I always get psyched to read articles like this and too often they’re just little stubs. I feel like the second this one gets going it just ends.

Done for my grandmother and at least three customers for my small (small) business. No one has had any complaints or questions. Just make the on screen text and icons kinda big, get them a Firefox icon on the desktop, make sure they can print and call it a day.

I like it.

That’s great. I wish Visio/Vizio were not such common names for software and hardware. We done did those already. Do something else.

I can’t find the interview now or remember who it was with because of my brainrot but roughly than six months ago this woman was saying in no uncertain terms things will get progressively darker and more violent. And I’ve thought of that when every one of these moments has arisen. She was speaking more to the need of a parent whose health premiums quadrupled and SNAP benefits were cut having to care for and feed a sick child and what that might do to their anger and willingness to go do something against the elements foisting this upon them, but of course we never can predict what the precise hinge point moments are going to be during turbulent times. We just knew they were coming. And now they are. And will continue.

I care. I have Ring because it was the fastest way to get cameras on my property after trouble with neighbors. I found out how liberal they are with user data and handing it over to law enforcement but I couldn’t justify the expense in upgrading. For me this isn’t a bridge too far in a moral sense but more like a powerful reminder I’ve been lax in my responsibility. I’m pricing out some Reolink cameras I can host locally at home and put on a private subnet I can just VPN into. I’ll have to buy the kit piecemeal because I don’t have a lot of money to toss around but I am firmly committed to getting off Ring cameras in light of this news.

I think you’re essentially right but sometimes I look at the Linux panels and wish they looked a little less…burdened with aesthetic growing pains or like…aesthetic arrested development. They don’t have to be skeuomorphic or frutiger aero or like, keep up with the Joneses, but config menus in Linux are often one of those little reminders, no matter how trivial, that this isn’t a polished product but a humble labor of love. It’s endearing. But sometimes it feels like holding a toy from the CVS when you want a Transformers from Toys R Us lol.

Bought a used Surface Laptop and didn’t think about it being weird proprietary hardware. Just figured it was a good price. Bought AMD because fuck Intel. Well, it turns out you have to run a surface-laptop custom kernel, a big pain to get going for a normie like me, and even then, because I bought the AMD one, my biometrics and touch screen are completely unusable. It’s like the one SKU that it’s just a bust on and since this is all volunteer maintained, it’s likely they’ve given up on fixing that on this obscure, years old model of laptop.

Whoa I didn’t know Affinity could run in Wine. How well??

I had to do something very basic recently which was to make my single-channel microphone ‘mono’ in the sense that it was present in both ears. This involved a lot of googling and command line action. I don’t mind that in principal but I can’t say I learned anything. I don’t remember what I ran, why I chose the option I did to make it work…and I know when I have to do it again it will be arcane again. If Linux is ever going to be truly mass market and bridge the uncanny valley of weird little use cases between pro users and Facebook grandmas, this sort of thing needs to be more readily available in settings applets. Call me a normie but there it is.

My concerns are mostly all unfair. Just want to acknowledge that right up front. Compared with macOS:

• Cider is an admirable but buggy solution for Apple Music (whose own web player is barely usable)
• I wish Alt+Tabbing had the option to bring to the fore all window instances for a given app like macOS’s Cmd+Tab; as it is I am always having to hunt down stray Firefox or Files windows, which get further buried down the Alt+Tab bar(in Cinnamon) when you minimize them.
• no OS does common alternate characters (dash and em-dash, accented characters, etc. all accessible with variations on the Alt key) or Japanese language input (Ctrl+space and then just start typing phonetically) as well as macOS does. The composition key is useful to a degree but it feels like second class citizen shit compared to the macOS implementations that make some typing and much language learning basically useless for me on my Linux devices.

Compared to Windows:

• pretty basic (and again Cinnamon centric) but Files / the file browser in other apps could use some love. Typing the first few letters of a file name in Files takes me there and highlights it which is great but if memory serves (not near machine now), I can’t just hit Enter from that point to open the thing. Equally annoying is when browsing for a file to open or save, there is often not a create folder option or button, and when there is, it isn’t tied to a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+N or F12. I sincerely hate switching input methods when it isn’t called for, so having to grab my mouse just to click the new folder button and return to typing or worse, to leave that browser altogether to go to Files and create the folder because the button or command to do so didn’t exist in the browser window is a real drag.

In general:

• the least fair complaint of all because it seems especially like the answer is “well then why don’t you pitch in and help?” (The answer to which is, “I don’t have the skills, I’m sorry, I’ll be quiet”), is trying to replicate workflows in off-brand software. I love LibreOffice spiritually but trying to do some basic PowerPoint stuff recently, it really let me down. ONLYOFFICE was much more usable but it still has a lot of jank and, I suspect, a memory leak because the longer I use it, the slower and less stable it becomes. Krita seems more usable than GIMP, but neither is as usable as Affinity Photo, let alone Photoshop. Put another way, it’s tough to be constantly reminded you’re compromising in order to live a largely faster, stabler, freer computing experience. MacOS is a pile of shit these days but when compared to Windows (since I’m not gaming with it) I never feel like I’m compromising. It can do everything Windows can, and often better. If there isn’t Windows specific software, macOS may have competitive indie darling software to fill the void. Pixelmator for example (before being gobbled up) didn’t feel like it was a somewhat rudderless, good faith effort by a tired gaggle of volunteers…it felt premium. I’m still waiting for that experience on Linux.

China no. 1

there’s more than one amendment that has an opinion about that

The reason I’m a Clicks convert isn’t the typing. I only use the keyboard for that half the time. The reason is it opens up keyboard shortcuts which make the ordinarily horrible experience of doing anything on a smartphone much better.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of Nazis.

Thanks for doing that. I was typing the original comment from my phone, in a hurry.

I know this is not one size fits all, but I switched to a Seiko watch like a year ago and I’ve been so much happier. I can weigh myself on my scale, take my blood pressure with a $40 Braun device from the pharmacy, and everything else I can intuit: I know for a fact when I’m not walking enough, when I feel bloated and over-salted, when I haven’t slept long enough, when I get winded going up stairs, etc.; I don’t need to quantify and graph it out to know I need to do better and what it will require of me.

Again I’m not saying health stats aren’t or shouldn’t be important for you, but I do think the Web 2.0 / smart-everything era got us all so hooked on the constant feed of data points from all aspects of our lives that we came to feel things were required that really aren’t.

If you’re diabetic, or have a heart condition, or the in and only way you will ever exercise is if you can gamify it or whatever, then of course, try to find a health tracking solution that minimizes the sale of your data to brokers or whatever (if that is even possible). But for many average people who’ve just gotten used to health tracking, I gotta say, take a walk on the wild side and try going without.

I can’t put a price or a good enough description on how much happier I am to have one less thing sending me notifications and pulling my poor, abused attention all throughout the day…one less entire category of stats to keep up with, micro-manage, get anxious over. I’ve still got my Apple Watch if I ever absolutely need it but so far I haven’t needed it at all. I do not miss health data.

Google the FUTO Guide to a Self Managed Life. Louis Rossman far overstates how simple it is (“if it was too complicated for my grandma I rewrote it until it was something she could handle” is giving himself too much credit) but it is still a super super comprehensive guide anyone should be able to follow for getting an exceptional amount of home infrastructure self hosted. It includes owning and managing your own router, setting up a VPN to get your services away from home, setting up replacements for all the cloud services 99% of us rely on, and goes as far as self hosting security cameras and PBX phone systems and stuff. If you get that far into the guide, even if you don’t wanna run those things, you’ll have learned enough to host anything else you want.

Man! I think I even noticed that when I installed by my thought was, “this software is so modest and inconsequential, I bet the AI integration is inconsequential too and will stay out of my way.” So far that is the case. I think there’s a ‘ribbon’ tab at the top for AI? Haven’t clicked it. It’s probably just bullshit that will overwrite my authorial voice like the inside of a vacuum cleaner quick start guide.

lol we did. I think they’ll be around at the end of the week.