I had a W10 phone at work. The OS and UI were nice, had no issues there. The app selection was a serious bottle neck though. Finding a good flashlight or a calculator was not a trivial task. Anything more complicated than that just simply didn’t exist.

All of them have at least one. Usually it’s 2-4 emojis per post, but some have way more. Seems like a deliberate marketing tactic.

Easy fix: invert colors.

I really like the idea of having my own server, where I could have a bunch of cool stuff like email, VPN, Nextcloud, and so much more. The primary reason why I don’t have a server like that, is because I can’t trust myself to follow the best practices. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should hire a proper professional to take care of all that.

It can be a rocky ride if you happen to have hardware that hates Linux. AMD video cards and intel wifi cards are well supported, so sticking with those is like playing this game in the easy mode.

Every OS comes with compromises. With Windows, things generally are well supported, but you get a bunch of annoying features. It’s a package deal.

With Linux, you get a different package with different compromises. There will be new things you need to get familiar with, and that can feel annoying. On the other hand, there’s no bloat or spyware preinstalled on your system. You have free rein to do what you want, and that can feel awesome and terrifying. With the right hardware, things just work out of the box. With the wrong hardware, some tinkering is required, and some hardware will never work. It’s a very different kind of package deal when compared to Windows.

But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.

Soo… nobody needed that tool any more? Did they ever though?

Oh yeah. This looks like a much better way to do it. My solution is pretty bare bones by comparison.

Absolutely not, quite the opposite actually. However, the end result is close to 100% CPU load, which is good enough for some purposes. Let’s say you want to test the performance of your CPU cooler, or overclock stability, this should good enough. There are also dedicated tools for people with more advanced needs.

As an absent admin myself, I can assure you that the system can take a surprising amount of neglect and abuse. There were times when I feared the system was beyond repair, but I’ve been surprised time and again by how resilient it actually is. Nowadays, you can also use your least hated LLM to give you suggestions and help with interpreting logs.

The thing is, you can neglect your system for long periods of time, run system updates blindfolded, but eventually, the tasks pile up and catch up with you. My latest misadventure involved finding out the hard way that lots of packages that used to be in core, were moved to extra. You know, reading those announcements might be a good idea… Anyway, I was unable to update my system, because about half of the packages were no longer available in core. Eventually, I figured it out, enabled extra, fixed some of the stupid mistakes I made along the way, and the system was back to normal. Yay! After about two hours of messing around, I can finally get back to neglecting my admin duties again.

That’s a horrifying concept. Better not think about it.

That reminds me of the CPU stress test I ran many years ago.

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null

If you have 8 cores, just open 8 terminals, and run that code in each of them.

See also: /dev/null

It’s basically a black hole where you can throw anything.

Same. Many years ago, I tried a bunch of low spec browsers, and Midori was the best one at the time.

All the others were really light and stripped down, which also made them pretty much completely incompatible with the modern web. So what exactly can you browse with them, if not the web, I was left wondering. Well, Midori was the best compromise. It’s very light, but still capable of doing things.

My thoughts exactly. My bare bones installation didn’t come with one. I had to specifically install it myself.

And why is it that people don’t want to see any ads at all? Some people argue that ads can help you discover products and services you might want to buy? Well, I tried that.

Got a separate computer just for this experiment. Installed Chrome, used online services that have ads etc. I exposed myself to tracking and ads for a while, and the ads I saw on that computer are still completely irrelevant. I’ve even told some sites exactly what I like, and the ad targeting still sucks.

Nobody benefits from this, except for the ad companies. Advertisers loose their money, and they get no sales in return (at least not from mme). Ad companies and related platforms get the money for showing me stuff I will never buy, while the ads infuriate me at every turn.

Even in the best case scenario where the ad companies have all of my data, they still can’t figure out what I might want to buy. The whole idea of ads is just completely broken. On my other computers where I actually do more serious stuff, I use every tool in my arsenal to block all of this digital cancer.

Oh, I totally agree. US english has diverged from UK english by making certain things more sensible, but there’s still a long way to go.

I think I’ve seen some organization try to change the spelling of health to helth. Maybe it was an Australian clinic or something. Can’t remember. Anyway, I totally agree with that sort of spelling reform. Just make the spelling closer the pronunciation and get rid of all the random nonsense.

Unlike many other languages, English doesn’t have a central authority thay could even propose changes, let alone dictate them. Spelling reforms have been attempted many times before, but it doesn’t look like we’re getting anywhere.

English is also incredibly widespread, which is beginning to turn into a burden at this point. If you want to change something, your new spelling won’t be compatible with the rest of the world. If you make the spelling match the pronunciation, you need to choose one dialect. Which one though? Oh, I’m sure that decision won’t be controversial in the slightest and everyone will be totally ok with the outcome.

Predictability is key. As long as thouse double letters don’t misbehave, this system should work just fine.

Just from that table alone, I can tell that there are many “collisions” (to borrow a cryptography term) where single letter can map to multiple sounds or vice versa. As long as the rules are clear, you don’t necessarily even need spelling bees.

That’s pretty cool. Tell me more about your system. Is it fully consistent, or only partially?

Yeah, I think sonic shorthand sounds good. Or maybe auditory? It even helps me remember absurd spellings like gothi.

The actual pronunciation and correct spelling may have some convoluted mechanism connecting the two, but I don’t need to worry about layers of history, a list of exceptions, language of origin and other things. I just memorize a particular sound and generate the correct spelling based on that. I guess that’s a shorthand of sorts. Not the shortest route really, but doing it properly is way beyond my memorization skills.