I’m a bit baffled by this Motherboard article on “screwing ourselves” with the pursuit of thinness in laptops.  This is of course coming out of an Apple controversy where some bad software and a lot of tipping the scales in favor of form over function has lead to a haus looking laptop spec turning out some pretty bad real world performance numbers.  As has often been the case, once the initial outrage of some Apple stumble starts growing old people start looking around at other vendors and then the quiet problems of the industry are shown the light of day.  Apple’s MacBook Pro thermal problem is more egregious than others but turns out they all are essentially hobbling performance on their UltraBooks and compact laptop chassis making the list specs nothing real world.  Why are we surprised by this though?

Since the release of Ubuntu 18.04 I’ve been using it a bunch in various VMs.  I do love the new minimal install feature.  Even though it doesn’t save that much hard disk space it does make things a lot less  cluttered, which I absolutely love.  Because I work in VMs I’ve been experimenting with migrating OS’s up to 18.04 rather than crushing old VMs, building from scratch, and porting data over.  This process has worked almost seamlessly the dozen or so times I’ve done it across many VMs from various different baselines: Mainline 16.04, Mainline 17.10, Ubuntu MATE 16.04.  The actual core software itself seems to work perfectly fine out of the box, but as I said it is almost seamless not seamless.  There seems to be a bit of a wrinkle with the Ubuntu MATE update with respect to the VirtualBox Guest Additions, specifically with respect to shared folder drives.

I’m now three weeks into picking up and using non-walled garden social media systems instead of traditional ones, specifically Diaspora over Facebook and Twitter.  It has mostly been a good experience despite some major disagreement on some of their decisions on user experience and other rough edges that I hope to help fix soon as a contributor.  But the thing that puts social media apart from blogging or other static production ecosystems is the concept of sharing and interacting with other users.  By the nature of the the fact these massive digital halls are still pretty empty I’m just not getting my fill of that.

This pro-Swift article came across my RSS feed recently and while I don’t want to do a direct comparison of Swift versus Kotlin since I haven’t done Swift coding I did think it was interesting to point out similar points of efficiency in their simple example built as a product of the Kotlin language compared to others like Java, the language they picked on too.

Over the weekend I had made a bunch of progress on migrating away from the walled garden systems.   I’m happy to report substantially more progress.  This will of course be an ongoing process of refinement and testing.  However I’m currently getting substantial amounts of my needs met in enough areas that I’m prepared now to start pulling the plugs on Facebook, the Google Ecosystem, Twitter, and so on.  When I wrote about this over the weekend I had completed my hypothetical replacement of several systems.  I have some updates to those elements as well though.   My current replacement portfolio looks as follows (summary at the very end):

As I wrote earlier this week after the Cambridge Analytica event came to light my nagging feeling that I needed to get off these Facebook, Google, etc. platforms crossed a threshold.  It was no longer something that I thought I should do but something I was going to actively do.  In one week I’ve made progress in pretty much every dimension (scroll down to the bottom if you just want my list of alternatives).

I’ve had my moments in the past where Facebook pissed me off and I tried Google+.  That didn’t work out too well so I went back to Facebook after they addressed some of those problems.  I had my moments in the past where I was concerned about the amount of tracking Google does in searches so I went to DuckDuckGo.  That’s still my main search engine but sometimes I need results that come out better in Google so go there.  I also use the Google platform for my e-mail, documents, etc.    The concept of them selling my data in exchange for giving me free service has bothered me to varying degrees over the years, but seeing how greedily it was manipulated recently is really amping that up to me.  The amount of information available to the highest bidder has always been a known quantity to me but these recent stories are just putting that up to eleven.   It’s not just the Cambridge Analytica story.  There is also the story about Facebook and other companies forcing users to turn over their keys, so to speak, so they can look at any and all their personal data as a condition for working for them.  There is the way they exploited that data in difficult discussions.