What makes a professional camera professional? Direct access to all of the functions without going through ten sub-menus simply to adjust the sound level or open up the iris. What was great about Facebook. Everything was available on sight, not hidden away in sub-menu.
They decided overnight to “simplify” the look but what they’ve done is forced me to think about the logical place for something to be and hoping I’m right. I wish they hadn’t changed something that was working so well for me.
Facebook, why change something that works so well. Why this obsession with sub-menus?
For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.
What I Struggled With
The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor. With some distributions you download it, install and it’s easy. With NixOS it took some searching to find the right ISO image that I also had to download a tool to unzip.
The Command Prompt That Updates
I think I could have got NixOS to work much sooner but I was confused by the command prompt. Every few seconds it gives messages about bluetooth devices and more. It made me think that the install had failed and that there was an error. I also had to learn to use the passwd command at the first prompt to set the password for the nixos user before moving forward.
The Other Challenge
When you install NixOS on an HP laptop, or other device you can download the standard ISO, make a bootable USB stick, and then install NixOS from NixOS. With the Pi you can’t do that. You have to do some things in the command line. The key step is to set the password, find the IP address and then SSH from xour usual machine. Once that is done it is easy to experiment with setting up NixOS.
And Finally
Now that I have NixOS up and running on a Pi I can experiment with the OS. When I update the configuration file I can keep a copy of it. Any time I install Nix on a system I can re-use the config file and replicate a setup within minutes, rather than hours. I set it up on a Pi4 with 2gb of ram but I could move it to a Pi4 with 4 or 8gb of ram, when I see that it requires more ram. Now that I am at this point I can experiment with more flexibility.
As a World Community Grid volunteer, you download a secure software program to your computer. And when your computer is not using its full computing power, it will automatically run a simulated experiment in the background which will help predict the effectiveness of a particular chemical compound as a possible treatment for COVID-19.
Downloading and installing the software and creating an account is quick and easy. Once you have done this, and once the application is running your laptop or desktop will help in the effort. It costs us little effort and we can still use the computer as usual.
The idea is not a new one. My laptops and desktops have been contributing to such efforts for decades now. I was introduced to this concept back in the late 90s to early 20th century. My first glimpse of this was the Seti@Home research project back in 2002.
With Grid computing, you don’t need to purchase or develop supercomputers. Instead, you rely on a networked cluster of computers to work together to process data. Instead of requesting and waiting for slots to become available on supercomputers scientists have access to thousands of machines to help them work through the data. Every work unit is worked on by at least two or more computers and verified.
World Community Grid has 650,000 individual contributers and 460 organisations helping in the effort. They have contributed to 31 research projects to date. This has resulted in 35 peer reviewed papers.
Over the years my computers have contributed 356 days of computing power. They have generated over a million points for mapping cancer markers. They have contributed to the Microbiome Immunity Project, FightAIDS@Home Phase 2, OpenZika, Outsmart Ebola Together, Genome Comparison, Help Defeat Cancer, Fight Aids@Home, and Smash Childhood Cancer.
Although Folding@Home gave people the power to help in the search to beat COVID-19 sooner I prefer the World Community Grid application because it runs in the background without me hearing the fans running. When you’re using a laptop that you want to keep using for years this is important.
I have been playing with Angular again over the last few days. I was playing with the Angular.io Tour of Heroes Tutorial. The course is simple to follow. For a while I was stuck on one problem but was able to find an answer using search engines. I then got stuck with a separate issue. The advantage of getting stuck is that it encourages reading around the subject. It gets us to make sure that we understand what we are working on.
The course will leave you with an overview, but for a deeper understanding courses like the one mentioned below are better because they explore topics in depth.
For those who prefer to learn by watching there are a few videos available on YouTube. They may be using Angular 9 or other versions. The tutorials are from two to four years old so may not reflect the latest iterations of the framework.
I had been studying this course: “Angular – The Complete Guide (2021 Edition)” I like video tutorials, and I plan to complete this one, but I also like to learn to use different methods. I liked being able to skim through text, write a few lines of code, see if it worked and move on. It is the old-fashioned way of learning. Videos are the new way. With what I learned via the angular.io website I feel that I could experiment with bringing the html part of my website into the modern era. I want to try to use components for each section of the website. I have an idea of how it would work.
As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.
I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.
As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.
When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.
Google Reader was a great tool because it made gathering and sharing content from specific sources intuitive and easy. It provided us with one place from which to do most things. Today Google have announced that they are pulling the plug on Google reader.
In my eyes Google reader had become obsolete four years ago. That’s when I moved to services like Feedly, zite and others. Each of these services was more interesting because it took our feeds but used algorithms to make relevant content discovery faster and more intuitive.
Feedly was fun for a while but eventually I stopped using it in favour of zite. Zite was excellent until they decided to downgrade the user experience to a pinterest like interface. I don’t want the kindergarten treatment when searching for information. I want headers, I want a line or two of content and I want to have a lot of information displayed in a small space. Zite fell out of the useful apps category and was deleted from the ipad and iphone as a result.
The next project I’m looking at is Scoopinion. They have a plugin which tracks which news sources you visit and which articles you read. Based on your browising habits it recommends future articles. So far it estimates that I have spent 22hrs reading news over the past month or two with over 980 articles. By this logic it should be good at recommending stories that I would enjoy but it is too tabloid at the moment. This is probably due to the relatively small user base as this is a new project by developers in Finland.
I love content aggregators that study my habits and give recommendations based on this. It makes the surfing experience more enjoyable. You also don’t suffer from RSS burn out.
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