eitland

[eitland]

Apps I use: Telegram

Excellent:

Usability

UI

Good

Features (far better than sms and mostly in another league than Whatsapp as well.)

Bad:

No end to end encryption by default.

In all fairness a major reason for this is to support usability

Warning: this is my somewhat uninformed decision, I am not a cryptographer. There seems to be well argued concerns about the crypto used in Telegram. While I haven’t seen anybody posting any known weakness, a number of cryptographers have been concerned about it. I should note that I choose to use it for many things anyway, I just pretend to myself that anybody can read it if they really want.

More about Telegram

Compared to Whatsapp, Telegram has more features and new features mostly arrive weeks or months earlier than on WhatsApp.

Notable examples include

Reply to a specific message. (Came on WhatsApp later.)

@ mentions. (Came on WhatsApp later.)

Tags (not yet available on WhatsApp.)

[eitland]

Disks exist in two states: broken or about to break

Me? (Happy to update if anyone has earlier references.)

[eitland]

Apps I use: Whatsapp

Excellent:

Usability

UI

Good

Features (far better than sms but still plays catch up with Telegram)

End to End Encryption: messages are by default encrypted from they leave the senders phone until they arrive with the recipient.

Ugly:

Owned by a guy I have reasons not to trust, for now at least.

A little back story:

2 years ago Whatsapp was the best messaging platform I knew of.

It worked flawlessly, was beautiful and had a decent monetization strategy: USD 1/User/Year.

The only missing piece was an API. The only thing I didn’t like about them was their active hostility towards anyone who tried to make APIs and I could partly understand that as well.

Then they where bought up by Facebook and alarms went off immediately. While all hope was not lost, assuming that Facebook ownership would in any way improve on an app whose main selling points was privacy and strong focus on usability was kind of far fetched but all hope was not lost as we could hope they’d leave it alone.

However the next warning sign showed up quickly afterwards: Whatsapp would now be free and they would monetize it in another way, possibly by selling API access or something IIRC.

Later sweeping changes to privacy policies was introduced, taking effect by default unless the user actively opted out. These new policies would allow Facebook to link user data between Whatsapp and Facebook.

AFAIK they have been stopped from doing this in EU because of EU regulations, but for me I now consider Whatsapp unwanted and actively tell users to leave like I used to actvely recruit users for them.

[eitland]

Short review of Journey, Android app and Windows standalone

I've been using Journey both on my phone and on my desktop on and off for months now. Here are some findings: Excellent: * one payment, no subscription and don't try to push its own proprietary sync but rather just integrates nicely with Dropbox. Good: * Looks nice (IMO) * Doesn't crash * Does what it says Could be better: * Never seems to remember where I live or work. Always suggests another address than where I am. * Everytime I add a picture it asks me if I want to update the date and time of the post even if the pictures are taken seconds apart. Verdict: Good. Would buy again: yes.

[eitland]

Dicipline might get you up in the morning, passion keep you awake at night. A few hours of sleep from falling asleep during the day.

[eitland]

lenovo Yoga 15 ThinkPad

The good:

Good processor

Good disk

16 GB RAM

Touch screen

Mostly good build quality (6 months in)

The bad:

Loose screws. Fortunately the don't fall out.

Software / drivers, especially the screen dimming "feature" that will change screen brightness when you change programs or sometimes just for fun.

The ugly:

All the mess that lenovo has created wrt to Superfish etc

Verdict: Very good, could easily have been a whole lot better and if I was to go back to May and choose again I'd maybe land on a Dell or, - if I could convince myself that 8GB is enough a Surface Pro or Lenovo 14" off-the shelf edition.

[eitland]

Loose screw, again. From my lenovo Yoga 15 ThinkPad.

[eitland]

Mitt vesle kunstverk.

[eitland]

God helg! #helg #highfive (ved Horten)

[eitland]

Postman Pat Project

is when everything is delivered at the last second of the extended deadline and the PM needed to involve the entire village to complete it.

[eitland]

Elementary OS Freya Review Of New Features

elementary OS Freya has been released today. I have already tried out this beautiful Linux distribution. There has been several changes between the previous version Luna and upcoming Freya. If you ...

It is no secret that I like elementary os and here is a nice walkthrough of the new features in Freya.

[elementaryos]

Will you guys support things like smooth touchpad, two finger scroll or three finger selection in freya?

Indeed! Smooth scrolling is standard thanks to GTK+, and you scroll with two fingers. :) As for three-finger selection, I’m not familiar with that one. But due to the inconsistencies in hardware, we limit OS-wide multitouch to two fingers for now.

We’re looking forward to Wayland and LibInput (two low-level open source components) for more extensive multitouch in the future.

[eitland]

elementaryos being elementaryos they keep improving while making sure the whole thing stays usable it seems. (Full disclosure: haven’t had time to test the latest yet, but it seems promising.)

[eitland]

OK, I’ve had time to test the latest and it rocks.

It’s like having a Mac with

a sane keyboard[0],

a full repository of apt-get goodness[1],

sane alt-tab[2].

Issues I still have with Elementary:

It doesn’t automatically convert my power connector to a magsafe one.

Microsoft hasn’t released Office 365 and Visual studio for it yet.

[0]: Ctrl in bottom left, PgUp/PgDn, Home, End all exist.

[1]: Well because it is based un Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

[2]: Everything in a stack, you don’t have to worry about alt-tabbing to last application or something else to last “document”.

[eitland]

tobiasflohre/movie-database

A fully working example of setting up multiple Spring Boot micro sites  complete with SSO etc. Nicely done as well!

[elementaryos]

Will you guys support things like smooth touchpad, two finger scroll or three finger selection in freya?

Indeed! Smooth scrolling is standard thanks to GTK+, and you scroll with two fingers. :) As for three-finger selection, I’m not familiar with that one. But due to the inconsistencies in hardware, we limit OS-wide multitouch to two fingers for now.

We’re looking forward to Wayland and LibInput (two low-level open source components) for more extensive multitouch in the future.

[eitland]

elementaryos being elementaryos they keep improving while making sure the whole thing stays usable it seems. (Full disclosure: haven’t had time to test the latest yet, but it seems promising.)

[eitland]

Some more thoughts on open floor plans.

While I can absolutely manage to work in such places I’ll be happy to admit that I don’t think they improve efficiency all the time.

Oh, and I should read Peopleware I guess.

[elementaryos]

Super Shortcuts

Most keyboards have a special key designed for use by the computer’s original operating system. On a PC, it’s the “Windows” key and bears the Windows logo. On a Mac, it’s the “Command” key and has a “point of interest” or “⌘” symbol. In elementary OS, we use this key for several shortcuts and call it the “Super” key. Since the Windows logo is trademarked and the point of interest symbol is not, we can use ⌘ in our documentation and user interface.

Read More

[eitland]

I already love elementaryos and if they can get shortcuts consistent and reasonable it will be a giant win.

More specifically I'm thinking about the possibility that all general shortcuts could use one modifier (⌘) and applications could use ctrl and alt/meta without ever worrying about conflicts. I've never come around to really thinking it through though.

[eitland]

That won't scale.

That's been proven to be O(N^2) and weneed a solution that's O(NlogN).

There are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.

The syntax is idiosyncratic.

Trying to build a team behind that technology would be a staffing nightmare.

That can't be generalized to a cross-platform build.

Unfortunately, the license would contaminate our product.

etc etc including winners like

"RAM is cheap and all, but..."

"This is all covered in Knuth, and we don't have time to go over it again."

"Yes,but can this be embedded in a toaster, for example?"'