Gathering Hashtags from the Fediverse
Background
One minor foible of the fediverse instance I'm on is that searching (for accounts or hashtags) can be quite slow. As a workaround for now, I've saved a list of accounts I've followed for easy reference, but I also wanted some way of saving a list of hashtags to …
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Device mini-review: One by Wacom
Partially for the sake of my daily doodles, which I've been posting to the Fediverse, and also because I've been learning the Persian alphabet, I recently purchased a small USB pen digitizer, the "One by Wacom," by Wacom (great branding 😄).
For those of you not familiar with digitizers, think of …
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Used laptops are wonderful... except when you need batteries
When I was a kid, a new computer cost the equivalent of $3,000 in today's money, and a five year old computer was basically a dinosaur.
Nowadays you can get a brand new computer for $200 or less, and a ten-year-old computer can still be a viable daily-driver. You …
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Why I love Markdown
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Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age!
Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!......
The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The …
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The Case for AVIF
Disclaimer: Right off the bat, I am NOT an imaging expert, a compression expert, or really an anything expert. I'm just speaking from my own experiences as a relatively ordinary user of image formats.
When I was a young-un in the early, early 90s, PICT was the day-to-day image format …
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"Online" documentation should be offline
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 …
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"Ableism" and the Linux Aristocracy
Being an armchair FOSS advocate, there are a lot of anti-FOSS arguments I've become quite used to seeing and answering. Some of them are honestly just pretty dumb:
eloquent_FOSS_apologia();
Well, I just don't CARE about that!
Well …
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How I Watch YouTube
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, TuxJam the other day, and they were discussing ways to watch YouTube without the annoyances that Google has added to the experience, namely ads and the inability to download videos for later viewing (also, YouTube stopped letting you listen to videos …
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Laptops: A Romance
As I wrote in yesterday's article, I have a soft spot in my heart for laptops. They exist in this incredibly sweet spot where convenience and agency/freedom converge in the very best way, possible. I bought my first laptop in 1995 with my very hard-earned money, but let's start …
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What is FOSS?
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 …
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