olav

The traditional Office suite is still good

I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions.

Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.

The could shut down the company and `rm -rf *` all their assets, no?

Plus, fulfillment of wishes to users as opposed to IT architecture management. Users have been brainwashed to demand certain brands. When you combine this with an IT Management that lacks mid-term risk management or a vision, you get happy users and an IT landscape easily taken hostage by single vendors.

I avoid folders because many of my entries belong to more than one area of thought

This is the reason why I find Trilium Notes so liberating, where one note can have many parents.

Even more so: The 9P protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol)

Maybe the most mainstream incarnation is its use in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

I love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with https://pocketpages.dev/ which gives me file-based routing and nice templates.

Ah, and Pocketbase has automatic database migrations, so all schema modifications can go into version control.

I even hacked a Gemini protocol server into it, so that I can browse my personal knowledge graph using Lagrange.

I'd rather stay in Linux and use Windows if I really must. Can we have an LSW, then?

https://web.archive.org/web/20250518171639/https://amberwill... as long as the original throws a 500 "Internal Server Error".

For thirty years now, the world knows that the last company to trust calendars and mail is Microsoft and yet they are all over the place. I have lost all hope for humanity‘s future.

I ported John Earnest's Octo variant to an ESP32 cheap yellow display (CYD) board, loading many of the examples from the archive: https://github.com/codekulturbonn/espocto

A password manager for ~20€

I wonder if the way the author describes it, ie. new memories are just diffs against older experiences, is scientifically grounded.

I came up with another explanation: My thought processes have slowed, so the world has sped up, relative to myself.

Is there scientific evidence for either explanation?

As a product manager, I am frequently confronted by UX people who declare something as „standard“, a feature that is supposed to be an absolute „must-have“, or else our organisation would loose even the last of our users. Unfortunately, developers tend to accept these things as interesting challenges and (knowingly or not) underestimate the effort and complexity needed to implement it.

My very lonesome role in these cases is to insist that this shiny thing is no standard at all and that our users would be quite happy without it.

My employer forces me to, why else?

My heart jumped with joy when I saw this post. Fossil is such an ingenious system, and, if you are not aware, has been created by the very D. Richard Hipp who created Sqlite. Here is a technical overview: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/tip/www/tech_overview.wiki

Fossil may never become the VCS that rules the world. But, for note taking, it has some very attractive features:

- it is a single executable, written in C with very litte resource requirements

- the file format (an Sqlite database) is designed as an "enduring file format"

- it has an integrated scripting language

For a very long time now I have been considering to port my own note taking system, knowfox, to Fossil. Inspired by this post I might finally come around doing it.

I am a huge fan of Firefox, and have small startup scripts for different profiles. Sadly, together with Microsoft Teams on my work Mac, Firefox causes it to switch on the fan.

This does not happen with Safari (which also supports Profiles, even with a button in the UI). So, I see me using Safari more and more on my work Mac, although there is the occasional page that doesn't render properly in it.

If you don't mind self-hosting a PHP app, https://webtrees.net/ is a nice option.

I wonder if there is some programming language that supports combining both styles:

- A linear control flow - Named Blocks with explicit, named, typed parameters and return values

I understand that one can use anonymous functions, immediately called to simulate this style.

The site is curiously broken in Safari browser.

I use Hypothesis a lot. It works on arbitrary sites by just invoking their javascript bookmarklet which I keep in my bookmarks. It is also very easy to integrate with static sites which is nice.

And, of course, https://gpblocks.org/

https://pocketbase.io/ Simple, performant, batteries included

Ah, "hudli hudli" stands for "Extraordinarily fast guitar playing" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hudli - it's only now that I look this up

Nice. I vividly remember the days, sometimes in the 80s, in some university cellar, hacking away at our green-lit vt terminals connected to some vaxens, that one of the other regulars in the room and I used temp variables _hudli_ and _tralla_ as some kind of ritual.

I fell in love with it when I first saw it, but had to return it after discovering that it was barely usable for my eyesight without backlight.

On the other hand, I love my Kindle, not for the closed ecosystem, but for the rather slick (compared with eg. the German Tolino) UX.

I am afraid that the new Kindle with pen will be a killer for the ReMarkable 2, as much as I would have preferred a small company making the race.

Not related to this particular tool: It strikes me as extremely odd that nowadays „modern“ has become a desirable software feature. For me, „modern“ is the opposite of „durable“, which seems to be a rather bad thing.

Excel is seriously killing humanity. No version control, no debugging, brittle support for automation. Excel, to me, is the single most obvious sign that we must get rid of the giant tech monopolies to re-enable innovation in software.

This is actually the use case I have in mind when I think of moving my personal knowledge management system knowfox to something more enduring like fossil.

It currently is built on php/mysql with laravel with a web ui in bootstrap. This has become super annoying for a few years now because once a year or so I have to port it to a new version of laravel and cope with the new javascript framework du jour that it now promotes.

This would be fine, of course, if you run an agency which extracts money from clients for continuous upgrades, but not for a personal project.

Fossil, on the other hand, is built for longevity. It is a single executable and comes with all tools built in.

Nice article. Since the beginning of the 1990s I enjoy using the hash tables implemented by John Ousterhout for Tcl: https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/file?name=generic/tclHash.c&ci...

I opened this page because of the friendly "Non-Facebook alternative...". In my view, we should ignore software by companies that actively seek to destroy our societies.