don’t be evil

The extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store in 2009 by Google due to it’s ability to bypass advertising. It will not be developed further, sorry for the inconvenience.

youtube-html5-chrome website

youtube-html5-chrome was an extension to switch Flash for HTML5 on every youtube video on every webpage out there. Apparently Google forcefully canned it. So nice of them. I just love, love those text tags over the video i’m trying to see…

My thoughts exactly

The Mac offers me access to most of the programs and/or tools that I need, and most importantly is *nix under the hood (unlike Windows). I can sit down and go immediately to the task or job I need to work on, without the various idiosyncrasies I’ve experienced in other *nix desktop environments.

The Mac was, for me at least, the very first environment where I did not have to worry about the OS or system. I could just sit down and work. Of course, controlling hardware and software makes that easier for Apple than just about anything else. Still, it’s a powerful feature that doesn’t appear on any box.

gsyoungblood commenting an OS News Story

How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free

The problem? An underfunded school needed computers for the classroom. Budget? $0. Staff involved? Just one: Robert Litt, a sixth-grade teacher.

[…]

With the help of his local LUG, he got Linux up and running on his 18 donated machines. Suddenly, they were fast. They were clean. They worked well in the classroom. Robert was invigorated, as were his students. His principal saw how excited they all were, and decided to give Robert four hours of teaching leave per week to give him time to find more computers for a full lab for ASCEND. And so Robert became a “teacher on special assignment,” as he puts it.

Finding computers was less difficult than he originally anticipated. Most families and businesses have an old computer (or ten) sitting in storage. Robert began to call businesses and ask for donations of equipment they’d otherwise be sending for recycling. People were generally very receptive. Most people would rather their used computers do good than rot in a landfill or get shredded; they just don’t usually know how to get computers to where they are needed. “Underfunded schools are starving in the midst of plenty,” Robert explains. “Discarded computers are our nation’s most wasted educational resource.”

iFixit.org

For old computers, specially old desktops, there’s nothing that comes close to Linux distros. They run on everything, they are fast, they are nimble on resources and they can give you a lot of simple free software for basically everything that you want to do.

I personally recommend and use Linux Mint. It’s not perfect but it’s a great OS, much easier to maintain than Windows and much, much safer too.

A tale of modern times

A 64bit processor with 64bit EFI, (( i can’t have a pure 64bit kernel & extensions because Apple won’t let me. Apparently somebody forgot to write “pro” after “Macbook” on my screen. And OS X is very picky when it comes to what’s written on the PC it runs. )) 8 gigabytes of RAM, Pyhton, Matlab, calendarized tasks with UNIX scripts and Automator, an entire LaTeX suite, R, MS Office, redundant and automatic backups to different destinations, a carefully managed library of almost a thousand scientific papers in Papers2, shared folders and a endless bunch of other “gizmos” and automations and “power-tools” and the only way of finally getting some work done is going back to a black screen with green letters and a green blinking cursor.

Enlightening.

Black screen macbook with writeroom

One of Apple’s Best Ideas Ever, Made Worse

“The beauty of the MagSafe connector was that Apple had found precisely the right balance between attachment and detachment. Strong enough to hold the connector in place, weak enough to detach if it gets yanked.

The MagSafe 2 connector fails that balance test. Badly. The magnet is too weak. It’s so weak, it keeps falling out. It falls out if you brush it. It falls out if you tip the laptop slightly. It falls out if you look at it funny. It’s a huge, huge pain.”

David Pogue – NYTimes.com

Everybody hates Firefox updates (3)

“After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I’ve come to the extremely humbling realization athat the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often! Let it remain stable long enough for us to learn it and get good at it. There’s no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now have to relearn.”

Evil Brain Jono’s Natural Log

Just go and read the damn thing. In fact, if you’re developer, print it, frame it and stick it on your office room.

Everybody hates Firefox updates (2)

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the fundamental disconnect between the developers and the users. I think it comes down to: Software developers have a perverse habit of thinking of updates/new releases as a good thing.

It’s hard to convince a software developer otherwise: their salary depends on outputting a constant stream of updates, so of course they think updates are good.I used to believe it. Only after I heard from dozens of different users that the rapid release process had ruined Firefox did I finally get it through my thick skull: releasing an update is practically an act of aggression against your users. The developer perspective is ‘You guys are going to love this new update we’ve been working on!’ The user perspective is ‘Oh god here comes another update, is there any way I can postpone the agony for a few more days?'”

Evil Brain Jono’s Natural Log

I’m reading this post and thinking that is just too good to not quote. ((Can i copy an entire post or would that be too rude?))

Also related with this previous post.

Everybody hates Firefox updates

“I’ve heard this story a lot in the last year.

I used to be proud to say I worked (or had worked) for Mozilla, but a careful listener might detect a certain sheepish quality that has crept into my voice lately when I name-check my former employer. And this is why. Even on the opposite side of the world, it’s always the same story: ‘I used to love Firefox’, but ‘I switched to Chrome because my extensions stopped working’ or ‘I switched to chrome because Firefox kept asking me to restart’.

I’ve had this conversation with dozens of people across three continents. Not one person has had anything good to say about the rapid release process. Nearly 100% of my highly unscientific survey volunteered the information — unasked, unprompted — that the rapid release process had ruined Firefox for them.”

Evil Brain Jono’s Natural Log

+1!

I still have to understand what’s these “features” that were supposed to get to the users faster. Hey Mozilla, Firefox’s features are the Extensions!!! I keep upgrading firefox, breaking compatibility, disabling extensions and i haven’t found a single “new feature” to talk about.

Mozilla to cease development on Thunderbird

“Mozilla has announced it’s ceasing development on Thunderbird; one more version will be released, and it’ll be security updates from then on. ‘Most Thunderbird users seem happy with the basic email feature set. In parallel, we have seen the rising popularity of Web-based forms of communications representing email alternatives to a desktop solution. Given this, focusing on stability for Thunderbird and driving innovation through other offerings seems a natural choice.'”

OSnews

Actually, although a bit sad for this “much dear friend”, this is good news!

I’ve been realizing that the most proclaimed and loved “quality” of open-source is simultaneously it’s worst enemy and the single major reason why, unfortunately, open-source software is usually not an option. I mean this referring solely at “end-user software”, not open-source libraries or small UNIX-style programs/packages.

The driving feature of open-source is it’s community passion and desire to program something new and exciting. Something that “scratches their itch”. So, as result open-source “new programs and projects” spring everywhere and for all things.

But a mature, robust software is not that very exciting. Simple bug correcting and security updates (the kind that Mozilla says that are the only ones they will be doing for thunderbird) is probably a PITA and dull as hell. I know i would probably hate it.

So, to keep developer momentum and joy, as soon as the program is mainly stable and stuff is just chugging along the way, some need comes along so that we just have to rewrite the entire stuff, or add a revolutionary new interface or just go in another completely absurd direction.

I’ve first experienced this when i changed to linux back in 2007/2008. Switched a lot, try a dozen distros and finally decided i was really comfortable with KDE. Highly polished, highly usable Graphic environment. I assume there was some fundamental need for something different/security/touch/sound/fireworks in the sky or diamonds on strawberry hills and “they” had to change do KDE4. which was utterly unusable back those days, and a complete departure from everything i liked about KDE3.

Switched to gnome after a lot of teeth grinding and adjusting, and when i was getting comfortable using and thought that a good “enterprise class” (stable, robust, simple and clean) product could probably be built on it, “they” had to build something different for security/usability/diamonds or the fireworks or whatever, and then came Gnome3 and/or Unity. And guess what, they’re still pretty much a mess…

I’ve been realizing that of all the open-source software that i use, eventually they all either die in “abandonment” when they are in the “good-enough”/robust phase and all that’s left is some boring maintenance and some loooooong development cycles; or they all got sent back to square one for a complete, utterly unusable, refit/redraw of the whole thing. There’s some exceptions off course but on the whole that ‘s been my general experience.

So unfortunately, i’ve been unconsciously changing (i’ve realized later) to paid software (or backed by some big corporation/foundation) because it allows me my “found something that does what i want, how i want, then i don’t ever change it and just keep using it as i want” behaviour. Which is also the behaviour of most people out there.

I don’t see how this can be fixed in a voluntary driven environment, so i’m kind of pleased that mozilla decided to took this step. The truth is that Thunderbird is already good enough for most, so instead of killing it by abandonment or just dropping the whole thing and starting over, they are just slowly keeping it updated and working for us folks that just want use it and never thinking about it.

I would love that it had some new features though (as a more Mac OS integration or a slightly simpler and slightly cleaner interface) but on the whole the entire thing is pretty much everything you could expect from a multi-platform, free mail client and it’s hard to find a reason to complain strongly about it.

So thanks Mozilla! And may Thundebird keep working along, silently and efficiently for a long, long time!

Windows 8: New UI, but old-school Microsoft

“The integration with the classic desktop though? Wow. It’s. Completely. Fucking. Insane.

The combination is jarring, confusing and ultimately unusable. I can’t even respect it as an interesting attempt, as it just simply doesn’t work. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Metro UI and apps should have been set off in a ‘mode’ – similar to how the Windows Media Center works. The fact that the Metro UI has been integrated in wholesale with the old-school WIMP interface is ridiculous, and more to the point, represents incredible cynicism on Microsoft’s part.

Make no mistake, this is Microsoft falling back on old-school monopolistic tactics to take on an upcoming challenger to their OS dominance. It’s like 1997 all over again, when Microsoft jammed Internet Explorer into Windows in places it didn’t really need to be in order to compete with Netscape. Remember when the entire *desktop* used to be an IE Window? Remember all the security and performance problems that came as a result? Remember U.S. vs. Microsoft? Why in the world do they think this tactic which failed so spectacularly before will work now? Are they psychotic?”

Russell Beattie