Being anti-social, I hate anything that reeks of social media, but I do like posting up comments about apps on Google Play. For a long time, I just needed a standard Google account to do this and was very annoyed when I was effectively forced to sign up to Google+ just to make comments on the Play Store (the two should *never* have been forcibly joined, IMHO).
Not only did I have to regularly trawl through my Google+ settings to disable every single "we'll share everything with everyone" option (and any new option added was invariably enabled and you weren't told about it), but the Google Play Games dialogue box that popped up on first run of a game would have all its settings default to share everything about the game with everyone, so I had to tediously disable those as well for each game.
So there's a bit of joy this week as I managed to delete the Google+ account that I never used other than as an "auth" for Play Store reviews. Having deleted my Linkedin account (that I also never used) due to the recently revealed hack, I can proudly say that I'm no longer on social media at all. Now get off my lawn!
And yet three seriously weak points of the Pi 2, namely the 1GB RAM (I'd far rather have 2GB RAM than "faster" 1GB RAM, especially with a 64-bit CPU), 100 Mbit/sec Ethernet (ruling out the Pi as a fast fileserver - can't believe Gigabit costs much more) and the pitiful USB (2 - In this day and age ) weren't upgraded at all. If they fix these three, I'll be first in line for the Pi 4.
With a Xiaomi 10000 mAh power bank attached to my Pi 2 Model B running Raspbian desktop (but idle, other than a script writing the uptime to a file every minute), I got 13 hours and 46 minutes before the power ran out. I wonder if the Pi port of Android will support the Pi 2 Model B too? It'll be annoying if it doesn't, because the Pi 3 wasn't a massive upgrade over the Pi 2 Model B.
It's surprising that after all this time in beta and a move of its home to EFF, there still doesn't appear to be an official client for Windows Servers running IIS. Yes, there's several unofficial Windows clients, but am I supposed to trust them and even if I did, which one is the best?
Why not write a small utility that may do something similar to sometrhing that already exists (let's face it, almost everything has been thought of already!) but does it a better/easier way?
For example, I always hated the syntax of sed (regexp's aren't easy either) and it missed quite a few features I'd like, so I wrote "replace" instead:
I also find "bc", "dc" and "calc" completely unfathomable, so I wrote my own "calc" (without knowing about the other one until well afterwards!) which actually has an expression evaluator based on BASIC (i.e. "obvious"):
JavaScript is loaded client-side and can be downloaded and viewed as plain text, so it's certainly not closed source. Minified JavaScript is just JS code that's harder to understand due to function/variable substitution and whitespace stripping and again it's not closed source.
I don't know if you can actually buy commercial JavaScript libraries, but if you did, all the source code would be sent to the public every time a page was loaded with the JS loaded from it, so again it isn't closed source, but technically could be proprietary (i.e. it can only be used on authorised sites and anyone putting it on another unauthorised site is breaking the licence terms).
What's the difference, though, between custom HTML/CSS and custom JS in terms of licencing? All of them could be developed in-house and have the same "proprietary" licencing (i.e. can't be copied and used on other sites) - after all it's illegal to clone someone's site and host it elsewhere without permission surely?
I think the FSF have got this one wrong - if there was a way to make JS closed source, then they might have a point, but claiming JS can be "proprietary" just because it's minified or developed in-house (and not usable on other sites - after all, a lot of money could have been spent developing - or purchasing - the JS) is barking up the wrong tree. As long as the JS works cross-platform on the major browsers, I see no issue myself.
You do suspect there'll be unskippable ads in this (even 6 second-long ones would be abhorrent on a subscription service). but even worse I suspect it'll be US-only, which would be a huge missed revenue opportunity. Many US people will already have access to the channels on cable, so the real demand for this would surely be non-US viewers?
What riles me about Amazon's Prime Video service is that not only do you have to pay a subscription, but quite often there's a charge for content too, which Netflix doesn't do. A random example - the 15-year-old season 1 of "Six Feet Under" costs 14.99 pounds ($22 or so) from Amazon Prime Video in the UK...and it's only in SD too!
I tried the video service as part of a 30-day free Prime trial and I was deeply, deeply unimpressed with it - not enough free content as I said and a limited content range overall too. Their original content isn't as good as Netflix's either - it simply isn't a service worth purchasing and adds very little to the overall Prime package, IMHO.
This might be fine where you've got a single Linux machine and, say, backup to an external USB3 hard drive, but what about bigger setups than this? For example, multiple Windows/Linux client machines to backup and a central server with an autoloader/barcoded Ultrium tape drive attached? There's very few open source solutions that deal with this in a heterogeneous environment (Amanda - which is poor with Windows clients - and Bacula - which is ridiculously complex to setup - are just about the only two that spring to mind). Until BorgBackup can do something similar, it's not really useful in a multi-machine/autoloader setup (no, I don't want to install two backup systems on every client...).
The UK price of the $699 tested 256GB SSD model is unbelievably expensive in comparson - it's over 800 pounds ($1200) which is sheer madness and will kill its UK sales. Add the fact that it's very hard to find it with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed (there's another 100 pounds - $150) and this will see near-zero UK business sales.
If you look at projectors designed to be hooked up to laptops and desktops, guess which is the most common connector on them? Nope, it's not HDMI, but actually VGA! It's actually quite hard to find a projector without a VGA connector even in 2016...
Yes, I too would like a monitor-style TV (loads of inputs, *no* built-in tuners or even built-in audio), but you wouldn't suggest an actual computer monitor because the price increases exponentially once you go beyond a 24" monitor.
Dell's 55" computer monitor ("only" 1080p!) is over 1,000 pounds ($1500) in the UK, whereas a 55" 1080p TV can be had for little as 400 pounds ($600).
I use Adaway too, but supplement it with Adblock Plus in Firefox to get wider coverage (my assumption here is that some URLs in Adaway aren't in Adblock Plus and vice versa). The only time I look at ads now is usually for a short video to let me be resurrected in a game or get some bonus coins, but even that can be tedious (if you must show me video ads, uniquely cycle through them rather than having the same video ad over and over again and only switching it after about 5 views).
One of the major pains in the backside of WordPress is its use of absolute URLs for pages on the site thousands of times in the WP database. PHP is always had $_SERVER variables to dynamically find the top level component of your URL (e.g. http://www.joebloggs.com/ if you need to (does WP ever need to know it anyway?), yet if you dump the SQL DB, you'll see that URLs are pretty well all absolute rather then relative. This is horrible because:
* HTML generated by WordPress contains absolute URLs all over the place for resources contained within the site, when they clearly should be relative URLs to save bytes if nothing else. * Any need to change the URL of a WordPress site causes massive pain because you can't just mysqldump/sed/mysql to change the URL because of serislised data. I have to use a special tool for this, which is highly annoying to have to do so (though the tool is nice to use admittedly). Warning: WP-CLI's "wp search-replace" often missses replacing some URLs, so I don't use that any more.
In case you think you'll never change a top-level URL of a WordPress site, think again - it's very common indeed: * Site goes from national (www.joebloggs.co.uk) to international (www.joebloggs.com) and wants the latter to be the primary address. * Site needs to be copied from dev -> UAT -> live (and maybe -> DR) or in the reverse direction and all instances have different URLs. * Site is converted from http to https.
...and sites with Wordfence:-) The latest Wordfence release outrageously renames a core WP file (/readme.html) by default which breaks the official WP API used to verify checksums of core WP files (tools such as WP-CLI use this). I posted up to the Wordfence forum about this and got a useless reply and my thread marked as "resolved" despite nothing being done about the breakage!
I've now had to go around all WP sites with Wordfence installed, manually turning off this renaming of/readme.html (which was turned off by default in older Wordfence releases and very sneakily silently turned on in the latest release).
WP-CLI is your friend - lets you do all the admin pointy-clicky stuff via the command line instead (cue a cron'ed wrapper script!). Even manually updating WordPress is painless compared to pretty well any other CMS out there. If I mention "Umbraco updates" (yes, I know, it's Windows only) to anyone within earshot, they run away screaming. Umbraco has *no* updating facility at all (manual clicking in admin interface or automated) and it can literally take days to update just one Umbraco site following a horrendous set of complex instructions!
I, too, have an ever-growing script that wraps around WP-CLI, but there's a *lot* of gotchas you've got to deal with:
* Use "wp core verify-checksums" to make sure no-one's modded core files before you do a WP core update. * Check at least the Web site home page is returning a 200 success code before attempting any updates. * If the home page fails to return 200 after an update, auto-rollback the Web/DB from the pre-update backup you took. * You need the ability to exclude specific plugin updates if they break a particular site (so you can rollback/freeze UAT/live on the last working version while you work on dev to find a workaround for the newest version). This means you need to construct a list of "available" updates from the output of "wp plugin list" and then exclude broken plugins for specific sites i.e. you can't use --all like the parent post did. * You should do a second plugin update pass if the first pass updated any plugins - some plugins such as Woocommerce can trigger fresh "available" updates for other plugins. * Massively irritatingly, many commercial plugins fail to hook into the standard WP upating system (i.e. "wp plugin list" fail to list new updates as being "available"). I've had to resort to horrendous site scraping to detect and download such updates - paid-for plugins often insist you manually log into their site and manually download/install a plugin zip file, which is madness.
There are quite a few other things that my script does (e.g. scan Apache config for ServerName and DocumentRoots containing wp-config.php for a WP site list, generates Web pages for each server detailing the updates, e-mails the WP admin contact when core/plugins are updated for a site), but too much is specific to my setup to be publicly released I'm afraid.
If you're worried that you'll not build your PC correctly and it'll fail to work, then one alternative to that is to find a good whitebox shifter that lets you customise everything. Of course, you'll have to check they'll not overcharge for components (they sneakily don't put the absolute price for each one up, instead picking a "default" component and then displaying the +/- delta price difference between the default and each alternative you can pick from a list).
You will be restricted to what components they let you pick of course, so make sure there's nothing too restrictive. At the end of the day, you'll get a well-tested box that can be purchased without an OS if you're only going to run Linux on it. My "trick" is to order the best bang for buck components that can't be easily replaced (CPU is the scariest - I know you'll say it's easy, but it's just too frightening to change IMHO simply because of the high chance of damage of what's often the most expensive component) and then get the minimum of what can be easily swapped out/upgraded later (disk, RAM, graphics cards and the like).
Oh and I'm fussy about keeping my PCs quiet - I think there should be a decibel rating for all components and an overall one for the final built PC. There's nothing worse than firing up a PC and having it sound like a jumbo jet on the runway. I order silent/quiet components for as much as I can and add soundproofing if the case doesn't come with it (make sure that's an option for your whitebox shifter). The acid test is: can you sleep overnight in the same room as your running PC? I can with my current PC from a whitebox shifter...
I like to use Linux Firefox with DejaVu Sans 16 point (minimum font size set to 16 as well, plus I don't allow pages to use their own fonts) and it's quite shocking how many sites break with this. Web designers don't seem to think anyone would ever use than 10 point fonts (which are ludicrously tiny on my monitor). It's annoying how Web fonts have crept into sites in recent years as well. Rather than images, they set up Web fonts for navigation icons, social media icons etc. which come out as hieroglyphics (random bitmaps almost) if you don't allow site to use Web fonts like I said I don't. Again, site designers never test their designs with Web fonts disabled, ho hum...
Amanda is great if you're backing up only Linux clents, but the Windows Amanda client is a total abomination. Not been updated in over 2 years (don't believe the version numbering - check the timestamp of setup.exe), pointlessly uses a MySQL DB on the client side (ridiculous!) which the Linux client *or* server doesn't use, regularly times out, regularly crashes, produces byzantine error codes without any description/documentation of them, much slower than the equivalent Linux client and produces ZIP64 backups that are pretty well impossible to extract from on Linux (which is annoying, because the Amanda server side is Linux-only).
We have a Ultrium tape drives with multi-slot autoloaders/barcodes, so there are very few Open Source backup solutions that can handle this (including tape-spanning if needed) out-of-the-box. Bacula was another potential solution, but it's horrific to set up (makes the dreadful Oracle DB install process look like a breeze) - just reading the Bacula install docs brings me out in a cold sweat:-) I guess business-level backups just aren't sexy enough to warrant a decent Open Source solution...
Although LG have come up with newer models, my trusty old LG G Pad 8.3 is still my "go to" tablet for when on the move. 1900x1200 resolution (none of this 4:3 nonsense seen in recent tablets) and an SD card slot are nice bonuses, though watch out for colour calibration issues and a somewhat darker display than other tablets.
I *strongly* recommend that you put CyanogenMod on the G Pad 8.3 - it's an officially supported device and CM lets you tweak the colour calibration too in the Settings. I just wish LG would come up with a decent successor to it - all their later models just don't do it for me.
When it comes to Android, there's only three solutions to getting decent updates: a Nexus device, a device that ships with Cyanogen OS or a (preferably official) CyanogenMod custom ROM install.
> The British did perfectly well on four channels.
Yes, they did, but with the advent of cable and satellite in the late 80's (and Net-streamed channels in recent years), the number of UK channels exploded and are now probably approaching 1,000. Of course, 950 of those 1,000 channels are completely hopeless and probably have viewers in the hundreds or thousands.
The quality of British TV has nosedived in inverse proportion to the number of channels available - the "big 5" UK channels are now so bad, that I'm down to recording maybe 5-6 shows a week (it used to 40-50 about 20 years ago). BBC and ITV compete for the lowest of the low-brow now - endless quizzes, soaps, reality shows and "talent" shows dominate prime-time viewing and it's been many years since I've liked any UK TV comedy (Have I Got News For You remains the only regular UK comedy show I'll bother recording).
I'm finding that the best US shows are just so much higher quality now than their UK equivalents, so a decent broadband connection is all I need to satisfy my viewing needs...
I have a long grass verge by the side of the road and several dog owners have taken to dumping their dog poo bags on it, which is bewildering. Why make the effort to collect the dog poo in a small black plastic bag, only to illegally litter it right afterwards? It's an on-the-spot 80 pounds = $120 fine where I live, but unless I install CCTV and review the footage (and even then identifying them might be impossible), they're never going to get caught by the local council.
Some scoundrel even *saved* 10 of their poo bags and then dumped them at various intervals along my verge. And, no, I'm not enemies with anyone local before anyone asks...
If your distro (e.g. CentOS 6) doesn't carry the latest LibreOffice release, then you have to download it from the official LibreOffice site. Unfortunately, a litany of RPM packaging disasters still abound with 5.0. I've never seen any Open Source software as badly RPM-packaged as the official LibreOffice RPMs!
Quite a while ago, Google made the onerous and 100% unnecessary requirement that reviews of Google Play store apps *required* a Google+ account. I very begrudgingly created a Google+ account which I have everything turned off on because I do like to review apps, but hate everything to do with social media garbage.
If they remove the Google+ requirement for Google Play app reviews, my Google+ account is gone. BTW, does this mean that the Google Play Games service doesn't need a Google+ account (unlikely I guess - I loathe that it defaults to sharing everything to the world about your gaming by default and I always have to turn off the options for each game)?
Slashdot Mirror
Being anti-social, I hate anything that reeks of social media, but I do like posting up comments about apps on Google Play. For a long time, I just needed a standard Google account to do this and was very annoyed when I was effectively forced to sign up to Google+ just to make comments on the Play Store (the two should *never* have been forcibly joined, IMHO).
Not only did I have to regularly trawl through my Google+ settings to disable every single "we'll share everything with everyone" option (and any new option added was invariably enabled and you weren't told about it), but the Google Play Games dialogue box that popped up on first run of a game would have all its settings default to share everything about the game with everyone, so I had to tediously disable those as well for each game.
So there's a bit of joy this week as I managed to delete the Google+ account that I never used other than as an "auth" for Play Store reviews. Having deleted my Linkedin account (that I also never used) due to the recently revealed hack, I can proudly say that I'm no longer on social media at all. Now get off my lawn!
And yet three seriously weak points of the Pi 2, namely the 1GB RAM (I'd far rather have 2GB RAM than "faster" 1GB RAM, especially with a 64-bit CPU), 100 Mbit/sec Ethernet (ruling out the Pi as a fast fileserver - can't believe Gigabit costs much more) and the pitiful USB (2 - In this day and age ) weren't upgraded at all. If they fix these three, I'll be first in line for the Pi 4.
With a Xiaomi 10000 mAh power bank attached to my Pi 2 Model B running Raspbian desktop (but idle, other than a script writing the uptime to a file every minute), I got 13 hours and 46 minutes before the power ran out. I wonder if the Pi port of Android will support the Pi 2 Model B too? It'll be annoying if it doesn't, because the Pi 3 wasn't a massive upgrade over the Pi 2 Model B.
It's surprising that after all this time in beta and a move of its home to EFF, there still doesn't appear to be an official client for Windows Servers running IIS. Yes, there's several unofficial Windows clients, but am I supposed to trust them and even if I did, which one is the best?
Why not write a small utility that may do something similar to sometrhing that already exists (let's face it, almost everything has been thought of already!) but does it a better/easier way?
For example, I always hated the syntax of sed (regexp's aren't easy either) and it missed quite a few features I'd like, so I wrote "replace" instead:
http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hpp...
I also find "bc", "dc" and "calc" completely unfathomable, so I wrote my own "calc" (without knowing about the other one until well afterwards!) which actually has an expression evaluator based on BASIC (i.e. "obvious"):
http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hpp...
Neither utility is large and both were fairly straightorward to write and I use both quite regularly to this day, many years after writing them.
JavaScript is loaded client-side and can be downloaded and viewed as plain text, so it's certainly not closed source. Minified JavaScript is just JS code that's harder to understand due to function/variable substitution and whitespace stripping and again it's not closed source.
I don't know if you can actually buy commercial JavaScript libraries, but if you did, all the source code would be sent to the public every time a page was loaded with the JS loaded from it, so again it isn't closed source, but technically could be proprietary (i.e. it can only be used on authorised sites and anyone putting it on another unauthorised site is breaking the licence terms).
What's the difference, though, between custom HTML/CSS and custom JS in terms of licencing? All of them could be developed in-house and have the same "proprietary" licencing (i.e. can't be copied and used on other sites) - after all it's illegal to clone someone's site and host it elsewhere without permission surely?
I think the FSF have got this one wrong - if there was a way to make JS closed source, then they might have a point, but claiming JS can be "proprietary" just because it's minified or developed in-house (and not usable on other sites - after all, a lot of money could have been spent developing - or purchasing - the JS) is barking up the wrong tree. As long as the JS works cross-platform on the major browsers, I see no issue myself.
You do suspect there'll be unskippable ads in this (even 6 second-long ones would be abhorrent on a subscription service). but even worse I suspect it'll be US-only, which would be a huge missed revenue opportunity. Many US people will already have access to the channels on cable, so the real demand for this would surely be non-US viewers?
What riles me about Amazon's Prime Video service is that not only do you have to pay a subscription, but quite often there's a charge for content too, which Netflix doesn't do. A random example - the 15-year-old season 1 of "Six Feet Under" costs 14.99 pounds ($22 or so) from Amazon Prime Video in the UK...and it's only in SD too!
I tried the video service as part of a 30-day free Prime trial and I was deeply, deeply unimpressed with it - not enough free content as I said and a limited content range overall too. Their original content isn't as good as Netflix's either - it simply isn't a service worth purchasing and adds very little to the overall Prime package, IMHO.
This might be fine where you've got a single Linux machine and, say, backup to an external USB3 hard drive, but what about bigger setups than this? For example, multiple Windows/Linux client machines to backup and a central server with an autoloader/barcoded Ultrium tape drive attached? There's very few open source solutions that deal with this in a heterogeneous environment (Amanda - which is poor with Windows clients - and Bacula - which is ridiculously complex to setup - are just about the only two that spring to mind). Until BorgBackup can do something similar, it's not really useful in a multi-machine/autoloader setup (no, I don't want to install two backup systems on every client...).
The UK price of the $699 tested 256GB SSD model is unbelievably expensive in comparson - it's over 800 pounds ($1200) which is sheer madness and will kill its UK sales. Add the fact that it's very hard to find it with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed (there's another 100 pounds - $150) and this will see near-zero UK business sales.
If you look at projectors designed to be hooked up to laptops and desktops, guess which is the most common connector on them? Nope, it's not HDMI, but actually VGA! It's actually quite hard to find a projector without a VGA connector even in 2016...
Yes, I too would like a monitor-style TV (loads of inputs, *no* built-in tuners or even built-in audio), but you wouldn't suggest an actual computer monitor because the price increases exponentially once you go beyond a 24" monitor.
Dell's 55" computer monitor ("only" 1080p!) is over 1,000 pounds ($1500) in the UK, whereas a 55" 1080p TV can be had for little as 400 pounds ($600).
I use Adaway too, but supplement it with Adblock Plus in Firefox to get wider coverage (my assumption here is that some URLs in Adaway aren't in Adblock Plus and vice versa). The only time I look at ads now is usually for a short video to let me be resurrected in a game or get some bonus coins, but even that can be tedious (if you must show me video ads, uniquely cycle through them rather than having the same video ad over and over again and only switching it after about 5 views).
One of the major pains in the backside of WordPress is its use of absolute URLs for pages on the site thousands of times in the WP database. PHP is always had $_SERVER variables to dynamically find the top level component of your URL (e.g. http://www.joebloggs.com/ if you need to (does WP ever need to know it anyway?), yet if you dump the SQL DB, you'll see that URLs are pretty well all absolute rather then relative. This is horrible because:
* HTML generated by WordPress contains absolute URLs all over the place for resources contained within the site, when they clearly should be relative URLs to save bytes if nothing else.
* Any need to change the URL of a WordPress site causes massive pain because you can't just mysqldump/sed/mysql to change the URL because of serislised data. I have to use a special tool for this, which is highly annoying to have to do so (though the tool is nice to use admittedly). Warning: WP-CLI's "wp search-replace" often missses replacing some URLs, so I don't use that any more.
In case you think you'll never change a top-level URL of a WordPress site, think again - it's very common indeed:
* Site goes from national (www.joebloggs.co.uk) to international (www.joebloggs.com) and wants the latter to be the primary address.
* Site needs to be copied from dev -> UAT -> live (and maybe -> DR) or in the reverse direction and all instances have different URLs.
* Site is converted from http to https.
...and sites with Wordfence :-) The latest Wordfence release outrageously renames a core WP file (/readme.html) by default which breaks the official WP API used to verify checksums of core WP files (tools such as WP-CLI use this). I posted up to the Wordfence forum about this and got a useless reply and my thread marked as "resolved" despite nothing being done about the breakage!
I've now had to go around all WP sites with Wordfence installed, manually turning off this renaming of /readme.html (which was turned off by default in older Wordfence releases and very sneakily silently turned on in the latest release).
WP-CLI is your friend - lets you do all the admin pointy-clicky stuff via the command line instead (cue a cron'ed wrapper script!). Even manually updating WordPress is painless compared to pretty well any other CMS out there. If I mention "Umbraco updates" (yes, I know, it's Windows only) to anyone within earshot, they run away screaming. Umbraco has *no* updating facility at all (manual clicking in admin interface or automated) and it can literally take days to update just one Umbraco site following a horrendous set of complex instructions!
I, too, have an ever-growing script that wraps around WP-CLI, but there's a *lot* of gotchas you've got to deal with:
* Use "wp core verify-checksums" to make sure no-one's modded core files before you do a WP core update.
* Check at least the Web site home page is returning a 200 success code before attempting any updates.
* If the home page fails to return 200 after an update, auto-rollback the Web/DB from the pre-update backup you took.
* You need the ability to exclude specific plugin updates if they break a particular site (so you can rollback/freeze UAT/live on the last working version while you work on dev to find a workaround for the newest version). This means you need to construct a list of "available" updates from the output of "wp plugin list" and then exclude broken plugins for specific sites i.e. you can't use --all like the parent post did.
* You should do a second plugin update pass if the first pass updated any plugins - some plugins such as Woocommerce can trigger fresh "available" updates for other plugins.
* Massively irritatingly, many commercial plugins fail to hook into the standard WP upating system (i.e. "wp plugin list" fail to list new updates as being "available"). I've had to resort to horrendous site scraping to detect and download such updates - paid-for plugins often insist you manually log into their site and manually download/install a plugin zip file, which is madness.
There are quite a few other things that my script does (e.g. scan Apache config for ServerName and DocumentRoots containing wp-config.php for a WP site list, generates Web pages for each server detailing the updates, e-mails the WP admin contact when core/plugins are updated for a site), but too much is specific to my setup to be publicly released I'm afraid.
If you're worried that you'll not build your PC correctly and it'll fail to work, then one alternative to that is to find a good whitebox shifter that lets you customise everything. Of course, you'll have to check they'll not overcharge for components (they sneakily don't put the absolute price for each one up, instead picking a "default" component and then displaying the +/- delta price difference between the default and each alternative you can pick from a list).
You will be restricted to what components they let you pick of course, so make sure there's nothing too restrictive. At the end of the day, you'll get a well-tested box that can be purchased without an OS if you're only going to run Linux on it. My "trick" is to order the best bang for buck components that can't be easily replaced (CPU is the scariest - I know you'll say it's easy, but it's just too frightening to change IMHO simply because of the high chance of damage of what's often the most expensive component) and then get the minimum of what can be easily swapped out/upgraded later (disk, RAM, graphics cards and the like).
Oh and I'm fussy about keeping my PCs quiet - I think there should be a decibel rating for all components and an overall one for the final built PC. There's nothing worse than firing up a PC and having it sound like a jumbo jet on the runway. I order silent/quiet components for as much as I can and add soundproofing if the case doesn't come with it (make sure that's an option for your whitebox shifter). The acid test is: can you sleep overnight in the same room as your running PC? I can with my current PC from a whitebox shifter...
I like to use Linux Firefox with DejaVu Sans 16 point (minimum font size set to 16 as well, plus I don't allow pages to use their own fonts) and it's quite shocking how many sites break with this. Web designers don't seem to think anyone would ever use than 10 point fonts (which are ludicrously tiny on my monitor). It's annoying how Web fonts have crept into sites in recent years as well. Rather than images, they set up Web fonts for navigation icons, social media icons etc. which come out as hieroglyphics (random bitmaps almost) if you don't allow site to use Web fonts like I said I don't. Again, site designers never test their designs with Web fonts disabled, ho hum...
Amanda is great if you're backing up only Linux clents, but the Windows Amanda client is a total abomination. Not been updated in over 2 years (don't believe the version numbering - check the timestamp of setup.exe), pointlessly uses a MySQL DB on the client side (ridiculous!) which the Linux client *or* server doesn't use, regularly times out, regularly crashes, produces byzantine error codes without any description/documentation of them, much slower than the equivalent Linux client and produces ZIP64 backups that are pretty well impossible to extract from on Linux (which is annoying, because the Amanda server side is Linux-only).
We have a Ultrium tape drives with multi-slot autoloaders/barcodes, so there are very few Open Source backup solutions that can handle this (including tape-spanning if needed) out-of-the-box. Bacula was another potential solution, but it's horrific to set up (makes the dreadful Oracle DB install process look like a breeze) - just reading the Bacula install docs brings me out in a cold sweat :-) I guess business-level backups just aren't sexy enough to warrant a decent Open Source solution...
Although LG have come up with newer models, my trusty old LG G Pad 8.3 is still my "go to" tablet for when on the move. 1900x1200 resolution (none of this 4:3 nonsense seen in recent tablets) and an SD card slot are nice bonuses, though watch out for colour calibration issues and a somewhat darker display than other tablets.
I *strongly* recommend that you put CyanogenMod on the G Pad 8.3 - it's an officially supported device and CM lets you tweak the colour calibration too in the Settings. I just wish LG would come up with a decent successor to it - all their later models just don't do it for me.
When it comes to Android, there's only three solutions to getting decent updates: a Nexus device, a device that ships with Cyanogen OS or a (preferably official) CyanogenMod custom ROM install.
> The British did perfectly well on four channels.
Yes, they did, but with the advent of cable and satellite in the late 80's (and Net-streamed channels in recent years), the number of UK channels exploded and are now probably approaching 1,000. Of course, 950 of those 1,000 channels are completely hopeless and probably have viewers in the hundreds or thousands.
The quality of British TV has nosedived in inverse proportion to the number of channels available - the "big 5" UK channels are now so bad, that I'm down to recording maybe 5-6 shows a week (it used to 40-50 about 20 years ago). BBC and ITV compete for the lowest of the low-brow now - endless quizzes, soaps, reality shows and "talent" shows dominate prime-time viewing and it's been many years since I've liked any UK TV comedy (Have I Got News For You remains the only regular UK comedy show I'll bother recording).
I'm finding that the best US shows are just so much higher quality now than their UK equivalents, so a decent broadband connection is all I need to satisfy my viewing needs...
I have a long grass verge by the side of the road and several dog owners have taken to dumping their dog poo bags on it, which is bewildering. Why make the effort to collect the dog poo in a small black plastic bag, only to illegally litter it right afterwards? It's an on-the-spot 80 pounds = $120 fine where I live, but unless I install CCTV and review the footage (and even then identifying them might be impossible), they're never going to get caught by the local council.
Some scoundrel even *saved* 10 of their poo bags and then dumped them at various intervals along my verge. And, no, I'm not enemies with anyone local before anyone asks...
If your distro (e.g. CentOS 6) doesn't carry the latest LibreOffice release, then you have to download it from the official LibreOffice site. Unfortunately, a litany of RPM packaging disasters still abound with 5.0. I've never seen any Open Source software as badly RPM-packaged as the official LibreOffice RPMs!
Quite a while ago, Google made the onerous and 100% unnecessary requirement that reviews of Google Play store apps *required* a Google+ account. I very begrudgingly created a Google+ account which I have everything turned off on because I do like to review apps, but hate everything to do with social media garbage.
If they remove the Google+ requirement for Google Play app reviews, my Google+ account is gone. BTW, does this mean that the Google Play Games service doesn't need a Google+ account (unlikely I guess - I loathe that it defaults to sharing everything to the world about your gaming by default and I always have to turn off the options for each game)?