Going to a gathering in a synagogue, my partner said something about the 'Jew party'. This raised a tiny heckle, but I couldn't see why. She'd invited me to a gathering with her community. Most were Jewish, some brought non-Jewish partners (like she brought me). What's the problem? Her native language is Slavic, and …

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Every computer I go to seems to have the same sad story. A mess of files sit on the desktop. In 'Pictures', random pictures sit (the user downloaded them before making a half-hearted attempt to organize) with a few folders, some marked 'holiday' (which one?), and others given names by the computer. Renaming the lot …

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Some American made a video on Balkan history which flipped between saying that the Balkans has many cultures, then mentioned some war or similar catastrophe, then went on repeat. The video asserted bluntly (if not explicitly) that multiple cultures coexisting created all the strife in the Balkans. I commented: It looks …

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Neomutt exemplifies everything wrong with documentation. Neomutt advertises itself as an email client for the terminal. I like email, and I like terminal stuff, because it's easy to automate, and works with all my automation stuff. That was me, and probably a great many other unsuspecting victims of neomutt. However, …

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People just can't see reason, and perhaps that's a good thing. Nobody feels happy about it when explaining a stark, obvious fact, and hearing lazy, irrelevant nonsense as a reply. Telling people that X is a genocides, and all genocides are bad should make sense. Hearing 'yea-but', and 'whatabout' can make the blood …

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I can't stand coding helpers which suggest auto-completions, and this is why. When the spelling checker came along, it helped writing a great deal. Nobody wants the job of looking up how to spell words. Then one dark day, I wrote a twisted sentence, subverting some standard English phrase in order to emphasise a point …

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I regularly see indie artists posting some great images, and encouraging open-source-adjacent use, but messing up the latter completely. Just to clarify: Professional artists probably understand art licences well enough, and likely don't care about 'open source'. This isn't a post for them. Other artists don't care …

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Arch Linux often does what Ubuntu tries and fails at. I started with Arch due to a simple problem; every so often I'd read on some cool new program I wanted to check out, then feel disparaged as I read over the instructions. 1sudo apt update 2sudo apt install lib-xyz kitchen-sink python3-kitchen-sink In the early days …

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XMPP can be a nightmare to operate, but I still think it provides better long-term benefits than Signal, because XMPP without any encryption gives all the benefits of distribution, which grant better protection than encryption, overall. XMPP is a Nightmare My journey with XMPP so far has been: Use OTR encryption. Ask …

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Every time Adobe does something horrible, hordes of Adobe Photoshop users attempt to migrate - generally to either GIMP or Inkscape. They arrive and start a standard string of complaints: This UI is bad (it should be like Photoshop, but it's not) GIMP can't do vector graphics properly. Inkscape can't do bitmaps …

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