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lphnull

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programmer spreadsheet abuser linux command line fetishist food & cooking nerd

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This reminds me of something I made once in "Macromedia" Flash back when I was 16 in like 2001ish or so.

It wasn't really an actual OS, but I managed to get a working desktop with a file browser, fake non functional web browser, and a task bar and start menu.

My flash application didn't accomplish anything, but I felt immensely proud of having been able to create a mock up of a UI, even though it was extremely kludgy and wasn't even able to read or write files in the fake applications.

...No offense to the creator though. I don't mean to compare my high school project to this one. This project is indeed very cool!

I too dream of one day inventing my own kind of spreadsheet and terminal hackery OS, so I salute this person for creating a proof of concept that looks good.

I used to see geometric shapes upon waking up if I woke up abruptly in the middle of a very visual dream, but only if the first thing I saw was a sudden bright light (as in having my sleep mask abruptly removed). Hasn't happened to me in a while, but usually the bright light of the real world looks "pixelated" in very weird geometric patterns that for me were morphing, chromatically abberated and animated. These flashes of shapes only lasted 1 second at most but were very trippy to experience.

Dotfile madness 7 years ago

There is a program for windows that does this if I recall correctly. It records every file and registry entry created during installation and allows you to compare snapshots of "before" and "after" installation.

Back in the day, I used to work at General Electric in the warehouse unloading and re-building pallets of GE lightbulbs for 8 hours straight.

One of my coworkers there was this guy who liked to play ska music really loud. His buddy that he talked to used to be really violent with the boxes- chucking some of them hard on purpose, trying to get some of the product to break.

I remember browsing the web on my old Nokia N900 phone and watching everything get progressively slower as javascript started getting more and more memory intensive. Eventually I stopped receiving updates, and the entire web became unusable because lots and lots of websites break without javascript now.

I wholeheartedly agree with this comment. I recently had my facebook account "accidentally reactivated" against my will after I had deactivated it on facebook. I deactivated it a second time, and am currently hoping that it doesn't "come back to life" again for one reason or another. The last time it happened, it was because I was right in the middle of a big california fire and I think facebook was trying to be "helpful" or something by giving me the option of alerting family members that I was okay.

I wouldn't mind deleting everything, loading up facebook onto a VPN-facing VM and selling it for cash and watching it burn. Maybe my old account would become so cluttered with garbage, that they'll be forced to finally let me open up a blank new account with nothing on it that I'll park and forget the password to one day. Only then will the illusion of privacy finally be complete.

Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years?

It's because "desktop" web is difficult for newbies.

People like you and I love the "desktop" web because we grew up using desktop computers. We don't mind firing up our web browser, typing in a URL and poking around for tiny menu items using CSS that's optimized for big HD desktop monitors. That's what we're used to and that's what we think is normal.

Nowadays, everybody- even your grandma- is on the inernet. Everybody's using an iPhone with a tiny screen and large fonts. Opening up a web browser to browse a website is just something people no longer do.

Grandma would much rather have an app on her home screen that connects her to the world rather than a bookmark in Google Chrome.

Not everybody is a nerd like you and me. The internet has exploded in ways we never imagined, and now we're going to have to deal with everything being optimized for the average user.

The web isn't what it was back in the 90s and early 2000s though. Back then, you wanted a website to last because there wasn't much on the web to begin with. Those of us who were online owned a reasonable amount of web bookmarks that led us to nice solid pages that were designed to load nice and fast over slower connections.

Nowadays, the landscape is way different. There are just so many "normal folk" on the internet now that content is being consumed at an alarming rate. There is so much stuff on the internet now, that even Youtube videos have become disposable. Most of the stuff that people read and watch now is consumed once and then never visited again because there's just not enough time to revisit the insane amount of content we're exposed to.

Nowadays, why does it matter if a website is made "brittle" if the content isn't going to matter in a few months anyways? And if you do want to archive something for later, shouldn't the words on the page matter more than the code behind it? After all, if a user 12 years from now wants to read your article, all they're going to want is your words and pictures. Code is always brittle because new technology makes everything obsolete.

I really like their concept. I can see why people would sign up for this. I just didn't like their small selection of designs. The impression I got from their website was that they only have a handful of fabrics that they use for both male and female. I was expecting more rainbows and unicorns, but the one rainbow unicorn male boxer design didn't grab my attention like I thought it would.

Still beats paying $5 a pair for generic boxers at walmart. If I had the extra cash, I'd say why not and sign up.

I wouldn't recommend any of the current generation kindles. I've been gifted every single Kindle there is, and I have to say that $50 is not worth it unless you really just want a throwaway tablet as an alarm clock or something. It's cheap for the following reasons:

1) you're stuck inside the shitty Amazon App store ecosystem. Lots of developers hate that Amazon created their own separate app store, so expect no major apps on the download section of your kindle's app store. Especially not Google apps like YouTube. Just the lowest quality of low effort apps made by foreign developers. 2) screen and speaker quality sucks now compared to previous kindles. The UI and user experience has just always been bad because you don't get anything resembling stock Android OS. You have to use whatever weird skin that Amazon decided to tack on to their weird and limited version of Android. 3) the tablet's price is subsided by ads. It's cheap because you have to see a different ad every time you unlock the Kindle screen.

The kindle's speakers used to sound amazing on the old HD, I forgot what it's called but it was the best tablet Amazon ever made. Every Kindle ever since has been significantly worse.

Id you want a tablet, find some $80-$100 Chinese tablet from somewhere that can at least doesn't blast you with ads. It's worth it.

You can probably justify the expenses as "travel expenses" that you would have done anyway. If I was rich and had no job AND I had an important place that needed mapping, I wouldn't mind doing this just to get to play with the gadgets.

I could be wrong, but don't people have autocorrect on their phones that will correct the character based on context? Is that even possible?

Lets say somebody wants to say "how I eat" in spanish. The correct way to do it would be "cómo como". "cómo" means how, and "como" means "I eat". I wouldn't make sense to say "como cómo", so therefore, autocorrect should, in theory, feel free to correct all instances of "como como". Only until it becomes an international household brand name will this ever be a problem- for this one phrase at least.

I've had some of the best lucid dreams I've ever had while my sleep was disrupted by living in the second story of a building smack dab in the corner of a very busy street corner during broad daylight. I had a night job so my sleep schedule was from 7am to 3pm. All in all I had half a dozen lucid dreams and one mindblowingly extreme out-of-body experience which left me breathless upon waking. I think I even had a night terror or two while I was there.

I didn't hate it. Sleeping during the day has taught me how to put a pillow over my head in order to block out all light, and now I can sleep in the brightest loudest room without trouble.

I haven't had lucid dreams since then, or if I have, they've been really really rare and extremely hard to remember. Now that I think about it... Could my lucid dreams and OOB have been triggered by smog from the traffic in that area??

serious question: Why do people like to do work or leisure in pitch black rooms? Don't you feel clumsy, sleepy and uncomfortable when everything is dark? How can anybody go more than 10 minutes without needing to use vision to interact with their surrounding environment?

I personally can't have the lights off even if I'm watching a movie. Maybe because I was raised without TV, I can't sit still for more than 20 minutes watching entertainment before I feel the urge to do something productive like wasting time on the internet.

It's funny that I'm reading this thread because I just went through this exact same thing last night and it was weird. I don't ever make a habit of using my phone in the dark, but I did yesterday and I did at full brightness and for many hours and it did not feel good.

Eventually after like 6 hours in the dark and accidentally using just one eye for reading- eventually I started to see really trippy and weird visual noise in the dark areas of the room. I also noticed that if shone at the right angle- the pitch black areas of the room suddenly lit up, as though I was giving my over-exposed eye some kind of night vision, which is weird because you'd expect an oversaturated eye to be completely blind in the darkness.

Now this is all anecdotal, but reading screens in pitch black light has always felt bad for me. I don't understand people who insist on watching TV shows or movies in a fully pitch black room. I mean I get why school teachers and home theater enthusiasts do it- but for normal TV viewing, it just seems wrong to me.

The Bullshit Web 8 years ago

I find that the best way to do this is to just VNC to a windows or Mac dedicated slave computer to do graphic arts work. VNC is so good nowadays that I can use my QHD phone screen as a second monitor for all my Adobe apps- and the lag nowadays is almost non-existent thanks to super fast wifi.

The Bullshit Web 8 years ago

Funny thing is I use my i3wm environment on 16gb of RAM and a 4k screen. I'm actually migrating to rat poison because it's so incredibly simple and basic that it has been making me drool. I mean, look at the source code. It doesn't get much simpler than that for a tiled WM.

I'd prefer a wild-west type of world where certs are decentralized and "blind trust" towards big authorities becomes optional and still there as a reinforcement, but not necessary and definitely not required to communicate securely.

I mean- if there are adversaries out there trying to hack our communications- then we need to let these adversaries try so that we can engage them head on so that their methods become published, public, and thoroughly analyzed by the people in charge of strengthening our protocols.

This approach would be like fracturing the bone to make it stronger- we allow nation state hack us in order to figure out ways to stop and prevent such hacks using open and transparent software alone. Trusting any group of people anywhere "just because they're trust worthy" feels like a variable defining <the contents of its data> as equal to <the contents of its data>. It just doesn't make sense for a variable to trust itself "just because" because then I wonder if something fishy is going on under the hood.

I must be rare because I wouldn't mind being treated as less than human. McDonald's was one of my first jobs- and one thing I learned there was that I can chose one of two things: (1)be upset that incompetent bosses are treating me like shit and move on to another job without having learned anything, or (2)I can simply not care about Michael Scott-type managers and just focus, like a robot, on getting really good at my job. Then, in the future, I can move up and become one of the best managers anyone has ever seen thanks to knowing what not to do.

In my opinion, people care too much about work politics. Yes people suck, but sucky people will be everywhere. Learning to cope with difficult people is a skill that everybody absolutely needs to learn at some point in their lives.

You're right, I probably used the wrong words there. By barebones distro, I actually meant "headless debian with minimal packages configured to fit nicely inside 1/3rd of a 32 Gb SD card". My main problem with Ubuntu is that even Xubuntu felt too bloated for me under raspberry pi. I can't even fit Xubuntu into a 64Gb SD card without running out of space. What do all those extra gigs do? They sure as hell don't make my rpI faster that's for sure.

Emacs? yes. Terminal work is enjoyable on the pi.

PDF? PDFs and the web will be laggy unless you set up a compositor like Compton to speed things up. There's enough GPU power in the PI to set up decent 2d compositing with transparencies.

Videos? I wouldn't count on it because youtube videos are still choppy for me. Even after a ton of work, I still get light choppiness on 320p video. I haven't tried local video files yet, though I assume local files might perform better than web videos. I mean, gifs and webms play smoothly without choppiness, so why not mpv video?

One of the biggest flaws in the raspberry pi is the USB Micro port. If your USB micro cable is broken and unreliable, then your PI will get extremely slow and may even crash a lot due to the flickering power supply. Your pi won't tell you what's wrong either, which makes troubleshooting a pain until you figure out that the lightning bolt icon on your screen means power problem.

If you like linux and tinkering, I would highly recommend you get a pi. Just don't expect a pi to work out of the box. Most distros are so bloated and the pi is so limited, that you have to trim everything down for the pi to be even remotely enjoyable.

If you wish to send me a download link to an example video file of yours, I can play it on my setup for you and let you know how well the video performs.

Well said. :)

Personally, I don't think laptops like the Pinebook should ever be used by the masses because, like you said, building your own OS from scratch is difficult, even for the tech savvy! And no I'm not talking about compiling your own Gentoo yourself. What I mean is just starting with a barebones distro with NOTHING installed, then sudo apt-get intsall your carefully selected list of packages- followed by tons and tons of googling and man pages to figure out how to configure your config files in just the right way.

This is how I learned linux- the hard way. My powerful windows 10 workstation died one day, and I decided to actually try using my abandoned rpI for day to day use. It took a LOT of googling, but I finally figured out how to make my pi enjoyable after close to half a year's worth of effort.

I'm definitely buying this laptop when I get paid because I am one of the few people out there who's masochistic enough to enjoy pi-like devices. This laptop is EXACTLY what I have been looking for.