Notices by R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd: (rl_dane@fosstodon.org), page 2

@steamgirl

I never had a qwerty phone. Was it really that much better than modern touchscreen keyboards?

@prometheus

Right! Just tap around. It's like an Easter egg hunt! :blobfoxangrylaugh:

@alcinnz

@alcinnz @prometheus

Man, I SO miss buttons now.

I turned on my grandmother's old flip phone a few months back and got hit with a wave of -- not nostalgia, but realizing how much better even a stupid T9 keyboard is to a touchscreen-only device.

@prometheus

Good grief.

Someone thought they were being über-modern, didn't they?

@alcinnz

#design

@byterhymer @apparentlymart @alcinnz

Not only that, but the iPhone has dumbed people down to the point that they just accept any blasted thing.

They'd give away a kidney if it was in the EULA of a cat video app. 🙄

@apparentlymart

Very true. It's amazing that that cottage industry is thriving the way it is.

I love it.

@alcinnz

@apparentlymart

Yeah. In this case, it would probably work fine on something like Debian where versions are held for a couple years at a time.

But on a rolling release distro, things not maintained tend to break.

This is absolutely not ideal.
I'd deal with balooning exeutables to get everything statically linked, but that then comes with security problems.

@alcinnz

@alcinnz

...

Example: I tried to install and use Virtscreen to turn a surplus old iPad into a second laptop monitor, but found that it was unusable. The last commits were five years ago, from what I can tell. Five years, and whatever python packages/libraries it relies on have changed to the point that it renders the project useless without further refinement.

That... is just nuts.

@alcinnz

Couldn't follow all of it, but it was fun to skim.

I think they make some good points. The need for telemetry in a *language* is bizarre, but an understandable consequence of the shift away from stable software and languages to a constantly shifting platform.

I for one, kinda miss stability. I don't mean that things are always crashing, but rather that things are changing so quickly.

...

@alcinnz

Not familiar with this particular brouhaha, but I think opt-in analytics with example reports are the way to go.

I thought the outcry over Audacity was hilarious*, given that even Debian has an (optional) package called popularity-contest that reports on what packages people have installed.

*The part where they were going to use GOOG (iirc) for the analytics was not funny, though. Poor choice. But it was still voluntary.

Hey @mike,

Just noticed that #SimpleNote seems to be crashing #WebKit browsers. I tried it on both Suckless.org Surf and Gnome Epiphany. Surf crashed, and the Epiphany tab crashed, both when trying to log in.

Only tested it on one box, so far, so it might be a fluke. Arch-based, so it's all reasonably up-to-date.

Just thought I'd put that out there in case you had time to check it out, like tomorrow or some later day. Not today!
Enjoy your Sunday. :D

Just realized that Firefox's resist fingerprinting mode uses a generic windows user agent. So, it's not that everyone is being a jerk by calling my machines windows machines.
It's just #firefox being professionally paranoid.

I appreciate. XD

@alcinnz

It's not an Elementary-themed app, but if you're looking for a simple and rock-solid music library organizer and player, I've had good luck with Quod Libet.

There's always cmus for that terminal nerd cred! 😂

@colinsmatt11 @alcinnz @doctormo @james

Really? I always thought markdown was a very elegant and simple format, at least for basic notes and markup.

To me, it's basically just a distilled and clarified form of several 2000s wiki syntaxes, particularly WikkaWiki (sadly defunct) and old-school #TiddlyWiki (still going strong!).

@alcinnz @colinsmatt11 @doctormo @james

...

(Take a look at the very first wiki for an idea of something that is very simple and elegant the way I was describing: https://wiki.c2.com/)
Also, wikipedia article for the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

@alcinnz @colinsmatt11 @doctormo @james

...

But remember when websites just consisted of some flat files and some perl scripts? You could have a simple cgi-bin that converts the source .md to html and serves it up, presto. Throw in some really basic CSS to make it prettier, and you've got something light, elegant, and usable.

NAAAH! MOAR FRAMEWORKS!!!

...

@alcinnz @colinsmatt11 @doctormo @james

Yeah... The web was for documents. Even wikipedia is in a broad sense a silly obfuscation of the web's original mission: using html, databases, javascript to serve documents vs. just serving and editing html.

Not saying it's WRONG -- I'd much rather edit something like markdown than even early html. It's just way better.

...

@alcinnz @colinsmatt11 @doctormo @james

> I don't know how it'll evolve in the future.

Like Godzilla? ;)

@colinsmatt11 @doctormo @james

Supposedly (I'm afraid I can't recall with whom I was discussing this), WASM is a little better sandboxed than JS, and has less access to things within the browser, but it's still a binary, and it still gets near-native execution speeds. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

It could be a great technology when you WANT to run 3rd party code, but getting code hurled at you from random websites that can use up CPU resources is a bleeding horrid idea.

@james

Totally agreed.

JS has gone from being a little bit of sugar to spice up a website with to a horrid, bloated, abusive application delivery framework. Hate it. :P