Let me bore you for a while
Well, okay, we didn’t cover that entire length just in the Alps, but I needed a catchy title. If you want the short version: there is nothing to say here, and that’s the most significant thing I can tell you about electric driving in Europe today.
Continue reading “55'555 kilometers in a Tesla Model S in the Swiss Alps”
Canonical are apparently preparing for an IPO. If that happens, I’m pretty sure Microsoft will grab a good chunk of them and maybe absorb them completely later.
While Microsoft has been focusing more on the container side with Docker lately, they have also been cuddling with Ubuntu. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which runs Ubuntu in a cage, is only one of these examples. Observe also that e.g. Microsoft’s MS-SQL adapter for PHP only explicitly supports Ubuntu and RedHat, none of the other distros.
If the IPO does happen, see me back here in 2 – 5 years to resolve any bets 🙂
Microsoft yesterday announced Windows 10 S, a cut-down version of Windows 10 for the education market. They plan to make it available to PC makers to sell laptops with, for as little as US$ 200 a pop. “Like a Chromebook, then”, you say? Exactly, like a Chromebook.
This is the start of a new turf war for child mindshare. Like drug dealers, Microsoft and Google know that it’s best to get them early, get them young, make them depend on your products. Microsoft even helpfully supplies teaching aids.
Continue reading “How Microsoft and Google are manipulating your children”
Some games happen to have wonderful audio (and music), like Wolfenstein: The New Order. Some games happen not to be available natively for Linux, like… err… also Wolfenstein: The New Order. So we play them with WINE, and sometimes there are slight audio issues.
But have no fear: If you get audio crackling in such games (especially if your audio device is not running at 44.1 KHz), the following environment variable might fix it for you like it did for me:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60
You can either start WINE in a terminal with this env var prepended:
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 wine MyCoolGame.exe
Or you can export it in your ~/.profile file if you want it to be set for all your applications (don’t forget to completely log out and back in, since .profile is read only once per session):
export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60
Modern frontends like Lutris (and I think Bottles and Heroic?) also include a setting for this option.
Does this work for you? It works for me. I can’t remember where I found it first, but it’s a hint that’s been passed along, so pass it along I shall.
May the Flying Spaghetti Monster extend its noodly appendage to guide the hands of Lennart Poettering so that such issues become a thing of the past (if indeed Pulseaudio is to blame, but we always blame Pulseaudio, so we shall blame it one more time).
Now to enjoy the screams of expiring Nazi cyborgs in ultimate smoothness.
For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM. It turns out I was very, very wrong. All you need to install on Debian-like guest systems is the package spice-vdagent. You may have to start the service afterwards:
apt-get install spice-vdagent
systemctl start spice-vdagentd
Again, this goes on the guest system. On the host system you just have to make sure you’re connecting through spice with a spice client (outdated documentation about that is here). If you use the Virt-Manager GUI, this is all set up correctly by default for Linux guests.
Free bonus: 3D acceleration and compositing seems to be working by default in Linux guests as well. This has nothing to do with spice-vdagentd, I just thought I’d mention it since this seems new. It’s a boon for testing software in multiple desktop environments, especially since many modern desktop environments profit a lot from direct rendering and compositing (or even require it to function properly).
The Swiss People’s Party (one of the most powerful parties in Switzerland) has recently launched a campaign against easier naturalization of third-generation foreigners. This is one of the billboards:
As a Swiss person, I am way more afraid of the old white men behind this campaign than I am of that hypothetical woman behind her niqab.
These men have in the past:
And they are mostly men. Only 11 of their 65 seats in the national council are under the butts of women.
As a reaction to their billboards I would love to see an interview with a third-generation foreigner who likes to wear the niqab, but I’m pretty sure you won’t find one. The only person I am aware of in Switzerland who even wears a niqab is Swiss through and through: Nora Illi. On the right in this picture as you can surely guess:
But since she’s had Swiss citizenship since birth, I guess that won’t be a problem for our geniuses at the People’s Party, eh?
The PaperColor theme has been my favorite vim color theme for quite some time now, and I’m happy to find the same theme in Atom as well, even by the same author!
They have been ported to the Base16 color scheme system. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it doesn’t matter at all. Thanks a lot, Nguyen Nguyen, aka NLKNguyen. If I knew how to reach you, I’d send you beer money.
It appears that Microsoft decided that its voice-controlled assistant can no longer be disabled in Windows 10 after the upcoming Anniversary Update. So they can now be listening in on everything someone says in a household. Is this immoral? Microsoft probably doesn’t think so. But then you discover that Microsoft also decided that school children will not be spied on (so that would be immoral?)
A hardware killswitch is probably the only way you can make sure Cortana doesn’t hear you, but some manufacturers don’t supply those anymore.
Microsoft is not alone in wanting to listen in on your bedroom performance, Google also sneakily placed a recording system on all computers running an up-to-date version of Chrome. They even managed to infiltrate the free software base of Chrome, Chromium. So do Chrome users on Windows 10 now have two spies in their home? Seems that way.
Our friends over there in the US like to have their own measurement systems, and they don’t stop there. They also like to start the week on Sundays. I hear this has religious reasons.
This leads to problems when you generally want to set up your Debian systems with plain old English (US) locales but need proper measurement units in your programs. One of the solutions here is the magical file /etc/default/locale. Here’s a screenshot of what amazing feats this can accomplish:
My weeks start on Monday (as they should!) and I get European paper formats, Swiss date and time formats, but still have my precious English error messages. No one wants German nerdspeak, it’s gibberish! “Sendewarteschlangenlänge”? What does that even mean?
The beauty of the locale system is that you can mix and match any of these. You can have Portuguese weekdays with English error messages, Swedish currency and US paper formats.
First you have to generate all the locales you’d like to use (as root):
dpkg-reconfigure locales
Then just put whatever combination you like in /etc/default/locales and log out and back in again. Here’s an example:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=de_CH.UTF-8 LC_TIME=de_CH.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=de_CH.UTF-8 LC_MONETARY=de_CH.UTF-8 LC_PAPER=de_CH.UTF-8 LC_MEASUREMENT=de_CH.UTF-8 LC_ADDRESS=de_CH.UTF-8 LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
The system gets US English spelling and language, but the rest is in German (Switzerland). So we Swiss Franc as currency, ‘ as a thousands separator, etc. And this works both in pure console sessions and in most desktop environments.
Be careful, though. Some desktop environments (like Plasma) allow you to override these settings in your desktop session.
Some years ago, I read a review of a GNU/Linux distribution where the reviewer, coming from Windows, commented that “some applications look slightly different than others,” and this person was puzzled as to why. I can guess why: One application was probably using the Qt toolkit and the other GTK.
Continue reading “Windows 10 is no better than GNU/Linux at UI uniformity”