palordrolap

There are posts on Usenet from the mid-to-late '90s under my real name that are probably still around. I don’t go looking for them and hope they don’t come looking for me. About 50% of them are an embarrassment.

I feel like proponents of that calendar might be better off giving all the months completely different names. It would avoid some of the potential confusion during the changeover. Sol could keep its name, I guess, but the rest, no.

On the other hand, that still wouldn’t disambiguate numeric YYYY-MM-DD and the like.

Due to the omission of the year number on the grid, it’s somewhat reusable too. 2037 is the next time all the dates and days of the week will match.

My diet is fine. You may have missed that I’m cutting out things that qualify as snacks. Things whose nutritional content is limited and are mostly fat and carbohydrates, including those commonly eaten right after what might otherwise be a sensible meal.

I’m talking biscuits (cookies), cakes and the like. I already don’t eat crisps (chips) nor do I drink anything with fizz or sugar (or both).

If I can’t get to a good weight doing just that, I might look into alternative sources of nutrition and superfoods, but those tend to cost the sort of money that I can ill afford to spend.

Also, I looked at the blurb for that book and it claims that it contains recipes that will “treat” cancer. That’s weasel wording to avoid being called snake oil, while at the same time convincing the gullible that it contains a cure, so you’ll forgive me if I give it a miss.

Same reason people like watching TV dramas. It’s escapism. They get to vicariously live someone else’s more colourful life - or are glad they’re not living the celebrity’s real or acted horrible life - for a short while to get away from their own.

And anyone on a screen is usually better-looking as well, which is a big draw.

I’m in the process of trying to lose a little weight to get my BMI a comfortable distance below the “Overweight” tier. That requires fighting natural urges to eat anything and everything available because of evolving in an environment where food was hard-won or otherwise scarce.

And yet, I wouldn’t say I’ve fully overcome the programming because my body and hindbrain literally scream at me and start bargaining every time I skip a snack, but it seems to be working.

I figure they’re more likely related, in spirit and vocalisation if not etymologically, to the French phrase «et patati, et patata», translatable as “blah blah blah” or “yada yada yada”.

The venerable Jargon File has the French metasyntactic variables (i.e. the equivalents to foo and bar) as toto, titi, tata and tutu.

Or to take this in another direction: foo sounds like French “fou” which means “mad” (as in “insane”), so “coucou” might be an interesting alternative.

Even as a relative youngster I remember visiting previous schools for some reason or another and being astounded by just how tiny the chairs and desks were.

Firefox. Considering moving (back) to Waterfox, but unwilling to make the effort right now. I last used Waterfox back when they beat Firefox proper to being a true 64-bit browser.

But here’s the interesting one that I’ve mentioned before: MiniBrowser. It’s a bare bones browser that’s included with libwebkit* packages on Linux, which are, in turn installed by various other packages that might need some kind of web-like parsing.

I wouldn’t recommend it as a daily driver, but it’s useful as a troubleshooting tool when I think there might be a problem with Firefox or between Firefox, my config, and some site or another.

Call me cynical, but I think you’ve put quotes around the wrong part of your title.

Try around “accidentally”.

“120mm optical media” is better, because that’s the official measurement, but it has its own problems. There’s the “mini” form factor at 80mm and the credit card form factor as well, and those still qualify as CDs, DVDs, etc., even though they’re not 120mm.

“Optical media whose most common form factor is a 120mm disc” fits, as does “CD-like media”, but the former is wordy and the latter comes with the potential confusion that the others are CDs, when they’re not. Which I admit to deliberately avoiding for precisely that reason.

My computer, in full working order, with Internet access.

If any of that goes wrong, I’m in a very bad place.

If it’s owned by a corporation, then fair use and/or non-commercial use may come into play, depending on local legislation. Basically, use it until you get told to stop. It’s effectively free advertising until they take exception to you.

For a smaller creator, they’re usually more receptive (and responsive) than a corporation, so consider asking permission.

You could go full Weird Al and ask permission of a corporation if you’re that way out. But they’re more likely to not respond or say no if they have no idea who you are.

Of course, a thing to watch out for is the unlikely occurrence of becoming famous while using that avatar. It can’t be your brand because it’s someone else’s.

So, you might consider pulling a Ray Parker Jr. and (commission someone to) make something that’s almost but not entirely unlike the artwork you’re trying to use. That said, RPJ did get sued anyway. Maybe take it a couple more notches off similarity.

… oh and try to avoid using AI to clone something.

If the day ever comes that I end up in possession of a healthy late 20th century laptop, I’d genuinely consider putting FreeDOS on it. Not least because I threw away my customised MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 floppies years ago (a regrettable decision).

For later hardware, I think I’ll stick with Linux.

For a middle ground, I seem to remember Puppy Linux, which is designed to run on more limited hardware, runs most things as root. (Though maybe they’ve changed that in the intervening years. Correction welcome).

The pedant in me cannot let slide that your title talks of compact discs but the image is of write-once blank DVDs.

But no, I don’t use any form of 4.7" optical media very often. The last time I used the optical drive in this computer was to watch a DVD that I didn’t want to go downstairs and watch on the TV. That must be a good few months ago now.

As to why I even have such a drive - long, boring story. I had assumed that if I ever had need of one, I’d just take the one out of my old PC. When that time came, the newer PC refused to boot with that drive installed. (Imagine, if you will, being in that situation, and the ensuing horror and frustration.)

It then made sense to buy a different one to troubleshoot and cover that potential need. And I haven’t bothered to uninstall it after “testing”.

Edit: Sometimes I a word.

I assume they’re using (year - 2000) as the version number, which happens to match “last two digits” and will do until 2099. So any version of Minecraft released that year under the new system would be Minecraft 1002.x, not 2.x.

And here’s me thinking it was called Vintage Story.

Actually, Minecraft 26 comes out this year. They dropped the “1.” and bumped the sub-version from 21 to 26 to match the year. They’ve also changed the way the new second tier works to be related to the quarter-year.

26.1 is due next month.

So yeah, there’ll never be a Minecraft 2.0. The versioning no longer allows for it.

(This doesn’t rule out a game called “Minecraft II” with its own set of unrelated but identical version numbers. Minecraft II 36.1 drops in ten years. Maybe. But probably not.)

It’s kind of amazing that this is only anachronistic by four months. Both Bliss and (that image of) Tux are both from 1996, and Tux is younger.

Thirty years ago. Please excuse me while I turn to dust.