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johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Taboola to go public at $2.6B valuation

Most pumps around here will mute the sound by pressing the right button, second from the top, beside the screen. Some pumps require a different button to mute so I just spam all the buttons around the screen if at a new station. They are incredibly loud and obnoxious sometimes.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: How to leave Google and why

I've made the same switch and had the same thought. In response I just unsubscribed aggressively from most everything. Much cleaner mailbox now, and I really never took any action on almost any promotional/update style email anyway, so less noise overall than Gmail now. It's actually been a good switch.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Degoogling My Life

My wife and I just did this. I've been using a custom domain for years, so it was just a matter of changing MX records to Fastmail. My wife only used her @gmail address, so it was a bit more involved. Essentially:

- Set up new email at your service of choice

- Import whatever old email from gmail that you want to keep

- Go through whatever list you have (password manager, your brain, etc) and update email addresses (as a bonus rotate passwords while you're at it)

- For a few weeks, regularly look at both your new and old email. As something comes into gmail, either unsubscribe or update your email for that sender, and delete it.

- A few weeks later, nothing remains to switch over (at least nothing of importance).

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

I did the same thing over the past few weeks, along with some other self-hosted apps to get rid of as many SaaS dependencies as possible, DropBox being one of them. Fairly easy to install, but someone would need to write the "glue" to piece everything together for it to really take off.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

A car has tons of parts that, sure are "governed by physics", but in effect just randomly fail. I can theoretically understand that my there's a clunk in the frontend of my car because I've exceeded the MTTF of a suspension bushing. To almost everyone though, it's essentially just a random event based on nothing they've perceived.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Home Office Projects Series: Air conditioner setup

I recently installed a mini-split in my garage, Mr. Cool DIY 24k. The lines come precharged, as long as you don't need to alter the length, you can completely DIY it. Most people just coil up the extra line behind the unit if needed, the length of my run meant I had no extra.

It's clearly not the same quality as the non-DIY Mitsubishi and other units, but US installers barely know what mini-splits are anyway. Installing mine cost under 2k total IIRC, and the nearest quote from a pro was 5k+. Highly recommended.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: From farm to factory: the unstoppable rise of American chicken

I have plenty of savings, but about $300 in my savings account, the rest spread across checking and other accounts. I'd be counted amongst the "poor" in this poll due to that. Is there more data somewhere? The poll is often touted, but I wonder if it shows what you think, or just shows that savings accounts now days are mostly useless?

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: How to Start Using Microservices

Some of the people with a reflexive "probably don't do it" response _have_ done what you are saying. They've assessed and learned. They've gone with microservices, and they've watched it go poorly. In short, people are giving a reflexive "don't do it" because they are sharing their experience (which is one of the points of comments in general, right?).

If you're anywhere near the point of "needing" microservices (if there is such a thing), there is no simple "try stuff out", fwiw. You're talking about potentially 10s of different teams needing to be involved even for some small effort.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: New fitness habits being created during Covid?

This article doesn't really have any facts, it's just asking a question into the void. I doubt people staying home is going to lead to _more_ fitness, but I have as much data to back it up as the article.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Woodman’s Markets to deploy aisle-roving robots

There's quite a bit of just-in-time delivery for grocers. Years ago when I worked at a large supermarket, we only kept stock of items that would reasonably need restocked within the next day or so. Things like yogurt, milk, eggs, soda, chips, etc. The majority of the items on the "inner" items (ie not staples) had 0 stock in the back room.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Systemd: Don’t fallback to Google NTP and DNS

I've run into this situation at home when setting up some new networking equipment with much more configurability than I'm used to. My system had no DNS, alerting me to the issue, and I fixed it. I don't need nor want my systems to decide for me to use Google's DNS, or any other DNS.

As you mention, this _is_ a rare circumstance, and likely self-induced by some sort of "power user". I assume there are few of those power users who want the choice made for them.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: How does the Gmail unsubscribe button work?

FWIW, this solution isn't as easy to implement as you'd think. I've seen unsubscribe pages harvested for email addresses when they show the full address and used urls/tokens that weren't sufficiently secure. In the case I'm thinking of, the home-rolled algo that generated the unique links was bugged enough that you could reverse it, and I was surprised that someone actually took the time to do so.

johnbrodie | 5 years ago | on: Time is the only real currency we have

They introduced these at the grocery store my wife and I frequent. We used them just once. As long as the lines aren't long, it seems just as quick to have the 2 checkout people (1 cashier, 1 bagger) do the work in a batch at the end, as opposed to fiddling around with bagging as you go.
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