captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

I’m kinda hoping that with an actual American in the White House this time any and all rioters that attempt to enter the Capitol building this coming January are met with volley fire and bayonets.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Well whatever this is about needs to be Streisanded. Find out who is responsible and why, and then make it a household name.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

There’s this expression, it refers to a piece of information that is often spread as wisdom but has no basis in fact or truth, that expression is “old wives tale.”

Old wives be trippin’.

captain_aggravated, 5 days ago

In my 10 years around the Linux ecosystem, I’ve never seen anyone recommend Red Hat to new home desktop users.

Ubuntu has joined Red Hat. It’s a corporate server distro now.

Go look at their website. More corporate logos than a Cup series stock car. Just figuring out which version you should download so you get a “normal desktop” is a task bigger than it should be. Back on the stupid bad old website I came across a guy who said he “installed Ubuntu but it didn’t come with APT” and I’m like “wtf…did you install Ubuntu Core, their Snap-only IoT thing?” And he stopped responding.

Actually I’m going to accuse Fedora of doing this too. You kind of have to know “Fedora WorkStation” is the Gnome version which is considered the default, “Spins” are the versions with other DEs, and “Silverblue” is the immutable file system version.

captain_aggravated, 4 days ago

In the fact that they offer several DEs with one being their flagship, and then having one or two weird other things going on, like Silverblue or LMDE? Yeah that’s similar.

The presentation is very different, with Mint being way less bullshit about it. Go to Mint’s website, click Download and you’re presented with three choices, from top to bottom: Cinnamon Edition, Xfce Edition and MATE Edition, with brief descriptions of each. Cinnamon Edition is at the top and says it is the most popular/primarily developed for Linux Mint, so it heavily indicates that’s the flagship flavor. LMDE has a separate page.

If you click on “New Features” you are given a list of specific features, like the stuff they’ve done to the Hypnotix internet TV viewer, or new features of Cinnamon 6.0. Everything here is factual and verifiable.

Go to Fedora’s download page and you’re presented first with a big useless graphic that says “It’s your operating system”, with choices for Workstation, Server, IoT Cloud, and CoreOS below that. The short marketing blurb says Workstation is “…for laptop and desktop computers” so let’s click Learn More. And we get a page full of ultimately meaningless marketeering wank like “Reliable, Beautiful, Leading Technology” with very few verifiable facts at all. The word “Gnome” is not mentioned anywhere.

So it’s difficult to learn that Workstation ships with Gnome from their website, and it’s also not 100% intuitive to find out how to get the other DE versions, which are farther down on the page in a different looking section titled “Want more Fedora options?” under Fedora Spins. It would be much more intuitive if the “Workstation” button led you to a page with the Gnome Edition on top with a blurb about it being the most popular, flagship edition, with alternative choices listed below.

Similarly, people on forums casually talk about Fedora Silverblue, which is the immutable file system container-based version. Except you will find nowhere on the main downloads page that says the word “Silverblue.” You’ll find it under Atomic Desktops. Silverblue is specifically Gnome Atomic. KDE Atomic is called Kinoite, which is a word no one will say out loud correctly. They didn’t bother coming up with wanky branding for Sway Atomic or Budgie Atomic.

They’re really trying to channel Apple here, with Retina displays and Airport cards and Magic mice. And I’m trying to channel Tantacrul; as I’m typing my inner voice has adopted an Irish accent, and the next thing I’m going to say is my frustration at all of this makes me want to RAM AN ATOMIC SPIKE STRAIGHT THROUGH MY FACE! Okay, dial it back a bit…

Fedora’s attempt at branding has made it difficult to understand what you’re getting when you click on something on their website. There’s a lot of Fedora-only branding like “spins” that I would get rid of, and go with something like “Fedora Gnome Workstation” “Fedora KDE Workstation” and then “Fedora Gnome Atomic” “Fedora KDE Atomic” etc. That would make it much easier and straightforward to shop.

captain_aggravated, 6 days ago

It has been my experience that it is a bigger pain in the neck to install Windows. Something you can try is practice it in a virtual machine using something like VirtualBox.

captain_aggravated, 26 days ago

Idea 1

I’ve been looking for a journal/to-do/checklist app that isn’t completely thumb chewing stupid. I’ve yet to find anything as good, flexible and feature complete as what you’d get on PalmOS devices in the early 2000s.

I often use my journal for brainstorming and planning, and basically the best I can do is bulleted lists. I would like a checklist section that can do things like recurring tasks, one-off tasks, daily tasks, and persistent tasks. (Daily tasks: Feed cat. Each day it puts a task with that name in the Tasks window for you to check off. Persistent tasks: Fix the kitchen drawer. This same task remains in the Tasks window until it is checked off, and then stops appearing.) I would also like “take 5 loads of yard debris to the road 0/5” and be able to click to advance it to 1/5. Marry this with a journal app so that you can keep track of progress on stuff like fitness goals or whatever.

And please. Even if it is stored as human-readable markup, please. PLEASE. Let the user edit it in rich text mode. Too many of the “journal” apps out there require you to edit in markdown mode and then you can switch to a “view” mode to see what you’ve done. Also: Don’t be that guy whose app cannot be themed. I don’t want some light mode Gnome lookin’ bullshit in the middle of my dark mode Cinnamon.

Idea 2

Do a fully local fitness tracker. Apple/Google/Samsung health apps are there primarily to invade your privacy and no one should ever use them. I get that this one is more useful as a mobile app running on a device with MEMS sensors, possibly rigged to a smart watch with biometric sensors, and there is no such thing operational in the GNU/Linux world, but still it might get some use.

Idea 3

You asked for it: Woodworking CAD. This “seems quite complex.” The best workflow I can find is in FreeCAD, which is too complex and cumbersome for the job. It’s a general purpose engineering CAD system and it’s designed to work in abstract absolutes; you can’t think in terms of “put a mortise and tenon joint here” you have to think “create a sketch on this face and constrain a rectangle to this edge with these dimensions.” And then it doesn’t give you things like automatic cut schedules, materials lists, templates. FreeCAD is allegedly extensible, it is allegedly possible to create your own workbench to add more specific features. I even tried. There is no documentation, they didn’t write down what they were doing as they were doing it, so…I’m not sure why they bother at this point.

I’ve been interested in a CAD package that works the way a woodworker works. I’ve thought about trying to implement this in the Godot game engine, but even then the project strikes me as “monumental.”

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Yeah I can’t detect how they’re sorted here, for a minute I was thinking “alphabetically by first name? Andrew Jackson is before Barack Obama, but no there’s no George section…”

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Does this mean that the earth no longer makes coal? That since there are now microorganisms that break down cellulose logs don’t just stack up for millions of years?

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

The manual to A Link to the Past contains basically the franchise’s design document. Go read the little lore section at the beginning of that manual and tell me they haven’t been just pulling nouns out of it to make games out of for the last 20 years.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

They got a lot worse after 2010 when “thin” happened. I’ve got an NEC laptop from 1998 that has an excellent keyboard.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

If you’re being laid off I don’t know if that works.

It is my understanding that they’re going to try to get you to say something on the record or worse sign something they can deny your legal rights over.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Advice I have heard is decline an exit interview, because those are for the company’s benefit and not yours.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Okay, some feedback from having used this little tablet PC in a wood shop use case:

First of all I don’t have anywhere to put it. a piece of paper can just sit on my workbench surface and who cares if I get boards or tools on it, a tablet feels more precious than that. This may be less of a factor in a larger shop.

MEMS sensors were a mistake. Take me back to 2007 when my convertible laptop had a button on the bezel to rotate the screen.

While we’re turning off automatic features, turn off automatic screen off/suspend. This machine takes a full 8 seconds to wake back up, and when I’m in “Okay that step is done, next step, how long do the rails need to be?” mode I’m pretty sure I could chew through my own forearm in the time it takes the screen to come back on. Like I say, easy solution is don’t turn the screen off. It seems to have enough battery life.

I briefly tried three DEs with this little touch screen, Mint Cinnamon is not up to it; it’s 100% a desktop UI that will let you click on things by poking a laptop touch screen, it is NOT mobile friendly. Fedora KDE is willing to try but it’s still desktop first, Gnome is a tablet OS that remembers when it was a desktop OS slightly too much. I would honestly rather have the “switching between apps” workflow you get from Android than the “workspaces” of Gnome because it doesn’t leave enough touch gestures for applications. Just trying to scroll through a PDF, it wants to click-drag-highlight rather than just scroll.

FreeCAD continues to be second only to GIMP as “FOSS software that is amazingly powerful at what it does with the UX of a colonoscopy.” It works surprisingly well on touch screen. It’s not even in the same time zone as good or usable, but “works surprisingly well.” It starts up, runs, opens files etc. quite competently but it’s outright combative when it comes to looking at different parts of a model, switching modes, switching workbenches, looking at dimensions, selecting geometry etc. I’ve had it not accept input from an onscreen keyboard, so I outright couldn’t change a dimension.

I’m a little tempted to build my own furniture CAD package in the Godot game engine. I don’t know how to do 90% of that but I’m about to try.

The core of the idea does work though: it has been very nice being able to take measurements in the shop, put them in CAD right there, walk into my house, and then that file is just on my desktop. My favorite thing about the whole experience is Syncthing.

captain_aggravated, 8 days ago

Yeah I’m with you; I’m also in the resurrecting old hardware with Linux club.

If I treat the little Lenovo tablet like a laptop, well…it is one. it’s a small, low-end x86 PC. Standard install images work fine, it installs .rpms and flatpaks just fine, FreeCAD launches and operates correctly…with the keyboard attached.

Snap the keyboard off and it performs a heartfelt but untalented impression of a tablet. Gnome is still Gnome, it still wants to be a mouse and keyboard UI, but it has had touch support bolted on after the fact and it works about as well as tits on a fish. It’s got a lot of the problems Windows 8 had in trying to be a desktop OS that can also run on tablet, but without the schizophrenia. A lot of the UI elements are still quite small even when upscaled to 200%, you can tell by the way certain UI elements fail that it doesn’t like being scaled like that especially in portrait mode, and it still interprets touch inputs largely as mouse inputs. So if you try to scroll through a PDF file, you might scroll, you might highlight a bunch of text which causes it to scroll strangely.

FreeCAD has paid even less attention to touch compatibility, I’ve noticed that sometimes interacting with some elements via touch will cause the view controls to break until the app is restarted. The UI isn’t built for fat fingers, a lot of stuff is designed for shift+clicking or for keyboard only controls, and I had a dimension dialog box refuse to accept input from the onscreen keyboard.

The hardware might be able to do what I need, the software almost certainly can’t.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I wonder what it would do for those of us who have had dental implants.

I had a tooth removed and replaced with a socket bone grafted into my skull to which a crown is bolted. If I were to lose another tooth, what would happen if I took this drug?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

As a woodworker I am compelled to point out that milled lumber is available in much larger nominal dimensions than 2x4. There’s no need to limit yourself.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

What about a 4 inch thick whole trunk bark on slab like they make those ridiculous trendy “river tables” out of?

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

hoisin sauce.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

See I knew someone was going to bring up TNG, that the original show was really Kirk-Spock-McCoy character centric and that was a big criticism aimed at TNG at first. And “Then TNG came out and it was fine” No it wasn’t, the first two seasons are pretty rough, the show really found its footing in the third season.

I think trying to create a new Stargate show would be like trying to create a new show in the Hercules/Xena universe. Because they have basically the same problem: They ran out of ancient gods to kill before the series finale. I think they’ve already kinda proven they milked SG-1’s setting dry because both spinoffs went “Meanwhile in another galaxy, something almost completely unrelated is happening.”

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

No I don’t think I ultimately would, for a bunch of reasons.

I’ve said it before in this community, the 2 decades of “gritty realistic” heartburn drama ushered in by Battlestar Galactica cured my love of television. I don’t currently subscribe to any streaming service and as they get more numerous, more expensive and worse I don’t think I’m going to pick the habit back up.

I think I’m developing a contact allergy to resurrected IPs. Upon reading this I don’t think “Oh boy a chance for more of my favorite adventures” I think “oh brother, some business suit with a neckhole infection has detected an IP they aren’t monetizing hard enough.” The most recent TV show to catch my eye was The Good Place, which is an original property. It was made because someone had an idea. “Do you think you’d watch a new Stargate show” sounds to me like “would you buy the industrial slop we’re going to churn out anyway if we dye it the color of a thing you liked 20 years ago?” The one thing no one has there is an idea.

It’s also just one of those shows where I don’t know what you’d do with the setting. Star Wars and Star Trek, those settings are open enough to where you could go 90 lightyears to the right and still find cool stories. Shows like Stargate, Farscape and Babylon 5 are so character-centric that I don’t know if I want to watch just another show made in that setting. Like, you could make me a Star Trek show that doesn’t have the Federation in it. Set it on a Romulan warbird or something, it would work. There have been numerous works set in the Star Wars universe that didn’t have to do with the Jedi or Rebels or Empire or whatever. What would you make out of the Farscape universe without Moya and the gang?

No, let it rest on what it achieved.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Naw man just turn it 15 degrees or so.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

There it is wearing four coats of spar varnish. I’ll post one last picture once it’s got some plants on it.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/3cfe3063-1e4d-4486-9968-86b7be24b364.jpeg

Welcome, by the way, into the tiny garden shed into which I have crammed an almost feature complete furniture shop. I still haven’t found a place to put a lathe of any useful size. Maybe I can do something different with the whole router table situation?