Thu 30 January 2025

I'm noticing a troubling trend among FOSS projects, even terminal-only utilities: no manpages (or a 1-paragraph useless one), barely any help screens, and a link to a wiki site like a github page or "readthedocs."

The thing is, the whole ethos behind so many terminal utilities is a hearkening back to a simpler time of keyboard-driven user interfaces, and specifically of eschewing the kind of bloated, unusable mess that characterizes so much of the modern web.

So please don't force me to crank up firefox just to read your docs. They should be included in some kind of plain text (or easily convertible) format along with the source and binary distributions of your package.

Heck, I'd even settle for a PDF at this point, so please:

Keep your online documentation offline. (Because online means on the computer, not on the web, behind some horrid cluodflare captcha just to read five pages of a wiki).

100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 6

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Linux Non-religious post Polemic Productivity UNIX

Sun 24 November 2024

Note: This article was originally written last December, and was sidelined because I didn't feel it was finished. Reading through it this morning, I realized reason that I never "finished" it is because the next step would've been to write a 1280-word chapter, which is no small feat. But honestly …

Category: Tech Tagged: BSD Computing Content Warning Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Linux Non-religious post Philosophy UNIX WritingMonth

Tue 26 December 2023

Exactly a month ago, I wrote an article challenging the prevalent pragmatist-argument for choice in the digital world.

I'd like to refine that thought a bit further, based on recent experiences.

A little over a week ago, I started crafting an article covering FOSS keyboards for Android. This is one …

Category: Ethics Tagged: BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Linux Non-religious post UNIX

Sun 26 November 2023

I was watching a youtuber I rather like, and he closed out his video talking about his pragmatic approach to operating systems. He said he used multiple OSes (some FOSS and some non-FOSS), and he summed up his approach with "Use what works for you."

This is not a polemic …

Category: Ethics Tagged: BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Linux Non-religious post UNIX WritingMonth

Wed 22 March 2023

Do *not* do the following :D
Please scroll down to the **Update** section below, instead

I was watching this video about FreeBSD last night, and the gentleman made mention of a blog which had extra information on FreeBSD. Looking at the blog, I found an excellent article describing how to …

Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux/Unix Tips BSD FreeBSD Non-religious post