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omnibrain

11,157 karma · joined March 20, 2013

I'm getting old and wired.
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omnibrain··on .name Termination
Funnily I did exactly this, so the {lastname}.name is now legacy for me and nobody else of my family ever picked up the offer to have {firstname}@{lastname}.name adresses anyway. Later (but before my name change) I managed to secure {lastname}.de which I stupidly missed during the early internet due to being a stupid teenager with stupid convictions. If I had secured this back in the day I think they would happily started using it but now they are all too settled in their provider/free webmail addresses.

Nice twist: The father of my wife owned {newlastname}.de since the dawn of the internet. So I'm still fine on that front. ;)

omnibrain··on .name Termination
About 20 year ago I registered {lastname}.name and have dozens third level domains below it. So there are "privately owned" second level domains under .name for quite some time...
omnibrain··on 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
EVE Online.
omnibrain··on Why OOP Exists
"Object thinking" by David West was eye opening about this back in the day. The gist is to model the objects not along the line of real world entities, but along the line of "behaviour" like you mention.
omnibrain··on Stop Making TUIs
Yes, stop making TUIs. Make GUIs in Terminals!

It’s ridiculous how far we have fallen behind the Terminal GUIs from the early 90ies. Look at the Turbo Pascal IDE and business apps built with it. Windows, window management, scrolling in windows, rich dialogs. Everything there. While many modern TUIs are just lists with numbers you can select. Everything is pretty rudimentary

I was missing a real terminal GUI library for some software I built. The rudimentary libraries did not work for me.

That‘s why I took Free Vision (the Turbo Vision derivative for Free Pascal) and ported it with the help of Claude Code over to modern Delphi, then modernised the object system and added lots of features and from there we ported it to go.

There are still lots of bugs and oversights (some caused by me not really knowing how original TV worked) that I fix as I go along using it for real projects.

https://github.com/oldwired/fv-delphi-modern https://github.com/oldwired/fv-go

omnibrain··on Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage
They had bet 100% on it killing PA-RISC and DEC Alpha. They ported HP-UX, OpenVMS and NonStop to it. All 3 of them were tangled up in long running enterprise and government contracts.

They since discontinued HP-UX, offloaded OpenVMS and ported NonStop to x86-64.

omnibrain··on Lego building instructions through time
I just built one of those plant sets. I'm use to that modern instructions just place 1 or two bricks per step. But these plant sets took the cake. You had to build identical submodules. From the picture at the box you could see that it's essentially 8 times the same submodule. But the way the manual presented it was, that you build one submodule 2 times, fit it to the base, then build it 2 times again (same illustration!) and put them on the other side of the base. Then you start building the top and build the same submodule 2 times again, fit it to the top and then 2 times again and fit it to the other side of the top.
omnibrain··on Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
IIRC the Apple website used to use (client side image maps) them. But I suspect that was Mai my so they could do some research where users actually click on their screen.
omnibrain··on I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of
It's the shell around the core.
omnibrain··on John Ternus to become Apple CEO
German here and me and my wife almost exclusively use Apple Maps, mainly because it looks and feels nicer. The differences in navigation are miniscule, but if we want to really check the traffic before we start we do a quick glance at Google maps. One difference in navigation we noticed is, that Apple Maps gives some small local streets - those just one revel above "Feldwege" (agricultural/forestry roads) - more weight than they should have. They are not really "single track" (almost unheard of in Germany) but come close, with no lane delineation dashes, etc.
omnibrain··on German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function
The German ID card (Personalausweis) supports certificates and communication via NFC. I really don’t understand what’s all this about?
omnibrain··on WSL Manager
Yes, I since embraced pwsh for terminal stuff on Windows. For everything else I switched back to proper VMs or remote hosts.
omnibrain··on No right to relicense this project
Nobody that is not already writing (L)GPL licensed software wants to pull LGPL licensed libraries into his software. I'm not a lawyer. If you have it in separate object artefacts that you can dynamically link to, you should be fine. Everything else may be more difficult.

See what FFmpeg writes on this topic: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

omnibrain··on The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)
> It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

You can't really blame MS that around the same time screen manufacturers started to switch to 16:9 for cost reasons and cheap laptops all only offered a 1366x786 resolution.

omnibrain··on The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)
> people who've already come to grips with the app

They would, or should, be using keyboard shortcuts anyway.

omnibrain··on The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)
> 2010 was my favorite Office UI.

Mine too. Office 2010 was what made me switch back to Windows after using Linux and OpenOffice for years. I found the ribbons to be perfect for my use of Office. They usually automatically focused on the task at hand. Everything else was just a click away. Advanced stuff stayed in the menu. And, at least for me, it helped discoverability of features.

omnibrain··on Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
Try reading Masters of Deception first, to get in the right mood.
omnibrain··on A History of Haggis (2019)
One of the worst things about Brexit for me in mainland Europe is that it became very difficult to obtain real, proper Haggis and Stornoway Black Pudding.
omnibrain··on East Germany balloon escape
It's interesting that this is a serious movie by the director Michael 'Bully' Herbig, who is generally known for bad taste comedies, full of clichees about race and sexuality.
omnibrain··on Scott Adams has died
His explanation why he endorsed Hillary Clinton was pretty lunatic though.
omnibrain··on Unifi Travel Router
How does it compare to the PiKVM?
omnibrain··on Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices
I have fond memories of Publisher. We used it to layout our school newspaper back in the 90ies. I even considered going into the DTP field as a career and did a small internship. But I soon realised that while I can easily master the technical aspect and learn all the rules, my "design work" just doesn't "pop".

Nonetheless, for years after, I was the goto layout guy if a relative needed something done. I soon stopped using Publisher after I "found" a copy of QuarkXPress.

omnibrain··on The fall of Labubus and the mush of modern internet trends
> ?

exactly

omnibrain··on OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation
Morrowind had (and still has) a huge modding scene. Especially because it's even more mod friendly as its successor. A big plus back in the day was that the Construction Kit came with the original game disks. So you had direct access to the real dev tools. Like Unreal came with UnrealEd but with access to an Open World RPG instead of "just" a shooter.

Nexus Mods started as portal for Morrowind mods.

omnibrain··on Asus Announces October Availability of ProArt Display 8K PA32KCX
Sadly it's just 16:9. Not even 16:10.

I now run 2 3:2 Displays (BenQ RD280U) at home (more in the office, but I never go there) and love my vertical real estate. (No, portrait mode won't work out)

omnibrain··on WorldGrow: Generating Infinite 3D World
> Minecraft is of course the poster child for very large worlds of interest these days.

Minecraft used to create very interesting worlds until they changed the algorithm and the landscapes became plain and boring. It took them about 10 year until the Caves and Cliffs Update to make the world generation interesting again.

omnibrain··on Asbestosis
I played with pelleted cattle feed as a child in the early 90ies. I still remeber the smell. Not sure if this contained meat and bone meal but it's in the back of my head ever since.
omnibrain··on Sandhill cranes have adopted a Canada gosling
I live near a lake with lots of Swans. There is always one solitary one who is just into threatening everybody. Even outside breeding season and with no kids around. But I suspect he wasn't born this way, but some kids may have hit him with rocks or similar.
omnibrain··on iPad Pro with M5 chip
They will probably keep the other iPads at 60Hz displays in future. I don't need the other Pro features.
omnibrain··on GNU Health
> Can't view his reddit history as I'm in the UK

What does this mean?

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