system7rocks

Couple this with the fact that many Silicon Valley/tech nerds are in a bit of a bubble, as has existed for a long time... And we are losing more and more news outlets who can critique these giant, strange companies. I am aware other fields of research do cross-disciplinary conversations from time to time, for example have biotech researchers share dialogue with human rights philosophers, religious scholars, etc to think carefully about the purpose and ethics behind work being done and its potential impact. Is that happening within tech?

And we must protect it at all costs.

I love Firefox.

We need more browsers like Firefox - more open source, more open to standards that improve the web, that can improve our browsing experience.

Truth! I bought my Apple Watch so I could skateboard with my AirPods in and not lose connection. But the connection is a pain to make happen, not intuitive, and sometimes just doesn’t work. I like the watch for trying to keep me reminded to stay fit and active, but I have been considering just not ever buying another one and going without. I turned off all notifications on it because it’s useless.

When I met my future wife, the first thing she did was to check if my personal homepage was fully validated. It was. And we are celebrating 20 raucous years this year!

These articles, over and over again, are what have made Hacker News one of my regular go tos for amazing ideas and creative ingenuity.

Wow. This is the golden age for classic Macs.

Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.

Interesting.

I've never quite found that Linux is more optimized on battery-powered machines for energy savings, even though supposedly there is a lot of room to tweak and optimize settings -- from selecting a low resource window manager/DE to turning off various services to switching up power management utilities. But this does seem like an approach that might produce that kind of fruit?

Wow. Just wow, I will give this a run on my old iMac G4 later today. Very cool to see this progress, and I am a big fan of NetSurf.

So grateful for all of the dedicated coders and hackers in this space to keep our old Macs relevant and useable.

PowerFox has tweaks especially for Leopard and Snow Leopard and Mac-quality of life features. You can also try Basilisk, which is the upstream version without those tweaks.

Momiji is another variant targeting Mac OS Mavericks and other targets with ESR Firefox fixes. Works pretty well!

Finally, there is work being done to revive Safari for Mavericks and work to bring Netsurf to MacOS 9.

I love these books. I would like to own every single one of them, as crystallizations of a moment. But let's be real -- some of these books are trash.

This story remains pertinent.

Can we imagine a world where we can question everything? Where we have the means to do so?

The Lottery parallels plenty of other works - of the banality of evil. Of how we can turn to cruelty through our traditions and patterns. But can we imagine a future where we create space to ask questions? Constantly?

One of my favorite things to do is update the firmware of devices. I know it is often ill-advised because if it is working fine, why risk something going wrong? But it’s kind of fun to imagine gaining tiny speed increments with optimizations. I like to do it on Fridays - Firmware Fridays - vacuum cleaners, hard drives, motherboards, ip cameras, Apple IIGS expansion cards, Bluetooth scales, and on and on.

I may buy a Neo just to do this. Intrigued.

I like Dillo, and I like this project.

I have tinkered with Gemini on occasion, and while there are stubborn adherents, it’s not super intuitive to use. Not sure why it can’t be beautiful and simple. Maybe it can’t?

I think a standard like this proposed would make it far easier for browsers for older tech to be developed, used, and maintained. That would be a massive win.

And in addition to security and privacy concerns, the less that a browser actually needs to do, the better for us all.

But it feels like a pipe dream?

This is deeply disturbing. The terrible, incoherent messaging and strategy around the Iran war (unapproved by Congress) is connected. This is an administration that is seeking less freedom, not more. What entity would sue on behalf of the ombudsman?

Thank God human beings who spend money on these resources are left to fend for themselves. Imagine if we spent good money on a flight, and now the company winds down its operations even as we are on route to our destination. Since we are just a number, I supposed we should simply cease to exist or occupy a liminal space. Or maybe... we could be treated as a human being?

I am so grateful for this announcement. In a time when gas prices are high, Spirit should be the kind of capitalist example that dominates. Instead, it goes bankrupt despite the President trying to nationalize it. Thanks be to the God of money.

If you are a tech guy and working with drones or any AI company that has even a bare relationship to some security firm, you have a few options:

1 - Immediately share all information and intel with the public so as to spare any judicial accountability. 2 - Quit. 3 - Prepare to go to jail for the rest of your life. This is profoundly evil.

I notice they are sold out at MicroCenter - I was hoping to go look at one in person today.

This is why I come to this site. Some of the tech stuff goes over my head and limited skills, but this article was insightful and still so relevant. It probably applies to non-profit organizations that tend to falter after their visionary (aka psychopath) leader retires.

And it likely applies to a ton of churches out there, especially megachurches, where you walk in to the lobby and see leadership books by their star CEO aka pastor about leadership or life lessons or whatever. But those megachurches churn through employees until they find just enough psychopaths (aka executive pastors) willing to be assholes for God, plenty of clueless who are happy to serve as that middle management, and then those who are okay with being loyal and doing just enough week to week for a paycheck.

I've seen it all too often.

Check out the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus if you want a glimpse about what happens to those who actually call some of those megachurches to live into what they say - like actually caring for their neighbors.

I don't like to paint Apple as being completely incompetent (but damn have they been screwing stuff up), but I do think trying to solidify the experiences around a common codebase has become untenable. The idea is great thought - write one app that works on macOS, iPadOS, iPhoneOS, visionOS, etc. What a time saver that is for developers - but the problem is that screen sizes and interactions with those different platforms vary. Yes, resizing a window with your clunky finger needs a bit more wriggle room, while a pixel precise mouse or touchpad is a lot different.

I am a diehard Apple fan. I stuck with Apple through the dreadful 90s and fought for their relevance as a needed computing alternative in education spaces. I extolled their virtues. I hung on until Steve Jobs took over and helped things improve... quite drastically, in fact. I could never have imagined the widespread celebration of the hardware with the m series of chips. Quite an achievement.

But even now, I acknowledge the latest macOS release is dreadful. Just absolutely dreadful.

And the fix is easy - hire new young talent. Hire kids out of college. Bring in fresh faces who are going to speak the truth, who are hungry to make it better. Listen to them and do what they say.

I love the idea of this... but here is what I want - IT SHOULD WORK WITH EVERY HARDWARE PERMUTATION KNOWN TO EXISTENCE. If not... combine your energy with Fedora.

I’ve been waiting for this post.

I run OS 9 on my lamp iMac G4 but now I want to try 7.6.1!

This looks like an advertisement for a new season of Severance or something.

The image on this page is wild: https://radiant.computer/principles/

Of course, I am intrigued by open architecture. Will they be able to solve graphic card issues though?

Just in time for Halloween nightmares!!!!!!!!

Imagine being a kid and waking up to this sitting in your room, silently watching you sleep.

Imagine how terrified your dog is going to be of this thing, shuffling around or getting stuck with its foot on the edge of a rug.

Imagine finding it going through your underwear drawer when you come home from work early.

I love this idea, and I imagine with years of successful lobbying efforts we could potentially get some laws passed to provide rights and clarity around our own data that could move us into this direction. But until then, while BlueSky is solid, I'll wait and see.

It's usually something like this. But I guess for Ubuntu?

https://wiki.debian.org/wl

Just note: anytime the kernel is updated, you need rerun these commands and rebuild the drivers for the new kernel.

How difficult would it be just to switch to Swift for some of these apps?