apricot

My parents lived in the countryside in the middle of the "dark triangle". They went without power for about 30 days in the middle of winter. They lived in the basement around the wood stove. Dad was an obstetrician, and Mom was his secretary. They kept the home office open and he examined his patients using a flashlight, then candlelight when the batteries ran out.

> Yeah, imagine if this applied to trucks. No one could use one for non truck bed usage.

John Deere has entered the chat.

You want a space cadet keyboard: http://xahlee.info/kbd/lmi-cadr_keyboard.html

My institution's administration does this. Every message from them is typed in Word, then attached to an email whose body says "Please read the attached message". They do this for every message, no matter how trivial.

I asked them why they do this, but haven't received a reply, perhaps because my question was in an attached gzipped Postscript document.

A great read for a lazy Sunday morning. The author's tastes in programming languages agree with my own, and he's defending them in an eloquent way so it's an article I read drinking coffee and nodding my head.

Also describing Miranda as "Ugly Haskell's beautiful mom", and invoking old Hindi movie censorship to belittle static type checking is just mmph. <Italian chef's kiss>

Baka! You're the dummy, Shinji! Now get in the robot!

You wrote: "If we removed everything that confused or angered people, it would be a full-time job"

If I rephrase it as "Let's keep the Nazi pictures that confuse and anger people because it would be too much work to remove them", does that help you understand why people aren't happy with your decision?

That insane bug was reported many times, and every time the developers reply that they won't fix it, it's our workflow that's broken.

Are we sure GNOME developers aren't some kind of agents provocateurs working against free software?

Comparing the GTK File chooser dialog to a clogged toilet is an insult to clogged toilets.

That's why my reflection email always includes at least one question about some detail of the statement I want to confirm.

"Per our conversation of this morning when you asked me to delete all our backups, do you want me to erase the disks or should I also roll over them with the company steamroller?"

Nice! The world needs more literate assembler programs.

Answer to the title question but not the second one: I decided to go into computer science after reading "The Turing Omnibus" by A.K. Dewdney. It was like my brain was let loose in a candy store. I must have been insufferable that summer, always talking about Boolean logic and perceptrons and Turing machines and NP-completeness.

Answer to the second question but not the title one: "The Friendly Orange Glow" by Brian Dear is a well-written history of the PLATO computer system and, most importantly, of the community that grew around it.

Could be. Certainly the problem is not unique to mine. Maybe they eventually fixed it, or maybe it only shows up on some batches, and I've been unlucky.

I want to emphasize that this is my only complaint regarding the Pinebook Pro. Everything else is really good, actually much better than could be expected for the price.

I did. I also applied the software patches I found when googling the problem, such as https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9094. It made the trackpad go from unusable to really annoying, which is progress.

Some people are looking into it: https://github.com/akirakyle/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater/t...

I'll tell them mine if they tell me theirs.

I love everything about my Pinebook Pro except the trackpad, which suffers from lag. Not much, just enough to be really annoying.

Outside of education (where your lobbyists can ensure they are required by all students), there really are very few use cases for a complex graphing calculator. If you have access to a computer, Octave, Maxima, and Python (or any non-free equivalent) will run rings around any graphing calculator. For field use, the only point in favor of a graphing calculator as opposed to a phone app seems to be ruggedness.

Fun fact: English isn't my native language and I learned programming before becoming fluent in English. I believed for a long time that 'else' was just a shorter alternative for 'otherwise'. I used to say things like "I'll have apple juice if you've got some, else I'll have orange juice."

Most buyers of early scientific calculators bought them to replace their slide rule. Early TI calculators had model numbers of SR-xx, which stood for "slide rule".

And there I go, reading it for the umpteenth time.

That you're not Knuth, but I suspect you knew that already.

If not, um... retroactive spoiler warning? Sorry.

Say, have you heard of that book, The Three Knuths of Ypsilanti?

Can confirm, nandgame was a hit with my 12-year-old.

I had one of those for years, then I switched to the analog MQ24, also by Casio, after realizing I liked looking at angles more than 7-digit numbers.

"Therefore if MacDonald's farm animals ultimately have long names they should make slightly shorter noises."

I totally read this in Knuth's voice, and this was made easier because of the absence of commas after "Therefore" and "names".

Thank you very much for that.

I have a 12-year-old. The killer app for learning programming for him has been Minecraft bots. He's on Discord with a group of friends from all over the world, and they're learning to program by writing bots in Javascript. Those bots watch what happens on the server and react. His current project is writing a bot that can play connect-4 with the user. He's slowly reinventing the minimax algorithm and having a lot of fun doing it.

GNOME suddenly changing things for the worse, breaking muscle memory and making previously easy things difficult or impossible, while tone-deaf developers intone the "it's not broken, your workflow's broken" mantra in the background, has become a regular thing. It's like living in hurricane country and accepting you'll need to replace the windows from time to time.

I really wish they'd stop doing this, though.

Home printers suck because home computer buyers will always buy the cheapest printer, so it's a race to the bottom.

> That's another way to make your brain work, use a terrible font.

And suddenly my complex analysis prof who wrote his exams in Comic Sans is vindicated!

> I've never seen a website with a specific shut down time

Me neither, but I think it's a wonderful idea.