Oh content from this blog has been popping up in random places. Methinks it’s le epic trole.

So yeah, Xfce looks the same as it did 10 years ago.

And?

Desktop environment is meant to launch apps and give me windows and maybe have a file manager. Xfce does that. It’s a desktop environment.

Hey, “modern” desktop environment enthusiasts, if you bring Compiz back from the dead, give us luddites a call, will you? Ohhhh you kids should have seen it back in the day. Windows and Mac users saw Compiz in action and were, like, “wat.” You don’t get them to react that way to modern Linux desktops, no. And all that is lost now. Thanks Wayland.

Yeah, there’s an important distinction. Just because you could use Linux doesn’t mean you can at any particular moment.

I don’t really do music production; I’m more into writing and visual arts and photography. I could do all of those things on Linux and be perfectly productive. But there’s a difference between being productive and being optimal. My current process happens to be based on software that runs on Windows. (Heck, a lot of the software I use already runs on both Windows and Linux, anyways.)

The key here being that you shouldn’t lock yourself too much to just one tool and one approach, and that actually goes both ways.

And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.

Turtles are such underrated creatures and most people don’t realise how important they are to computer science. Turtle robots! Turtle graphics! Not to even mention the very concept of shell access! And yes, turtles are probably very happy that Secure Shell was invented.

Personal homepages. What we used to call 'em in the nineties.

Sssss, tail number SSS-55555

There are a lot of people who go “I tried to learn X through Duolingo and failed”. Sure, that’s probably true, because staring at the app is not how language learning works. Much like 100 years ago, people would have said you can’t learn a language by reading a single book.

Duolingo is great for basics of the language, vocabulary and constant daily lessons. But you always need more. There’s a whole language sphere out there. People actually using the language and whatnot.

I started studying French through Duolingo and about 6 months later I was like “I really need a grammar book and a dictionary, dammit”. Year in, I was like “I should try reading news in French and maybe try a book.”

Yeah, the thing is, “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” is kind of a meme among non-Haskell developers. Personally, I think Haskell is a very interesting language. The mathematical jargon, however, is impenetrable, and this particular expression is kind of the poster child. I’mma go look at Erlang if I want my functional language fix without making my head hurt, thank ye very much.

It’s a thing! Sadly it won’t rewrite Haskell codebases for you, though.

They don’t have to be legal. In Finland we are getting YouTube ads for a sports betting website. That’s illegal. (Only the nationally regulated gambling monopoly can do that, and even they have massive restrictions on what kind of advertising they can run.)

In the off chance that you can report the ad to YouTube (can’t do that on TV or Android), YouTube has nuked the ad. Doesn’t matter. The ad has been submitted via bazillion different advertiser accounts.

The skip button was already too small, so of course they had to make it even smaller. YouTube’s usability on Android is already terrible enough, which is pretty spectacular considering YouTube and Android are made by the same company. The seek bar barely works. The video end screen hides the de-maximise button. Nobody at Google has heard of the concept that controls at the edge of the screen are harder to aim accurately at. Just to scratch the surface!

Well of course it has a picture of his parents fighting (???) in it. Dude’s a severely messed up right-winger.

Newspaper Nerds appreciation day! …Maybe. The dude’s political signalling was fucking all over the place.

Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn’t separated by colon. The format is “YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm”. Date is separated by “-”, time is separated by “:”, date and time are separated by “T” (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just “Z” for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that’s a thing I’ve never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that’s apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There’s also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.

I was about to comment on this, but my Android phone spontaneously rebooted.

Anyway. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say: Firefox. It is a thing. An awesome thing.

32-bit software is still absolutely supported on amd64. Just go to C:\Program Files (x86) and be amazed.

It’s funny, the only Linux software I’ve ever used that was only shipped as binaries was Loki games. Also, the only software that broke after binary compatibility went south. There used to be a giant tarball of old libraries and jiggerypokery that enabled the Loki games to sorta kinda work.

I was kind of sad to see that Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri didn’t run too well, but then I tried to play the GOG version on x64 Windows 11 and there are occasional weird issues. So, eh.

Windows: Can you run 25 year old binaries? Yes you can.

Linux: Can you build 25 year old software from source? Yes you can.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.