The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[BetterRed]

Assuming you take the same routes, set Keep to trigger a notify at an open air location a short distance away from where you're going - work/home etc.

BR

[AnotherCat]

3M do a good solution .

Just as an aside, I would strongly suspect that Google Keep uses the Estimated Position and the GPS is not used due to the heavy energy demand of the GPS receiver. But that has no influence on the problem but may be interesting to have Google Maps running at the same time so the GPS receiver is enabled and see if that improves the Keep update rate????

[4691mls]

I hadn't thought about the app checking the location on a schedule - that makes sense. (I am not a very tech-y person.)

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Assuming you take the same routes, set Keep to trigger a notify at an open air location a short distance away from where you're going - work/home etc.

BR

My parking lots at home and work are open-air and the buildings in my city are not skyscraper-tall (the tallest one in town is maybe 20 stories, most are under 10). Of course I do live in the mountains so phone reception is always trickier here and could perhaps have an impact.

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

3M do a good solution .

Just as an aside, I would strongly suspect that Google Keep uses the Estimated Position and the GPS is not used due to the heavy energy demand of the GPS receiver. But that has no influence on the problem but may be interesting to have Google Maps running at the same time so the GPS receiver is enabled and see if that improves the Keep update rate????

That's an interesting idea - I'll try that sometime and see if it makes a difference.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I hadn't thought about the app checking the location on a schedule - that makes sense. (I am not a very tech-y person.)

I'm missing something here.

If the problem is remembering to put your parking tag in the window when you arrive at the office, two questions:

1. What happens if you forget? Who/what checks for it? What penalties might ensue if it isn't there?

2. Where to you keep it when it's not in use? Is there a reason you can't just leave it in the window (or sitting on top of your dashboard where you can't help but see it and stick it where it needs to be when you park?)

I'm all in favor of technology to assist with problems like this, but this sounds like it really needs a no tech solution.
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Dennis

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm missing something here.

If the problem is remembering to put your parking tag in the window when you arrive at the office, two questions:

1. What happens if you forget? Who/what checks for it? What penalties might ensue if it isn't there?

2. Where to you keep it when it's not in use? Is there a reason you can't just leave it in the window (or sitting on top of your dashboard where you can't help but see it and stick it where it needs to be when you park?)

I'm all in favor of technology to assist with problems like this, but this sounds like it really needs a no tech solution.
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Dennis

1. If the permit is not there I could get an expensive parking ticket. The lot is managed by a private parking lot company.

2. I don't leave the permit up for two reasons:

i) It's a hang tag for the rearview mirror but is very loose. If I drive with it hanging from the mirror and go over a speed bump or around a sharp corner the tag flies off and inevitably ends up someplace hard to retrieve, like way under the seat. It's also coated in slippery plastic so can't just leave it lying out on the dash or seat or it will slide off.

ii) The tag clearly states the address of where I work in print large enough to be read by anyone walking past my car and I don't necessarily want to provide this information to everyone everywhere I go.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I hadn't thought about the app checking the location on a schedule - that makes sense. (I am not a very tech-y person.)



My parking lots at home and work are open-air and the buildings in my city are not skyscraper-tall (the tallest one in town is maybe 20 stories, most are under 10). Of course I do live in the mountains so phone reception is always trickier here and could perhaps have an impact.

My thinking was that the time taken to travel the 'short distance' from where you're going would provide Keep with enough time to synch with the GPS - the 'open air' would have come from seeing Google Maps losing its way when driving in tunnels

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm missing something here.

If the problem is remembering to put your parking tag in the window when you arrive at the office, two questions:


Dennis

Dennis, dear lad:

I'm looking for you. I have run into something, outside of here, vis: servers and archives, that makes my head hurt. Can you drop me a line? Need advice/guidance from the best person I know around server maintenance that can speak Hitch.

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Dennis, dear lad:

I'm looking for you. I have run into something, outside of here, vis: servers and archives, that makes my head hurt. Can you drop me a line? Need advice/guidance from the best person I know around server maintenance that can speak Hitch.

I'm easily found. You have my email address. I normally respond quickly.
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Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I'm easily found. You have my email address. I normally respond quickly.
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Dennis

DU-uh.

I found the (earlier) email I sent you. No wonder you didn't get it, I fat-fingered it. (You just can't take me anywhere!)

So, I've now sent you another, a reply, so hopefully, it shan't go into the black hole.

Hitch

[wodin]

I just downloaded Microsoft's Chrome version of Edge. Initial impression: everyone should do it.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

Over the weekend, I had massive issues getting Debian installed on my new laptop. It seems GRUB is massively messed up on (at least some) Apollo Lake devices and you need to use a different bootloader like rEFInd. Only took me like 9 hours to figure that out.

And stuff like that is THE main reason why I don't use Linux on the desktop or laptop. There's always SOMETHING that doesn't work, or needs research and fixing that takes hours; time I don't have.

The only devices I've ever successfully used Linux on were:
- Embedded devices, where I started with a bare-bones installation, added only the stuff I needed, and then built my own stuff on top of tht;
- Older computers running recent distro's, so I know all the drivers are already in there and bug fixed.

Linux on new computers, especially laptops? Nope. It never, ever works without a hassle, and after you get it to work, it breaks every week. At least, that has been my experience.

And that's coming from someone who VASTLY prefers doing things on the Linux command-line and with the Linux philosophy as compared to Windows.

If Linux could just get to the point where they seperate the operating system, the drivers, and the applications, so you can install old applications on new OS-es, new applications on old OS-es, and drivers would work for 15 years... I think that would make adoption skyrocket. (Many Windows Vista/7 drivers for old devices still work in Windows 10... in Linux, if a driver isn't open source, today's driver won't work on tomorrow's kernel.)

[Adoby]

Last year I got a new laptop. I wanted a laptop that would be good to use with Linux. And not too expensive. And upgradable.

So I got a ThinkPad E595. Something of a budget machine, but good enough for me. Ryzen 7 3700U. I added some more memory and replaced the NVMe SSD with a 1 TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus and added a 2 TB Crucial MX500 SATA SSD. And installed Ubuntu Mate 19.10 and added a PPA for the Radeon GPU.

And guess what! Everything just works!

I have easily room for most of my calibre libraries on the NVMe SSD and plenty of room for blazingly fast versioned snapshots on the SATA SSD.

So I would argue that it is possible to use Linux on new hardware just fine! But you need to choose what hardware to get.

Before this laptop I had a 14" HP Pavilion. It worked perfectly with Linux as well. But was poorly built and fell apart. And was not upgradable. The E595 feels much more robust.

Looking forward to Ubuntu Mate 20.4 later this month!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If Linux could just get to the point where they seperate the operating system, the drivers, and the applications, so you can install old applications on new OS-es, new applications on old OS-es, and drivers would work for 15 years... I think that would make adoption skyrocket. (Many Windows Vista/7 drivers for old devices still work in Windows 10... in Linux, if a driver isn't open source, today's driver won't work on tomorrow's kernel.)

To some extent, Linux has done that.

Old applications should run on newer Linux versions. New applications should run on older versions. What tends to be specific to whether an application will run is libraries, and whether the right libraries are present, in the correct versions. (Linux, properly speaking, is the OS kernel. I don't recall ever seeing an old app fail to run because it issued a system call that had been deprecated and removed from a more recent kernel.)

Drivers working for 15 years is likely unnecessary.

I run Ubuntu here, and chose it because it does the best job I've seen in a Linux distro of figuring out what it is being installed on, setting itself up, and Just Working with minimal user involvement. I'm a tech. I can do the user interaction. But I want to spend my time using the resulting system, not fiddling to make it usable.

The usual pain points in getting Linux up and running are video and networking. Ubuntu detected my video card and used it, and detected my network and accessed it.

Now, I do have a vanilla setup. I am not a gamer, and don't have the pain of trying to get Linux to use all the features of the fancy high-end video card I got for gaming. The generic Linux video drivers don't support it, and I must install a non open source proprietary driver, assuming one exists. But if I am a gamer, chances are near unity that I don't run Linux. I run Windows because that's what games are written for and supported on.

Another pain point can be libraries mentioned above, and that's another reason for Ubuntu. The package manager does a good job of scanning your system to see what you already have, so when you choose a package folder installation, you get not only the package, but any dependencies it may have that aren't already installed. (Playing "The app failed to run. Why? Oh, version X of library Y isn't installed. Where can I get that?" gets old fast.)

I'm not dual booting at the moment. I'm in final stages of co0nfiguring a new desktop, which right now is Win10 only. That's not a hardship, as a lot ofd what I do is Windows-centric, and running Linux is "keeping my hand in."

But I'm also an old command line guy, and am set up to do that, with a tabbed terminal client in which I c an run CMD, TCC-LE, and Win21 ports of bash, tcsh, and zsh.
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Dennis

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by wodin

I just downloaded Microsoft's Chrome version of Edge. Initial impression: everyone should do it.

Do you know how to get the old one back, the one with the ePub viewer, for me that viewer was almost perfect from a functional perspective and much faster than the bloat ridden alternatives.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Do you know how to get the old one back, the one with the ePub viewer, for me that viewer was almost perfect from a functional perspective and much faster than the bloat ridden alternatives.

IIRC, uninstall the new one. It will revert to the old one.

I generally prefer not to read in the browser. If I must read on my desktop, instead of a mobile device, the choice under Windows is SumatraPDF. Aside from PDFs, it also handles ePub and Mobi.

Which "bloat ridden alternatives" did you have in mind?
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Dennis