Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Oh, one last thing! I missed this:

My current powershell version is 5.1.18362.752.

PowerShell 5.1 is the one that comes with Windows 10, yeah. But - and this is completely separate from all that Windows Terminal stuff I talked about above - an optional, updated PowerShell 7.0 was officially released last month. You have to download and install it yourself from the project's repository though. Announcement, Release Notes

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

This means I can never update from my copy of Word (2001)! Curse you, Microsoft!

I'm still using WordStar.

 

[Fionalein]

Back in my Windows days I used CygWin to get console stuff done, is that still a thing?

 

[Essence Lumin]

Back in my Windows days I used CygWin to get console stuff done, is that still a thing?

Apparently. Their page says their latest stable version was released last February.

 

[Dancien]

There are not enough words to describe how much I loathe Mac Catalina. Fucking thing made my job a nightmare up until two weeks ago.

 

[Fionalein]

A new Ubuntu Linux version has been released, 20.04. As a general rule I don't know a whole lot about Linux, but I keep being told that Ubuntu is beginner-friendly and particularly Windows-user friendly, and this release is supposed to be good, so I'm considering downloading VirtualBox and playing with it.

updated to it last night... after 6 hours of installing (yeah, so I have way too much junk installed, I know , damn LaTeX...) I instantly ran into some problems

• the update trashed my Vivaldi installation (thankfully a forced reinstall fixed it)
• python-evdev package (for python 2.7, python 3 package is there - Curse on your heads python developrs for splitting the language) is missing in 20.x yet - I installed the old one (from 19.10 repository) hoping it works (does so far) you might need this package for some analog HID devices
• I have yet another Kate entry in my applications menu (Kate starters seem viral, they multiply with each KDE change, I had about 20 deactivated ones before I got the smart idea to purge Kate and reinstall it.. I still have 3 "open with" entries for Kate though *sigh*)
• update removed Brasero (no idea why, Brasero is in new repository as well I reinstalled it...)

hang in for updates on more broken things...

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Also maybe how to give it my SSH passwords.

Key based SSH auth is the way to go.

I'm still using WordStar.

I liked that, getting it work with various printers was a PITA though, IIRC. The open-source terminal editor Joe has WordStar keybindings if you invoke it as "jstar".

Back in my Windows days I used CygWin to get console stuff done, is that still a thing?

Yes, but it is annoying and makes you want to go back to your Linux box.

python-evdev package (for python 2.7, python 3 package is there - Curse on your heads python developrs for splitting the language) is missing in 20.x yet - I installed the old one (from 19.10 repository) hoping it works (does so far) you might need this package for some analog HID devices

People have been complaining the python switchover with Fedora 32 too. Some people might have to do an altinstall from source of python-2.7 and whatever libs they need.

[*]update removed Brasero (no idea why, Brasero is in new repository as well I reinstalled it...)

I had some issues with Brasero some years back and switched to XFburn included with XFCE for the rare disc burning I do.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

updated to it last night... after 6 hours of installing (yeah, so I have way too much junk installed, I know , damn LaTeX...) I instantly ran into some problems

• the update trashed my Vivaldi installation (thankfully a forced reinstall fixed it)
• python-evdev package (for python 2.7, python 3 package is there - Curse on your heads python developrs for splitting the language) is missing in 20.x yet - I installed the old one (from 19.10 repository) hoping it works (does so far) you might need this package for some analog HID devices
• I have yet another Kate entry in my applications menu (Kate starters seem viral, they multiply with each KDE change, I had about 20 deactivated ones before I got the smart idea to purge Kate and reinstall it.. I still have 3 "open with" entries for Kate though *sigh*)
• update removed Brasero (no idea why, Brasero is in new repository as well I reinstalled it...)

hang in for updates on more broken things...

As a general rule, I've always clean-installed every Ubuntu update back when I was running Ubuntu. Less potential for pitfalls that way.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Talking about editors: some who are around here definitely still remember the glory days when Emacs was the king of editors, and its abbreviation meant "Eight megabytes and continously swapping." When Vi and Emacs were battling for the crown of the best editor ever, and Vigor was still a thing.

Those glory days are long gone, and new editors like Atom happened, which is basically a Chrome environment turned to behave like a editor and dwarfs Emacs by sheer size and bloatness by a long, galactic shot, making Emacs looking like a mean and lean fighting machine in comparison.

The issue with Emacs though is that its popularity is on the decline, so guess what's going on right now? Right: a discussion on how to make Emacs more welcoming to newcomers. Of course the main author of Emacs, Richard Stallmann, is also participating at it.

By the way to come to full circle: Emacs also offers a Wordstar binding mode. http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode.el

 

[Clara D.]

/me still uses nano

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Talking about editors: some who are around here definitely still remember the glory days when Emacs was the king of editors, and its abbreviation meant "Eight megabytes and continously swapping." When Vi and Emacs were battling for the crown of the best editor ever, and Vigor was still a thing.

Those glory days are long gone, and new editors like Atom happened, which is basically a Chrome environment turned to behave like a editor and dwarfs Emacs by sheer size and bloatness by a long, galactic shot, making Emacs looking like a mean and lean fighting machine in comparison.

The issue with Emacs though is that its popularity is on the decline, so guess what's going on right now? Right: a discussion on how to make Emacs more welcoming to newcomers. Of course the main author of Emacs, Richard Stallmann, is also participating at it.

By the way to come to full circle: Emacs also offers a Wordstar binding mode. http://web.mit.edu/Emacs/source/emacs/lisp/emulation/ws-mode.el

I was a MEmacs girl.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Just in casy anybody still thinks that the security of Apple's products is better than the rest - think again!

 

[Fionalein]

/me still uses nano

Me too, I'm too young for this vi/emacs nonsense. I have all of them installed but I usually end up using either Kate or nano.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Nano is just an open source version of pico. And pico was the editor which came integrated with the pine mail user agent, if anybody does still remember that.

Pine had a non free software license, so nano was the answer of the GNU project about the editor. Pine has been long abandoned, later a fork named alpine was created, which by now is still maintained.

The more tech savvy people anyway used mutt on the console, and in the recent years more Gmail based like agents like Sup or Notmuch became a thing. Bascially both are just a local mail tagging search engine, and rely on third party components to fetch the emails like fetchmail or offlineimap.

 

[Free]

A pretty interesting read.

The Confessions of the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

At 22, Marcus Hutchins put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.

www.wired.com

 

[bubblesort]

I just stumbled across a platformer game engine with an unfortunate name... Corona. If you scroll to the bottom, it says copyright 2018, so I don't think they had diseases in mind when they picked the name.

I wonder if games from this engine got censored by Google Play store's overzealous policies against anything that has anything remotely to do with corona.

 

[Essence Lumin]

It's funny this discussion is coming up again. I haven't programmed in ages but am learning django. I used vi / vim minutes ago and for so many years. I'll continue to when in a linux environment. It's second nature.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Nano is just an open source version of pico. And pico was the editor which came integrated with the pine mail user agent, if anybody does still remember that.

Pine had a non free software license, so nano was the answer of the GNU project about the editor. Pine has been long abandoned, later a fork named alpine was created, which by now is still maintained.

I had to modify the source code to pine (not alpine) many moons ago. What a goddamn mess that code was.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

That's the beauty and ugliness of open source: everybody can write it. Aside that not every legacy code base is bad. Quite often also old code bases contain many edge cases you would have to reconsider when re-implementing that stuff from scratch.