Tech Dump: The Best Of Tech From The Net

#21

Unfortunately, this is Mississippi. Wifi is sporadic.

#22

Do you have Eduroam? I get great coverage near all universities and even some railway stations, airports, and libraries.

#23

Well, I’m no longer a student. I graduated this past May. :smiley:

I do work for my alma mater and the connectivity is great on campus. However, there’s a seperation between it and the city I live in (Oxford); the service only extends to the outer edges of the campus. A few businesses have great wifi, but there is not enough coverage to envelop the entire city (city by population, not necessarily size). Cellular rules the day here (and it’s damned fast too).

#24

Ha. http://wifi.olemiss.edu/

Check out the graph to the right. Eduroam is worthless here.

Edit: Wait. I guess that’s bandwith usage. We don’t have Eduroam users using the service here.

#25

Fascinating reasoning as to why Apple most likely won’t touch ceramic anymore. Great read.

#26

Got my Pixel XL last night. Really enjoying it so far. It is smaller than my N6 by quite a bit, but feels good in my hands and is fast. It’s at that point where it just works and you aren’t thinking about any slow downs or lags in the UI.

Battery life is has been good so far, but of the 21+ hours I had on the initial 85% charge (directly after opening the box I got it in), part of them were while I was sleeping which had little to no battery usage. It was almost exactly flat, which is quite awesome. Also over 6 hours screen on time, which is pretty damn good.

Google Assistant is a beefed up Google Now, but more conversational. It will sing you short songs and cringe worthy dad jokes. I love it just because of how much it annoys @Chimera, the look she gives me every time I have it sing something or tell a joke is great.

I’m glad I got it so far, will report if there are any issues or interesting things to note.

#27

Second “day” of battery usage:

1d16h now at 5%
6h13m on screen time

Not heavy usage overall, mostly a Reddit app (Boost is the app) and browsing. A little podcast over BT headphones.

So far very impressed with the battery life. Going to continue only charging when it is dead or almost dead to maximize battery life/usage.

#28

Sounds great @chapel

The iPhone 8 rumors have me interested. There are details about a curved edge-to-edge OLED display and wireless charging. Another rumor that it’ll have a glass back, which I don’t want. Easier to grip, but more prone to crack.

#29

Third “day” of battery usage:

1d20h at 4%
4h12m screen on time

Light usage over the two days, again mostly Reddit app with some Google Maps navigation and multiple hours of podcasts through bluetooth listening at 2x speed.

With even lighter usage, I could easily hit two full days without compromises which is fantastic.

Thoroughly loving this phone, it is so smooth and responsive. I have no regrets upgrading.

#30

EVGA updates ACX 3.0 GeForce 10X0 cards to avert overheating

ugh

#31
#32
#33

I started using htop this week. It’s definitely an improvement over top.

#34

The day after my bday, my MBP finally bit the dust. It held out after five years or so, but the video card failed spectacularly. I threw Linux Mint (I haven’t finalized this yet, but I’m probably gonna avoid Arch Linux [Antergos] since the processor is so old. I don’t look forward to mass amounts of compiling on this thing.) on an old Core 2 Duo Inspiron I bought in 2007. It runs…okay? It seems that the 2GB of RAM is the biggest bottleneck. It gets yucky if I push it harder than Chrome and Spotify simultaenously. Video is restricted to pretty much 720p and gaming is non-existent beyond a few old titles.

Updating took forever. It’s SATA, but mechanical.

8g0Hgd8.jpg1680×1050 104 KB

#35

I like Mint although I recently decided to go back to Ubuntu. I kept running into situations where I needed recent versions of the kernel. All of my computers have at least 8 GB of memory so I don’t have to worry about that part.

#36

I probably will swap to the MATE version of Ubuntu. I may attempt GNOME as well. Wayland has been pretty decent of late on my desktop.

#37

Arch doesn’t require compiling unless you are installing non-standard packages.

pacman is a great package manager, one of the better ones.

If you want to dig into Linux more than just use it, Arch is great. I run it on my PC and on my work laptop.

#38

I do need to dig into it more. I really like Arch’s “style” of Linux, if you get me. And it’s wiki is phenominal.

My only use of it is through Antergos, though. I haven’t been brave enough yet to install it from scratch. :slight_smile:

Check this out, @chapel and let me know what you think. I haven’t tried any of these, but I was reading volumes of praise for pacaur the other day.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers#Comparison_table

#39

I’ve used pacaur and yaourt, and I prefer pacaur. It wraps pacman well and as the chart shows is one of the preferred helpers.

#40

The relevant things you should take from this article are 40 years,「FUJITSU Server GS21 1400」decomissioned, COBOL(!), less maintence, and no overtime due to more productivity from their new server.