How Many Pixels Do You Really Need?
I was reading in Ploum's excellent blog yesterday about his history with Ubuntu, when I stumbled upon a lovely screenshot of his FVWM setup circa 2003, and it brought me back to a friendly, and long-raging debate with some fedifriends on the subject of pixels, namely, whether or not …
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Monocultures Considered Harmful or: Why Linux Nerds Should Give BSD and Other "Weird" OSes a Try
In yesterdays's article, I described the benefit of having a large supply of physical hardware to try different OSes on. Now I would like to talk about why it's important to run more than just various Linux distros (although just trying different distros is a great way to start broadening …
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Why You Need A Stack of Thinkpads
Modified image of a stack of thinkpads taken originally from https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/17xf8kl/my_thinkpad_stack/
A lot of people experience vendor lock-in and outright "ecosystem captivity" because they've plunked down several grand towards pricey and shiny laptops from Apple, Microsoft (*snicker*), Samsung, or whomever. Such a …
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Desperately Seeking Preview.app
Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org
In yesterday's post, I talked about the things I do and don't miss about MacOS, mainly focusing on the global menubar search as the main positive from my experience with Mac OS X.
Looking over blog post ideas note …
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What I Do and Don't Miss About MacOS
Background and disclaimer
I was a Mac kid. I was lucky to have my own Mac at home (a relatively low-end one, but still) for most of my high school. And like most people, I do look at the past (particularly the retrocomputing past) with pretty strongly rose-tinted glasses.
But …
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My Favorite GUI Programs, Part II
Background
In yesterday's article, I went over the GUI programs that I enjoyed using over the years and remembered fondly. While I was going to go over TUI programs today, I realized that there's a category of GUI that straddles the line between GUI and TUI that deserved its own …
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My Favorite GUI Programs
Background
Yesterday, I wrote about why I loved the command-line, and one of my good Fedifriends commented that while he appreciated a good command-line program, he generally preferred GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces).
My personal history in computing started with what you might call command-line computers, although I think it's more …
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Why I Love the Command Line
I was going to post a much more serious blog post about anhedonia yesterday, but I didn't get to do so, as I was feeling... anhedonic!
One thing I do when I'm struggling to feel... anything (because I've spent way too much time feeling way too much, but that's a …
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Why I love vim
Disclaimer: I will be using the name/term vim in this blog post, but I actually mean any command-line editor based on or inspired by vi, or "vi-style editors." This includes the original vi, nvi (which IIRC was the basis of the vi that comes with the various BSDs), elVIs …
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My Approach to Online Notes
Note: When I say "Online" in this context, I literally mean "on a computer," vs. "on paper." This is the older, more classic meaning of the word, similar to "on-line documentation" (i.e., "on the computer," not "on the internet").
Background
I know a lot of folks like solutions like …
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