My problem is people keep infecting the world with software designed with Gnome’s “Mac with Meningitis” style sheet.

If you tell me to install an end-user facing application with a programming language’s package manager, I’m out. Like, Adafruit was at one point recommending a Python IDE for their own implementation of micropython called Mu, and the instructions were to install it with Pip. Nope. Not doing that.

Everybody’s touting round corners like it’s something people want. Cinnamon 6.1 features round corners! who cares?

I encountered a weird thing in my BIOS. I’ve got a graphics card and a CPU with integrated graphics, I could save power and free up some system RAM by turning the iGPU off. The option in the BIOS says “dGPU Only Mode” and you Enable it to turn the iGPU off.

dGPU Only Mode, turns the iGPU off. It makes more sense the less you think about it.

A further complaint: There’s a setting in the BIOS called “Game Mode” and what that does is turn SMT and some other TLA off. SMT is AMD’s name for hyperthreading. Learned this when I noticed KDE system monitor reporting 8 processor threads instead of 16. Apparently that is to increase single core performance on high end chips to wring a few more FPS out of single-threaded games, but meh.

Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They’re one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you’d check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?

Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.

There’s a game for the SNES called Act Raiser, I think it was by Quintet or Taito or Square, one of those. You play Actual God taking back the world from Probably Satan, you do this partly in a side scrolling platforming combat style, and partially in an overhead city building style. Surprisingly good soundtrack for a game as weird as it is.

Profoundly, hilariously slow.

Amazon sold me a defective planer that had sawdust in it. Ibwas apparently the second to return it under warranty.

They keep re-implementing things.

Just the Start menu. You can see how 95 evolved into 98 evolved into ME, then they changed it for XP, and they never stopped making big pointless changes. In many cases, those big pointless changes have been lengthening the process of going from the bare desktop to the thing you need by adding pointless screens and dialogs. Or, like the Start menu, they just drastically redesigned it such that a user used to Win XP tries to use 7 and they just…stare at it because it’s not what they were expecting. Windows 7’s Start menu might even be objectively better, Microsoft’s software engineers could very well produce good research documentation about UI design based on observing or polling users about what features they wanted and then they made the thing people seemed to want, but to people who got used to how it already worked the new thing was bad because it’s different.

I could be convinced Windows 8.1 is a mental unwellness simulator. In Sierra’s FMV horror game Phantasmagoria 2, the player character goes insane at work, and this is simulated by the paperwork he’s working on flashing scarier words for a split second. You’re reading this document and then near the bottom of the page an ordinary word like “recommended” turns to “murdered” for a few frames. Win 8.1’s animated tiles reminded me of that. Plus the whole “The desktop and all normal Windows apps therein is itself just an app that can be run in split screen next to special phone-like single tasking apps which pretty much only we will develop for and we won’t include desktop versions of so you have to deal with this.” I hate Windows 8.1.

What’s real fun is you can tell when they abandoned work on a project by which drastically different UI it’s encrusted with. The modem dialer looks like Windows XP, the fax program looks like Vista, some things have the flat purple stank of 8, some things have the dark glass look of early 10.

Funnily enough, the main place I worry about resolution is on a desktop computer doing desktop computer stuff. My 1440p ultrawide is kind of decadent for games, but when I’m doing something I just want a bunch of real estate.

Just watching TV or movies…honestly I think I might like lower resolutions more. I’ve got a copy of Master and Commander on “fullscreen” DVD, 480p 4:3. I’d really like it to be 16:9 but I can’t come up with complaints about the video quality. I get immersed in that movie just fine at DVD quality. I’ve got a few films on Blu-Ray, and at 1080p film grain starts being noticeable. And the graininess of the shot changes from scene to scene as the film crew had to use different film stock and camera settings for different lighting conditions, so I spend the whole movie going “That scene looks pretty good, oh that’s grainy as hell, now it’s better.” Lower resolutions and/or bitrates smooth that out, but I think they actively preserve it on Blu-Ray because the data fits on the disc, there’s no internet pipe to push it down, and film grain is “authentic.”

So at 4k, it’s either going to display a level of detail that I’m sitting too far from the screen to notice, it’s going to look even noisier, or it’ll be smeared by compression rather than resolution because of bitrate limitations. So…?

Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.

I use Syncthing for this; it syncs directories on my phone and computer, so to put something on my computer from my phone I just put it in that directory. I share my camera roll so my pictures are synced with my computer.

If you just want a “send this file” application, warpinator might do that.

If I understand correctly, the 1541 was initially launched for the VIC20, where the datasette and several Commodore printers that would remain compatible with the VIC20, C64 and later were PET-era. This is what I think I’ve learned from Youtube, mine was an IBM household since before I was born.

Windows, like DOS and CP/M before it, was designed for a standalone microcomputer that the user had physical access to, so they lettered the drives A, B, and C, That would allow mounting 26 drives which should be enough for everybody forever.

Linux, like UNIX before it, was designed to run on a minicomputer in a university basement accessed through a dumb terminal where the end user has no physical access to the hardware, so the file system presents as completely abstract.

In the modern paradigm of local PCs attached to network storage, both approaches have their disadvantages.

I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone’s guess, I’m sure it’s been rewritten by Copilot by now.

I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn’t the same.

Every slicer I’m aware of runs on Linux. I’ve got PrusaSlicer and slic3r installed right now. Cura is on Flathub. Hell, Simplify3D does or did offer a Linux version, though it was one of those janky .run installers where they translate the Windows install process as literally as possible to Linux.

As for modeling software, depends on what kind of modeling. I tend to use FreeCAD, but it’s mostly suitable for engineering and not art.

Ages ago when I still bothered with Octoprint, Cura Engine could be installed as a module, and you could slice an STL on a Raspberry Pi through Octoprint. I quickly gave up on that as a stupid gimmick because you pretty much always need to do adjustments in the plater, but once upon a time Cura could do it.

There is no goddamn reason to continue to use magneto ignition in aircraft engines. I’ve been a Rotax authorized service technician for 13 years, I have never seen the digital CDI installed on a Rotax 900 series engine fail in any way, and you’ve still got two. Honestly I believe a CDI module is more reliable and less prone to failure than a mechanical magneto. The only reason why we’re still using pre-WWII technology in modern production aircraft engines is societal rot.

So there hasn’t been any RAM manufactured in Europe in nearly 20 years? Is that the point you’re making?