While not nearly as dramatic, this story reminds me a serious accident I had in my early childhood. For a long time I thought that perhaps I did die and that I had continued life in a near identical parallel dimension while leaving friends and relatives mourning in the one I had been born in.
I wonder if this thought ever occurred to the pilot.
I guess we're wandering a bit from the topic, but I used to feel the same way about, of all things, that childhood pastime of spinning around with your arms out. I spent more time than I'm comfortable specifying believing that every revolution put me in a slightly different universe, and that in order to get back, I'd have to perform exactly as many counter-revolutions in the opposite direction.
While this may sound insanely OCD, I remember thinking that I didn't have to get the number of counter-revolutions exactly right -- within a half-dozen or so should be "good enough".
Haha, wonderful. It's a an appealing thought I must say. What if the the "right" maneuvers in space actually open inter-dimensional portals. Sounds like we could've made good friends.
Anathem is a great book that explores lots of interesting, fairly unique ideas, and does some moderately original world building. But I always tell people Stephenson (the author, personal favorite) isn't for everyone, and Anathem isn't even for all Stephenson fans, it can be a hard read for many.
I installed CopperheadOS on my Nexus 5X, it has been a blessing. I use OsmAnd~ maps and navigation, Startpage for search and Firefox (and Firefox Klar) as my browser.
I chose Mailbox.org as my mail/calendar/contacts provider. DAVdroid syncs my calendar with the default Copperhead OS calendar app (Etar) and the Contacts app. I use the K-9 mail app.
For YouTube I use NewPipe. It suits me a lot better than the YouTube app. I can even download video/audio for offline use.
All the apps I mentioned above are free and open source and available via the F-Droid app “store” that comes pre-installed with Copperhead.
For the first time I feel that I own my phone (not the other way around).
I don't want to have to change the OS on my phone to get an acceptable experience. I rather do something else with my time.
But I use fastmail for mail and calendar. It works great for me. I still have like 10 years worth of data in Google Mail. So it will take some time before I can completely release that.
An iPhone gets OS updates for years and years, Google's flagship Pixel phone has two years of updates. Never would I spend that money on a phone that has so terrible support.
It's 3 years now for the Pixel 2[0][1]. This has been discussed before on HN, and it tends to fall on the reliance on Qualcomm as the chip maker, who is responsible for driver ports on any kernel upgrades. It's the reason Google kicked off project Treble[2].
Treble’s great, but overall it’s still not iOS competitive. For example, the iPhone 4S and 5 got 4 years and 10 months of OS support, and the 5S that launched 4 years ago got iOS 11 and presumably will get all the updates this year.
The "minimum 3 years support" for the Pixel 2 and the 4 years 10 months actual support for the iPhone 4S / 5 are not comparable numbers, exactly because one is the minimum they're promising (so it will apply from the date that the phone is discontinued) and the other is the maximum achieved (so it was measured from the model release date).
Anyone who bought an iPhone 4S at the end of its run only got 2 years of support. The iPhone 5 did much better though - 3 years 10 months.
For the the iPhone 5S to reach a minimum of 3 years support, it'll have to continue to get updates for another 17 months.
Google cut support relatively early for plenty of phones, including my Nexus 5. There were endless stupid excuses about chipsets, but the fact remains: nothing past 6.0.1. They barely supported it for two years.
IIRC Google cut support for the Nexus 4 whilst maintaining support for their tablet that used exactly the same chipset. One of Google’s Android engineers even did their own cut+paste builds for the Nexus 4 from the new Android release at the time.
Dropping support at that particular point in time was purely a marketing / management decision that wasn't driven by any technical considerations whatsoever.
When you do this kind of thing as a company over and over again, people notice.
Of course, it may be that it all came down to support contracts internally between Google and the Nexus device suppliers (the Nexus 7 blobs come via Asus, the Nexus 4 was an LG device that used the same Qualcomm chipset IIRC.) but that’s the kind of detail that end users really don’t care about: both were Google devices that Google sold & from the point of view of the end user Google dropped support for one device for no obvious reason as far as the end user can see.
1 - Google has a history of living up to the absolute bare minimum promised. Apple does not. Per history, one can assume that when Google says they'll support for 3 years they mean 3 years and one day, and Apple means about 5.
2 - Google has a history of whining as if they are absolutely powerless, broke, and incapable of affecting what Qualcomm or others do. At least when it suits Google.
The reason I don't (and wouldn't) use RawTherapee is that it does not have any selection tools that allows you to edit parts of the image (beyond gradients).
What this means is that you set your global contrast and export the file for further dodging/burning and edits in Photoshop, Gimp or some other software.
If you increased the contrast of the image in RawTherapee you will have darkened the shadows. So, when you open the exported bitmap in Photoshop, dodging an eye or some other part in will give you a lot more noise and a lot less headroom compared to doing this work on the undemosaiced data.
This is a big design fail and an actual problem if you go beyond the most basic raw conversion.
My point was that you could probably simply export as 16-bpc TIFF and I'd be surprised if RawTherapee didn't support that (cursory search through the docs suggests that it can do so).
To expand on that, there is no “beta“ channel, just a channel per release. If you install 17.10 beta, you‘ll get 17.10 package updates until the day of release, at which point you have the set of package versions that are considered the „stable“ release. After that, the 17.10 channel gets post-release bug and security fixes only.
There is one reason I've stuck with TextWrangler for so long. It has excellent auto saving features. I can close the application with dozens of unsaved documents, and it opens with the exact same state the I left it in if I re-open. Some of the documents I have open have been sitting unsaved for over a year, surviving restart, crashes and god knows what. AFAIK, I have never lost a document in TextWrangler.
The Textadept manual says:
> By default, Textadept saves its state upon quitting in order to restore it the next time the editor starts up.
But how well does it work in practice? Does anybody have experience?
Sublime does the "autosave unsaved docs" thing too, and does it flawlessly. (I have other gripes with Sublime, I just don't think this is a USP for TextWrangler.)
At least on the beta channel that hasn't always been flawless. You can find many reports and patch notes regarding corrupted sessions and I've definitely lost some work over the years to that, the last time happening just half a year ago on the then latest version.
This is not autosave, this saves open buffers, and may cause saving changes you may have wanted to discard. With non version controlled files this may cause data loss/corruption. See "Auto Save" in emacs manual instead.
I've guessed you mention about autosave feature like SublimeText, but I tried TexAdept and found only Save session at the File Menu, it's not autosave, just save the sessions by hand
Holy hell, finally FF57 isn't looking quite as frightening. New TST even supports tab containers. I really hope Mozilla fixes the inability to hide the horizontal tab bar (without userChrome hacking) though…
