Am definitely human.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’m just running a pain Linux with the MATE desktop, with increased sizes of mouse cursor and UI elements.

    The big thing is using VLC with a wireless keyboard, and using a white sharpie on the keycaps to show the quite customised VLC shortcuts.

    It’s been years since I tried Kodi et al, and I always found the actual media playback to be lacking some customisation (eg. audio or subtitle timing offsets).

    In lieu of a media database, I simply mark the movie folders with file emblems when I’ve watched a movie or episode (VLC keeps track of partial viewings, resuming where it left off).


  • I haven’t seen Our Groceries listed yet. I don’t know Grocy so I don’t know how this one compares, bells-wise, but it’s pretty straightforward, you can share a list with any number of users, and manage/add/edit/remove lists and items via a web app or mobile app.

    I’ve sent the devs more than one feature suggestion / bug report, and they were impressively responsive and forthcoming.


  • I’m not an artist, I just need the occasional hack job or screenshot annotation.

    I loved the simple programs (this love stems from all the way back to MacPaint v1.0) and MS Paint has largely been ok for me apart from its lack of png support and only 90° rotations.

    On Linux, Pinta has been fantastic but these last few years it got increasingly more crashy, to the point where it will now consistently crash within 10 seconds or two clicks, regardless of Linux distro / laptop/pc / version of Pinta. (insert “whyyyyy” meme here)

    I’ve tried Krita, but it’s simply too much. Don’t even want to try installing Gimp. I am sad.






  • I’m with you, but see a million obstacles (aka. reasons for why things require payments).

    You would need some form of moderation, to weed out illegal content as well as simply bots, spam, and dead profiles. Also for message content. I’ve given it some thought and suspect it can be crowd sourced to some degree, but also needs counter balances. Instead of limiting a profile to be live/banned, you could have a percentage score of peer-reported subjective legitimacy (ditto for message responses, heck you could even have a section of outright reviews of the person’s behaviour - although that, again would be subject to abuse and moderation).

    Hosting, traffic, etc. would be an unavoidable cost, but can be mitigated with low resolution photos (VGA should be “good enough” for an initial impression, no?)

    For sure, an open source solution would offer way more fine grained filtering.




  • I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

    Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!

    Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”

    …sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

    There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

    Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.




  • The trouble is that, apparently, “perfect UI” can mean “let’s take all the sidebar tabs, remove their text labels and make all their icons really abstract and in the same colour. Oh, and change their order, too, while you’re at it.”

    Thank you from the bottom of my muscle memory and pattern recognition. Now, give us back our old UI that was actually meaningful, or at least make it an option if you insist that your “clean look” is more important than actual usability.

    ^(Apart from that, I love you JetBrains.)