Eclipse

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

Up to 2.x, GNOME used what was basically the MacOS philosophy: make things easy and simple and intuitive, but if the user wants finer control and power features, make sure it’s still possible somehow. GNOME 3 and later pretty much adopted the philosophy that there’s the GNOME path of simplicity and streamlining, and power user functionality is going to be removed from the core and relegated to extensions. And, of course, GNOME started requiring boatloads of memory to run, which to me didn’t go hand in hand with “simplicity”.

I eventually settled on using XFCE, because it didn’t have the bloat and still had enough customisability. Really good environment for old and underperforming systems. If I’m using a modern high performance system, I’m actually pretty impressed by what KDE Plasma is doing these days.

GNOME 1 & 2: The dock is in the bottom by default. It can be moved elsewhere if the user prefers it.

GNOME 3+: The dock is wherever we think the user is likely to find it. Maybe it’s in the bottom. Maybe it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s everywhere. Verily, who can even begin to understand the mysteries of the brain?

I’m suddenly having flashbacks of the whole SCO fiasco. And people older than me probably have flashbacks of the BSD/System V lawsuit.

I mean, this thing is fun to argue about, until you remember people used to argue about this in court.

Debian’s Firefox is Firefox ESR, or Extended Support Release. It’s behind the bleeding edge, but gets security updates.

If you want the bleeding edge Firefox, you can add Mozilla’s own APT repository and install it. Doesn’t even conflict with Debian (firefox-esr vs firefox, it even uses a separate user profile by default). Instructions are on the Firefox download page somewhere.

large, easily readable font

Ah, but readable by whom? I have a bar code font here. If you can’t read it you’re clearly not nerd enough.

Also, putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms will only turn the kids into sarcastic, blasphemous little fellows. …I mean, more so than they already are.

I prefer this version: Wikihistory

When I was learning about GIMP key shortcuts I was like “Ctrl+A selects everything, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects everything. Makes sense.”

And then I went to most of the other apps. “Ctrl+D? Well it’s one less keypress, but… WHY?”

To be fair, I get it now, I’ve used plenty of image editors and I remember the keybinds wherever I am. Just that I sometimes find it annoying that The Other Software hasn’t adopted logical keybindings.

(I find it particularly annoying that a lot of image editors try to be fancy and sophisticated and Photoshop-compatible and think it’s at all appropriate to use Ctrl+NumpadPlus and Ctrl+NumpadMinus for zooming. Just use what GIMP uses! NumpadPlus and NumpadMinus. It’s not hard! What are you using the plain plus and minus for, anyway? Absolutely nothing! I just checked, I need to use Ctrl in Affinity Photo. Plain plus and minus are useless. I see you. …oh I can just rebind these. Done.)

Well, voting registration as it’s implemented in America isn’t exactly in vogue. As in “oh, you just need to get an ID to vote from now on.” And people without ID need to do some extra paperwork and the office is open 5 minutes every other week, just go through the door located behind the acid moat and bear traps.

Over here in Finland: Government has a comprehensive record of citizens, they know where everyone lives and who’s eligible to vote. So they send you a letter. “Here’s how to do the advance voting, here’s the polling location you need to go to on election day, Also here’s how to draw the numbers, so this will be less confusing. Just bring this notice card with you. And an ID. If you don’t have an ID, visit the police station and they’ll give you one for free.”

I’ve been using GIMP since the very dawn, I use plenty of other image editors for variety of reasons (Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab, ArtRage, Clip Studio), and I have no problems with the UIs in any of them.

Yet every time I use Adobe software I’m like “why is it doing this? Why is it designed this way? Who thought that was a good idea? This is stupid.”

As it says on AdoptOpenJDK page, the project has rebranded to Adoptium.

I use Adoptium on Windows (dunno, seems to run Minecraft, OK, that’s good enough for me). On Linux I just use whatever OpenJDK is packaged in distro.

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

To adapt an old joke: “If you see a raging dipshit driving like a lunatic in the middle of the road with their giant-ass car, you should contact the nearest police officer immediately. It’s possible they’re behind the wheel.”

The meme is from around 2000. Originally it was about downloading MP3s.

I’d argue that Audacity (audio recording/editing/processing suite) is a little different niche than Reaper (full-fledged DAW). If your use case is “I’m doing a podcast and I need to do an audio recording from multiple mics and mix them down”, Audacity is good enough that there’s no point in paying extra for a DAW. If you’re a musician and you need to mess nondestructively with recordings and MIDI and filters, then you know you need to go bigger.

You know what’s even more beautiful about capitalism?

When national (and multinational) legislation sets extremely high standards for drinking water providers. So high, in fact, that tech bros just go “you know, I have no idea how to improve on that”. So they don’t launch their shitty product here in the first place.

Until next time!

A somber thing about nitrogen gas executions:

People generally agree that nitrogen (or any inert) gas asphyxiation is a relatively painless and peaceful way to go. People have been using it for (animal and human) euthanasia for years without incident. Seems appropriate, right?

So how did it work in capital punishment scenario the first time around? The guards slapped the face mask on the condemned. Then they asked them for their last statement. Quote: “Mffmfmf, Mffafam fmfmfm mfffmfmf mf mfmf f mfmf mfffmfmmf. Mfffm mfm mfm mfmfffmfmf mf. Mfff mff mf mff.” (Transcribed as: “Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. Thank you for supporting me. Love all of you.”) Then they opened the gas valves. It took too long. …OK, it’s time to pause now, let’s see how many problems you can spot with this procedure.

Problem: They’re continuing to use “medical” and “painless” and whatnot procedures, administered by unqualified staff, on unwilling participants. Look, I’m not an advocate of death penalty at all and I think it should be abolished everywhere, but even I know that the guillotine designers were up to something. You need to minimise the amount of fuck-ups at all levels.

Fun thing, the last time I used LimeWire was actually in Linux. So obviously I was immediately highly suspicious about .exe results. (Wouldn’t even have been able to run them anyway. Wine was far less functional back then.)

Oh yeah, Orcs & Elves, one of my absolute favourite games for the DS!