Week three runs finished.

Actually ran yesterday but had to break the run early since I ended up with a nose bleed part way through.

Redid the run later that day.

Not often I quote from a publication from Ireland, but this was quite an intriguing read. Someone who went from Windows to Mac to Linux (Mint)

Linux is everywhere – and will free your computer from corporate clutches

It was 2002, I was up against a deadline and a bullying software bubble popped up in Windows every few minutes. Unless I paid to upgrade my virus scanner – now! – terrible things would happen.

We’ve all had that right?

In a moment of clarity I realised that the virus scanner – and its developer’s aggressive business model – was more of a pest than any virus I’d encountered. Microsoft’s operating system was full of this kind of nonsense, so, ignoring snorts of derision from tech friends, I switched to the Apple universe.

It was a great choice: a system that just worked, designed by a team that clearly put a lot of thought into stability and usability. Eventually the iPhone came along, and I was sucked in farther, marvelling at the simple elegance of life on Planet Apple and giving little thought to the consequences.

Then the dream developed cracks. My MacBook is 10 years old and technically fine, particularly since I replaced my knackered old hard drive with a fast new solid-state drive. So why the hourly demands to update my Apple operating system, an insistence that reminded of the Windows virus scanner of old?

Apple is no different to Microsoft it seems.

I don’t want to upgrade. My machine isn’t up to it, and I’m just fine as I am. But, like Microsoft, Apple has ways of making you upgrade. Why? Because, as a listed company, it has quarterly sales targets to meet. And users of older MacBooks like me are fair game.

I looked at the price of a replacement MacBook but laughed at the idea of a midrange laptop giving me small change from €1,200. Two years after I de-Googled my life(iti.ms/2ASlrdY) I began my Apple prison break.

He eventually went for Linux Mint, which for a casual user is fine. I use Fedora and Ubuntu (and a really old version of Ubuntu since my workplace VPN doesn’t seem to work properly with anything above Ubuntu 14 - their way of forcing me onto either a Windows or Mac machine)

Source: www.irishtimes.com/business/…

www.youtube.com/watch

Continuing week 3 runs. Today’s run felt easier – guess I’m getting used to the additional time for the runs.

Week 3 Day 1, more effort than the previous runs with two 3 minute runs in the middle, but felt good afterwards

Final day of the Week 2 runs. Nothing major, same routine as the previous two, but decided to push the jog speed up a bit compared to yesterday.

Busy day tomorrow, so probably won’t be doing my run tomorrow.

Training today was in a hotel in Dublin so on Treadmill which screws up the tracking of the ZenLabs app. Second day of the Week 2 set of runs

Started Week 2 runs. This week, 5 min walk, then 6 sets of 90 secs jogging, then 2 mins walking, then 5 minutes cooldown. This schedule was more effort than last week and felt better :)

Continuing to work through ZenLabs' 5k app. Today, W1D3, 5min walk then 1min run/1.5min walk x8 and then cooldown.

A cold run today - bumped into a group of runners in the local park also doing intervals and they invited me to join them. Politely declined as they were doing small laps, and I wanted to do the larger laps.

Today, W1D2, 5min walk then 1min run/1.5min walk x8 and then 5min cooldown.

Starting to work through ZenLabs' 5k app. Today, W1D1, 5min walk then 1min run/1.5min walk x8 and then cooldown.

Also picked up Zombies Run again, and again, had problem with the app staying up - which was helped by me installing Greenify to keep some unwanted apps frozen.

My opinion of Apple and its practices has never been high. But this is just stupid.

Type in “1+2+3=” in an iOS 11 device’s calculator app, and you get 6 (correctly), but type it in quickly (as demonstrated in this video) and you get 24.

youtu.be/BQabEcG42…

Sure, it’ll no doubt get patched soon and Apple will twist the incident to prove how fast they can push out updates compared to Android. But the point remains - how did such a bug make it past testing? And what OTHER, similarly stupid bugs that have yet to be detected, also make it past testing. And what if one of those bugs was in something fundamental? Something that breaks the functionality of the device? Something like the 1/1/1970 bug that would brick the device, or even the infamous “effective power” bug that would annoying reboot someone’s phone. Or even the famous crashsafari site that was only meant to crash safari but managed to crash the device too (originally, anyway).

OR, was there even ANY testing?

I dug out my old login credentials for Zombies Run and reinstalled to see of they’ve gotten any better since my departure. So far, I’ve been able to do a run (well, walk). With Apollo running without the app crashing on me, which is a definite improvement on what I had previously.

I seemed to have lost my entire base so I’m now having to rebuild from scratch. No matter, I’m replaying Season 1 again right now, anyway.

I also lost my ability to renew my legacy subscription so I’m on standard monthly subscription right now. The S1E1 story has changed slightly with a few additional clips explaining how to play the game and there’s a few new episodes which are showing as I haven’t done yet, which is weird since I’m pretty sure I did all of them.

Finally, got this after my return run.

And just in case you don’t get the references, Sam is talking about the song “500 Miles” by The Proclaimers.

www.youtube.com/watch

I’ve been slacking in my running for a fair bit, and not doing my usual distances.

This last week, I’ve been through the painful process of saying goodbye to my uncle from the viewing in the mortuary, to the final viewing, the funeral, and the internment of the ashes.

Cancer is a horrible condition, indiscriminate and relentless. But it doesn’t always mean death. Research has allowed cancer patients a good quality of life compared to a few decades ago and it continues to grow as research progresses.

In 2014 I did the Royal Parks Half Marathon (completion post here). It was a painful experience, but one I’m going to attempt to go for again. I’m going to train up for another Half Marathon and this time nominate a cancer charity. The current primary charity I’m thinking of is Cancer Research UK.

Bipul Lama believes Facebook is spying on him.

And he’s got proof, sort of. Lama performed a test. For two days, all he talked about was Kit-Kats.

“The next day, all I saw on my Instagram and Facebook were Kit-Kat ads,” Lama said.

After his Kit-Kat experiment, he successfully repeated it with chatter about Lysol. The 23-year-old musician is now more convinced than ever that Facebook is listening to his conversations through his phone’s microphone.

“It listens to key words. If you say a word enough times, the algorithm catches those words and it sets off targeted ads,” Lama theorized.

Lama is far from alone. The belief that Facebook is actively listening to people through their phones has become a full-on phenomenon. Facebook has, of course, denied it does this. That has done little to dampen the ongoing paranoia around the theory.

Because it is just a theory… right?

Source: Why everyone is so convinced Facebook is spying on their conversations

Something new I learned today – doing

export TMOUT=120

Will auto logout your current shell/login session after that many seconds.

Very useful if you hook this into the root account’s profile or as a default to all users so people can’t leave terminals open

Source: TMOUT - Auto Logout Linux Shell When There Isn’t Any Activity

An interesting quote popped up on my screen this morning

As someone who has tinkered with multiple distributions, this will be a great way to try out multiples

This tutorial shows you how to install multiple Linux distributions on one USB. This way, you can enjoy more than one live Linux distros on a single USB key.

Source: How to Install Multiple Linux Distributions on One USB

Save Your Uber in London #saveyouruber

I’ve signed the petition.

Source: Petition · Save Your Uber in London #saveyouruber · Change.org

Rarely I post stuff from Facebook due to my bad history with them, but this (via Mashable) is pretty damn good

[embed]www.facebook.com/Dharnioff…[/embed]

Another female captain to add to the diverse list of captains of Star Trek vessels. And I’m actually happy it’s finally someone from the East. Even more so, someone with a history of action films. Patrick Stewart had a history of films behind him too, but not all were action, and is mostly famous for his  Shakespeare work.

Source: ‘Star Trek Discovery’ premiere review: Smart, serious sci-fi on a slow burn

In the capitalistic nightmare we live in, everything has to be a transaction. So, when Pact launched its fitness app that let you make money for working out—or else pay a fee for failing to do so—it seemed to be the perfect motivational tool. There was just one problem: The company apparently wasn’t that great at paying up, and was it too good at collecting fees.

Hah, I remember this app. I actually did try it for a while but failed to see its appeal, or how it could make me continue to exercise. People would only be interested in this if they were really seriously wanting to meet a goal. People demotivated enough, would just cancel the pact/goal and continue on.

Source: App That Paid Users to Exercise Owes Nearly $1 Million for Not Paying Users to Exercise

The malware backdoor in this story is quite intriguing. They are targeting specific companies (Samsung, Akamai, Cisco, Microsoft amongst them) and only attempting the second level attack if they are detecting they are being installed there.

The advice mentioned in the article is that anyone who installed the software on their system should REFORMAT THEIR DRIVE. Quite an extreme recommendation. My suggestion - stop using Windows.

Source: CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared | Ars Technica

So Google has officially hooked up with HTC. How do I feel about this? Rather ambivalent, actually. On one side Google is already using their phones (Pixel), but HTC did roll over to Apple a long time ago without standing up to their bullying tactics - something that made me ditch HTC in favour of Samsung (and, tbh, I’m glad I did). However, this link up means Google gets a dedicated team to work on their phones. Whether this means they’ll become a decent competitor to the other devices, remains to be seen.

Source: Google/HTC deal is official, Google to acquire part of HTC’s smartphone team | Ars Technica

Torvalds is not a huge fan of the ‘security community’ as he doesn’t see it as black and white. He maintains that bugs are part of the software development process and they cannot be avoided, no matter how hard you try. “constant absolute security does not exist, even if we do a perfect job,” said Torvalds in a conversation with Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

“As a technical person, I’m always very impressed by some of the people who are attacking our code,” Torvalds said. “I get the feeling that these smart people are doing really bad things that I wish they were on our side because they are so smart and they could help us.”

Source: Linus Torvalds Invites Attackers to Join the Ke… » Linux Magazine