You mean the stripes coming from the corners of her eyes like every tabby has?

I reserve some time between ~Dec 20 and ~Jan 10 for bright colored sweaters, visiting relatives, exchanging gifts particularly for the kids, rich food and strong drink…I live in the Northern hemisphere, it’s the beginning of winter, it’s cold and bleak and the days are short, spend a bit of time doing something to keep your brain inside your skull.

Why are we selling 8 foot tall inflatable glowing candy canes in early October?

I’m kinda done with it taking up a third of the year. You start seeing Christmas decorations and shit hit store shelves before Halloween.

Wasn’t Linux first released in like 1993?

Okay so, this is less a line in the sand and more a 14 foot concrete wall topped with razor wire and guarded by marines with rifles with fixed bayonets in the sand:

I will not install an end-user application using Cargo, and I will say many mean things to anyone who suggests it.

Python’s Pip or Pypi or PyPy whichever it is (Both of those are the names of two different things and no one had their head slammed into a wall for doing that; proof that justice is a fictional concept) I can almost accept. You could almost get me drunk enough to accept distributing software via Python tooling, because Python is an interpreted language, whether you ship me your project as a .exe, a .deb, a flatpak, whatever, you’re shipping me the source code. Also, Python is a pretty standard inclusion on Linux distros, so Pip is likely to be present.

Few if any distros ship with Rust’s toolset installed, and the officially recommended way to install it, this is from rust-lang.org…is to pipe curl into sh. Don’t ask end users to install a programming language to compile your software.

Go ahead and ask your fellow developers to compile your software; that’s how contributing and forking and all that open source goodness should be done. But not end users. Not for “Install and use as intended.” For that, distribute a compiled binary somehow; at the very least a dockerfile if a service or an appimage if an application. Don’t make people who don’t develop in Rust install the Rust compiler.

Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you’d call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.

The original iPhone did not have an app store.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.

Everybody’s touting round corners like it’s something people want. Cinnamon 6.1 features round corners! who cares?

I encountered a weird thing in my BIOS. I’ve got a graphics card and a CPU with integrated graphics, I could save power and free up some system RAM by turning the iGPU off. The option in the BIOS says “dGPU Only Mode” and you Enable it to turn the iGPU off.

dGPU Only Mode, turns the iGPU off. It makes more sense the less you think about it.

A further complaint: There’s a setting in the BIOS called “Game Mode” and what that does is turn SMT and some other TLA off. SMT is AMD’s name for hyperthreading. Learned this when I noticed KDE system monitor reporting 8 processor threads instead of 16. Apparently that is to increase single core performance on high end chips to wring a few more FPS out of single-threaded games, but meh.

Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They’re one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you’d check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?

Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.

There’s a game for the SNES called Act Raiser, I think it was by Quintet or Taito or Square, one of those. You play Actual God taking back the world from Probably Satan, you do this partly in a side scrolling platforming combat style, and partially in an overhead city building style. Surprisingly good soundtrack for a game as weird as it is.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just…stare at it because it’s not what they were expecting. Windows 7’s Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft’s software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it’s different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra’s FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he’s working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You’re reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like “recommended” turns to “murdered” for a few frames. Win 8.1’s animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole “The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won’t include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this.” I hate Windows 8.1.

What’s real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it’s encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

I use Syncthing for this; it syncs directories on my phone and computer, so to put something on my computer from my phone I just put it in that directory. I share my camera roll so my pictures are synced with my computer.

If you just want a “send this file” application, warpinator might do that.

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?

Mainland Europe has never had a culture of computer hardware development or manufacture. They’ve been coasting on the United States and Britain since WWII. Name me a CPU architecture developed in the EU. There’s one, ARM. British.

Furthermore, Europe just doesn’t have the work ethic to run a chip fab. You know those attempts to bring fabs to the United States? They’re running afoul of American labor laws, turns out American citizens won’t work 14 hour days like the Taiwanese. You lazy ass Europeans with your 51 weeks of vacation a year don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making your own CPUs.

The one that gets me is the cat treats that list their flavors as “With Chicken.” Like, that’s the back half of the sentence, where’s the front half?

I can’t see this product without thinking of astronaut Chris Hadfield. He tells a story of going blind in space, because they apply a surfactant to the inside of the EVA helmet as an anti-fog coating, it’s basically a mix of oil and soap. And a drop of it got in his eye, while in a spacewalk, it stung and his eye slammed shut and began to tear up, and because zero g, tears don’t fall, so it just pooled in his eye socket until there was enough tears for it to spill over the bridge of his nose into the other eye.

“Now we use Johnson’s No More Tears, Which is what we should have been using from the beginning.”

Funnily enough, my fiber provider advertised my internet speeds as “up to 600Mbit/s” and I get about 630 in practice.