krylon

Yes, but the single-floppy live system with a desktop and a browser came much later. ;-)

Oooooh, that's a blast from the past! I used to use LiteStep for about 6-9 months in 2000, before I started using GNU/Linux.

At the end, I had really beautiful (to my eyes, back then) and very functional desktop, but something went wrong when I made backup before installing SuSE Linux 7.0, so months of vigorous customizing were lost. :-(

But it was fun while it lasted. There were a number of alternative desktop shells in the Windows 95/98 era.

I'm a little sad to see i386 go, but I understand the reasoning. Lots of Linux distros have gone down the same route, and I don't there hasn't been a new PC sold in the last 15 years that wasn't 64-bit.

But I am happy to read about the unification of freebsd-update and pkg.

Other than that, I don't find anything in the release notes to excite me, just more of the same goodness. Which is fine by me, I appreciate the reliability.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible! <3

I vaguely recall there was a case a few years back where a patient had been cured of HIV. But they had effectively their entire immune system wiped out by radiation therapy or something along those lines, and then received a bone marrow transplant from a healthy donor. So not something that could easily be replicated in many patients.

Still, that is big news, considering how many people have died from HIV, and how many still live with the virus. Treatment has come a long way - I remember how it was practically a death penalty in the 1990s; but a complete cure would be so much better than depending on medication for the rest of one's life. I don't think this is the breakthrough, but it is proof that search for a cure is not futile.

Stars of the Lid are sooooo good, yes! Their entire catalog is amazing.

Carbon Based Lifeforms are amazing.

Sleep by Max Richter is great (and very long)

Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore is very very sleepy Jazz (they have released more albums, but this one is my favorite by a wide margin)

Long Ambients 1 & 2 by Moby - he was kind enough to make them available for download free of charge, too

Under Wires and Search Lights by Marconi Union

In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

Pretty much anything by Sigur Rós. It's not strictly speaking instrumental, but the lyrics are Icelandic, which I don't speak, so it's close enough

Cocteau Twins recorded many very ambient-ish albums. Not instrumental, but the "lyrics" are mostly glossolalia, so not distracting (at least for me).

I love this album. I often listen to it when programming, Ambient (or more generally: calm, instrumental music) helps me focus.

I run OpenBSD on two old laptops at home, two virtual machines, and one old former SOHO router/firewall appliance. So far I've upgrade all but one laptop, and once again I am impressed how painless the process is these days. And how reliable. One laptop has been running OpenBSD since 6.8-ish, and it's never given me any problems.

Thank you to everyone who made this possible!

I used to use Fossil years ago, and I was happy with it. Then for work reasons, I had to start using git, and magit was what made switch from Fossil for my private stuff, too. I almost never resort to the git's CLI directly these days.

The only pain point is that last time I checked (2020), it was painfully slow on Windows, but as I haven't touched Windows (other than doing a bit of tech support for my parents) since then, that is not a problem for me.

I vaguely recall looking at the slides from a talk on OpenBSD's approach to this topic, which came down to (paraphrasing from hazy memory) "if it can be disabled, people will disable it; if it needs to be configured, people won't configure it".

I do use the phone for audible, but I started both uses before I had a smart phone (I was very late to the game), and I am a creature of habit. Plus the netbook has a bigger display, more storage, and a real keyboard (again, creature of habit).

Thank you very much!

One sits in my bathroom so I can browse random Wikipedia articles while I'm, uh, busy. The other one sits on my nightstand and plays audiobooks/podcasts when I'm going to sleep.

So nothing critical. But something they are still good at, and being very small makes them a natural fit for these use cases.

As an owner of two i386 systems (both netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270), that run Debian, I am a little sad. I understand the reasoning, and I won't deny it is a very niche platform by now. But I had hoped Debian, with a history of supporting a wide range of platforms, would keep i386 going for a while longer.

Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)

EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.

Such is life, yes.

OTOH, yes.

OTOH, when coding, I consider FILE to be effectively opaque in the sense that it probably is not portable, and that the implementers might change it at any time.

I am reminded of this fine article by Raymond Chen, which covers a similar situation on Windows way back when: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031015-00/?p=42...

They're probably using a 3270 emulator on a PC, but that emulator will still display 16 colors.

I really appreciate this service.

Worth pointing out, maybe, that there is an emacs package, too - more than one, actually, the one I am using (occasionally, at least) is https://github.com/cjennings/emacs-wttrin which is available from melpa.

My knowledge of most of these is superficial or seriously outdated. Particularly OCaml, Haskell, and Rust (AND C++!!!) are not languages I would claim to really "know". When I was younger, I tried to get to know as many languages as possible, at least in passing, but I have not used many of these in a professional context.

I did... let me think, it's been a while... C, Python, C++, Java, Common Lisp, Ada, Erlang. Also OCaml, Ruby, Haskell, Emacs Lisp, Lua, Rust, but I don't think any of those ever reached a working state.

When I learned programming, one of my first programs was a (rather lame) attempt to check the Goldbach conjecture. Over the years, as I learned more programming languages (first attempt was in C), it became my go-to program to get acquainted with a new language (for a few years, anyway). I never got very far, but it was fun to see how much performance I could squeeze out of the programming in various languages.

So this tickles my nostalgia bone strongly. And maybe makes me feel a tiny bit jealous. But more excited than envious, really, to see people are still working on this problem.

Respect! This is really cool!

It's fun, I got the confetti! <3

"The same procedure as every year" - the repetition, the ritual is a big part of it.

There was supposed to be one talk about an attempt to re-vitalize a Guile-powered Emacs. I am not sure if it's in there somewhere or not (but I haven't looked yet).

I imagine Emacs gaining native compilation capability took some pressure off that. But the appeal of scripting Emacs in languages other than Elisp still has some appeal, I think. Scheme or Lua would very nice for that purpose.

EDIT: There it is - https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/

IF I understand this correctly, this is something that has been missing from the ARM ecosystem. A standardized platform as with the IBM PC and its successors in the x86 world could lead to the creation of some cool machines, hopefully with good support by both Windows and the Linux/BSD systems.

But it's probably too early to tell.

I've been on board when it was called Firebird (before someone noticed that name was already claimed by a RDBMS project, so it was renamed to Firefox), and I still am.

It's been a while. 20 years ago, what Firefox offered to me was a) tabbed browsing, and b) an ad blocker that was a total game changer; some sites back then were so overloaded with annoying ads, popups, blinking, etc, Futurama made fun of it.

Let us hope that 20 years from now, the Firefox is still fierce.

I have been a Thunderbird user since very shortly after its birth. I don't claim to have been there on the first day, but it wasn't long after that. (crazy to think it has been this long - our perception of time is weird). The stand-out feature in its early days was the built-in junk mail filter that worked pretty well, and not being Outlook helped a lot.

In later years, the lack of support for MS Exchange was a drawback. I was a macOS user for a few years, and I needed to access Exchange for work email. MacOS allowed me to access both email and calendar when Thunderbird did not. There was a plugin, but it cost money[1]. Evolution did support Exchange well enough, but it was not as pleasant to use as either Thunderbird or Mail.app.

When I went back to GNU/Linux in 2017, I tried Mailspring for a while, which I liked for its similarity to Apple's Mail.app - but something or other didn't work the way I liked it, so I returned to Thunderbird.

I am glad it is still here, after all those years. I no longer need Exchange support, and with that nuisance gone, Thunderbird is still my favorite email client. There might be better ones, but it feels like switching my hairdresser or dentist. I feel at home with it, it works well for my needs.

So, Thank you to everyone who has made it real.

[1] - that is okay, but I was/am on a tight budget

Honest question: Is this satire?