[Thu Feb 22 15:00:26 CST 2018]

Here is the link to an excellent tutorial on how to use journalctl. {link to this entry}

[Tue Feb 20 15:12:07 CST 2018]

A couple of weeks ago or so, I ran into a product called Shift which is marketed as a "the best email client for Gmail and Outlook", among other things.

Basically, it's a software app that runs natively on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it allows you to connect to multiple web services (Gmail, Office 365, Facebook, Trello, Evernote... from a single app. In other words, it simplifies the management of your web apps. It works nicely, but the pricing (almost US $29 per year for their "Pro" account, and almost US $100 for their "Advanced" account) is sort of excessive, I think. So, I searched around for an alternative, and found Wavebox, which also runs on all three major operating systems, and costs US $20 a year.

In any case, I downloaded and tested both of these. To be fair, both are nicely written apps that do simplify the end-user experience with so many web apps out there. They do make it easy to access them all. However, once the effect of the shiny new toy passed, I realized that, truly, there is little difference between any of these and running the web apps directly on Firefox using their feature to pin your favorite tabs and, if a more strict separation of user accounts is needed, then using their contextual identity containers feature, which is enabled by default on their latest release. Well, the difference is that one can save US $30 a year. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it doesn't appear to add much more to the experience of running the standard browser in the manner I describe.

Now, for a different app that I did find useful. There are so many messaging apps available out there that, if you are anything like me, you need a ton of them just to keep in contact with your friends and relatives. Well, enter Franz. I installed it in Linux, and it works fine.

It's free, but the author accepts donations. Since I just installed it a week ago, I will wait a bit longer before making the donation. It may be well worth the trouble. {link to this entry}

[Wed Feb 7 17:35:20 CST 2018]

It's amazing how fast things change these days. Microsoft, the darling child of the technology industry yesterday (OK, well, perhaps the day before yesterday), appeared to be going down on a slippery slope not so long ago. The desktop and laptop market, which is where it established its domination originally, was (and perhaps is) quickly disappearing while, at the same time, it was unable to set a solid foot in the server market (well, relatively speaking) and it was without a doubt losing the race on other fronts (mobile devices, for example). And yet, we recently read that Azure, their cloud services, has increased its revenues by a massive 98 percent, which helped the company show a net income of $7.5 billion in their FY18 Q2 results. It doesn't look as if the company is dying anytime soon. It may make for an interesting case study since it looks as if they have succefussly managed to revamp the company in a relatively short period of time. {link to this entry}