Feedly on a 1st Gen iPad Mini

Hi Feedly guys.

I said:

And then you said:

...and while it is great that you've found a problem in general and are working quickly to fix it, that isn't what I'm actually on about. (I think.)

I have a first-gen iPad mini, being an early-adopter and all that. One of the problems with having a first-gen iPad mini is that it is getting a bit old, and applications are starting to get big enough that I can't run them without issues.

I don't think Feedly by itself is the issue. The problem is that something has changed in Feedly, and/or the surrounding environment that Feedly is running in, that the iPad mini can't deal with properly.

What happens is this:

• I load Feedly. Feedly goes off and collects the latest feed information. I have a lot of feeds and don't read them during the work day, so there's lots and lots of stuff there.
• I click on something and Feedly shows me the feed item. Most of these items don't have "full feed" functionality, so I only get a little bit plus maybe a picture.
• I click on the "show me more" (or whatever) and here's where it gets interesting. Sometimes Feedly seems to shell out to what looks like Safari to show me the entire page. Sometimes it shells out to Chrome to show me the entire page.
• I read my page, and then click "done" or "back to Feedly" as appropriate.
• Feedly has been swapped out because my iPad only has 512MB and I've just had Safari or Chrome running, so Feedly restarts, goes off and collects the latest feed information, and shows me that list from the newest-first page. Which is fine except that I'm a couple (or couple dozen) pages in to the list, and getting kicked back to the top of that list is annoying.

It doesn't happen on my iPhone 5S, but that's because the 5S has more memory so Feedly doesn't get swapped out, so it doesn't lose my place. However I like my mini, it has a better form-factor than the phone. Plus if I use up the battery on the mini, my phone is still usable.

I suspect the root cause of this is my trying to use an Apple device that's more than two years old at this point, silly me, but while I am an early adopter I'm also not in a place where I can buy something newer at the moment. (And anyways, I suspect my next tablet will be a Windows 10 tablet instead.)

Sure, this is a first-world problem. But it is annoying.

Thanks for reading.

Legacy Management Pages - A Tragedy In Three Parts

So you want to manage this old voicemail system, do ya?

Remember when Java was write-once, run-everywhere? Yeah, me neither.

Review: Suffragette

Yes, it is the dreary days of November when the only movies out are Oscar bait. And so, to Oscar-bait we went. Overall I would rate this movie as better than Still Alice, but since it is a parallel-history there is no happy ending for anyone and so I really don't have the inclination to see it again.

TV: Supergirl Pilot Is Really Bad

We finally watched the pilot. A super hero story with a strong female lead, what could go wrong, right?

Well for starters, the previews made it look like it was some kind of teenager drama, with emphasis on the drama. Not a fan.

Then the pilot actually starts, and we're in some kind of comic-book teen-drama mash-up with The Devil Wears Prada. And I'm not a fan of either genre. And it manages to conflict with the teen-drama aspect too, since our teen lead is not a teenager, she's clearly some kind of young, probably post-college, career woman who behaves like a teenager.

Then the whole episode they manage to go without identifying Superman by name. Did the series not get a license to use that name? It's always "him". And I turn to Jenn and say, why to they refer to Superman that way? He isn't fucking Jesus. Well except at the end of the episode where we hear: "He's proud of you." Maybe he is Jesus! TV rights do strange things.

Then Supergirl's secret identity is the only one to come up with a clear photo of the super hero. A real Peter Parker moment, if you would. And at this point I said to Jenn, have we seen an original idea here yet? And she couldn't think of one.

I'll give the show a pass on how bad the special effects were, too. They were cramming a lot of other bad things into the show and there clearly wasn't the time to design the effects properly.

At the end of it all Jenn didn't want to watch another episode. My view is, we gave Heroes Reborn two episodes before bailing, we should give this at least another episode. 

But on the other hand, Heroes Reborn wasn't this bad.

Review: The Martian

The book was better.

Now, that may be because the book was really fucking good, but this isn't the kind of movie that works well for me when I know what's coming next even in general terms.

Obligatory relevant XKCD link.

Breaking K545

All good things come to an end, I suppose, and today I see the impending end of a favourite tool:

Well that's unfortunate

My AKG K545 headset is splitting along one of the plastic housings. I can probably extend the life a bit by trying to exclusively expand from the other side of the band, but usually when plastic splits like that it will break completely pretty soon after that.

The headset lives in my backpack every day and gets taken out constantly, clearly the wear and tear are too much for it. I guess I will have to look into something more collapsible to replace these with.

Pity, I've only had it a little over a year and I have used them, if not daily, then on average several times a week for that year. I might have got my money's worth out of them but as always I am disappointed not to have gotten more.

I Didn't Last A Week With Fedora

So the constant hanging of Windows 10 finally did it: it drove me away from Windows.

Temporarily. Let me explain.

Last week I finally had it with Windows 10. For those of you tuning in late, my issue was that Windows 10 would just... stop. The CPU widget I kept running would show 100% CPU usage, but I didn't believe it because the laptop fan would never start, and when the CPU is running hard that fan screams like a kid being taken to the dentist. Sometimes, if I left it alone for 45 minutes it would come back. Most of the time, no it wouldn't. The only way to get it back would be to hard reboot it.

So, having finally "had it", I downloaded a Fedora Core 22 Workstation Live CD and spent a day playing with it. Nothing bad happened, so at the end of the day I pulled the trigger on installing it to the laptop's hard drive.

The next day I got started with the patching and installing the things I needed to work. And part of the way through that, I had another system crash.

Over the next day I would have the same problem. When the computer appeared to exhaust RAM and began to reach for swap, I would frequently get a hang. Occasionally it would come back in five minutes, showing a load average of something like 25 when it did so. But again, most of the time -- nothing. Hard reboot.

Then on Wednesday something magical happened. My new laptop arrived. I am the proud user of a HP EliteBook 820 G2. And, since I was now blaming hardware for my woes, I decided what the hell, why not start with Linux on this computer and see how that goes.

I did decide to go with Fedora 21 instead of 22 because I figured maybe 22 was less than fully baked, and since 21 had been out longer maybe it would be less... exciting to use. So I dutifully installed Fedora 21 to the disk.

The install, by the way, was amazing. Just click "install to disk" from the live CD, deal with your partitioning, and that was effectively it. Really fast, too. And Fedora recognized all the hardware in the laptop that I wanted to use. Sleeping and hot-plugging monitors just worked like they were supposed to. Fedora automatically detected and installed drivers for the printer on the local network when I wanted to print -- not even Windows can do that! I could even run my old friend xload as a graphical way to keep an eye on the computer's health.

However, there were issues in paradise.

• Static IP network device profiles seemed to roam around between the wired, wireless, and virtual (VMware) interfaces.
• Remmina was hopeless in Fedora 21.
• Minimized applications sometimes became impossible to find again (Skype, I'm looking at you).
• The font in gnome-terminal was excruciating to look at.
• The pop-up bar from the bottom of the Gnome screen usually wouldn't pop up.
• The Ratpoison rpm didn't yield a usable window manager.
• There's still no good way to read Exchange mail on Fedora.
• And there's the problem of having all my work files on OneDrive, which would mean I was stuck using them in a Windows VM. 

The usual mix of stupid minor things and serious work impediments.

Over the labour day weekend, I decided to go back to Fedora 22 in the hopes that some of that stuff would be addressed. And it was. Remmina was (more) usable. The pop-up bar from the bottom was replaced with a clickable pop-out bar in the lower left corner. Other things were not fixed such as the roaming static-IP profile.

On Tuesday I again tried to work productively with a Linux laptop. But at the end of the day it was clear to me that I was being seriously impeded by the lack of a usable mail client and by having all my files trapped in a Windows VM.

See, I use OneDrive as a backup-slash-distribution system, so that all my work files are not uniquely stored on any one computer and can be accessed from multiple computers, right now my laptop and a VM I keep running at the office. There is no substitute in Linux. Rsync might be considered something, but I would have to set it up and remember to deal with it manually.

On the email side, we use Exchange and access it via RPC-over-HTTPS. I use the calendaring features pretty heavily because they synchronize with my phone. I find it very useful to have my calendar with me wherever I am. Evolution doesn't work^* with the version of Exchange we have, OWA is pretty clunky -- not to mention frustrating when used through a web browser that pops up windows on random screens so you can't find them -- and frankly if I have to run a VM just for email I might as well just run Windows natively.

Not to mention my distrust of Libre Office's "compatibility" with the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I've been burnt by open source tools compatibility before. I know that's unfair given how far the rest of Linux has come, but that's my instinct.

I was faced with an inevitable conclusion: if my files were trapped in Windows, then Windows was the logical platform for me to use for my business computing.

And so, less than a week after I tried to commit to Linux, I've come full circle. Windows 10 installed on my laptop and was pretty much as uneventful as the Linux installs were. Windows went off and found all the drivers for the hardware, so I have not had to manually download and install any myself.

Going back to Windows feels like I am giving up to a certain extent. And maybe I am. But for the way my work and tools have evolved, I think I'm stuck with it.

^*I only played with it for a couple hours. In the old days, that'd be nothing, you couldn't give up on an open source product after *only* a couple of hours. But I don't have time to fuck around with this stuff any more, I have work to do and a life away from it.