hutaffe.blog

Here’s a phone that’s cheap and actually built under fair conditions. Just sayin’…

Curious what the new „phones“ will cost this year. I guess the greatest design and functionality is reached when nobody can buy it anymore because it cost 3000$ plus 1000$ for the optional display.

Learning a new programming language can sometimes be quite intimidating. It’s not just the syntax. If you know one programming language, you understand more or less any programming language. It’s all the things around the language itself. The whole ecosystem might be special in its own ways, maybe a little quirky to your eyes if you’re so used to some other environment for a long time. Once you’re fairly confident to move a long in one language and its ecosystem you’re used to a certain way of how things work. At least for me its hard to really get into a new language simply because I have a certain standard of code quality in my mind. But what is considered good code in a new language? I don’t want to create tiny playground tools nobody needs and that only use the bare minimum of language features. I have other aspirations and a bigger project in mind. But bigger projects mean bigger responsibilities and bigger complexities as well. If you want to do it open source out in the public, it even means others judging your code. If you go into an ecosystem for the first time, this can be really intimidating.

What does this mean when learning a new language? To me it means figuring out how unit testing works and how to do concurrency and asynchronous tasks. How are you supposed to package your stuff? What to people in the community consider good code? What frameworks are considered the way to go for specific use cases? In my case it even means which of the many UI frameworks should I use?

There’s so much more to learning a new programming language. I still learn best reading books about it, but unfortunately the most books are often just about the syntax and maybe a little theory about how and why things work the way they do. It’s rare to find lots of books to cover more advanced but still generic topics that are needed for more complex solutions.

But it’s fun and rewarding to learn all these things. It’s my level of standard I like to adhere to when programming that slows me down in the beginning. I’ll get there… I just need a little longer to learn everything to get up to speed.

First time in forever that I probably won’t watch an Apple Keynote at all. If there is no big surprise… I really don’t care about new phones nobody can afford anymore. Times change.

This is why I don’t paste any photos of my daughter anywhere. NYT video about „Sharenting“

We actually went to the farm where animals are sent to die 😉

I sometimes start writing a blog post and it becomes something I’m just unable to share with anyone, including myself. I count this as a valid reason not to blog

Very nice! I was just wondering what I would do if I went Linux fulltime. Apple Launches Web-Based Music App as Public Beta - MacStories

The Don’t be Evil thing is long gone. Google tracking users with hidden web pages

Deepin looks really amazing! Finally a Linux system that doesn’t look like a decade ago. (Love the new Gnome BTW) Unfortunately I can barely run it in a VM. Testing postponed, sadly.

In general it seems impossible to get my Mac keyboard mapped correctly. I blame VMWare, but it’s also what I expect from Linux 😉

I’m a big fan of the option to encrypt my harddrive and/or home folder, offered during installation of some Linux distributions. If this is not offered by default I think I won’t consider the distribution for now.

So far the best experience for me has been with Pop!_OS (seriously… that name 🙄). I also tried Mint with xfce, which is a little more snappy than Gnome, but lacks out of the box development packages and everything is complicated without having to figure out what packages I actually need. Elementary looks nice, but it feels a little slow and I can’t put a finger on why I don’t think it’s the distribution for me. I want to try Deepin next, but I’m a little concerned it might spy on me 😉

Pro-Tip: when one of your friends is getting married, put it on your calendar so you don’t commit to business trips at the same time. 😔

In other news: Sometimes it feels like I‘m not on top of my game lately.

I‘m strangely drawn to country music every now and then. This is a new album I’m looking forward to. The first songs are really amazing! Stumbled upon this while checking out Brandi Carlile, who‘s part of this new supergroup of country stars I never heard of 🙃

★ Daring Fireball - Thirty Years of Fetch

I didn’t know Fetch is still around. I totally forgot about it, but I loved it back when I needed it. I always thought it’s much easier to use than Transmit, which was always too much for my needs. I’m really glad it’s still alive!

A couple of weeks ago I decided to dive a little bit deeper into Linux and try out some new stuff. One thing I hoped would help me was to listen to some Linux Podcasts. I wanted to expose myself to the topics in this community and how the people in there think. This is a whole new world to me, as I tried Linux way back and decided it’s too complicated. (My first impressions basically confirmed this, but that’s a whole other topic.)

So I downloaded a few Podcasts that popped up in a search in Overcast. I didn’t have too much time for lots of shows yet, but I thought I’d write up a (very) short summary of the few I listened to so far.

Linux Action News

This is kind of a fast paced quick news only show, but they cover a wider range of topics, not just Linux specific but also open source in general. It’s around since quite a while with more than 100 episodes yet. They’re not that much opinionated, at least in the few episodes I listened to so far, which I like. The Apple world is really narrowed down in opinions, repeating the same ideas and often circling around themselves too much lately.

It’s just about 30 minutes long and appears weekly, so it’s a nice way to get an update on different topics. I think this is one I’ll stick with for a while.

Linux Unplugged

I heard two episodes and I’m not quite sure what to think of it yet. It’s kind of an ATP format and one of the hosts also is on Linux Action News and founder of the Jupiter Broadcasting network. There are a couple shows on this „network“, all in the area of Linux. Maybe it’s worth checking them out a bit more. It looks a little like Relay.fm for Linux.

The show is a little opinionated, but not in an offensive way. It’s well established with more than 300 episodes. A few notes here and there made me chuckle because they were exactly how I imaged „Linux aficionados“ would think. Having them discuss some topics with the hosts of ATP would definitely be very interesting!

An episode is around one hour, also released weekly. I’m not sure I’ll stick to it, but I’ll keep listening to a few more. In the beginning I didn’t like ATP, but that changed too. Maybe this is similar here.

Going Linux

As a „newcomer“ to the scene it sounded like this would be a good one to get some basics about how Linux runs today, which tools are in fashion and that kind of stuff. I think this one would have potential, but I could only listen to the first couple of minutes of two episodes. The audio quality differs a lot between the two hosts. One is up to today’s Podcasting standards, the other one sounds like a bad phone call. I don’t know why though, because even if you record audio with your phone it sounds quite good today. They’re heading towards 400 episodes, which is why I would expect a more polished sound quality. My time is limited and if I’d wanted to listen to some bad phone audio on my commute to work, I’d join a conference call.

Maybe I’ll try it out at some later point, but for now there are lots of alternatives.

Exploit Brokers - Hacking News

Also a show I’m not sure about yet. The topics they cover sound interesting: It’s about cyber security, „hacking“, data breaches etc., but somehow I kept diverting.

It’s short (around 10 minutes) relatively new and not too regularly it seems. I think I’ll try out some more episodes to get a better opinion and see how it evolves.

There are still a few more Podcasts on my list. Maybe I manage to write up another quick review when I listened to more of them.

We saw a sloth and her baby in the zoo the other day! We never saw it outside before. So cute ☺️

Going back to the office for the first time in six weeks. 3 weeks sick, 2 weeks „recovery home office“ and a small stay-home vacation later it’s time to get back into the groove. This will be hard. 💪

I don’t know why LinkedIn gets hyped so much. It’s not a social network by any means. It’s a platform for self-promoting business clowns, selling themselves as the biggest shots in history. I don’t see a difference to the behavior people show on Facebook, minus the racists. It’s a window to a rosy business-freak show and head hunters that don’t even try to show any real interest.

Going to see Slipknot live in January 🎶🎸🤘🏻

Good start for my home team 🙂 First Champions League game in team history!

I can definitely see myself switching to Linux on a daily basis. It’s fun to play around with it… a lot of improvements since I tried it the last time. Although I have the feeling that it would be too fiddly in the long run. I ran into some walls even with some basic stuff. The state of the GUI is mostly ridiculous even after all these years. I guess designers don’t care about open source, or the developers not about design. Maybe I should go in and help on some projects 😉

Found a couple of Linux podcasts. Curious to hear of what quality they are. Could be a good way to get a feeling for this community and the topics coming up there. I feel like I’m fed up for the time being with Apple news and discussions in various forms.

Allright then… I’ll go and try out a couple of Linux distributions. That’s the first thing that’s quite tedious. How is someone coming fresh to this topic going to know which one is the right one? This is one reason Linux will never be successful on the desktop (not even this year!). But maybe that’s also the good thing about it and an advantage.

I think I might be sick… I‘m honestly thinking about getting a Linux laptop and I‘m interested in the Librem 5 phone which should be out soon. I might also just be tired of developing for iOS.