I really wish I could use Firefox!

But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'.

From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering.

As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.

please, report the bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org and describe your problem. Thank you!

Not in my experience.

With 4 GB ram, Chrome will happily give ~2GB to any tab that requests it in a couple of seconds, leaving me with an unresponsive Windows aggressively paging memory to disk, only to give whatever it finds... back to chrome

> Measuring memory usage is hard ...

Exactly, I usually find that chrome is eating a little more than what it's displayed in task manager in windows ;) I have no idea how it can achieve that to be honest. Restarting it seems to bring back the 5-15% missing ram in my case.

Funny thing, most if not all 'client-side failover' strategies you might find through google or the likes won't work either.

This is because the loaded resource will 'fail' anywhere between x seconds up to minutes, or never! In the meantime the user just sees a blank page, or best case, some 80-90% page that keeps trying to load something...

I've experienced this myself a couple times. Most probably my ISP messed up some stuff taking down whole chunks of 'internet' :)

The fact that browsers don't have any built-in mechanisms to load-balance resources it disappointing, but not surprising. Think about who are the main drivers of HTML specs. There is probably a way to implement such balancing manually, though. Either through loading parallel documents and exploiting cahcing or through using setTimeout and loading a different set of resources.

And that's why I moved most of my website registrations to a name@mydomain.com address and host the server myself on a $4/mo VPS. Still, my domain name is tied to my gmail address. Now I'm paranoid I'll lose access to my gmail, and my domain name quickly after. (remember the @N guy?)

Unless I manage to learn some social engineering skills or hire myself a marketing team I doubt I'd be able to get my stuff back. I'm no social butterfly, I'm not pretty and I've got some serious Eastern European accent.

So I'm considering maintaining two mail servers with different companies and different registrars, both pointing at each other. Such that in case I lose one, I can recover with the second.

Am I crazy?

What I'm planning to do is move the services I have registered with my Gmail account to a Fastmail account, and migrate my Gmail archive to that service. They handle contacts and calendars too, and their basic service is $3/month. That's cheaper and easier than running one's own mail server.

I've been test driving their service for a few days and so far it feels much more intuitive and faster than Gmail. It also works properly on every browser I've thrown at it, and their Android app is nice. I'm going to spend the next few days pruning my Gmail archive before transferring it so I don't have to buy the 25GB plan from Fastmail, then I'll tell all the services that use the Gmail address to use the Fastmail address instead. That second task will be the most time consuming and frustrating one, but it's worth the effort to break the chains of the big G.

(Edit: Corrected the price for Fastmail's basic service)

Good luck. I did the same and now I have all sorts of issues when employers send Calendar invites to my (ex-Google, now Fastmail) email address. I cannot accept them due to weird errors, etc. Not the best look if you're ostensibly an Operations guy. :)

We're not aware of any general issues like that. Please open a support ticket with the full details and we'll happily investigate: https://www.fastmail.com/action/support/

I'm absolutely certain it's not you, but some lingering record in Google that thinks there's some mismatch when I go to accept.

I don't use Google services for anything work related (we're government so we have "good old" Outlook and Exchange), just personal stuff and side work. Basically, as long as it can sync with the calendar and contacts on my phone, I'm set.

Thanks for the warning though, and maybe one of the FastMail devs will see your post and address it.

>Am I crazy?

Yes, for hosting your own mail server! I read and remember that it is quite annoying to maintain it and get it right so you won't get flagged as spam.

That's why I just pay $5/month to fastmail instead, so I do not have to worry.

If you're concerned that your domain registration is tied to your Gmail address, consider having different addresses on different providers (e.g. Outlook.com, your own domain, etc.) and assign different addresses to the Registrant, Admin, Billing and Technical contacts. You could also use a separate Gmail account, though that could be slightly riskier if the accounts get linked somehow by the giant data vacuum.

I'm actually planning on renting a VPS soon to use as a personal VPN, dedicated IP, hopefully dedicated bandwidth etc.

I don't have even the smallest idea how to configure one or what software I actually need, BUT, my greatest fear is that I'll end up with a pretty "broken internet" since I won't be using a residential IP anymore.

Cloudflare will just think that I broke into some random wordpress site and started using the server to ddos (who? with 1-2 requests/minute?).

It doesn't look that they implement any kind of serious IP reputation algorithm. I have a static residential address since I remember signing the contract, almost a decade ago, pretty paranoid about security with a clean PC and I never seem to stop getting captchas.

Is PIA a paid only service? I doubt any "hackers" will be using it to break cloudflare sites. On the contrary, I'd argue its users are actually more civilized than the residential folks.

Not sure I'd want a VPN via a VPS, as you'd lose the anonymity of being just one of a swarm using a particular IP point of presence. Though you'd probably get fewer CF captchas, but all traffic would be you.

I've no idea how clever CF are (tempted to quip clearly not clever enough) to decide their sites or their network is under attack. I'd imagine there's going to be a lot of connections from PIA's users, from all the various regional exits. Same for all the other VPN companies. I can't believe they can't be distinguished from a real DDOS or whatever else they see as "bad traffic".

Where Cloudflare start winding me up is they treat each domain alone. I get a captcha on blog a, 30 seconds later I'll get another at company b, 5s another at blog c. If CF gave me a 3 or 24 hour cookie I'd hate them so much less! (There's a couple of ways around captcha madness - If I switch to another exit I can usually get a captcha free one)

PIA is paid, but good value - around $35 a year.

This is actually not just about Tor. Their definition of "suspicious" is quite liberal and naive to be honest.

As an anecdote, I get ~1 captcha per month because I live in Eastern Europe. Add to that Linux, Firefox, NoScript and you're in for a fun ride.

I believe it's wrong to say that users don't care.

Rather, users, don't really have a choice.

From personal experience, linux is still far from actually being user-friendly. And it's easy for me to compare: 1) I haven't had a blue screen on neither my, or my mother's laptop since XP SP2. 2) 6 months ago when I wanted to switch to Ubuntu I had my HDD suddenly die after an update. No mo trying for me.

Besides, these "clueless" users everybody imagines are not the ones making the choices. They resort to their kids, nephews, or that computer kid down the road to reinstall their Windows. And I am not that crazy yet to install linux on my mother's laptop. I bet it won't even work.

Speaking as a past student I'm really glad I started with C.

In the beginning, the fear of getting some random Segmentation fault out of nowhere actually taught me more than any textbook, school or best practices blog could ever do. It also forced me to learn how to use debuggers :)

That's what I tell my students, it's "character building", in the same way playing sports in the rain was as a child for me.

Also, many students previously did a course on Java, and clearly never really understood the basics, it's much easier in Java to play "keep tweaking and fixing the exceptions until it works, then don't touch it", particularly for introductory-level projects.

At least for me the change log is one of the first items I read when looking to try new software.

It often tells quite a lot about how involved the developers are, what direction the project is heading to, or how mature it is overall.