I began an entry in July of 2018 with this:

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I do not recommend you purchase this or any other Fire tablet… unless you have some very specific requirements.

I can now say this:

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2019) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I can recommend that you purchase this tablet if you are comfortable with the use of adb and command line tools. It is cheap ($95 on Prime Day) and capable of doing a number of useful things, such as…

In the beginning of my experience, it wasn’t that computers had fonts so much as each computer had A Font, and that was how the computer talked to you. All of them were quite low resolution; blocky and bad.

Now I expect every character to be drawn in an appropriate, smooth, curved, and informatively differentiated typeface.

When did that change start, and when was it complete?

How the RPG rules describe dice rolls:
this result on the dice is a critical success,
this range is a success,
that range is a failure,
this result is a critical failure.

How every RPG player feels about it:
this is a critical success,
this is nearly a critical success,
this is an excellent success,
these are very good successes,
this is a success,
that’s just a little failure,
that’s a failure,
these are failures too,
that result is a critical failure.

What’s running on the firewall? A big list follows, with discussion.

For every computer system, someone needs to know what they are doing, and check up on it when something goes wrong. That person is the sysadmin.

If you don’t know who the sysadmin is, it’s you.

It’s just like everything else in life: if you care about a thing, you are responsible for taking care of it. If nobody takes care of it, it decays and dies.

Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house. The media server still has 4x3TB spinning disks, but the old 120GB spinning boot disk has been replaced by a cheap 1 TB SSD. Boot times improved dramatically, and the database access for various things now feels instantaneous.

Process follows, but it’s nothing extraordinary.

One thing that UNIX users have that Mac and Windows users don’t: it’s generally quite easy to change their window manager theme – and to write/draw their own.

Window decorations – a frame, a titlebar, some buttons – are handled by the X11 window manager, which is itself a replaceable part. Window managers range from minimalist exercises in reductionism through gaudy feature-festivals like Enlightenment, the original perpetrator of shaped, translucent and transparent effects. But…

“Magic”, applied to technology, is an indictment, not a compliment.

– me, July 15 2020.

A departing co-op (student intern, paid) said that she had been told by another co-op that the company’s keywords were “clever, competent, and kind” and that she was amazed to discover that we all lived up to that.

Since I was the first person at the company to start using that phrase – in employment advertisements, where I was describing necessary traits of the people I wanted to hire – I am entirely chuffed.

Internet Fast Lanes: Every time somebody says “Fast Lane” in this argument, I get a little more upset. The Internet doesn’t have fast lanes and slow lanes.

The Internet is not a highway.

The Internet is a railway system.

You probably already know this, but as a reminder:

• sed is for inserting, replacing and deleting. -i causes sed to edit in place.

• pandoc is for converting between text formats like HTML, Markdown, RST, TeX, various wikis…

• calibre has command-line subtools like ebook-convert which can produce good EPUB from lots of other formats.

• libreoffice handles typical office document tasks. Graphical.

• sigil is specialized as an EPUB authoring tool. Graphical.

• scribus can do page-layout tasks up to full daily newspapers. Graphical.

With those and a good text editor, you can produce good-looking documents ranging from a business letter through a book.

Comments go via email; if they contribute, I put them up. If they don’t, you never see them.

Don’t use the new search engine Privado (no link on purpose.) They keep spamming me with requests to mention them in a positive light. That’s not going to happen.

Perl is the best language if it’s the language that you remember well enough.

My father loves math puzzles. He told me about one he was working on, and I did a quick estimate of how complex the answer space was and told him that it would be faster to have a computer try out every answer than to be clever about solving it.

Of course he wanted me to prove that, so I had to brush off Perl or Python. For some reason, Perl felt better.

I got spammed by Privado – no link, they really want a link – which claims to be a privacy-enhanced search engine. Investigating their privacy policy, you can see that they are a proxy for Microsoft Bing. In effect, they exist in order to put ads in front of Bing searches: it’s another company eking out a profit margin between ads from ad networks and paying AWS fees.

Anti-recommended.