Is MacBook a good computer? Yes. Worth its money? In the long-term, yes. Unless it dies or has some other problems. In these cases, if you are not in US, or other country, that is on Apple’s map, you are screwed. The so-called official service will not, ever, help. They will just charge for no service. Over and over again.

What the subject says.

We all change, or, as we sometimes, with delusions grandeur, state: we grow. Sometimes, this takes our environment with us, most likely, it doesn’t. This is the reason why we see so many marriages break and also, why we see so many friendships abruptly ended. After all, marriage is a form of friendship (after the initial stages of lust go by).

As my friend eloquently stated for our mutual friend: “If I was introduced to him now, I would never befriend him!”.

When you cross the item of your task list. Palm understood this.

So, you are in an EU project and there is a nice fat promise, the project will produce a large body of work, called either compendium or something with “success story” in its name. This work will then be used for further promotion of the project, not only to the EC, but to the business partners, which will take up the results of this work.

Of course, this body of work is to show success (hence the naming), as a lot of work was done, by many partners, and a lot of money was poured into the project.

Almost always, the crucial mistake is made in writing of this stuff. Namely, in the name of saving time, saving effort, saving the travel money, the text is written by people, who did the work. Usually, this is written at the end of long working stints, when everyone is tired and nobody cares about some pieces of text that have to be written. Oh, and most of the time, the people who have to write it, are engineers.

The end result is crap. Always.

There is a lesson to be learned.

I hate it, when I go to the visit, we agree in coffee and then I go away half drunk.

It’s nice to offer, but less nice to “force”.

I you want to use Google Chrome Remote Desktop (CRD) like VNC or RDC on the Ubuntu remote computer, you need to hack the Chrome Remote Desktop on the client.

Below are different bits and pieces, merged together from various sources over the internet – unfortunately not from one place :/.

Assumption: you installed CRD, you have the local client running on the target machine and you can connect to it.

Now, open terminal and go to the CRD folder:

cd /opt/google/chrome-remote-desktop

Then open the chrome-remote-desktop file and do some changes. First, decide that we will use the first X display number and not something after 20+.

#FIRST_X_DISPLAY_NUMBER = 20
FIRST_X_DISPLAY_NUMBER = 0

After setting up the 0 to be the first one available, we need to select it despite the existing lock file. This will now make sure, we will always get 0, as the first (and only :)) candidate.

def get_unused_display_number():
“””Return a candidate display number for which there is currently no
X Server lock file”””
display = FIRST_X_DISPLAY_NUMBER
# while os.path.exists(X_LOCK_FILE_TEMPLATE % display):
# display += 1
return display

Now, only the final touch, use the current X server and session – prevent starting up of the new X server and session.

def launch_session(self, x_args):
self._init_child_env()
self._setup_pulseaudio()
self._setup_gnubby()
#self._launch_x_server(x_args)
#self._launch_x_session()
display = self.get_unused_display_number()
self.child_env[“DISPLAY”] = “:%d” % display

Save the file, you are all set. Enjoy!

Bake bread. Watch Star Trek. Enjoy 😉

As I get older, I see time to recuperate after serious work “stunt” takes longer. This means I have to be very careful and pick and choose what I stand for, what I am willing to work long hours for.

This makes me think what people could actually achieve, if they really focused, when they are younger, when they work in different startups, where the energy dissipates into … pivots, acquisitions, exits.

I don’t know.

The current verdict is no.

Why? Google has been changing its mind about their mobile hardware strategy several times in the last few years. Each and every time, it got it wrong.

For example – it started with nice flagships – they were aimed at development people, low price, crappy camera, crappy finishing touches. Then, the Nexus line came – more of the same, but now the phones were made well, had some restrictions (no SD card and crappy camera). They were still aimed at developers, so the price was low – at least until N6. This beast was the first really expensive one. This trend was followed with N6p.

And then, all of a sudden, Pixel. No more Nexus line. Out of the bloody blue.

And my experience? I had N7 2012 (problem with the storage controller, making it unusable after 6 months), Nexus 6 (major problems with camera, major problems with storage, making it unusable after approx. 8 months), Nexus 5 (battery swollen, died after 1 year), Nexus 4 (battery died after 1 year).

Some of them were, for no good reason, cut from updates.

So, Pixel? Expensive beast, with possibly no future? Thanks, but no thanks.