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I’ve decided to post these microcasts, which I previously made available only through Patreon, here instead.
Microcasts focus on what I’ve been up to and thinking about, and also provide a way to answer questions from supporters and other readers/listeners!
This microcast covers ethics in decision-making for technology companies and (related!) some recent purchases I’ve made.
Show notes
- Blood money is fine with us, says GitLab: Vetting non-evil customers is ‘time consuming, potentially distracting’ (The Register)
- Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers (The Guardian)
- Lenovo X270 (Wikipedia)
- Debian Linux
- Asus VivoMini (Wikipedia)
Noel De Martin
18 October 2019 — 08:15
I’ve had my doubts on gitlab for a long time. They’ve now updated their policies, but this is exactly what makes me doubt them. They did the initial update without thinking too much about it, and now they seem to have reacted to all the backslash in one or two days. I remember some years ago they announced they’d stop using cloud providers and go bare metal. Just to declare shortly afterwards that some comments in the announcement blog post had convinced them not to do it. Seems to me like they don’t think things through (specially seeing the motives they gave for this recent policy: “it’s time consuming and potentially distracting”).
About your new devices, I recently had to buy a new laptop and I tried to find the most ethical brand. I wanted to find something like the fairphone for laptops, but I couldn’t see anything that convinced me. Funny enough, I’ve been using Asus laptops my whole life and turns out they’re the best within the mainstream. So I guess I’ll continue buying them for now.
Finally what you mention about the calendar. I used one app called Sunrise that was great, but it was bought and closed by Microsoft. At this point, I don’t think I’d trust any product that isn’t open source, that’s why I’ve decided to start making my own apps. It’ll be a long journey but I enjoy doing it and I can trust they’ll be around forever.
Doug Belshaw
18 October 2019 — 10:23
I loved Sunrise! There was a successor called Kin, but I never really got into it: https://kin.today
I’ve just drafted a post to go on the MoodleNet blog about GitLab. Because it’s a ‘policy’ thing, I need to run it by others, first…
Oliver Quinlan (@oliverquinlan)
18 October 2019 — 10:17
I’ve also been on the look out for calendar alternatives, but also never found one. Keep me posted. I also find decent desktop calendar apps difficult to find. Nothing for me beats the Apple calendar on OS X.
Doug Belshaw
18 October 2019 — 10:21
Yeah, it needs to be cloud-based really and sync across devices. I’m going to investigate Nextcloud a bit more…