This makes me laugh a lot. I changed my online ledger app to use a unicode character in the URL, which I should probably just use a rewrite rule to accomplish, but for now just to see if it works I tried it out. After confirming that it does, I commited it.

Twenty years.

For twenty years I've used vim almost exclusively, and only now have I learned about buffers and registers. It feels like wasted years, but also it feels like a gift.

What is the fascination people-- especially old people --have with desktop icons?

What Google services are you still using? Earlier this year I made a conscious decision to avoid Google services if I can. I successfully got off gmail and gcal. Because I have yet to find viable alternatives, I am still using:

YouTube
Voice
Gboard
Android
Maps
Music
Home
Fonts (on occasion)

Greetings from vacation! Gaming in Hawaii be like:

I dug up my old ledger web app that I wrote when I was in my late twenties, as I realized with a tight budget toward the end of this year, I need to get a good view of future balances. The data was encrypted in gpg text files, but the site itself was unencrypted, with simple httpasswd auth. I dove into the code this week, and fixed a lot of crap that was all terrible practice, but all I knew when I wrote it in the mid-2000s. I grabbed a letsencrypt cert, and implemented cookies and session handling. I moved from the code opening and parsing a large gpg file to storing and retrieving all the data in a Redis backend, for a massive performance gain. Finally, I switched the UI from white to dark. It looks and works great, and most importantly, I have that future view that I needed.

A million years ago I used and loved a WM called waimea. I used it extensively, and even used it on my work machine. It was abandoned by its author for whatever reason, in 2004. I used a derivative wm for a while, called kahakai and loved that too. Since that time, everything has gone from 32bit to 64, and waimea got buried in the past.

Fast forward to this past weekend, when I discovered, on a whim, that there is an AUR for waimea! There was not one for kahakai though-- that appears to have been genuinely abandoned.

So I installed waimea and started working on configuring it, with only a man page and the wayback machine as a reference. As of a couple days into the effort, I'm not quite there yet, but I love the results so far.

Homebrew eats shit. It is easily the slowest and least effective package manager I have ever used on the command line. It feels like software that was great in 2006, but hasn't changed since then.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

It's ironic that posts asking for upvotes are a frequent source of upvotes for the people who reply, saying, "don't ask for upvotes."

The person who invented battery powered faucets that turn off automatically needs to be strung up by his toes.

When I was 23 or so, I worked nights in a tier-1 control room. Each workstation had a win98 desktop, and two HPUX workstations running CDE. I read all of the lord of the rings in text files on the HPUX machines, and since it was in an xterm window, my supervisor thought I was just tailing logs.

Vivaldi released a beta for mobile yesterday! I'm enjoying it very much, so far. Anybody else played with it?

I'm gona get fired and lose my wife and kids because all I can think about is 7 Days to Die.

"sudo apt remove nano" is easier than "update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.basic" so I just do that.

People need to throw away their manufactured outrage about the gimp fork, glimpse. Aside from the fact that there are people who are genuinely offended by the term, it also just makes FOSS look unprofessional and foolish, that such a capable piece of software is named so crudely. If we want to be taken seriously, then something easy like changing crude and offensive names is a no-brainer.

Alt-right, 4chan, edgy defenders of the right to offend need to step aside, because they're in the way of progress.

My Google fiber machine is down, so I have to proxy at work at Comcast speeds today.

A YouTuber posted a video today about how Linux users' bad attitudes account in some part for the fact that AAA games are not getting released as much on Linux as on Windows.

Here's my bad attitude: Fuck AAA games. I don't want them on linux. I don't want them to exist. The AAA studios are colluding to change the market to be less about selling games and more about leasing access to them, and prioritizing revenues based on mictrotransactions and gambling-- with a pursuant focus on exploiting addictive personalities for profit. We don't need that on linux, and frankly, I don't think EA, Ubi, Activision, Bethesda, and Epic do either. Linux is an environment of choices, where the inner workings of any particular piece of software are far more exposed than they are in closed systems like windows, mac, and consoles. That exposure breeds understanding, and the last thing the AAA studios want is a knowledgeable, informed customer base. They want naive children with access to their parents' bank accounts, and they want to eliminate all means to access games other than themselves. This is not behavior we should be rewarding by asking them to expand into our space.

Our PM hears us talking about git repos, and responds by referring to it as, "get," as if she was correcting our bad pronunciation.

"We could be the Vikings of our time."

If you want to install, configure, and dedicate resources to fail2ban, knock yourself out, but putting these options in your sshd_config alone will save you mountains of headache:

PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, without whom there would be no C or Unix. Titans. Fountainheads of technology.

Power outage. Our wifi dropped about 35 minutes in. God bless the UPS.

Just pulled the trigger on a Librem 5 pre-order. I'm super excited. Android was getting shittier with every release, and ios is even worse(to me), so I was getting distraught about my next phone.

Having fantasies about braining the couple two rows in front of me on the train, watching cooking shows at full blast on their laptop.

Slack's latest update just broke the darkify hack. It's 2019, right? It is unbelievable that there is no built-in dark mode for Linux, Mac, or even windows. I mean, they are aware of dark mode. It is available on mobile without trouble. Get it together, slack!

To run X11 apps I have to install xcode? Not gonna happen. I'll just VNC to a real computer.

What popular tooth grinder are you happy you don't use? I have a couple, so I will start.

javascript or a js framework
windows
a desktop IDE
google chrome

Start at the scheduled time. Don't, "give everybody a little time to join." You're just enabling shit behavior.

Never, ever ask, "who just joined?" when the join tone sounds on the call. If you need someone on the call, invite them, and address them directly by name. If you need to take roll, then call out names, one at a time. But don't do that either. Just do your meeting.

A meeting has a direct cost of the lost time of everyone on the call. Artificial delays for small talk or petty admin are a total waste of time and money. Keep it simple, on task, and as fast as possible.

I opened a ticket earlier with my automated ticket script, and saw its number, so I couldn't resist.