Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
14
I recently wrote that managing an external display on Linux shouldn’t be this hard. I went down a path of trying out some different options before finally landing at an unexpected place: KDE. I say “unexpected” because I find tiling window managers are just about a necessity. Background: xmonad Until a few months ago, I’d … Continue reading KDE: A Nice Tiling Envieonment and a Surprisingly Awesome DE →
over a year ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from The Changelog

Censorship Is Complicated: What Internet History Says about Meta/Facebook

In light of this week’s announcement by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc), I have been pondering this question: Why am I, a person that has long been a staunch advocate of free speech and encryption, leery of sites that talk about being free speech-oriented? And, more to the point, why an I — a person … Continue reading Censorship Is Complicated: What Internet History Says about Meta/Facebook →

2 months ago 46 votes
Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service

I last reviewed email services in 2019. That review focused a lot of attention on privacy. At the time, I selected mailbox.org as my provider, and have been using them for these 5 years since. However, both their service and their support have gone significantly downhill since, so it is time for me to look … Continue reading Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service →

10 months ago 98 votes
Photographic comparison: Is the Kobo Libra Colour display worse than the Kobo Libra 2?

I’ve been using E Ink-based ereaders for quite a number of years now. I’ve had my Kobo Libra 2 for a few years, and was looking forward to the Kobo Libra Colour — the first color E Ink display in a mainstream ereader line. I found the display to be a mixed bag; contrast seemed … Continue reading Photographic comparison: Is the Kobo Libra Colour display worse than the Kobo Libra 2? →

10 months ago 50 votes
Facebook is Censoring Stories about Climate Change and Illegal Raid in Marion, Kansas

It is, sadly, not entirely surprising that Facebook is censoring articles critical of Meta. The Kansas Reflector published an artical about Meta censoring environmental articles about climate change — deeming them “too controversial”. Facebook then censored the article about Facebook censorship, and then after an independent site published a copy of the climate change article, … Continue reading Facebook is Censoring Stories about Climate Change and Illegal Raid in Marion, Kansas →

11 months ago 34 votes
The xz Issue Isn’t About Open Source

You’ve probably heard of the recent backdoor in xz. There have been a lot of takes on this, most of them boiling down to some version of: The problem here is with Open Source Software. I want to say not only is that view so myopic that it pushes towards the incorrect, but also it … Continue reading The xz Issue Isn’t About Open Source →

11 months ago 78 votes

More in programming

New Blog Post: "A Perplexing Javascript Parsing Puzzle"

I know I said we'd be back to normal newsletters this week and in fact had 80% of one already written. Then I unearthed something that was better left buried. Blog post here, Patreon notes here (Mostly an explanation of how I found this horror in the first place). Next week I'll send what was supposed to be this week's piece. (PS: April Cools in three weeks!)

13 hours ago 3 votes
Notes on Improving Churn

Ask any B2C SaaS founder what metric they’d like to improve and most will say reducing churn. However, proactively reducing churn is a difficult task. I’ll outline the approach we’ve taken at Jenni AI to go from ~17% to 9% churn over the past year. We are still a work in progress but hopefully you’ll […] The post Notes on Improving Churn appeared first on Marc Astbury.

15 hours ago 3 votes
Catching grace

Meditation is easy when you know what to do: absolutely nothing! It's hard at first, like trying to look at the back of your own head, but there's a knack to it.

13 hours ago 2 votes
Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()

Discover why 'if not mylist' is twice as fast as 'len(mylist) == 0' by examining CPython's VM instructions and object memory access patterns.

8 hours ago 2 votes
Our switch to Kamal is complete

In a fit of frustration, I wrote the first version of Kamal in six weeks at the start of 2023. Our plan to get out of the cloud was getting bogged down in enterprisey pricing and Kubernetes complexity. And I refused to accept that running our own hardware had to be that expensive or that convoluted. So I got busy building a cheap and simple alternative.  Now, just two years later, Kamal is deploying every single application in our entire heritage fleet, and everything in active development. Finalizing a perfectly uniform mode of deployment for every web app we've built over the past two decades and still maintain. See, we have this obsession at 37signals: That the modern build-boost-discard cycle of internet applications is a scourge. That users ought to be able to trust that when they adopt a system like Basecamp or HEY, they don't have to fear eviction from the next executive re-org. We call this obsession Until The End Of The Internet. That obsession isn't free, but it's worth it. It means we're still operating the very first version of Basecamp for thousands of paying customers. That's the OG code base from 2003! Which hasn't seen any updates since 2010, beyond security patches, bug fixes, and performance improvements. But we're still operating it, and, along with every other app in our heritage collection, deploying it with Kamal. That just makes me smile, knowing that we have customers who adopted Basecamp in 2004, and are still able to use the same system some twenty years later. In the meantime, we've relaunched and dramatically improved Basecamp many times since. But for customers happy with what they have, there's no forced migration to the latest version. I very much had all of this in mind when designing Kamal. That's one of the reasons I really love Docker. It allows you to encapsulate an entire system, with all of its dependencies, and run it until the end of time. Kind of how modern gaming emulators can run the original ROM of Pac-Man or Pong to perfection and eternity. Kamal seeks to be but a simple wrapper and workflow around this wondrous simplicity. Complexity is but a bridge — and a fragile one at that. To build something durable, you have to make it simple.

19 hours ago 2 votes