probably confuses a lot of people, but at least there's some frame of reference.
I'm sure a lot of people embark on researching 30 years of economic data on the recommendation of an anonymous Internet person.
If you have done this research already, you should make your point, citing the relevant evidence. Who do you think you are going to get onto your side with this suggestion?
Marshmallow and Nougat are the most popular Android versions (each taking around 30 percent of market), so either of those is hardly obsolete.
I guess their obsoleteness depends on the exact state of their software. I can't remember when Android started doing the security patch version (Marshmallow?) but I suspect many of them are running M or N but at a minor version number that does not include the latest security updates.
My partner is a big OPO fan & almost certainly will get this new version. She's not at all interested in the security issues I raise. If I can't convince her, I can't convince anyone - so I don't know what chance the average person has to make sure they're getting a less insecure phone experience.
(I since looked at the official site; this new phone also runs OPO's own version of Android, OxygenOS - not at all sure how it diverges from mainline Android.)
Doesn't that just mean it's obsolete out of the box given the current version of Android is 8 (Oreo)?
Pretty much the only thing I ever want to know about new Android phones is whether or not I'm going to get the latest updates. These days unless it's a Pixel the answer is 'no' (maybe that will change with this Project Treble thing) but for some reason we still get breathless Android phone announcements like this Wired one that are all about how many megapixels or bezels it has.
Ah interesting, thanks. It looks like they created an entire new version just for v57 (v4.0) and my current Firefox version (v3.17) is not linked to it, so it just looks like it's deprecated. Good to know!
Five of the five addons I have installed are marked as Legacy so will not work:( One of them is NoScript, which I know is coming in the next few days, but it's actually the one I care about the least.
The others are:
FireGestures (for gesture controlling - amazing how you get used to this & how much difference it makes to your browsing experience). No update news but from comments it seems it's unlikely to be updated to its former glory due to deficiencies in the new API. There are partial replacements so not too bad.
GreaseMonkey (for modifying webpages on the fly). I mostly use this for minor work enhancements so not critical but it's a really useful tool. I think it's easily replaceable though.
QuickJava. A super useful tool that simply puts icons in the status bar allowing you to toggle on/off JS, WebGL, RTC, Images, CSS, Proxy, etc. Staggeringly handy.
Classic Theme Restorer. I will miss the UI flexibility the most.
I have maybe 12 other addons that I mostly leave disabled; only two of these have been updated, the others are legacy.
I am really torn; I want to stay up-to-date with Firefox but the reason I use Firefox is that I've customised it to my preferences. If I lose that ability and it's not replaced with something better - the speed is nice but I don't really care about it - then why would I update?
Agree for the same reasons. Where I'm from (Qld, Australia) in summer the sun is up by 4.30am and it's often pushing 30 degrees celcius soon after. Unlike the other states on the eastern seaboard, we do not have daylight savings, so it's dark by 7pm.
I am not at all a morning person but in Qld I almost don't have a choice because it's hard to sleep much later. For me DST means a much nicer summer.
Where I live now (London, UK), we've just switched off DST. It's now suddenly pitch black by 5pm and it's creeping down earlier and earlier. It's amazing the impact this has on the day. Again as a non-morning person I'd happily sacrifice an hour of morning light for more in the evening, even though in winter the difference would be massively less noticable here.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought my Nexus 5X quite late (bit more than a year ago). This is my third Nexus phone - started with Nexus One, then Nexus 4, now this one).
I didn't expect to get much more than two years of core Android updates from it and it seems that's what I'm going to get.
I'm not disappointed by that - two years for a relatively low end phone (I paid AUD$450 for it new) isn't too bad. But I am massively disappointed by the fact that Google have erased the Nexus line and expect me to jump up to a top-tier phone - over twice as expensive - so that I can make sure I get the latest operating system updates reliably.
There's Android One but after reading their website I still can't figure out exactly what the hell it is. I think it's basically the latest version of Android but if you buy one of those phones, you're "guaranteed" to not get any of the usual vendor crap installed on top of it.
Of course it doesn't matter because I can't seem to buy them in Australia anyway without going through importers.
I feel like Google is missing a massive opportunity to have a Google-branded mid-range phone. But many of my friends were happy to shell out for the Pixel so maybe I'm just a grumpy cheapskate outlier :D
But giving the option to the user would be against their philosophy. Google needs to decide what goes into your calendar.
Settings -> Events from Gmail -> Uncheck 'Add automatically' :D
I have loved that feature for the last few years as I've been doing a lot of travel for work (and pleasure) and have been dependent on the calendar to easily understand my travel windows more easily.
Great post and that book has been on my reading list for a while. Totally agree with everything you say and that it doesn't work for everyone. Some specific comments though:
1. In "knowledge work" as has become most of the work in the last 3 decades : one is not always the master of one's own calendar. Unforeseen tasks of variable priority keep popping up by the minute. It can be frustrating and can cause induced helplessness if one is forced to reschedule tasks multiple times.
For work I found it doesn't bother me. The biggest hassle is my partner and I have a shared calendar and stuff will go into it (e.g., "dinner with Bill"). Because she can't give me notifications for those events I often don't find out about them until close to the event, when it's too late to reschedule.
2. Context matters a lot. E.g. your stock of apples at home is low. Nothing urgent, but you need to get some in next 2-3 days if you are around farmer's market. With calendaring, you need to make a false urgency of needing to get apples "today". Even ignoring this false urgency, while appearing on the calendar when you are at work, is not only useless but actively pushes away the real things you can do at work.
I get your example but for me this would just go into my "shopping list" calendar thing in the notes. (I am personally looking forward to Android's "remind me when I'm at [place x]" voice feature working properly. I would use this a lot but I've tried it several times and it never seems to properly detect when I'm where I said I wanted the reminder.)
3. Calendar is difficult to review. You put your current girlfriend's dad's birthday on your calendar, say it is 10 months away. In 2 months , you break up with the girlfriend and that information is now not very useful, yet occupies an important slot in the calendar. You need to prune this "calendaring" of yours periodically, but calendar interfaces generally don't give much of an opportunity to review easily. Going through next 10 years of events is not easy - especially if most of your TODOs end up in the calendar.
I haven't run into this issue; certainly some calendar items 'expire' in usefulness and you might get notified about it, but in practice what I find is if something else comes up and I'm looking for a slot and an expired item grabs my attention. Deleting things like 10 years of birthdays is typically easy (at least in Google Cal) because it cleverly gives you the option to remove all future recurring events if you want to.
4. Calendars have no place for notes. So they solve only half the organization problem. Notes are pieces of information not relevant to any day in particular. With calendaring, you need to handle it separately.
I guess I keep notes elsewhere. I know some people that use Outlook calendar and they keep all their 'notes' in emails, and for a note that requires a calendar item, they can just drag the email from Outlook into the calendar and it turns it into a calendar item.
This is the one feature I would like in Gmail - 'turn this email into a calendar item'.
Yep, I've tried this as well. I found it tough because my mornings were often basically "disaster recovery from all this emergency that happened overnight", so I really struggled with finding a dedicated chunk of time in the morning. Definitely think this would work in different roles though.
I have tried a bunch of TODO lists of various types. There are tons of them and many of them are great pieces of software; marvels of design and user experience and technology.
But all of them have the same critical fault: they require you have discipline. If you don't have discipline they quickly turn from a handy list of all the things you need to do into an extensive catalogue of your failure to get anything done at all.
The thing that made the biggest difference to me was to stop listing things and start putting them into my calendar. Give them an actual slot in your life like any task you have to do at work.
Obviously this still requires the exact kind of discipline but I found it way easier to get things done - both at work and at home - if I'd already set aside a time to get things done. Plus all your time management and task management and TODOs are all in a single application.
It's not perfect but when I started putting my entire life into my calendar - 'extreme calendaring'! - I found that I was more effectively able to manage my time for the drudge tasks that otherwise I'd just put off inevitably. Of course you do end up 'snoozing' items, but if you get in the habit of this meaning 'move it to another free slot' it takes a lot of the boring overhead out of trying to figure out all the things you have left to do.
The downside is you end up feeling a little bit ruled by your phone and computer constantly telling you what to do. But I found this better than the constant background radiation of dread knowing all the things on my TODO list that I kept procrastinating about.
I love love love all the Culture novels but I agree with this. Consider Phlebas was his first Culture novel and it feels like a bit of a mishmash of ideas and action.
I can see why someone would want to make it a TV series because of the varied action components but I'd much rather see one of the other books made into a series; one with more Culture presence instead of a background force like it is in Phlebas.
Still - any step that gets more Culture in my face. Hopefully it's the first of many.
Nice one! Haven't heard of that before but it looks nice. I'm a bit paranoid about email so feel like I have to stick with an open source client for as long as I can.
If you're on Android & care about email I strongly recommend K-9 Mail.
It is an open source mail client which is more like Thunderbird (i.e., it downloads messages locally) than the Gmail app. So you can open it even when you have no Internet and know that the email it downloaded will actually be available.
I travel quite a bit and found this ability utterly indispensable after a few times where I had things like boarding passes, hotel registrations, etc in my Gmail and wasn't able to easily load them in the Gmail mobile app. I now have a "Travel" folder in my Gmail which I've set to always download all the contents, so I know when I go to a new city it will have anything I need into it, accessible when I get there, with or without Internet access.
Maybe it has changed in the last few years but not having access to email that I had previously downloaded (i.e., "viewed on the cloud", which I suspect is what mostly happens with the Gmail app) was a total dealbreaker.
Supports multiple accounts, IMAP & POP3, even PGP if you care about that. The only thing that doesn't work great is search - it only will search your locally downloaded mail - and even then it seems to be a bit flaky. In these cases I use the Gmail mobile web interface to find things.
K-9 is a mail client on mobile that works much more like old school nerds would expect!
HDR still fails for me semi regularly on my 5X :( it seems to happen if I try to do something with my phone while it's in processing state - I end up with a corrupt photo. I leave it turned off mostly but tried it again the other day for one photo, and only just noticed it didn't work.
It strikes me as almost madness to not believe that most of the opportunities in cryptocurrency trading are already in arbitrage because of the desperate people trying to make (and not lose) money - and that these opportunities are not being massively exploited by many already!
We had our Christmas lunch yesterday with about 20 family members. Four people had Apple watches and I have a Fitbit Ionic (which is mostly a fitness tracker with some smart watch features).
I think it will be a slow burn, but totally anecdotally I feel like I'm seeing more and more smart watches. At least 3 colleagues have them as well (all Android ones).
I'm surprised by how much value I get out of even the half assed smart watch features of my thing. Apple watch seems way better.
I bought a one way ticket home after four years abroad recently. It was super expensive. When I hit the "buy" button (after much agonising about the cost), I got a "generic error" on the website that indicated it didn't work - the whole process basically died. I tried again - same error. I tried a third time - and it worked. I assumed it was a temporary error that had cleared.
Of course, 15 minutes later I got three tickets (for the exact same flight) and was charged three times. I called them immediately and was told it was a "website glitch" (the manner in which they explained it to me made it sound like this was not an uncommon problem) and they'd refund me immediately (subject to usual credit card refund processing times).
Two weeks later I checked my credit card and saw I had been refunded - partially. Each refund was almost 10% short of the purchase price. Turns out I had been charged in AUD and refunded in GBP, and after currency conversion & credit card penalties I was out of pocket almost $300.
I called their support back & explained the problem. They blamed the bank first, so I called them to confirm, which they did. I called back and had a very polite conversation with a guy who told me they couldn't help me and I'd need to contact their Customer Care team via email because it was an unusual problem.
I did this. Waited two weeks for the (inevitable) response - we can't help with refunds, please call the phone team. Explained they'd sent me to them to no avail.
Gave up and went to the Twitter team. Had to explain the problem several times in stages to get through the usual checklist but eventually someone senior picked it up, realised it was a problem, and refunded me.
It's embarrassing that in 2017 large companies can basically be so incompetent that they can just put you into a support circle like this. There is absolutely no reason Twitter should exist as an emergency escape hatch for people stuck in that cycle, but I'm glad it does. I imagine once their traditional support load dries up because everyone gives up on it, they'll simply assume they can axe the whole department and then be totally surprised when their Twitter teams ask for more staff.
This must be a v57 option as it's not in v56.
(I upgraded to v57 and downgraded a few days later because I couldn't live without my extensions. I'll have to try again later if/when the ecosystem has solidified a bit. )
The reasons you cite are why ad dollars for video pre-rolls are so great. If you have a bunch of popular video content, you will make more money because companies pay way way more to get in front of people like that.
But I think most people don't go very far to get rid of ads. My partner lives on Facebook and watches a lot of dumb videos (the source of several recent arguments and my inspiration for drastically scaling back my Facebook use); I am confident she would not bat an eye at a 2-5 second pre-roll ad.
I disabled autoplaying videos in my browser and just rarely watch video. In the event there is a pre-roll ad I just close the window immediately - I think starting to stream and closing before the content will send interesting metrics to publishers. But again I think it will just be lost in the noise of the hordes of people whose endorphins are triggered by cat videos.
Also literally everyone knows what "photoshopping" is (even if they don't know it's the name of a piece of software).
I got the new Fitbit Ionic about two months ago - it's my first fitness tracker/smartwatch thing. Quick summary from my brief & first time experience:
Positives:
- battery life is great. I get probably 4-5 days, doing a tracked run every 2 days or so. The rest of the time it's doing pretty regular heartrate tracking.
- heartrate tracker is great! never thought I'd care about it but it's really interesting looking at the data collected all day. Seems pretty accurate (comparing it at a high level to my dedicated Garmin chest-strap heart tracker).
- regular reminders to get up and do a bit of walking I'm finding really helpful - easy to get stuck staring at screen for too many hours in a row.
- has ~2GB of storage on the watch for music so you can stream directly to your Bluetooth headphones (see disadvantage below).
- new release (last week) opens up a new "app store" so you can do things like manage your wireless lights (Philips Hue), get NYTimes headlines, etc (see disadvantage below).
- smartwatch features are secondary to fitness but still pretty decent. Notifications seem to work OK with Android but not as well as they could.
- Built in GPS is neat (see disadvantage below).
- Screen is really nice quality!
- Apparently it has a decent developer environment but I haven't checked yet; I want to tinker with it a bit.
- Two physical buttons on the right you can customise the action for easily.
- Supports something called Fitbit Pay which supposedly allows you to use it to pay for things - just not in my country (UK) yet.
- Waterproof.
Disadvantages: /complete/ shitshow. See this thread but the process is ludicrous and barely works (I could only get it working by pinging my watch constantly from my PC so it wouldn't drop the wifi connection). It's plugged into my computer with an actual wire; does it not have a data channel via the connection? Who knows. :D
- not a major OS (i.e., not Android or iOS) so no super native integration eith
- notifications are not reliable enough. I'd estimate I lose 5-10% of notifications (i.e., my phone will go bing and I won't get the notification on the watch). Super annoying and frustrating.
- putting music on the watch is a
- Apps seem a bit awkward unreliable - Philips Hue for example gives me a "hmm, can't connect to your phone" type error a lot rendering it unusable. Weather app takes a little too long to start - although the new patch last week seems to have improved it.
- GPS accuracy isn't super great. It's good enough for running but it shows me running across water and stuff. I suspect it has a low sample rate deliberately to save battery time. GPS also takes a while to lock on and never works until I'm outside, so I have to wait a few minutes before I can start exercise.
- I find the band it comes with kinda uncomfortable - although honestly it might just be because I've been wearing this thing for two solid months because I like it so much
- I find the automatic screen activation when I lift my watch up a bit flaky. Having to press a button when it doesn't automatically come on is really really annoying. It doesn't work well at all in non-normal situations (e.g., lying down). I would like the option to tweak this a lot. It also hilariously comes in when I'm in the shower - and the water triggers the touch screen, so things will happen randomly, like it will just open the weather app because water slid down the screen, sliding it to the left and then another drop landed right on the app. Kinda funny.
It seems many of the formerly planned coal plants have been suspended or cancelled.
Yep great post. Completely agree. I am a DC fan over Marvel and I really wanted to love these new movies but I simply cannot.
I saw JL last weekend and I actually kind of enjoyed it from a broad strokes perspective. But as a DC movie meant to celebrate the characters I grew up with and love the most in any comic series (Batman & Superman - boring, I know!) it just didn't do it.
Comparing what DC have done to what Marvel as done shows such a striking difference I can't believe whoever is pulling the strings behind DC movies is allowing them to go on. Introducing not one but TWO "smaller" DC characters into JL with zero origin just seemed like a huge staggering mistake. I know of Aquaman but know nothing about his history. I barely have even heard of Cyborg guy. And throwing in a Flash - who is not the Flash from the TV series - I imagine probably confuses a lot of people, but at least there's some frame of reference.
The funny thing about this election, I do not remember when a candidate spent so much less on an election and won.
To be fair we don't know how much the Russians spent on getting him elected
*ducks*
I'm sure a lot of people embark on researching 30 years of economic data on the recommendation of an anonymous Internet person.
If you have done this research already, you should make your point, citing the relevant evidence. Who do you think you are going to get onto your side with this suggestion?
Marshmallow and Nougat are the most popular Android versions (each taking around 30 percent of market), so either of those is hardly obsolete.
I guess their obsoleteness depends on the exact state of their software. I can't remember when Android started doing the security patch version (Marshmallow?) but I suspect many of them are running M or N but at a minor version number that does not include the latest security updates.
My partner is a big OPO fan & almost certainly will get this new version. She's not at all interested in the security issues I raise. If I can't convince her, I can't convince anyone - so I don't know what chance the average person has to make sure they're getting a less insecure phone experience.
(I since looked at the official site; this new phone also runs OPO's own version of Android, OxygenOS - not at all sure how it diverges from mainline Android.)
Doesn't that just mean it's obsolete out of the box given the current version of Android is 8 (Oreo)?
Pretty much the only thing I ever want to know about new Android phones is whether or not I'm going to get the latest updates. These days unless it's a Pixel the answer is 'no' (maybe that will change with this Project Treble thing) but for some reason we still get breathless Android phone announcements like this Wired one that are all about how many megapixels or bezels it has.
Ah interesting, thanks. It looks like they created an entire new version just for v57 (v4.0) and my current Firefox version (v3.17) is not linked to it, so it just looks like it's deprecated. Good to know!
Five of the five addons I have installed are marked as Legacy so will not work :( One of them is NoScript, which I know is coming in the next few days, but it's actually the one I care about the least.
The others are:
FireGestures (for gesture controlling - amazing how you get used to this & how much difference it makes to your browsing experience). No update news but from comments it seems it's unlikely to be updated to its former glory due to deficiencies in the new API. There are partial replacements so not too bad.
GreaseMonkey (for modifying webpages on the fly). I mostly use this for minor work enhancements so not critical but it's a really useful tool. I think it's easily replaceable though.
QuickJava. A super useful tool that simply puts icons in the status bar allowing you to toggle on/off JS, WebGL, RTC, Images, CSS, Proxy, etc. Staggeringly handy.
Classic Theme Restorer. I will miss the UI flexibility the most.
I have maybe 12 other addons that I mostly leave disabled; only two of these have been updated, the others are legacy.
I am really torn; I want to stay up-to-date with Firefox but the reason I use Firefox is that I've customised it to my preferences. If I lose that ability and it's not replaced with something better - the speed is nice but I don't really care about it - then why would I update?
Agree for the same reasons. Where I'm from (Qld, Australia) in summer the sun is up by 4.30am and it's often pushing 30 degrees celcius soon after. Unlike the other states on the eastern seaboard, we do not have daylight savings, so it's dark by 7pm.
I am not at all a morning person but in Qld I almost don't have a choice because it's hard to sleep much later. For me DST means a much nicer summer.
Where I live now (London, UK), we've just switched off DST. It's now suddenly pitch black by 5pm and it's creeping down earlier and earlier. It's amazing the impact this has on the day. Again as a non-morning person I'd happily sacrifice an hour of morning light for more in the evening, even though in winter the difference would be massively less noticable here.