I used my first Wacom tablet for a long time. 15 years or so?
It used serial port. Kids these days often don't know about serial ports, I guess.
Linux support was rock solid though, all the way. (Edit: however, I think toward the end they basically said "serial tablets are unsupported now, but you can try to enable the support and recompile and see if it still works")
People can survive a Snailpocalypse.
The Turtlegeddon, not so much, because turtles are actually surprisingly fast.
Well, technically, Twitter has employees, so in very strict sense, they're "manned". However, thanks to these weird incomprehensible things called "current legislation" and "capitalism", no employee is in fact personally responsible for the fuckups. And neither is the company as a whole! ...Isn't this great?
Site that lets you build a contact info page, such as a list of links to various social media pages (some even not operated by Meta). As I recall it was originally made because Instagram only lets you have one link on your profile. Incidentally, Instagram doesn't like them very much and has banned it before.
I like to solve everyday problems through programming. My primary way of doing it is just Python on Windows right now, but Linux does make programming languages a bit easier to access. (And most of the stuff I write would easily run on Linux too.)
Every time I go "damn, this is more complicated/boring than it needs to be and the manual handling is so unnecessary, I wish I could automate this", I start making a script.
For example, I'm an amateur photographer, so I have scripts for dealing with photos. One is a photo importer/backup tool, because I didn't trust the importers in the apps to do it right (Adobe trauma). I'm writing scripts for report purposes. One script I wrote puts all of the photos I have on the map.
"We" didn't stop using Firefox. Open source boycotts are complicated because the software is separate from the developers. You can keep using the software even if you disagree with the development organisation.
Mozilla organisation is getting problematic for a whole lot of reasons. My issue with them is that they seem to be in the "more money than they know what to do with it" phase. They're flush with cash, but it's not reflecting to the product. If they buy an ad company and plan AI stuff, maybe things aren't going well.
Problem is, there's no viable competing organisation. Protest forks of software don't really work that well unless you can actually guarantee the development support. Compare this to what happened when OpenOfficeOrg successfully moved to LibreOffice - developers saw the old organisation didn't work, so they made a new one that did.
I think it wasn't even an OCR bug per se, it was a bug in the image compression algorithm implementation. "Yeah these squiggles on the paper look basically the same, guess we'll save space here."
OCR would have at least been mitigated by the fact that you could see if the text didn't match the image. And since OCR isn't perfect anyway, you could even anticipate that. But if the image is screwed up, well, what do you do then?
Content advisory: boneheaded discussion of suicidal ideation by an armchair psychologist
About a decade ago I was friends with a fellow weird unemployed video game nerd lady who liked books and stuff. Had lots in common. Had fun talking over Xbox games and stuff. Was pretty patient with my depressed stuff. Usually.
But I noticed she was pretty often in open conflict with other people. I'm thinking the reason she didn't get mad at me because I was following her "rules". I guess we just agreed to disagree sometimes. Later, I realised I was just doing what I usually did in most social situations, walking on eggshells to not annoy people.
Content warning
She "temporarily" blocked me on most venues because I broke one of the rules. You see, I had mentioned razors. She said, essentially, that I should not talk about suicide because she knew what suicidal people were like and I was not suicidal, according to her. She said people shouldn't be suicidal around her because that made her uncomfortable. (...I wonder what do the suicidal people feel like in that situation, you dum-dum?)
Now, I was deeply depressed at the time (not suicidal, that's true) and as someone who was walking on eggshells, I tended to look up to most people.
But at that moment, the room was filled with light. For I knew, in my very essence, that this woman was a dumbass.
In the email, I had been talking about Occam's Razor. Or was it Hanlon's Razor? Can't remember. Metaphorical shit. I also I explicitly said this is just metaphorical stuff and she shouldn't get alarmed.
I couldn't keep up with her even if I had bothered to. She went through like 3 email addresses and 3 blogs and 3 gamertags due to getting hacked and due to the drama. Don't know, don't care. Not nominal people numbers.
Dumb story, wasn't it?
Over the last few years I've been drawing stuff on Clip Studio Paint. Wonderful app, very powerful, the asset marketplace rules.
But it has a bunch of really weird jank too. It's as if it has all of the power in the world but you need to spend extra time digging through the app to do stuff.
Krita, which I finally tried a few months back, feels really excellent. Stuff is configurable as hell. All of the stuff is easy to discover. I'm working much faster.
Now, Krita doesn't have all of CSP's niceties, and I guess I have to see how to wishlist them.
Similarly CSP's 3D mockup tools are great, but nowhere as smooth and powerful to use as Blender's. Which is weird because CSP isn't a modeling program - you'd think they'd stick to what they actually do and at least polish the camera/pose controls and such. No dice. I wish I could just stick CSP assets in Blender, but they use a proprietary model format.
Two points. I've never paid for anything by cheque (we have had bank transfers in Finland for ages) and Blockbuster didn't operate here (we had our local video rental chains, and the convenience store chain that I used to go to is still in business, just, you know, not having movies for rent any more)
My own weird fantasy worldbuilding thing:
Common people usually picture the vampires the usual way, as aristocracy living in seclusion in spooky fancy castles. But in actuality, most of them come from lower classes. Vampires had a whole little communist revolution because they had no civil rights (on the account of them being deceased), and set up their own little autonomous grand duchy. Vampires elsewhere get mildly tolerated as long as they behave themselves but still have to work crappy factory jobs... in the Night Shift. (title drop)
AOL Shield Browser is some absolute Wack Crap.
Remember how AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced it, leading to the Mozilla project?
AOL Shield Browser is based on Chromium.
...I get it, Chromium is easier to use for developing custom browsers than Gecko. But, still... why?