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cicero

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I use cash to do my part to slow down its disappearance. I like the fact that it is difficult for central powers to control, and its existence means that people can more easily live off the grid. I like the ability to hand someone a tip without accessing the Internet. At the same time, I think the Bitcoin Lightning Network is pretty cool. I guess I like options.

Nano 5.7 5 years ago

I've always thought of nano as simplistic, but reading the discussion here, I see there is more to it than I thought.

I learned vi (precursor of vim) in the 1980s and the commands became second nature to me. However, as window-based systems and applications became the norm, I found it difficult to switch between vim and Windows or Mac applications, including the web. A good example of my problem involves the use of the escape key in vim to switch out of text entry mode, but many other apps use escape to cancel an action. I got tired of typing a paragraph, hitting escape, and then having to retype the paragraph because I had cancelled my input.

Nevertheless, it's great to have an editor I can easily invoke from the Linux command-line, so I still use vim for that. However, I will consider moving to nano for that purpose. At my age, I may never know it as well as the vi/vim I learned in my younger days, but it should still be useful.

Nano 5.7 5 years ago

Upvote for mentioning WordStar. I only used it some in the Texas A&M computer lab. I went from my dad's Apple II, to a Commodore 64 I bought in college, to a Macintosh after I graduated. None of them were WordStar platforms, but I remember it was very popular in the CP/M and MS-DOS world before WordPerfect took over.

Nano 5.7 5 years ago

I used to use ed when all I had was a single terminal screen/window and a compiler error message. Ed doesn't clear the screen, so you can still see the message. Vi or emacs would clear the error message away. Of course, in a multi-window situation, the compiler output is usually in one window or pane and the editor in another, so this is moot now.

So they appear to have mutually agreed to remove content to conform to the prevailing pressure to restrict public discourse to only politically correct content. While it is certainly their right to make any business arrangement they want, it is distressing that open conversation continues to shrink in our world, whether it be through unilateral cancelation or mutual agreement for the sake of money.

Modern people often portray the Middle Ages as a time of dullness, ignorance, and misery, such as depicted in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think this makes us feel better about how superior we are today. The truth is that medieval life was much richer and more beautiful than the stereotype implies.

When shame is used as a weapon and tool of manipulation, a measure of shamelessness becomes a useful defense. As the demands of popular morality increase and change on a daily basis, at some point, some of us will give up trying to conform.

When I was a kid, my dad connected a Model 19 teletype to our Apple II computer for amateur radio teletype (RTTY). He used an opto-isolator to protect the Apple II from the 60 ma loop that the Model 19 used.

I remember being very excited about this announcement. I had been learning about Java, but I only had an HP workstation, which ran HP-UX Unix at work, and a Macintosh at home. Neither of them had a Java implementation yet, but I could run Netscape Navigator with JavaScript. I gave an enthusiastic talk on JavaScript at the next meeting of our local Java Users Group.

However, as I got to know the language better, my enthusiasm dwindled due to what I thought to be a strange type system. Also, I got access to Java implementations on HP-UX and Macintosh, so I never went back to JS. This has always limited my ability to do web front-ends, but now I'm looking to using Blazor for that.

In January 2018, when a lot of people at the school where I teach were getting flu and colds, I got a "stuffiness" in my left ear that I figured would just go away. I talked to other people, including my dad, who had similar symptoms and then got better. Then I developed dizziness symptoms, so I went to an ENT and started treatment. Apparently, an unidentified virus caused permanent damage to my left ear resulting in hearing loss and dizziness. After about 18 months the dizziness has gone away as my brain readjusted, but I still have the hearing loss.

All of this is to say that while viruses were going around causing cold and flu symptoms for most people, for some reason it hit me differently. These things happened in the pre-COVID world. I think that COVID-19 is undergoing unprecedented scrutiny, so it may be appearing more unusual than it really is.

It's the same reason why those concerned about climate change inform the public rather than just tell Congress. If our food supply is in danger, that is as concerning as climate change, is it not? Or is this different because it is a corporation warning us rather than a scientist or former Vice President?

I became a teacher, so now I get to share the joy of programming with kids. I also manage the technology at my school, so I do some programming to enable that, which is enjoyable because I am pretty independent. I work at a great school with good kids, so my gig is not a common one, but it works for me.

I support 4 different individual content creators through Patreon or their own platform at levels between $5 and $10 per month. What they produce is informative, unique, and much more important to me than anything on Netflix, which is just entertainment. Unfortunately, I don't think Patreon is a very good content delivery platform, so I hope Floatplane takes off and has a better UX.

Enclosed patios provide some protection from the weather, but they are not the same as the insulated interior of a modern house. I've been to a house in Texas that had an enclosed patio that was unusable in the heat of summer. It acted like a hothouse.

I remember OKI Data printers from the 1970s and 1980s. They weren't the cheapest or most popular, but they were fast. I got a brochure from OKI today and saw that they still make dot-matrix impact printers that use a ribbon. They will work with multi-part forms and continuous feed labels. They also appear to have a very low operating cost, and I suspect they have a lower environmental impact compared to laser printers. They would only be good for text output, though.

Richard Garfield's new game, KeyForge [1], attempts to remedy this problem by using pre-made decks generated by an algorithm that makes every deck unique. You buy a deck for $10 and you are ready to play. Each deck is given a unique name that is printed on every card so you cannot alter the composition of the deck. Although some decks are better than others, they are all very playable, and I always have fun playing. I usually play a couple of sealed tournaments at my local game store each month where we all buy a $10 deck and play the tournament with whatever we got. It's a lot of fun whether I win or lose. When my deck collection started to grow, I gave away decks to get others started in the game. Although it's true that some people spend a lot of money in search of the really powerful deck, that is not necessary to enjoy the game, and I think it's much less expensive than Magic to play at a semi-competitive level.

1: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/keyforge/