blogposts op blog.futtta.be met geklaag en gezaag of met ongegeneerde idolatrie (or; ranting an raving, to be taken with a pinch of salt)
About #Eurovision; Loved Croatia, Finland and I’m happy my fellow-Belgian #Gustaph did (very) well. But my favorite by far this year was Spains #BlancaPaloma
Flamenco-ish, intense, great voice, beautiful act, uncompromising electro-track that completely avoids the standard 4 to the floor beat that is way to present in Liverpool.
So much to like & discover, I’ve got it on repeat!
Although I removed the “twitterless twaddle” byline from this blog years ago and I was present on Twitter with my @futtta-account, I’ve never been an avid user. That means I have no “social capital” there and given the Musk shit-show it has quickly become, I revisited the Mastodon account I created in April this year (when Elon declared he wanted to buy Twitter) and as instructed by God I happily “archived” my Twitter account by removing all my follows, protecting my tweets, changing my name and gently closing the door behind me (and I finally deactivated my FB account as well).
So if you want to get social with me, I’m https://mastodon.social/@futtta. Not that I’m good at doing the socials, not that I’ll have much to say there, not that Mastodon solves all problems with social media, but it does feel good to be on a federated/ distributed social network using open source software, not owned by one company or one person.
My work as a developer of free and open source software is an expression of my firm belief in humanity, communication and collaboration. War is the opposite of those beliefs and I strongly support any action that opposes Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As such the protests in Russian cities against the war need to be heard loud and clear and repeated by anyone who believes in dialogue; Нет войне!
So Fitbit is notoriously bad at getting a correct heart rate when the user is cycling. Compare below 2 screenshots of the same 1h ride I did earlier today, one from Fitbit and one from myWorkouts (nice Android app) which uses a Bluetooth chest-strap to measure heart rate;
37 minutes below 114 bmp? Average of 112? Bollocks!
I fully understand a wrist-mounted device is not ideal for monitoring heart rate when in bicycling position, but wouldn’t it be great if the Fitbit app kept an eye out for a Bluetooth chest-strap in that case if only to ensure not having utter nonsense (not only HR but also energy spent) in their exercise stats?
10 years after it became irrelevant (one of the first blogposts I wrote that generated discussions & traffic), Flash is now officially buried;
When my Thinkpad x250 broke down last week with what appears to be a motherboard failure, I tried to convince my daughter to hand over her T410 but work-from-home-schooling does not work without a computer, so she refused. Disillusioned in my diminishing parenting powers, I dug up my 10 year old Samsung n135 netbook instead. It still had Ubuntu 14.10 running and the battery was pining for the fjords, but after buying a new battery (€29), updating Ubuntu to 18.04 LTS and switching to Lubuntu it really is usable again.
Now to be honest, I did get replacement laptop (a bulky T510 with only 4GB of RAM) with my own SSD inside from my supplier, so I’m not using that old netbook full-time, but happy to have it running smoothly nonetheless.
The future, to end this old-fashioned geekery off with, will very likely be a Dell XPS-13 9300 (yep, I’ll be cheating on Lenovo) on which I’ll happily install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on. I’ve upgraded my wife’s x240 to that already and I must say it runs smoothly and looks great when compared to 18.04 which I’m still running.
Fun fact; As per wordpress.org “popular plugins” ranking , Autoptimize is slowly but surely closing in on what used to be the go-to solution for Web Performance Optimization W3 Total Cache based on the “active installs” metric. Who would have thought? What a crazy ride …
Wolf Braun is a happy Autopitmize user and created this testimonial to tell the world just how great he thinks AO is;
Thanks Wolf, we agree! 🙂
Being wary of all things tracking by Google & Facebook, both of who’s products I love but data capturing practices I hate, for the last 4 years or so I always logged in into these in “Private browsing” sessions in Firefox (because why trust the worlds biggest advertising platform with your privacy, right?)
Now I just “discovered” that the Mozilla team have rendered that somewhat clumsy procedure -which required me to log in each time I restarted my computer or browser- redundant with their “Firefox Multi-Account Containers” add-on, allowing you to contain entire sessions to one (or more) tabs;
So now I have one browser window with a couple of tabs in the Google container, one tab in a Facebook container and all others in the “default” container where Google & Facebook can’t track me (fingerprinting aside, but there’s an option for that).
I had a nice chat on The CommonSenSEO Show, if you want to hear me ramble you can do so in this video;
And if you’re into SEO, do subscribe to the channel!
