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Krita, not GIMP, has been the FOSS flagship 2D bitmap editor for many years, the way Blender is for 3D. Can't remember when I last used GIMP for anything.

RIP. Here in Sweden the headlines mention primarily his role in Ivanhoe, a movie that has aired on Swedish TV almost every New Years for over 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe_(1982_film)

He posted this video message to the Swedish people for New Years 2023: https://www.svt.se/kultur/ivanhoe-skadespelarens-nyarshalsni...

Great movie.

I worked for several American companies in Sweden an all of them insisted on calling us engineers. Many I work with happen to be engineers, but I dropped out before getting my (computer) engineering degree. It's embarrassing. I would never call myself a software engineer or any other kind of engineer (or a doctor or lawyer or anything else I am not).

It bothers me that my large collection of legally bought, drm-free, works (ebooks and digital games, mostly) will basically transform into illegal warez for my heirs, as I understand the law. They can still legally watch my DVDs, read my printed books, but my collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, GOG games, etc, they may as well have downloaded from some shady torrent site? That does not feel right.

Especially not since many things I bought, like from Humble Bundles, have not been available drm-free since, and may never be, so all legal drm-free copies will expire as the generation that bought them passes away?

My understanding is the laws you describe are mostly limited to a few European countries, while most of the rest of the world are more restrictive?

Also, with with the limited right to make copies like that comes quite high fees on recordable media that is paid to the music and movie industries as compensation through organizations like CopySwede here in Sweden.

I like this boardgame kit that the Germans printed for their soldiers:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30082557

Useless fact I just learned from Wikipedia: Ångström/Angstrom (in Sweden of course we still use the original spelling) has its own UNICODE symbol, Angstrom sign: Å (U+212B) not to confuse with the Swedish letter Å (U+00C5). Looks slightly different in my browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom

The problem with C++ string slices is that after many years of C++ becoming increasingly memory-safe with std::string and smart pointers, now we reverted to something barely more safe than a C string.

I guess Rust can keep slices safe using some borrow checker magic or something, but C++ can't.

That's pretty much what git over https does by default (is it even possible to do read-write to a git repo over https instead of ssh?).

https://git-scm.com/docs/http-protocol

Except the one on the right is in Swedish.

And Ion Fury, from 2018, made with the Build engine: https://www.gog.com/en/game/ion_fury

There is 16-bit DOS support in Free Pascal these days (yes, added long after 32-bit DOS support). That makes it easier to get a pointer to video memory. Makes other things less easy.

Also some (more) free (open source) 16-bit C-compilers now, like the ia16 gcc port and Microsoft's C compiler included in the MS-DOS repo on GitHub.

Not that 32-bit extenders do not come with some advantages, but I enjoy the simplicity of 16-bit.

Same as for GitHub Copilot?

"For more on how Anthropic handles this data, see Anthropic’s commercial terms and data retention policy. Enabling the Claude Fable 5 policy constitutes acknowledgement of this requirement. Leaving it off keeps Claude Fable 5 unavailable to your organization."

https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-09-claude-fable-5-is-g...

There is also fennel, earlier language originally by same developer, that is similar, but compiles to, and is fully implemented in, Lua. No standard library of its own so missing many nice things like the parser library from janet, but it is good for writing scripts for things that embed Lua.

https://fennel-lang.org/

I do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo.

Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.

I never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac?

I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).

Termux and DOSBox are great for running or writing software on a phone. I almost never resort to installing or writing apps anymore as that is just more cumbersome and has APIs that keep breaking (not to mention the threats from Google about making non-Play app deployment more regulated).

Using a cache of outputs makes sense, but that is just an optimization. I don't mind if a site publishes generated texts, as long as they are clearly labelled as such and have no fake-writer human names attached.

If I want to read a LLM's "opinion" on some subject I just prompt it myself. Inserting humans as intermediaries that pretend they wrote something is dishonest at best. Future generations will hopefully see through that and stop sign generated texts with fake human names.

Seems to render perfectly with NoScript blocking all scripts, even with images showing.

Browsing that wiki in the past and two pages that resonated with me were on the topic of stable APIs (that is a topic in need of much more discussion overall). There are some good thoughts there.

https://permacomputing.net/software_rot/

https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/

I only use BASIC with line numbers, mostly GW-BASIC and pcbasic. Without numbers it just feels like Lua or python or any other scripting language, but worse? The line numbers BASICs come with their own almost-REPL (IDE?) that I find quite nice (or at least fun) to work in. Maybe mostly nostalgia, but it is the only reason for me to use BASIC at all. I have some basic-mode installed to edit BASIC code in emacs, but I only rarely edit the code outside of its natural built-in line-editor.

I have not used SuperCollider in a long time, but there used to be a nice Clojure front-end (with some Emacs integration) and it looks like that still exists even if most recent commit was 8 months ago: https://github.com/overtone/overtone

Google did for a long time have a page documenting those features.

Picked a random date from around the time I know they had that. Clicked Adcanced Search, then a link near the top of the page to Advanced Search Tips.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041017053307/http://www.google...

https://lugaru.com/ They are still around. Most recent epsilon update was last month (but no real release since 2020?).

It was my first experience with emacs as well, but in MS-DOS, ca 1990. Did not know there was a CP/M version.

For making DOS games, there is also an old port of Löve2D. Löve2D normally uses SDL, but the DOS port has its own little (mode 13h VGA) graphics/audio/input library instead. Guess with a proper SDL port it might be possible to make a more complete port of Löve 2D (and of a newer version).

https://github.com/SuperIlu/lovedos

The original upstream version is archived and has not been maintained in 9+ years. The link is to a fork that has fixes as recent as 2025.

HP: https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packar...

149 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389893

DOSBox-X has DOS as one of its supported host platforms (using HX-DOS that a sibling comment mentioned):

https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x#dosbox-x-supporte...

Martin Gardner wrote an article on platonic solids in Scientific American, December 1958, and mentioned this in passing: "All five Platonic solids have been used as dice. Next to the cube the octahedron seems to have been the most popular". I have no idea what games using 8-sided dice were somewhat popular (or existed at all) in 1958 or earlier? I wondered about that since I first read that article some decade ago.

I also read a book about games from ca 1880 and it described 12-sided dice (the usual one, numbered 1-12) as if that was a thing some people used for playing games, but none of the games described in that book used them and I also have no idea about other old games using 12-sided dice.

There are games that use a d100 with 0-99 range, and games that read a d10 as 0-9 for that matter. First that comes to mind is Ambush! from 1983 that did both those things (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1608/ambush).

Love that game, but it is a bit distracting that probabilities feel one-off. Rolling 5 or lower to hit is 60%, not 50%. And when rolling 2d10 the result is 0-18, not 2-20.