dantheta · HackerTrans

geçen yıldiscuss

It's a lovely set of sentiments. I think another aspect of UI that has been lost is discoverability - finding out how to do things in a new interface seems harder than it used to be when there was one app-level menu bar. Too many things are hidden in context menus, found only by right-clicking or long pressing on just the right spot. A set of multi-modal interfaces might just make discoverability even worse.

dantheta

3 yıl öncediscuss

I couldn’t afford software in the 90s, but I would definitely have registered PowerMenu from Brown Bag software (DOS front end and program launcher). It was really powerful and enjoyable to use, and the interface was delightful. I still think about it often and fired up a DOS emulator pretty recently.

dantheta

3 yıl öncediscuss

Also an extremely happy Zim user for desktop notes, projects & work journal.

Recently I was looking for a self-hosted equivalent to Google Keep (which I use mainly for lists, quick notes and web snippets), and tried out Joplin. It looked pretty good, but I wanted a web app frontend, which Joplin doesn't seem to have. I'm now trying out Memos [1] now, and it's pretty good so far (though I would love to see postgres support in Memos as well as the current sqlite DB).

[1] https://usememos.com/

dantheta

6 yıl öncediscuss

Take a look at Gemini: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

dantheta

6 yıl öncediscuss

Same here - I was a Cakewalk user back in the 90s, and decided on a whim to find out if it was still around.

dantheta

10 yıl öncediscuss

There are parts of it that have aged really badly, though. I was working on an NNTP-related project last year. Article numbers and threading are a bit crappy. The conflation of messages and commands (like cancel) also sat rather uncomfortably with me.

I was impressed with it as a piece of history, but more thorough exposure left me with a much decreased interest in building a system on it. More modern approaches to pubsub feel more natural (and are also more fun to work with!)

dantheta

11 yıl öncediscuss

I'm running one for calendar syncing (cyanogenmod and iOS clients), personal file storage and as a limited photo gallery. The automatic file sync from my phone is good too. It's running at home on my server. Setup was straightforward, and although I had the odd couple of glitches after setup, it was nothing too major. It's worked out pretty well.

dantheta

12 yıl öncediscuss

As an aside to your edit, I have also seen "different than" used more and more often of late. I'm not sure if it is an Americanism that I was just unaware of. It's not that "different than" is wrong, it's just different from what I'm used to!

dantheta

12 yıl öncediscuss

One of my previous companies was producing a Digital TV set-top box based on a Via mini-ITX board. When using component output, the overscan on the image was way too big and we were losing a significant portion of the TV picture outside the displayable area. The next best video mode put large black borders on all four sides of the image.

I needed a video mode that was a better fit for the screen, so I derived a set of parameters to add a new video mode to the Linux drivers for the VT1625 Via video card.

I did this by writing a small C program which could inspect the video card registers on a Win98 machine that was using the official driver. Once I had a set of register values, I used online documentation to transform them into the initialisation values used in the video driver.

The video mode was submitted back to the openchrome project, and as far as I know it's still there. It took me about 5 days of prodding, and another day of trial&error.

dantheta

13 yıl öncediscuss

I have trouble finding any candidates I can believe in. The only benefit (for me) of the two main parties is that their stance on any issue is widely known regardless of who the individual candidate is, so I can avoid them. I like the idea of independent MPs, but it can be hard to tell ahead of time whether the candidate is a wingnut, even with fairly careful research.

I might vote, but tend to spoil the paper when I can't find a palatable candidate. I also live in an area that has had an unbroken chain of conservative MPs for the last 400 years, and will probably continue to have one for a very, very long time.

dantheta

13 yıl öncediscuss

I was also pleased to find that in version 1.4 a MySQL login health check was added "option mysql-check".

dantheta

13 yıl öncediscuss

It surprises me how much the closing paragraph sounds like certain elements of Buddhist philosophy.

dantheta

13 yıl öncediscuss

You can also use:

$ TZ=CST date -d "Sun Mar 3 18:05:17 UTC 2013"

Sun Mar 3 18:05:17 CST 2013

which doesn't invoke a subshell. env vars can always be prepended to the executable name for use with just that program (not sure if that's bash only, though).

dantheta

13 yıl öncediscuss

I'm currently a reasonably happy puppet user, but I do like the look of Salt. Puppet's configuration DSL always struck me as a little over-wrought (and slightly too inconsistent to remember easily). I would have preferred YAML/XML/ini files.

dantheta

14 yıl öncediscuss

As a UK resident, I feel a pang of embarrassment and sadness and anger as I see how non-residents are treated when going through immigration control. Heathrow immigration is the worst. It's depressing, oppressive, cold and ugly. These are probably deliberate choices.

On several occasions, I've seen customs and immigration officials behave aggressively, usually fidgeting with night-sticks (truncheons) in a way that suggests that they are itching to beat someone.

dantheta

14 yıl öncediscuss

I'd definitely agree. I guess more specifically (and more charitably), I'm thinking of the section of the audience that uses photoshop but doesn't need any of its intermediate or advanced features, whether they paid for it or not. There's a lot of them. If they had more awareness of their own (lack of) requirements, I think it would be a greater opportunity for the < $100 graphics packages to pick up more sales (since that's definitely a more attractive price than Photoshop's), or just more users in Gimp's case - if they were willing to put the time in to learning the interface.

dantheta

14 yıl öncediscuss

I'm not sure about photoshop killer ... although I do suspect that outside of the professional class of photoshop user (webdevs, print designers etc), a great many people who have a less-than-legitimate copy of photoshop and dramatically under-utilize its features could do worse than try out Gimp. These are the users for whom an entire copy of photoshop is massive overkill and a terrible waste - the absence of some professional-level features from Gimp won't be a problem.

dantheta

14 yıl öncediscuss

XML also has the advantage of declaring the character set of the content.

dantheta

14 yıl öncediscuss

Just a quick note on those HP microservers - I have one, and I'm fond of it, but the e-SATA port doesn't support hotplug and the inbuilt ethernet doesn't support jumbo frames (at least, under versions of Linux that I've tried).

The e-SATA thing probably doesn't matter too much, but for anyone looking to run iSCSI or even higher-throughput NFS, the absence of jumbo frames may be a more important consideration.

dantheta

14 yıl öncediscuss

I was an OS/2 user from 1993 - 1996 or so. I have very fond memories of it - for those lucky enough to have a supported machine, it felt indestructable. You could do the most obnoxious things inside a DOS session, and the most that could be trashed was the DOS session itself. At the time, I was doing x86 assembly and C programming for a college course. The kind of pointer mistakes that would cause (or necessitate) a reboot on DOS only took out the session on OS/2.

I only stopped using it because I changed computer to one that didn't have a nicely-supported Cirrus video card (my replacement machine had a Diamond Stealth), and there were no drivers for the new machine. Graphics drivers on OS/2 are a separate story! Two years later, I was on Linux full-time, but I still find myself longing for a Workplace Shell clone.

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