jvan

Less than an hour away from Marlow, NH, original home of PC Connection. Must be something in the water.

Changes that some applications made for Wayland definitely broke pasting for me. It seems Wayland added a separate clipboard so going between apps was a crapshoot if pasting would work. I haven't found a solution that covers everything at once.

Was there a fourth wife, or was she the Last?

a simple and consistent experience

Has that not been Apple's entire marketing thrust since 1984?

For people who like LW for more than just nostalgia, Joe Dever's son is republishing all the LW books in a unified format, including a greatly expanded edition of Flight From the Dark using Joe's notes. They're also pursuing new projects, last year they published three new books set in the same world and a (non-game) anthology, and some other games through various partners.

with isometric 2D graphics

I got excited because I thought I had missed something, but these are the same apps I've had for years. They're not isometric games, though some of the illustrations have a similar perspective.

The video for MC Frontalot's "It is Pitch Dark" has a cameo by Meretzky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

The Internet Archive is your first port of call. For some reason I can't get any of them to load in the browser, but all of the systems are emulatable locally.

https://archive.org/search?query=infocom&and%5B%5D=mediatype...

Probably because JavaScript has been part of pdfs since Acrobat 4, way back in the last millennium.

Ads. Tracking scripts. Interface hijacks. Dynamics that change the page as I read it. A myriad of other poorly executed ideas that someone who considers themselves "very clever" thought were good at the time but only make my experience worse.

Lucas was friendly towards fan works, so Disney kind of got that situation handed to them and were smart enough not to go against it. When nerds are your core audience, you have to accept them doing nerd things. WB took down the Hunt for Gollum fan film and ended up reversing course. Would Disney and WB still make a ton of money if they tighten the reins? Probably, but why risk it?

vcs is a 5000-line bash script wrapper around ImageMagick and FFmpeg, any features you want can be extracted to your own scripting.

I've used vcs[0] to make contact sheets from videos. It has a nice feature that if it detects the frame is blacked out, it will shift the capture time so every frame on the sheet has something to look at. Easy syntax to set capture at every delta or capture x number of frames evenly distanced, columns per row, ignore a set length of end time, and frame size.

[0] https://p.outlyer.net/vcs

I had hoped from the headline that it would shed some light on the Oakville blobs[0], but no such luck. The images don't look remotely the same material.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakville,_Washington#Oakville_...

What is it that you have to hide?

An argument so cliche, it has its own Wikipedia page[1]. In the US, we currently have a presidential candidate from a major party threatening harm to people based on their political, social, and biological qualities, which outsiders often determine by inference from data such as who people are in contact with and where they travel. Further, I would argue the need for individual privacy is innate in humans; as every child matures they find a need to do things without their parents over their shoulder, even without their peers, no matter how innocent the activity and it is a need that does not vanish in adulthood. We generally agree that things like removing bedroom doors as punishment is abusive because it robs the person of privacy. The same goes for installing monitoring software on your partner's phone, or a GPS tracker on their car. Privacy means we are able to be ourselves without our lives being scrutinized, criticized, judged, rated, shamed, blamed, or defamed by every person on the street. I close the door when I defecate, I draw the blinds when I copulate, I don't tell people my passwords, and I don't scan my grocery receipt to earn points because there are some things other people don't need to know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Criti...

For example, people spent hours exploring wikipedia, this could never be done with physical paper.

I must not understand what you're saying here. I'm envisioning someone reading an article, seeing a reference to something unfamiliar, then stopping to read another article in a nearby source about that thing or any other random topic, recursing for hours. This is easily done, and often was by children a few decades ago, with any encyclopedia set.

In study sessions in school I would sometimes look things up by thinking "it was on the lower left about this far into the book." I remember studies done years ago that showed reading a physical book improved memory and learning due to the geometry and positioning reinforcing the neural paths, and anecdotally that was definitely the case for me. I don't think I'm hallucinating them, this article cites several studies that support that. Anyone who suggests PDFs are just as good "because they have pages" is missing the point - they aren't physical objects, and that matters.

I think anyone making that claim is going to have to define human nature in a way that has eluded several fields of study for generations.

Please tell me what guarantee you would accept from any company that they won't eventually sell off a line of business or otherwise be acquired.

Incredible! Songs in the Key of X was the only album I ever knew to do this, and it wasn't even the first. I had no idea so many others did the same thing.

Edit: Son of a *, I've had a copy of Sister Machine Gun's Burn for almost 30 years and never knew there was a hidden track!

Warning for Linux users, it's only available packaged as a flatpak. Otherwise it requires Meson to build.

Seconding System76. I bought one for my wife after HP and Dell refurbs failed to be stable for her, so instead of trying to find a reasonably priced (<$800) business-class laptop we blew the budget on a $1500 Pangolin that's done well by her for several years.

My daily driver is a desktop because I'm an old fart that likes to build computers (with optical disc drives!), but I have a truly ancient HP Elitebook refurb with a dented lid that still takes care of me on vacation. Neither of us do anything fancier than use an HDMI projector with them so we're not asking for much. It really stung to be compiling Realtek modules for the HP only for it to crash every week and the Latitude to have a disappearing sound card, even for budget refurbs.

Microfiche is a small flat sheet, microfilm is on reels. "Fiche" being French for card.

The More You Know...

Oh that's good, I like that one! But a counterpoint for fun: weather is a system. I wonder if we can find a rule that seems sane but would classify an inert gas as alive? Imagine defining life and someone rebuts with "Argon."

99% of mules are sterile. And I'm not sure what the current debate on viruses and prions is. It's a difficult question to generalize.

Why not consider it alive? The same with the fires mentioned in other comments. In The Andromeda Strain (the novel, don't remember if it's in the film as well), there's a scene where the characters are trying to determine a single quality they can look for that signifies life. They come up with energy conversion, and they do consider luminescent watch hands and geologic formations. It's been a long time since I read it, I don't recall them ending with back-patting and "mission accomplished" cheers, but the point of the scene wasn't to make a definite answer for the readers nor the characters - it was that when you're looking for life, perhaps your definition of "life" will need expanded. So why do we need a definition that absolutely includes This, and absolutely excludes That and The Other? What if we settle on a definition and found out it does apply to The Other, why must we change the definition instead of changing how we categorize The Other? Both are adjusting our model to fit new evidence. Why be so determined that Life Must Be Like Us And No Other?

Do you have a write-up about this? I've been wanting to host my own almost entirely for the extra control over incoming mail and have been held back by the same worries. I'd like to see what a success story looks like.