I use org-gcal (https://github.com/myuhe/org-gcal.el). Since I only use Google Calendar for syncing, this works well for me. The set up is explained at the end of the article.

For sure. I started a few months back and granted it's a bit overwhelming at first. To me the key was to break it down: I started with a to-do list and scrapbook, then journaling, then org-agenda and just substituting my other GTD tools with org-mode. I can't live without it now.

Runbox. Norway-based, privacy-focused, responsive support, reasonably priced and so far reliable. It checks all the boxes for me.

It would be nice to have the song identification feature on iOS while on standby like the Pixel 2 does.

I still can't understand how that feature works. They stated that everything is done locally on the device, so privacy is not an issue. But how can they host a huge catalog of songs fingerprints without blowing the storage? Are they only saving the top charts?

For what it's worth, here's a bit (and discussion) on how Shazam actually works. I'm ashamed to admit I understand hardly any of it.

http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870408

It's definitely not just the top charts. Notably it has picked up when someone near me was playing Chopin on a piano as well as the occasional KPop tune my girlfriend is listening to.

My guess is it supplements the data with songs from your Google Music and youtube history.

The Shazam thread from the other day said it was only 60MB worth for like 10 or 20k songs

They only store a catalog of the most popular songs. (Where 'most popular' is determined by your geographical location). This catalog is periodically updated.

Isn't the use case to find obscure music? Weird to have just popular ones. To "discover" a top 10 hit I can just ask someone nearby.

I think the Pareto principal kicks in hard here. If it stores the top 20,000 songs as the other comments suggest then I expect that would include the vast majority of music you’d come across.

Not necessarily. Everything is "obscure" to you the first time you hear it.

Top 10, yes, but not top 10,000.

My understanding is that song fingerprints are tiny, so it's not too prohibitive to store an entire catalog of them on the device.

That's weird, because the AcoustID database is over 160GB: https://acoustid.org/database

Then again, it does have 48M fingerprints, so that's only ~3.3KB/fingerprint. Maybe Google has a decent subset in a reasonably-sized package.

Reports on the Pixel library have it at either the 10k or 20k most popular tracks only. That makes for a reasonably small library.

at 3.3kb it's only about 64mb to store 20,000 songs. If they periodically update that (in the background, on wifi, etc) you'd likely never know. It's basically noise when OS updates are multi-gb.

According to a friend who works at Google, they only store a catalog of ~20k popular songs that updates periodically. Fingerprints are small, so an archive of that size isn't too big.

Sucks for the little guys: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/CumulativeAdvantagePr...

Yeah it misses out on a lot of indie stuff

Much better load times than the current one.

Because they wrote it in an era when internet connections were slow. They have not necessarily moved along the time-to-load-vs-page-size tradeoff curve so much as the curve itself has shifted due to improved connections and computation speeds.

It's like looking at a newspaper from a century ago and remarking "how much cheaper it was back then!" Technically you're right, but the change in nominal price is not a useful economic indicator.

A newspaper a century ago is an excellent analogy.

Then, the front page was filled with advertising. The content was almost entirely sponsored, or in times of war or national fraction, overwhelmingly towing the official line.

Newspapers a century ago are exactly the same as popular web today.

It's like looking at an article from a news site today, and being presented with a splash-screen 5-second advert, or not being sure who sponsored the content you're reading.

100 year old press is identical to web-news today.

It’s around 64 KB, which means around 10 seconds load time on a modem, if I remember correctly. That’s very comparable to the current state of affairs.

Usual rational at that time was to not go beyond 40K, if possible. So 64K was rather "fat".

Same :(

Not anytime soon. You're most likely good to go. As a US citizen, you wouldn't need a visa to travel around the EU. Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore, by the way. Some people from the Balkans might get mad at you ;)

Yugoslavia does not exist any more, but it's still in the same place :)

haha I know. My point is that in this case we need to be more specific, because I don't know what the visa requirements for Bosnia are compared to, say, Croatia or Macedonia. While it's the same area, their migratory policies might be different now that they're independent.

Sorry, meant the Czech Republic. I never have been good at geography.

This made my whole day. Time for bed.

Love those blamestorming sessions....

Ubuntu is based on Debian; it's designed to be more user friendly, easier to use; but it's also less "pure" in the way it handles non-oss packages. Fedora is RedHat-based and it's the community-supported, bleeding edge version of RedHat/CentOS. If you're looking for a desktop OS, Fedora and Ubuntu will do well. I haven't played around with Arch.