When I was a kid in the 1980s, it was quite common for “My friends” books to make their rounds on the schoolyard. These books consisted of two page questionnaires for your buddies to fill out so you could remember them all. One of the more common questions was “What are your hobbies” and I can’t remember when I started putting “learning” in there but I sure did. Rather early in my life I noticed that learning new things was a lot of fun for me! Reading up on things in my parents’ lexicon…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1154/why-drawing-tablet-brands-wont-collaborate-on-linux-floss-drivers

Limiting myself to 9 because that's what the format was, but I could prolly go WAY harder Last week, the 9 Steam Games I Want to Spread page was going around all over socials and I wanted to do one, but instead of "make an image with it and social media post it" I kinda figured it would be great blogging vector since: I'm nothing if not verbose about shit I like and want to share with others The world is on fucking fire right now and we all could use some good vibes The only real downside here…

Here is my daily must-do list. It is additional to my to-do list. Frankly, I think I have over committed and need to cut back. Study French through Duolingo Walk 10,000 steps Write a blog post for the LivingKindfully blog (In case you wonder, it is this blog) Study for the Associateship of Asian Institute of Insurance (AAii) Level 2 certification Visit or call at least one potential customer Visit or call at least one current customer Update/ share one post on LinkedIn (Started on 20th June)

Here ya go, folks — check it out here. Thanks to the aforementioned RAM and memory apocalypse happening due to so much of the current pipeline of RAM and storage being pre-purchased for AI data centers, the pricing is a tough pill to swallow. You’ve got the base Steam Machine, 512GB of storage, no controller, for $1,049. If you want to add the Steam Controller (normally $99), that combo is $1,128. Want 2TB of storage? $1,349. Want that one with a controller? $1,428. But at least the 2TB models…

I don’t know if you play video games, but it’s likely you enjoy games in one form or another. Maybe you play a cozy game on your phone, a card game on your work computer (definitely only during breaks), or a cute adventure game on your gaming console. And table top games count, too, of course! NoteThere is no such thing as a real gamer or not, only gamers and gatekeepers. I mostly play on PlayStation, and a bit on PC, but also play a lot of sudoku on my phone (yes I am 400 years old), and the…

I can't stop thinking about this stupid interaction I had while playing an online game with strangers. For context, my username is very obviously feminine and I don't hide the fact that I'm a woman when talking to strangers. Somehow, in the chat, the topic of operating systems came up and I mentioned that I use Linux. This man proceeded to tell me that I must be a man because women don't use Linux. It might just about be the stupidest thing I ever heard. As if I'm only capable of thinking about…

On this page You can now pre-order Valve's Steam Machine! Fortuitous timing as I drafted this as a follow up to my post from December where I wrote about using Linux for PC gaming. At that time Steam ran well on my desktop and I chipped away at lighter games on the Deck. I ended that post by saying: I don't think I'll buy a Steam Machine, but I'm very happy it will exist. I've been testing out dual booting Bazzite on my desktop and I'd love to replace that with SteamOS proper. If I can pick up…

I don't need to tell you that generative AI has been shoehorned into just about every tech product and user interface lately1. Microsoft has been guilty of some of the most egregious examples, such as the inclusion of Copilot in Notepad and Calculator on Windows 11. But I think I've found one that's even worse. A member of my team at work has recently received a promotion and will therefore be moving to a new team. She will really be missed, and so my team has decided to put together a virtual…

After CalAction I wanted to experiment a bit with SpriteKit and try to make a small game for iPhone. I don't usually play any games on my iPhone myself, because most are overrun with garbage like ads and loot boxes. With Burst I wanted to do things differently. The bubble shooter genre (if you can call it that) has a lot of games in the App Store currently, but again most are either overrun with ads and scammy in-app purchases, or they haven't been maintained in many years. Burst has zero ads,…

In my “Open sourcing a quiz maker” blog post, I frame my quiz maker as a step toward what could be something better: a script that you can use, but where I see a vision for something more robust and reliable.This got me thinking about how blog posts can, in many ways, be a starting point. A blog post can start a discussion, help build community around an idea, be a written representation of one’s foundational thinking on a topic, contribute an idea to the commons that needs further development,…

Photo by Garonzi Stefania via Wikimedia CommonsA pizza wheel — also known as a rolling pizza cutter or just a “pizza cutter” — is not a great tool for cutting pizza. I know that’s a statement that’s going to anger a lot of people when I say it, but it’s true. I’m hardly alone in saying this — Wirecutter, Eater.com, and plenty of others have noted the same drawbacks. But anyway, let’s go through the many reasons why pizza cutters are not fit for the job they’re named after.First, it’s hard to…

This week I bought an iPod Classic 4th Generation (Mono) and I’m planning on daily driving it. It might seem a strange thing to do, but hear me out.

Yesterday we saw the new play by our comrades in Antrakt7: Fairfly. It’s a play written by the Catalan author Joan Yago which tells the story of four white-collar workers who, upon getting the news of their potential layoff, decide to “change the world.” Let me briefly summarize the story here. If you don’t want to get spoilers, skip this paragraph. Santi, Irene, Martha and Pere are white-collar workers employed by a small baby food manufacturer. The company decides to lay off an uncertain…

Link: https://derekhanson.blog/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/(Via rendezvous with cassidoo.)I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.Derek Hanson digs into the numbers: The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which…

Time is a precious resource for open source maintainers, especially if you aren’t doing it as part of paid work. The constant churn of changing development tools steals a huge chunk of that time. For example, I’m running NoFlo on a daily basis, but do changes to the library itself quite rarely. There were nearly six years between releases recently. The other day I wanted to add some functionality, and ran immediately to a huge set of issues with the development tooling we use. Basically…

It seems like the older child totoro doesn’t get enough attention. I made this to help remedy that.I actually carved this before the Jiji stamp, but am just getting around to posting it. The detail on this one was more challenging than the carvings that preceded it. I was still using the Speedball tool, and did not have the smaller 1mm gouge yet.I used the Tsukineko VersaFine Clair Blue Belle stamp pad for this print.There is an 18-second totoro imprinting video on YouTube.

So me and Cellar were talking about how to roll dice using cards and I figured that if I didn't write it down, I would forget it. These are our conclusions.1 "But Havoc, why? I own dice!" Maybe you like cards, maybe you forgot your dice at home, maybe your kid or dog or sub ate your dice, I don't know your life. Stop hectoring me. For this to work, separate your deck into one with just faces and one with just numbers. Remove the jokers. d2 - Draw a card, red suits are 1, blacks are 2. Can also…

Have you ever wondered how best to summarise your character as a member of the blogging community? If so, this quiz is for you! Answer the following questions to find out which blogger archetype best suits you. Question 1 When you are spending time outdoors, what do you like to do best? Watch the world go by. Stay busy with activities and friends. Take a book and read. Go to something new (art exhibit, concert, cafe, etc.). Mentally organise my week. Question 2 What do you do when you are in…

Ever since I got my first mechanical keyboard, I’ve been able to turn caps lock, one of the most useless functions on a keyboard, into something actually useful. The keyboard came with a switch on the back that allowed it to act as another control key. It was great! Made for an easier ctrl+s shortcut since my left pinky already sat next to the caps lock key. Been using it for 12 years now. It’s basically second nature. Unfortunately, when I got newer version of this keyboard, they swapped the…

A while back I read The Last Quiet Thing, a fantastic piece by Terry Godier, a piece about a twelve-dollar Casio watch compared to an Apple Watch, and why one of them is a product and the other is a relationship. I've been thinking about it ever since, keeping my eye out for single-use devices that just get out of the way. That's how I ended up with an Xteink X4 in my pocket.It's a tiny pocketable e-reader, smaller than a cell phone, with an E-Ink screen and no agenda beyond displaying books.…

I just read an article on ExtremeTech that the new Windows Media Player uses 3.5x more RAM than its predecessor, and it now charges users for third party codecs. This is asinine. What are you doing Microsoft?? I am trying to imagine what the managers at the helm are doing here. There's only two possibilities: Either they are completely blind to this issue and are asleep at the wheel, or they are aware of the requirements and have actively signed off on a worse product for reasons that are…

I recently moved this website away from NextJS as the static generation engine. The site was working, but it had become heavier than what I needed. Most pages are static. Most content is markdown. The build was doing a lot of framework work for a problem that had become much smaller than the framewo…

Bubbles —a site I am increasingly fond of as it’s turning up some wonderful posts and sites and people— was recently mentioned on Hackernews. I’ve followed Hackernews for a long time as a way to keep some form of view on the tech world (to which I am adjacent) but only check it every week or so. So I missed the moment when it happened, but there were signs… Can you spot when Bubbles got popular and then direct a fair chunk of traffic to my blog?? According to Benjamin Behnke, the Bubbles…

I bought my laptop for 350€ on Backmarket. I bought it because it was a decent price and looked sturdy. Well, actually this price wasn't for nothing. Ok you need to picture it. When I turn my computer on, it makes a buzzing sound, the kind of sounds old PCs used to make. When I hold it from the wrong corner, or put it a certain way on my lap, the whole thing freezes and needs to be rebooted with the power button. A laptop that is, indeed, not to be put on lap. One time, I don't know what…

So many things happened since the first day I released Town Square. I have been shipping a lot because people were genuinely having fun with it and naturally started imagining what else would make it even better. They were not just asking for features. They were playing with it, enjoying it, and saying things like how nice it would be if Town Square had this or that. There is now more room for people to make their own square feel like their own. You can customize colors, change the number of…

There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world. Most of them are cyans. On screens we live a life starved of cyans. It is shocking when you see one in person. They seem…

Twin Peaks fans are a lucky bunch. Whether printed in magazines, compiled in oral histories, or presented on stage at fan conventions, just about every cast member has shared unique memories of life on the set. But as much as I love to hear from the actors, what I long for are stories from the... The post Dave Robinson – The Process of Twin Peaks’ Prop Master & Painter appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Don't worry, this post is not about zits, but something comparably annoying: Zen and Zed. One is a browser and the other an editor. Even writing this, I don't know which is which. Their names and icons are so similar that I keep getting them confused. I couldn't take it anymore; I had to take drastic measures. That's why I replaced the icon of the Zen browser application with a nice-looking e logo. Here's how to do it on macOS: Close Zen. Create or download an alternative icon. Highlight the…

Anyone is capable of creating pictures more aesthetically pleasing than any renaissance artist. Cameras made sure of that. This led to the many attempts to redefine what art is, as it could no longer be defined as just a "pretty picture". In 1961, Piero Manzoni takes a dump in a can and calls it art. Merda d’artista is one of the most well-known works of modern art, and it’s only one of countless attempts at defining what art is. AI art is a joke. When AI is used as a substitute for human…