zafiro17

The nightmare is over? I've used Usenet for years. Most serious users filter out any post originating from G2 to do away with Google posts. It's been a huge source of spam and annoyance.

Usenet gets better as it gets smaller, honestly. Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. Several groups in the comp* hierarchy are active. Thunderbird, claws-mail, sylpheed, tin, slrn, alpine, neomutt all handle Usenet just fine. Visit http://newsgroupreviews.com for a list of providers, some free, some paid.

Interesting follow-up to your Autopoint story. I met Jonathan Veley at a pen show. He is a pencil afficionado too (a self-professed "Lead Head") and bought the remaining stock of the Panda lead factory, plus a lot of equipment. He now produces replica Autopoint mechanical pencils and sells lead. He's a really interesting guy and he's written several books about the history of manufacturing of mechanical pencils.

See https://www.legendaryleadcompany.com for his story. I bought the least expensive of his newly manufactured Autopoints (they're called Legendary now) and I really love it; it's my best pencil. I love 1.1mm leads and find narrower leads too thin for my preference.

This is tangential to the subject at hand, but I feel obliged to complain about how much Substacks now requires you install its app to read the content. Very similar to Reddit, in fact. I've watched the progression in pushiness over the year. On my phone, I did not install the app and there was apparently no other way to read the article.

I block Reddit at the router for similar dark patterns.

I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. I've used TDE for years (on the Q4OS Linux distro). It excels at being a low-resource requirement virtual desktop for teams needing a modern distro/kernel/browser but want it to run as lightly and cheaply as possible. My company uses it on virtual server infra accessed over Nomachine. It runs perfectly well with <1GB RAM and even in 500MB RAM it does well. The DE it's updated worked great on a Pentium III with 128MB back in the day.

The folks installing TDE want, if I am any example: a modern distro, kernel, and up-to-date Chrome or Firefox, and just enough desktop (task bar, apps menu, virtual desktops) to make it useable. IceWM is another option here but TDE is just a bit more comfortable, without all of the bloat that gives you the UX improvements people seem to be asking for here, or the non-mainstream (fluxbox, i3, etc.) that scares the non-technically inclined.

I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.

This is one of the apps that not only keeps me on a desktop/laptop computer (vs a phone/tablet) but also keeps me on Linux. I've got all my photos stored on a NAS device in my house, and manage backups myself (to external harddrives and to rsync). Digikam is my photo manager. I couldn't be happier and I'm sure I don't use even half of the advanced features. What a great app - easy to discover, straightforward, and very polished in my opinion. Many thanks, open source Digikam team.

I wish both the K9 and Thunderbird teams all the best. K9 needs some love, and so does Thunderbird, honestly.

I use Aquamail on Android and love it. Great feature set, works great with multiple accounts, lots of configuration options. It's not open source or free and I honestly do not care.

Back in the day it was something like USD 4. Now it's something like USD 25. Still worth it, and I don't mind paying for software if it keeps the developers in business.

Comp.misc for computer stuff Misc.news.internet.discuss for oddball Sci.misc for science

These are three decent groups for content similar to HN.

If you need a usenet provider, try solani.org (no cost) or individual.net (paid but excellent)

For clients, any *nix install will have slrn, tin, pan, or possibly knode. Thunderbird is on mac and windows as well as BSD/Linux.

I'm using Mageia with great success. KDE, frequent security and package updates, big repository, non-Ubuntu. Former Mandriva and Mandrake for those who remember Linux in the early 2000s.

I just tried out delomore and am very impressed. Bookmarking now!

I applaud the work that went into this, but unless I'm missing something, they've recreated a terminal server, where nomachine has delivered desktops for ages and works over a connection as poor as dial-up.

This article feels like it written specifically for me. I have a strong nostalgia and affection for shortwave radio while sadly also forcing myself to come to grips with the fact that it's a dead medium.

I was a volunteer in rural Central America from 1998-2000 and shortwave radio was an important news source for me (but already a VERY niche medium, even then). Nights I dialed in VOA and then found a lot of other interesting things too, from Cuba to broadcasts from Spain, Germany, and Indonesia. It was all fun and exciting.

Ten years later I began a decade of work overseas in rural West Africa. I dutifully brought my shortwave with me, only this time I found close to nothing on the airwaves. Some crazy religious broadcasts here and there, but nothing. I looked around and can confirm that in ten years of living in Africa (with a lot of West African friends and colleagues) not a single one of them had or used shortwave, or even really had any awareness that it existed. The number one media source even then was FM radio tuned in over cheap Chinese FM radios or over FM radio apps on cell phones.

I've still got a shortwave and occasionally scan the frequencies from my hammock here in North Carolina. But there is really not much there (religious stuff still being one exception). I ask myself, if rural West Africans aren't listening to shortwave anymore, really who is?

This article answers it: a few pockets remain, like Nigeria and Myanmar. But the shortwave era ended: everyone who left shortwave never came back, even when newer methods failed. Guess it was fun while it lasted :)

Looks like the first paragraph was a recent edit. I'm not sure how gopherpedia works but perhaps it only syncs periodically.

If text-based access to popular websites is your cup of tea, there are two very good gopher interfaces I use regularly: gopher://gopherpedia.com for Wikipedia and gopher://gopherddit.com for Reddit.

The latter is not very helpful on image-based threads but is excellent for text-rich threads (like askreddit). The gopher interface to wikipedia is surprisingly full-featured; I love it.

Every time a vivaldi post shows up on HN it attracts a lot of negative comments (and some positive ones). Will just add my voice to the mix - Vivaldi is my primary browser and I love it. On my 5 year old laptop I experience no slowness, and I generally enjoy it's very user-focused features. I also enjoyed Opera prior to version 12. I recognize it's not the browser for everyone, but on my Linux boxes it's the second app I install (mutt is the first one). Your experience may vary.

Prof. Davis' software is Jed. Slava Pestov's is Jedit. All is good.

I used jedit today, and actually I use it most days. It's a great piece of software and these days, the only reason I have to install a java runtime on my Linux boxes. Hypersearch is outstanding, I love the approach to macros (and I've written dozens for myself), and its approach to syntax highlighting is great.

I wrote five book manuscripts for a book publisher that used a custom typesetting syntax - not exactly XML but codes to turn on bold and highlighting, designate section headings, identify keywords, and place specific icons in the book. I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to hack an emacs syntax highlighting format, but with Jedit it only took an hour. I was then able to install Jedit on my co-author's Mac, where the software interface was easy enough for him to use without finding it too techie. Huge success. (Later I figured out how to create a vim syntax, but to this day I my custom emacs config goes uncreated).

I use different editors for different purposes, but Jedit is on every Linux box I build, and I use it regularly. VERY grateful for this software!

I do too. Slightly different template:

Left half of page: "work stuff." Right half of page "personal stuff." Bottom two inches of page: "long term goals for the week."

I use one sheet per week, adding bullet points to the relevant column. I created a template for printing on the office printer, then realized it was ecofriendlier to just recycle one-sided scrap paper (every office had tons of it), and draw my own lines. I use the To-Do app for tracking things from week to week, but when I put down my coffee cup and set down in front of my computer, thinking about what needs to get done, the notebook/pen combo somehow works best for me.

Edit: exchanged diagram for text since the diagram got mangled.

Fond memories of my click wheel ipod, but I actually just bought a relatively generic MP3 player and am thrilled with it. Wrote about it here: https://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/360-The-MP3-Play...

The hardware/software are nowhere as slick as that old ipod. But the freedoms this device give me serve as a reminder that all of the constraints of an ipod (one per user, no library comingling, needs itunes, etc.) were artificially imposed by a hardware striving to maximize hardware sales (and placate the music industry).

Noom, a popular diet/weight-loss app, works on the same principle. I've used it. To start the free trial you need to prepare the payment mechanism. Then after X amount of days, the paid service automatically kicks in. I wasn't super-excited to discover I'd just committed a lot of money before I was ready or even fully committed to the app/service.

I suspect this is going to be the new trend for future apps, since it almost certainly delivers a higher number of paid users than other methods do.

That's useful most of all to FB, where plenty of political discussion is about how to put a leash on FB these days. Don't want users to be subjected to that now, would we?

For that price (approx USD 120) I get 4 lines, so my whole family. I'm not happy about the data breach, but I'm very happy with TMobile otherwise, and I seem to have a better deal than my friends on AT&T and others here in the USA.

Hey wow, I love this idea, this design philosophy, and this commitment to reuse. It occurs to me it may also solve another complaint I've always had with laptops, that you have to find the machine whose screen, trackpad, keyboard, weight, etc. ALL match your wishlist (with a desktop you buy the display you want, the external keyboard you want, the external mouse/trackball you want). This device lends itself to customization, almost like an ecosystem: hopefully some day they will offer a Dvorak, Workman, and Colemak keyboard variant, or similar customizations. Better yet, open it up to niche customized hardware manufacturers and make it a market. Suddenly it becomes the substrate for an ecosystem of customized components. I love this idea. (For reference, my current approach to hardware reuse is to sytematically only buy used laptops. I save a ton of money too).

On behalf of Usenet users everywhere, this is excellent news, and I wouldn't be surprised if Usenetters begin stuffing other useful newsgroups with crap in order to removed from Google as well.

Google's assimilation of Usenet content had promise at first but quickly turned into a dystopia and the general consensus on Usenet is that Google has been a disaster for Usenet.

Funny to see this. About a month ago I took a break from my usual environment (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and gave Icewm a try. I decided after a week of usage that it did everything I need in a window manager: fully configurable with hotkeys, multiple virtual desktops, a taskbar, a decent "start" button with a menu system you can edit to your heart's content.

I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to them and icewm uses older technology so the newer terminals don't provide transparency. I fixed that by moving to aterm which in turn gave me trouble by not handling unicode.

So icewm is perhaps dated. But it's very lightweight, a bit more mainstream-feeling than openbox etc., and I thought it's a good compromise between a KDE/Mate/Gnome3 and openbox/fluxbox/i3 etc. It's nice for remote machines you remote into where you want some basic GUI functionality but not a full-blown desktop environment.

I love using Lynx on medium.com. It strips away all the non-content and leaves the good stuff. In fact, I can't browse medium pages using any other browser.

The folks who do Fastmail built Topicbox (https://topicbox.com) a few years ago and I don't yet see how Front differs from that product. Basically, it brings the concept of conversation channels to inbox, while providing a permanent record of the chats that your newer employees can read to catch up on what happened before they arrived, or for compliance. I think their implementation is pretty slick.

I've got a Brother MFC L2710DW that both Linux and ChromeOS print to without any trouble at all. Newer Chromebooks with the Google Playstore also give you access to the Brother Print & Scan app, which also works.

Apple is slowly disappearing from my family's hardware portfolio, and recent software changes are accelerating it. Back in 2005 or so I converted my entire CD collection to digital, and managed it happily using Itunes. Somehow in the transition from itunes to Apple Music, Apple refused to recognize any of the tracks I created from my own, legally purchased media.

My wife currently has no way to listen to any of the music we legally own, using her iphone. So guess whose next phone is going to be Android, with an SD card containing 1TB of music we own? The other advantages of iphone are not important to me, and the apps she uses are available on the playstore. For bonus points I can buy her a pretty decent Android phone for a few hundred bucks, instead of a new device costing well over a thousand.

I understand Apple wants to push everyone to monthly paid services. As a customer, I DO NOT want yet another $10/month expenses - I've got a lot of those already. I just want to listen to music I already own.

Have a look at serendipity. Certainly doesn't have "tons" of plugins but it's had all the ones I need, and it's dead simple: PHP and either a Mysql or a postgresql database underneath. I've used it for years, happily.

Sorry to see there has been no mention of Zulip so far. I fooled around with Slack a little, and then Zulip. And in my opinion zulip hit that sweet spot between email and chat. I really like the way conversations can be segregated into actual conversations. The trick to using it, I've found, is to set team expectations that posts might not be replied to until later in the day. There is something subtle about slack that sets your expectation for immediate gratification, and that drives the exhausting 'always on' culture.

I imagine you are all relishing that sweet irony/hypocrisy of a tool that facilitates distributed work, not permitting its team to work in a distributed fashion. Culture fail!

Fifteen years ago or more, I was able to work pretty effectively with a team using email and IRC. I know IRC is out of fashion now, but my point is that a lot of the challenge is team culture and expectations, and software doesn't really fix that problem.