blog.8-p.info

My tech books reading has been mostly on O’Reilly’s app which I have a discounted subscription through my ACM membership. I use the app mainly on iPad.

Then some of my friends got e-ink devices like reMarkable 2 and BOOX Note3. While these large e-ink tablets are too expensive for me, smaller versions are not so. For example, BOOX Poke3 is $189.99, Bouye Likebook P6 is $149.99 and Bouye Likebook Mars is $219.00.

So this is my “research” post to cool myself down.

Does O’Reilly app support paging instead of scrolling?

I couldn’t find the option on the iPad app, but the Android app supports paging, at least on my OnePlus 5T.

BOOX’s bold font issue

Apparently BOOX is rendering text in bold unnecessary on WebViews for more than a year.

• Text gets bold in third party apps
• Article text all bold in Note apps
• Onyx Boox bug: All fonts bold in Pocket, Overdrive

The third link specifically mentions O’Reilly app, that would be a deal-breaker for me.

Update: Bouye Likebook P78

Bouye has released Likebook P78. USB-C is nice. I have to wait a few weeks for see more reviews.

I have spent a few minutes for figuring out crates.io’s alternative which I’ve seen before. It was Lib.rs.

About // Lib.rs

lib.rs is fast. There’s no JavaScript anywhere.

I’m not a big fan of crates.io’s client-side rendering and I was working on crates.io’s server-side rendering from 2019 to 2020. crates.io’s front-end is written in Ember and Fastboot is Ember’s way of doing server-side rendering.

However switching to server-side rendering is a big change and crates.io’s team was not really ready for that in terms of workload. There was on-going Ember-related refactoring at that time such as migrating to native classes which caused a lot of conflicts. So, eventually I gave up.

Yeah. I’ve just shared my old sad story today. Sometimes things don’t work out.

I’ve been building software for other developers for more than a year now. While this is fun, I feel I’ve been escaping from asking myself a question. What are the values I’d like to bring to the world?

Building software for other developers, in other words, building tools seems a value-neutral act. Some of us want to believe so. Good folks use computers. Bad folks use computers. We can stop neither of them.

But, is it?

People said, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

Am I?

No. I wouldn’t quit my job to become an activist. But sometimes I think I’ve been working in a silo, solving tech problems for tech people, remote from the rest of the world.

2021-05-29

According to ZDNet, Moderna uses AWS, including Fargate.

Moderna built its own drug design studio, a web-based app hosted on AWS Fargate.

That makes me feel better :)

Spring is always a busy season for me due to tax filling. It is extra busy this year. I have additional things to deal with, from work and non-work.

I managed to have a short walk one day this week. I probably should do more.

If you know Ron Jeffries, you may be into Agile. I am not. But I know Extreme Programming and he is one of the three founders of Extreme Programming.

He was writing a lot about Dark Scrum from 2015 to 2019. I have read few and they are interesting and thought-provoking. I may not agree with all of them though.

FYI, Dave Thomas has also blogged Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility) in 2014.

And, unfortunately, I think time has proven me right. The word “agile” has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products.

So I think it is time to retire the word “Agile.”