I mean, you’re free to continue using your crescent wrench as a hammer if you find it drives nails for you decently well and you are comfortable using it that way. But it was neither designed with that purpose in mind, nor does anyone expect you to use it that way, so no one will be writing how-to guides on it.

A Post-It and a pencil, usually.

Not because “app bad” or “return to monke” or anything like that. Mostly because if I stow the note in a dedicated app, that somehow just makes me less inclined to write it down and read it later.

A scrap of papersticking out like a sore thumb on my desk or burning a hole in my pocket? I’m going to be cognizant of that all day long. But an obscure text file chilling in a disused part of my phone, or a txt file lost in the shuffle of random shit on my PC? Outta sight outta mind.

I also find all digital input schemes to be frustratingly less flexible than physical paper. Provided I have a writing utensil on hand that is functional (not always a given, granted) it is trivial to put anything I want on a note. Write anything I want. Draw diagrams. Underline or strike text. Write some things larger or heavier than others. All of these things are possible in note taking apps, but they come with the idiosyncracies of needing to know the selection techniques and menu options to activate them. In this way they’re all death by a thousand tiny annoying cuts for me.

I even had a smart phone with a built-in stylus for a good long while. It definitely extended the things you could do with ease, but it was a far cry from a pencil.

The only thing a note taking app can do in my mind that paper can’t is yell at you with a loud noise at a pre-programmed time. If I need one of those, I just set an alarm in my clock app.

As a very strong believer in Danny DeVito’s quote, “When I’m dead, just throw me in the trash!”, if any medical party is even remotely interested in dumpster diving for my parts when I’m done with them, they can have 'em. Better than throwing them in a box and taking up land in a cemetary. The less of my remains uselessly taking up space on this planet after death, the better. If I get my way upon my demise, anything they don’t take is going into the incinerator anyway.

The exception would be high-paid remote work, I guess. But with the reputation that corpos big enough to field those salaries have been recently building, going mask-off with no warning for no reason and asking employees to start filling desks again, I don’t know if I’d risk it.

City. Around 100k is the comfortable size.

Not like I require the city’s wider array of amenities all that much. I will still be spending 97% of my time at work or at home.

But if I lived in a small town again (born and raised in a town of <8,000), that extra 3% of the time I wanted to go out I’d have to remind myself, “Oh yeah, I live in a dead end town in the middle of nowhere that services none of my personal interests,” and that 3% would rapidly become 0%. I’d live fine with that, but eh. Why take a strict net loss when I can simply not?

The walkabiity and community arguments for small towns are complete non-factors for me, seeing as I go basically nowhere and talk to basically no one. And I’m not persuaded by the cost of living argument for small towns, since lower rent would be almost equally counterbalanced by lower salary opportunities.

Seeing “please” in the script for some commands but not all of them is giving me INTERCAL flashbacks.

No one said it was shameful?

It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.

I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.

But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.

It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.

The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.

You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.

HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.

The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.

oh cool. now I can block every trash news article that includes phrases like “blasts”, “slams”, “says”, “should”, “could”, “might”, and “need to”.

It’s Microsoft, intrusion of standards is their entire M.O.

It’s the “extend” in “embrace, extend, extinguish”.

I believe in the adage of, “If it sits between you and the ground, don’t skimp”.

Shoes, socks, desk chairs, lounge chairs, sofas, car( seat)s, mattresses…

You spend too much time in or on all of these things to be uncomfortable.

I also see posted here the Adam Savage advice of buying cheap tools first, and then upgrade after you better understand your needs. I also think that’s great advice you can apply to most things. Just not the above things.

Just as long as you’re not searching for a “gaming laptop”. IMO those do not exist to any degree of satisfaction. They are all a “choose two” among performance, size/weight, battery life, and noise.

Unless you are so mobile that you are never ever at home, and the prosect of only scraping mid graphical settings at best while being permanently anchored to a wall outlet any time you play is worth it to you, I’d suggest taking that money and instead putting it toward a combo of a desktop rig and a cheap netbook. You won’t be gaming on the go, but you’ll have a better experience for the price. And if there’s a more mundane task that the little netbook can’t handle, you can, provided you have an Internet connection, always remote in to the desktop workstation at home and delegate expensive tasks to it.

If all you need though is something that runs well with a dozen browser tabs open, doesn’t struggle playing back high definition video, and can handle playing a less demanding game every now and again, you can definitely find laptops that can do that while still being relatively slim, quiet, and cool. Just temper your expectations on how far you can push it.

Rythmbox. Syncs to my iPod Classic.

I believe this most recent update to v0.19 was somewhat unique in the regard of login incompatibility across versions, as major breaking changes to authentication itself were the focus of it.

Thank you for letting me know about this.

I use a few apps from the SimpleMobileTools suite. They aren’t full FOSS, they have basic and pro versions where the basic version is GPL3 and the proprietary extended features cost a few bucks. The basic FOSS tools are still decent, if barebones.

The suite includes:

• a calculator
• a phone dialer
• a music player
• a calendar
• a photo gallery (with basic editor)
• an audio recorder
• a flashlight
• a clock
• an app launcher
• an SMS messenger
• a camera
• a keyboard
• a note taker
• a file manager
• a contact book
• a simple painting canvas

I use the gallery and file manager the most. Though admittedly I threw a couple bucks their way for the proprietary extensions. It’s not FOSS, but if it was going to be proprietary, I think it’s one of the fairest deals in software these days. Better than another bloody subscription model, or holding the ad-free experience hostage behind a paywall.

I am not quite yet st the level where I have a ton of user scripts I’d be lost without, so SSHing into a box is hardly a speed bump for me.

I still listen to my music using a 160 GB iPod Classic. Apple struck gold with that clickwheel. Carrying around a dedicated device for music just for that elegant one-thumb control I don’t even have to look at to use is still totally worth it to me.

I’m sure you know it by now, but Mint is the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Windows!” distro very much on purpose, haha.