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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • Looks good man. I played with the same stuff trying to get windows to be more Linux like and not suck so much.

    I remember being really proud of finding and configuring some desktop application that showed all the CPU usage, memory statistics, etc.

    That, and like just adding functionality that you would think would be part of an OS like being able to control your music from someplace or customizable shortcuts.


  • Quicksilver changed how I use the Mac when I transition over from a PC. Quicksilver made everything make sense. I think my favorite thing at the time was the customizable global shortcuts, and being able to just start typing the name of some thing and launch it. Instead of having 1 million icons in shortcuts on the on the dock just the few that I always used.

    On PC in the early 2000s I started customizing the windows xp shell because it was so basic. I used something few people have probably used: Geoshell.

    It was a skinnable replacement for the windows UI with various plug-ins to customize functionality. I guess it was similar to what was available in Linux at the time as far as the window manager. It was also more stable since explorer wasn’t also handling all of the UI tasks.

    I think my record for uptime was like 47 days on Windows XP without having to reboot. Granted, things got kind of funky and it wasn’t perfect.

    I even learned how to make my own skins, which at the time was pretty difficult to do in windows xp.




  • Reminds me of the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness:

    The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

    But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

    -Terry Practchett, Discworld