hisham_hm

hisham_hm, 4 months ago to random

My planned schedule for the upcoming days:

Feb 1 - Amsterdam
Feb 2-4 - Brussels @ #fosdem
Feb 5-8 - Ljubljana
Feb 9-11 - Paris
Feb 12 - back home in Porto Alegre

hisham_hm, 4 months ago to random

Stop Calling Locked-In Platforms "Walled Gardens" Challenge 2024

hisham_hm, 4 months ago to random

Confession time:

Once I almost added a terminal version of Tetris as an Easter egg in htop. 🧵

hisham_hm, 3 months ago to random

Every six months or so I go into a search to see if there's a way to make the GTK "Save As..." dialog in Firefox to stop switching focus away from the filename I'm typing (you know, to choose what I want it to save as) and into a popup search field.

If this was on Gobo I'd be sure I messed something up when building GTK, but this is Firefox 122.0 from the Ubuntu Snap. Trying to keep things "standard" in this box (and I don't want to recompile a customized Firefox on every browser update...)

hisham_hm, 3 months ago to random

Argument: Giving it the stupid name "Blu-ray" was an industry self-own that was just another nail in physical media's coffin.

Counter-argument: "HD-DVD" was the better name.

Counter-counter-argument: "HD-DVD" was a terrible name because it was misleading, as it wasn't really a DVD. Hah, I have a great idea! HD-DVDs should be double-sided, with a regular DVD on one side! That will definitely win the format war, where's my time machine?

hisham_hm, 1 month ago to random

My home state in southern Brazil is suffering with heavy rains that are causing floods, deaths and destruction.

My city, Porto Alegre, is flooded right now. The river is at its highest level ever, surpassing the flood of 1941. (Last boost has a video.)

I live close to the river. It's been raining for the whole week. The flood has reached my street tonight. I'm fine, and I have water, power and internet, but I expect to the stranded in my apartment for the next couple of days.

hisham_hm, 2 months ago to random

Yet another vulnerability that I'm not affected by because the software in my Gobo box is too old: happily running xz 5.2.x there.

Thinking of Ivan Illich and considering a variation on Wirth's Law. If by any chance new versions add more bugs faster than they fix old bugs (and ever-growing issue trackers are definitely a thing...), then perhaps older software might be more stable than newer software and, if you don't need new features, then upgrading may not be always the right answer?

hisham_hm, 11 months ago to random

WebAssembly is cool and all, but it's depressing that the future of the web is binary.

So many people who grew up in the Web 1.0 era of HTML and JavaScript got their start exploring code with the "View source..." menu option.

I know Web 2.0 virtually killed the source-nature of the Web already, but Wasm is the final nail in the coffin.

hisham_hm, 8 months ago to random

is there an about: setting in Firefox where I can ask it to please never ever offer to translate any pages?

hisham_hm, 9 months ago to random

People who use Dvorak/non-"standard" keyboards:

do you use QWERTY keyboards on your phone?

(I do, because it seems to me there's no benefit to changing since I type on the phone with two fingers anyway...)

hisham_hm, 7 months ago to random

I'd watch the hell out of a retrocomputing YouTube channel focused on late-90s/early-00s Linux.

"Let's setup AfterStep widgets on RedHat 5.2!"

hisham_hm, 4 months ago to random

testing whether Air France's free "messaging" wifi includes Mastodon

hisham_hm, 2 months ago to random

Announcing a new release of LuaRocks, the #LuaLang package manager <https://luarocks.org/>, and the day has finally arrived when I can make this:

hisham_hm, 1 year ago to random

I'm starting to get sick of the stock type of "lo-fi beats" used as background music in every YouTube video, whether it's Karolina Zebrowska discussing a 1930s style flat renovation or a video esaay about Gen Z humor. Lo-fi beats have become the elevator muzak of our time.

hisham_hm, 1 month ago to random

How spoofable is an email From: field nowadays?

I know that back in the days of POP3 and unencrypted email you could write anything in From: and one would have to cross-check with the other headers to see if the message at least went through the domain in the address.

I believe nowadays big servers like gmail are stricter in the email they accept (to the point of rejecting valid emails, which is super annoying, I know), but is there a standard in check that foo@bar.com comes from bar.com?

hisham_hm, 8 months ago to random

What monitor resolution do you need to be able to draw the individual R, G and B thingies that CRT monitors are made of, and what brightness and refresh rate do you need to replicate their glow patterns?

Are we there yet?

hisham_hm, 1 year ago to random

ChatGPT: brought to you by people who can't distinguish between "intelligence" and "speaking convincingly", that is, venture capitalists

hisham_hm, 4 months ago to linux

is there any #NES #emulator that still builds on #Linux without a ton of dependencies? (in a perfect world, one that would depend on SDL2 alone or close to that)

hisham_hm, 1 month ago to random

I'm still waiting for that Russian keyboard design where each key was a tiny OLED screen to become a mainstream reality.

hisham_hm, 10 months ago to random

I'm drunk and I love you all

hisham_hm, 23 days ago to random

I'm back home, two weeks later.

Piles of destroyed furniture in front of every house in my neighborhood, and the stench of the leftover sludge still in the streets in spite of all the cleaning that is still ongoing.

hisham_hm, 13 days ago to random

"Unfortunately, to maintain C++98 compatibility, the C++ interface of librdkafka is not quite object-oriented"

Now that's a take I wasn't expecting. Is this a mainstream opinion nowadays, that one can't do OOP with old-school C++? I must be completely out of the loop as I can't see why that would be the case. I could see all sorts of arguments for using Modern C++, but lack of OOP is a new one to me.

hisham_hm, 2 months ago to random

how I know I am a pleb: I have never ever used a SCSI device.

hisham_hm, 1 month ago to random

I've never really used a trackball. I mean, I've played with them in kiosks and whatnot, but I never sat down to actually use a computer with a trackball.

Does anybody here use a trackball in a non-retro-computing environment? What are your impressions?

I'm happy with my regular mouse, just curious.

hisham_hm, 9 days ago to random

I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that since 3blue1brown open-sourced his library for producing his YouTube visualizations, various other channels produce videos with looks identical to his.

The reuse of his code to generate math animations is cool, but by sticking to the default settings (colors, fonts, text animations), people are effectively ripping off his channel's entire visual identity, and that sucks.