This is pretty standard in the UK these days, most debit cards are Visa/Mastercard - 10 years ago most debit cards were Maestro or Visa Electron, although I still didn't have much difficulty getting a Visa debit card for travelling.
I found it very odd when I was in Germany that this wasn't the case, Visa/Mastercard were entirely considered credit cards, and debit cards used some entirely different system. I couldn't use my debit card to pay for a Berlin subway ticket, as the machines only took German bank cards.
UK debit cards used to be either Switch/Maestro or Visa Delta/Visa Debit depending on who you banked with. The Switch/Maestro cards were then phased out around 10 years ago and replaced with either Visa Debit or Debit Mastercard. I used to travel frequently to Germany at the time so it was super annoying not to be able to use my card anywhere but a cash machine.
Visa Electron was in a different category with Switch Solo. I think they tended to be issued on accounts with no overdraft facility. (I had a Solo card as a teenager and it was only accepted at a handful of places.)
I hear of Revolut more in the context of using it as a service for sending money internationally, but I know plenty of people who use Monzo for day to day banking (although most also still have an account with a normal bank).
It doesn't surprise me that more people have used Revolut at some point, but I would still expect that Monzo has more active users.
Edit: This is in the UK, I understand Monzo isn't quite as well known elsewhere.
As much as bloatware is awful and Google could probably have some better rules on this, Google itself doesn't ship bloatware on it's own phones. I guess it depends on your definition of bloatware, but YouTube isn't exactly bloatware on the same level as the junk that comes installed on most third party phones, and it can be uninstalled - a lot of third party bloatware is installed as a system app and can't be deleted.
If people don't like junk pre-installed on their Samsung phones or by Verizon, they should probably complain to them, or stop buying those phones. There are plenty of brands with stock Android that don't come with pre-installed junk.
Are the AirPods actually good headphones? Personally I don't consider the basic Apple headphones that come with iPhones to be either good audio quality or comfortable design, and the AirPods look identcal aside from the lack of wires (but I've never used them).
I can sort of understand spending $200 on really good quality, comfortable headphones, though I wouldn't myself - if only because I'll inevitably break or lose them after a few months, even more of an issue with these wireless headphones. But if they don't check either of those boxes, I can't fathom why they're so popular, aside from Apple marketing.
My ears are not great so it's really hard for me to speak about audio quality. But in my eyes, they are comparable to some of the more mid-range earbuds in terms of sound quality. I'd love to try the AB2 due to the sound isolation & noise cancellation, but can't justify buying a new set when my current set still work so well.
The reason I bought the original Airpods and will likely buy the newer ones is all about convenience. I wear them on my mountain bike and commuting and being truly wireless is invaluable. Turns out for me the #1 way headphones pop out is due to snagging the cable on something (hands, branches, clothing, etc). Also, being able to quickly connect and switch devices, is fantastic.
If cables truly don't bother you, then there are plenty of great options for wired headsets which offer better quality sound. For me, I can't even sit at my desk and code anymore without getting annoyed now.
Airpods, not really. They still are the same uncomfortable plastic and not so great sound. Apple earbuds have always hurt my ears so airpods would be a no go for me. Airpods pro are quite a bit better but still won't be comfortable for everyone.
yes, they are (imho). AirPods Pro are noticeably better than AirPods and wired Apple earbuds, in both comfort and sound quality. I actually prefer them over my over-ear Sennheisers.
Wine has come a long way in the last few years, in large part thanks to DXVK (translates DX11 to Vulkan) and Valve funding and pulling together a few Wine related projects. The vast majority of offline Windows games run well on Linux these days, even a lot of high end AAA games often run well on launch day with a relatively minor hit to performance.
Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti-cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye, which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.
This looks pretty great, while the AWS CLI is very comprehensive, I always struggle to remember which flags are needed for each command, and it's not very consistent.
One thing I've not been able to work out with bash-my-aws yet was how to easily switch between regions and accounts. I noticed you can use `region` on it's own to set the current default region, but I'm often working with multiple regions, and it'd be a pain to have to run `region us-west-1` separately each time I want to use a different region. I couldn't see a way to just specify a region for a given command (eg how you'd do `aws get-instances --region us-west-1`). I guess you could do this with the environment variable `AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-1 instances` but that's a bit verbose.
Similarly with AWS accounts, I use multiple AWS accounts, which are accessed with different access keys, which are defined as profiles in my ~/.aws/config. Normally I'd use these with the AWS CLI like `aws ec2 get-instances --profile production`, I couldn't see any way in the docs to use or set this?
They're good questions. I can tell you how I manage regions and accounts but am interested in learning how people think Bash-my-AWS might better support users in this regard.
The AWCLI, as well as SDKs all support grabbing Regions and account credentials from environment variables.
For Regions, I work tend to use the following aliases:
alias au='export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=ap-southeast-2'
alias us='export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1'
alias dr='export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=ap-southeast-1'
I normally work in a single Region and swap when required by typing the 2 character alias.
To run a script or command (doesn't have to be Bash-my-AWS) across all Regions I use region-each:
For AWS accounts, I type the name of the account and I'm in. For accounts using IDP (ldap/AD backed corporate logins) I generate aliases so I have tab completion and simple naming.
In accounts that are only setup to use AWS keys, I use aliases that export credentials kept in GPG encrypted files. Last time I looked, AWS docs suggested keeping these long lives credentials in plaintext files readable by your account. That's asking for trouble IMO, especially if they're kept in a known location that a compromised node library could exfiltrate them from.
AWSCLI v2 beta includes support for SSO so it's probably a good time to look at how BMA could include support for auth.
I could see it being used for specific usage handheld devices. For example where I work, we sell train tickets and ship cheap Android phones with an app installed for tain conductors to scan the ticket barcodes. Something like this could be done with some "generic cheap Linux device with a touchscreen and mobile connection" locked down to a custom built app.
Not sure if that ends up being cost effective considering how cheap you can get low-end Android phones these days, and how easy it is to find Android developers, but I'm sure there are some applications along those lines that would be well suited for the equivalent of "a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen and smaller form factor".
Not really, among "normal" banks. This does seem to be the case with the new "challenger" banks like Monzo and Starling, which are all "mobile first" and are basically impossible to use if you don't have an Android/iPhone. But every regular bank in the UK has a website with online banking, often with more functionality than the apps, but maybe this is different in other countries - online banking in the UK has been commonplace since before mobile apps were really a thing.
This isn't an entirely new idea. BT was privatised in the 1980s, and before that had been run as a government department, and later as part of the Post Office, a public company but still under the control of the Government. At that early stage, the UK had some of the best internet infrastructure in the world, and had plans to roll out FTTH. Then Thatcher became PM, privatised BT, cancelled the fibre rollout plans, and encouraged more competition in the hopes that would improve investment. Well, 30 years later and we still have < 10% FTTH coverage. (Source: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...)
Internet infrastructure is in weird state here. Thanks to BT's legacy as a public/nationalised company, they still own the vast majority of infrastructure and cables. This was sort of spun out into a separate company (Openreach) to BT the ISP, but they are widely considered inefficient and disinterested in improving the infrastructure, and they're still a subsidiary of BT. In theory this move was to increase competition, but it hasn't done a lot. There's only one major ISP (Virgin) that truly competes with BT, built their own infrastructure, and ran their own cables, almost every other ISP just leases the lines from Openreach and sells their own services on top of that.
I tend to agree that nationalising Openreach (the infrastructure and cables) is a good idea, to increase internet speeds and coverage across the country - rural areas tend to have very slow speeds as it's not in the interests of BT and Virgin to improve the infrastructure for a handful of customers in that area. I'm not so convinced that providing free high speed fibre internet connections to everyone is a necessity or a good use of government money. I feel like nationalising Openreach but keeping the existing model of ISPs building services on top of the infrastructure makes sense, and public infrastructure would reducing the costs of leasing those lines, a saving that could hopefully be passed on to customers. I'm not sure how this would affect companies like Virgin who do own their own infrastructure though, would they then be competing with the government?
There's of course a privacy concern to the government owning the internet infrastructure too. While the UK government has already had some pretty draconian policies, and they can force ISPs to comply, they've struggled to implement some of their more "ambitious" censorship policies, in part due to it being difficult to get all of the ISPs to come to an agreement on how to implement them. If the government owns the infrastructure, it's easier for them to implement surveillance and censorship at a lower level, harder to circumvent with VPNs and the like. Internet surveillance and censorship are generally policies of the Conservative party, rather than the Labour party who are proposing this, so I don't think there's any malicious intent with this proposal, but if a left wing government nationalises the internet this year, what's to stop a right wing government of the future using this new found control to implement stronger surveillance/censorship in 5 years?
All in all, I'm on the fence about this policy, although I do think some steps in this direction would be positive. And if you've been paying any attention to British politics in the last few years, you'd know there's even more complexities that what I mentioned here.
I found it very odd when I was in Germany that this wasn't the case, Visa/Mastercard were entirely considered credit cards, and debit cards used some entirely different system. I couldn't use my debit card to pay for a Berlin subway ticket, as the machines only took German bank cards.