Am definitely human.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’m not an artist, I just need the occasional hack job or screenshot annotation.

    I loved the simple programs (this love stems from all the way back to MacPaint v1.0) and MS Paint has largely been ok for me apart from its lack of png support and only 90° rotations.

    On Linux, Pinta has been fantastic but these last few years it got increasingly more crashy, to the point where it will now consistently crash within 10 seconds or two clicks, regardless of Linux distro / laptop/pc / version of Pinta. (insert “whyyyyy” meme here)

    I’ve tried Krita, but it’s simply too much. Don’t even want to try installing Gimp. I am sad.





  • I’m with you, but see a million obstacles (aka. reasons for why things require payments).

    You would need some form of moderation, to weed out illegal content as well as simply bots, spam, and dead profiles. Also for message content. I’ve given it some thought and suspect it can be crowd sourced to some degree, but also needs counter balances. Instead of limiting a profile to be live/banned, you could have a percentage score of peer-reported subjective legitimacy (ditto for message responses, heck you could even have a section of outright reviews of the person’s behaviour - although that, again would be subject to abuse and moderation).

    Hosting, traffic, etc. would be an unavoidable cost, but can be mitigated with low resolution photos (VGA should be “good enough” for an initial impression, no?)

    For sure, an open source solution would offer way more fine grained filtering.




  • I used to joke that the last Mac I used was the first one they made that had colour - I’ve used every Mac from the seminal one up to and including the Color Classic (MacOS 1 up to 7) - but my last job gave me a MacBook. I was curious about it since I’ve seen many a coworker love them, but I soon found myself hating the damn thing so much that I ended up installing the work tools on my own Linux-laden ThinkPad.

    Used to be, they were fast and no nonsense, simply effective and efficient work horses. No doubt they still are, but it was fighting med in everything I wanted it to do. What do you mean “there’s no way to mount a USB stick on MACOS”?!

    Hardware wise they’re still brilliant wrt. power and battery life, but getting a 2nd (or, gasp, even 3rd) monitor to work with it? Yikes what a shit show that was. Truly a walled garden, I stand by my usual words of “they’re excellent machines if you want to use them exactly as Apple intended.”

    …sorry for going off track. So, back in the day. There was MacWrite, MacPaint, Aldus PageMaker (which, then, was way more useful for actual publishing work than after the Adobe take-over), and a ton of games! Granted, you only had 512*whatever in pure black and white, but it was crisp and the games had excellent sound. Pinball Construction Set had 4-voice digital sound and flawless physics (hmm, except I don’t actually remember if it had a Tilt feature). Oh yeah, add in AppleTalk which blew Novell and Windows for Workgroups plain out of the water. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) connector predates PS/2 and curiously allowed a Mac to have any number of keyboards and two mice connected, something we made good use of when gaming.

    There was the ImageWriter which could do plain copy paper rather than Leparello paper and had exquisite resolution compared to the clunky 8-pin DOS offerings. Really, the Mac SE and the ImageWriter II are, in my mind, the pinnacle of industrial design - at least of the 80s era.

    Thanks for reading all that. You should go have a look at folklore.org if you’re interested in stories from the inside.




  • The trouble is that, apparently, “perfect UI” can mean “let’s take all the sidebar tabs, remove their text labels and make all their icons really abstract and in the same colour. Oh, and change their order, too, while you’re at it.”

    Thank you from the bottom of my muscle memory and pattern recognition. Now, give us back our old UI that was actually meaningful, or at least make it an option if you insist that your “clean look” is more important than actual usability.

    ^(Apart from that, I love you JetBrains.)






  • I carry some because it’s no longer a thing. My card has only the information that I know will not change: my name, email address, and mobile phone number. On the back there’s a QR code (which contrasts the otherwise vintage look).

    I hand out perhaps one per month so not super often, and many times the most appropriate thing to do is to simply tell people my phone number. But sometimes, especially when we’re in a situation where phones are not nearby, it’s quite effective to hand over a pre-made card with that info.

    The average reaction is “Oh, cool” so even if they toss it once they’ve copied the info (which, tbh, is my expectation) it will still have made the exchange slightly out of the ordinary.

    Plus, sometimes they’re useful to stop a table from rattling, or leave a message for someone who’s not currently present, and so on.