462 karma · joined September 13, 2011
Usenet gets better as it gets smaller, honestly. Most groups are carcasses these days, but several have regular use. comp.misc, misc.news.internet.discuss, and sci.misc are active. Several groups in the comp* hierarchy are active. Thunderbird, claws-mail, sylpheed, tin, slrn, alpine, neomutt all handle Usenet just fine. Visit http://newsgroupreviews.com for a list of providers, some free, some paid.
See https://www.legendaryleadcompany.com for his story. I bought the least expensive of his newly manufactured Autopoints (they're called Legendary now) and I really love it; it's my best pencil. I love 1.1mm leads and find narrower leads too thin for my preference.
I block Reddit at the router for similar dark patterns.
The folks installing TDE want, if I am any example: a modern distro, kernel, and up-to-date Chrome or Firefox, and just enough desktop (task bar, apps menu, virtual desktops) to make it useable. IceWM is another option here but TDE is just a bit more comfortable, without all of the bloat that gives you the UX improvements people seem to be asking for here, or the non-mainstream (fluxbox, i3, etc.) that scares the non-technically inclined.
I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.
I use Aquamail on Android and love it. Great feature set, works great with multiple accounts, lots of configuration options. It's not open source or free and I honestly do not care.
Back in the day it was something like USD 4. Now it's something like USD 25. Still worth it, and I don't mind paying for software if it keeps the developers in business.
These are three decent groups for content similar to HN.
If you need a usenet provider, try solani.org (no cost) or individual.net (paid but excellent)
For clients, any *nix install will have slrn, tin, pan, or possibly knode. Thunderbird is on mac and windows as well as BSD/Linux.
I was a volunteer in rural Central America from 1998-2000 and shortwave radio was an important news source for me (but already a VERY niche medium, even then). Nights I dialed in VOA and then found a lot of other interesting things too, from Cuba to broadcasts from Spain, Germany, and Indonesia. It was all fun and exciting.
Ten years later I began a decade of work overseas in rural West Africa. I dutifully brought my shortwave with me, only this time I found close to nothing on the airwaves. Some crazy religious broadcasts here and there, but nothing. I looked around and can confirm that in ten years of living in Africa (with a lot of West African friends and colleagues) not a single one of them had or used shortwave, or even really had any awareness that it existed. The number one media source even then was FM radio tuned in over cheap Chinese FM radios or over FM radio apps on cell phones.
I've still got a shortwave and occasionally scan the frequencies from my hammock here in North Carolina. But there is really not much there (religious stuff still being one exception). I ask myself, if rural West Africans aren't listening to shortwave anymore, really who is?
This article answers it: a few pockets remain, like Nigeria and Myanmar. But the shortwave era ended: everyone who left shortwave never came back, even when newer methods failed. Guess it was fun while it lasted :)
The latter is not very helpful on image-based threads but is excellent for text-rich threads (like askreddit). The gopher interface to wikipedia is surprisingly full-featured; I love it.
I wrote five book manuscripts for a book publisher that used a custom typesetting syntax - not exactly XML but codes to turn on bold and highlighting, designate section headings, identify keywords, and place specific icons in the book. I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to hack an emacs syntax highlighting format, but with Jedit it only took an hour. I was then able to install Jedit on my co-author's Mac, where the software interface was easy enough for him to use without finding it too techie. Huge success. (Later I figured out how to create a vim syntax, but to this day I my custom emacs config goes uncreated).
I use different editors for different purposes, but Jedit is on every Linux box I build, and I use it regularly. VERY grateful for this software!
Left half of page: "work stuff." Right half of page "personal stuff." Bottom two inches of page: "long term goals for the week."
I use one sheet per week, adding bullet points to the relevant column. I created a template for printing on the office printer, then realized it was ecofriendlier to just recycle one-sided scrap paper (every office had tons of it), and draw my own lines. I use the To-Do app for tracking things from week to week, but when I put down my coffee cup and set down in front of my computer, thinking about what needs to get done, the notebook/pen combo somehow works best for me.
Edit: exchanged diagram for text since the diagram got mangled.
The hardware/software are nowhere as slick as that old ipod. But the freedoms this device give me serve as a reminder that all of the constraints of an ipod (one per user, no library comingling, needs itunes, etc.) were artificially imposed by a hardware striving to maximize hardware sales (and placate the music industry).
I suspect this is going to be the new trend for future apps, since it almost certainly delivers a higher number of paid users than other methods do.
Google's assimilation of Usenet content had promise at first but quickly turned into a dystopia and the general consensus on Usenet is that Google has been a disaster for Usenet.
I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to them and icewm uses older technology so the newer terminals don't provide transparency. I fixed that by moving to aterm which in turn gave me trouble by not handling unicode.
So icewm is perhaps dated. But it's very lightweight, a bit more mainstream-feeling than openbox etc., and I thought it's a good compromise between a KDE/Mate/Gnome3 and openbox/fluxbox/i3 etc. It's nice for remote machines you remote into where you want some basic GUI functionality but not a full-blown desktop environment.
My wife currently has no way to listen to any of the music we legally own, using her iphone. So guess whose next phone is going to be Android, with an SD card containing 1TB of music we own? The other advantages of iphone are not important to me, and the apps she uses are available on the playstore. For bonus points I can buy her a pretty decent Android phone for a few hundred bucks, instead of a new device costing well over a thousand.
I understand Apple wants to push everyone to monthly paid services. As a customer, I DO NOT want yet another $10/month expenses - I've got a lot of those already. I just want to listen to music I already own.