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and my pants fit again

Don't you replace pants from time to time, and toss away or donate (damaged/fine) old ones when they are no longer good for you?

Weight is not volatile enough for this to be a problem. If you don't have your own data, you can look at mine. I did rapidly lose 9kg recently, and all it meant was belt no longer being optional with old pants, a single hole tighter.

Well, don't forget Microsoft's take on ed. If you don't have any Windoze at hand, here's my packaging of FreeDOS' remake.

2.4ghz with 5GB of RAM is insanely quick, and an insane amount of RAM. it's only the fact that modern OSes are so stuffed with eye candy, adware and freeware that you've been hood-winked into BELIEVING that the OS *is* the computer. the only thing that will make a HUGE difference to speed is if you get yourself a GOOD SSD. by that i mean one with an Intel chipset i.e. not the 3700 series which is made *by* intel but using a shitty consumer-grade controller IC from Marvell. you want an S3500 or basically hunt around for anything that has "Intel Power-loss Protection". see here for full details http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_an...

the actual OS doesn't techincally matter, none of them will make a blind bit of difference, you have such a fast machine, you might as well pick one that will make your life easiee.

all apps will work perfectly fine as long as you don't do what i do which is try to run qemu, two web browsers, 3D Graphics Editors, videos, IRC, 2D CAD Packages *and* try to compile the linux kernel all at the same time. this tends to bring even a machine with 16GB of 2400mhz DDR4 RAM to its knees. don't do it :) keep an eye on things, but libreoffice and a few tabs open in browsers should be fine.

your main concern is web browsers, which is one application, and you should try to keep the size of the window to the minimum that you can tolerate. i manage fine with chromium running at around 1024x800 and underneath that firefox with 200 tabs open ar around 1024x700 or so (i use a 3000 x 1600 resolution laptop screen).

someone else here suggested fvwm2: i too love it, because the startup time is well under half a second. for everyone else i recommend XFCE as it's based on the older gnome2 infrastructure so does well at auto-detecting drives and so on. the other desktop i love and thoroughly recommend for end-users is Trinity Desktop.

the only other thing i recommend is that you NOT install systemd as it actually slows boot times DOWN (as well as making your life geneerally hell). you can either install debian and then install sysvinit, which will "disable systemd but still leave it hanging around like a bad smell" or you can go the whole hog, add http://angband.pl/deban and actually get rid of it entirely, going back to udisk2, policykit, consolekit and other packages that debian's developers rather foolishly removed.

bottom line is, the threshold for "good enough computing" was crossed many many years ago, and it's only the marketing teams DELIBERATELY making the proprietary OSes do more so that your machine APPEARS so slow that you feel you HAVE to buy a new one... you see where that's going? anyway, welcome to the freedom that comes with being able to choose your own OS, you're one of the few people that actually has control of their computing hardware back, now.

apt purge systemd

add http://angband.pl/debian/ to /etc/apt/sources.list before doing that and it will actually succeed. okok it's a bit more complex than that, but you can read the instructions online which are neeearly as simple :)

I don't think there's a problem with the idea of systemd. Having a standard way to handle process start-up, dependencies, failures, recovery, "contracts", etc... isn't a bad, or unique, thing -- Solaris has Service Manager, for example.

the difference is that solaris is - was - written and maintained by a single vendor. they have - had - the resources to keep it running, and you "bought in" to the sun microsystems (now oracle) way, and that was that. problems? pay oracle some money, get support... fixed.

free software is not *just* about a single way of doing things... because the single way doesn't fit absolutely *all* cases. take angstrom linux for example: an embedded version of GNU/Linux that doesn't even *have* an init system! you're expected to write your own initialisation system with hard-coded entries in /dev. why? because on an embedded system with only 32mb of RAM there *wasn't room* to run an init service.

then also we have freebsd and netbsd to consider, where security is much tighter and the team is smaller. in short: in the free software world unlike solaris there *is* no "single way" and any "single way" is guaranteed to be a nightmare pain-in-the-ass for at least somebody, somewhere.

this is what the "majority voting" that primarily debian - other distros less so because to some extent they have a narrower focus than debian - completely failed to appreciate. the "majority rule" decision-making, for all that it is blindly accepted to be "How Democracy Works" basically pissed in the faces of every debian sysadmin who has a setup that the "one true systemd way" does not suit - for whatever reason, where that reason ultimately DOES NOT MATTER, betraying an IMPLICIT trust placed by those extremely experienced users in the debian developers that you DO NOT fuck about with the underlying infrastructure without making it entirely optional.

now, it has to be said that the loss of several key debian developers, despite the incredible reasonable-ness of the way that they went about making their decision, made it clear to the whole debian team quite how badly they misjudged things: joey hess leaving with the declaration that debian's charter is a "toxic document" for example, and on that basis they have actually tried very hard to undo some of that damage.

the problem is that their efforts simply don't go far enough. udisk2, policykit, and several absolutely CRITICAL programs without which it is near flat-out impossible to run a desktop system - all gone. the only way to get those back is to add http://angband.pl/debian/ to /etc/apt/sources.list and use the (often out-of-date) nosystemd recompiled versions of packages that SHOULD BE A PERMANENT PART OF DEBIAN.

in essence: whilst debian developers are getting absolutely fed up of hearing about systemd, they need to accept that the voices that tell them that there is a problem - even though those voices cannot often actually quite say precisely what is wrong - are never, ever, going to stop, UNTIL the day that the role played by http://angband.pl/debian/ is absorbed into the main debian packaging, providing "Replaces / Provides / Conflicts" alternatives of pulseaudio, libcups, bsdutils, udev, util-linux, uuid-runtime, xserver-xorg and many more - all with a -nosystemd extension on the package name.

ONLY WHEN it is possible for debian users to run a debian system COMPLETELY free of everything associated with systemd - including libsystemd - will the utterly relentless voices and complaints stop, because only then, FINALLY, will people feel safer about running a debian system where there is absolutely NO possibility of harm, cost or inconvenience caused by the poisonous and utterly irresponsible attitude shown by pottering, with his blatant disregard for security, good design practices, and complete lack of respect for other peoples' valuable input by abruptly and irra

I don't think there's a problem with the idea of systemd. Having a standard way to handle process start-up, dependencies, failures, recovery, "contracts", etc... isn't a bad, or unique, thing -- Solaris has Service Manager, for example.

the difference is that solaris is - was - written and maintained by a single vendor. they have - had - the resources to keep it running, and you "bought in" to the sun microsystems (now oracle) way, and that was that. problems? pay oracle some money, get support... fixed.

free software is not *just* about a single way of doing things... because the single way doesn't fit absolutely *all* cases. take angstrom linux for example: an embedded version of GNU/Linux that doesn't even *have* an init system! you're expected to write your own initialisation system with hard-coded entries in /dev. why? because on an embedded system with only 32mb of RAM there *wasn't room* to run an init service.

then also we have freebsd and netbsd to consider, where security is much tighter and the team is smaller. in short: in the free software world unlike solaris there *is* no "single way" and any "single way" is guaranteed to be a nightmare pain-in-the-ass for at least somebody, somewhere.

this is what the "majority voting" that primarily debian - other distros less so because to some extent they have a narrower focus than debian - completely failed to appreciate. the "majority rule" decision-making, for all that it is blindly accepted to be "How Democracy Works" basically pissed in the faces of every debian sysadmin who has a setup that the "one true systemd way" does not suit - for whatever reason, where that reason ultimately DOES NOT MATTER, betraying an IMPLICIT trust placed by those extremely experienced users in the debian developers that you DO NOT fuck about with the underlying infrastructure without making it entirely optional.

now, it has to be said that the loss of several key debian developers, despite the incredible reasonable-ness of the way that they went about making their decision, made it clear to the whole debian team quite how badly they misjudged things: joey hess leaving with the declaration that debian's charter is a "toxic document" for example, and on that basis they have actually tried very hard to undo some of that damage.

the problem is that their efforts simply don't go far enough. udisk2, policykit, and several absolutely CRITICAL programs without which it is near flat-out impossible to run a desktop system - all gone. the only way to get those back is to add http://angband.pl/debian/ to /etc/apt/sources.list and use the (often out-of-date) nosystemd recompiled versions of packages that SHOULD BE A PERMANENT PART OF DEBIAN.

in essence: whilst debian developers are getting absolutely fed up of hearing about systemd, they need to accept that the voices that tell them that there is a problem - even though those voices cannot often actually quite say precisely what is wrong - are never, ever, going to stop, UNTIL the day that the role played by http://angband.pl/debian/ is absorbed into the main debian packaging, providing "Replaces / Provides / Conflicts" alternatives of pulseaudio, libcups, bsdutils, udev, util-linux, uuid-runtime, xserver-xorg and many more - all with a -nosystemd extension on the package name.

ONLY WHEN it is possible for debian users to run a debian system COMPLETELY free of everything associated with systemd - including libsystemd - will the utterly relentless voices and complaints stop, because only then, FINALLY, will people feel safer about running a debian system where there is absolutely NO possibility of harm, cost or inconvenience caused by the poisonous and utterly irresponsible attitude shown by pottering, with his blatant disregard for security, good design practices, and complete lack of respect for other peoples' valuable input by abruptly and irra

On Windows 10, can't you just run a proper shell? Too bad, you can only run win64 processes from it, not win32. Running some desktop environment this way could be interesting.

eat 4 hotdogs or 2 burgers. I see it every weekend. People eat multiple burgers/hotdogs, chips and fatty dip, strawberries with pound cake and whip cream, all while sipping their slimming Diet Coke.

How do you even eat multiple burgers? I have a moderate weight problem (85kg and slowly climbing), yet when I try American food in that 1-in-2-years visit to McDonald's, after a BigMac with medium fries I feel bloated.

So you'd need to overcome that bloated feeling and keep stuffing yourself.

My layout for N900 is pretty convenient for typing regexps and coding in general, especially compared to Nokia's anti-genious default where to type most symbols you need to press a key combination to pull up an on-screen menu, shift your fingers, navigate the menu (as terrible as the typical Android/iPhone on-screen "keyboard") and select something. All while there's a crapload of unbound shift/Fn combinations.

A physical keyboard is so massively superior to an on-screen one that I wonder why anyone would use the latter for anything but sparse status updates on this week's MySpace's remake (I don't know what's popular nowadays, now that Fecesbook is passe and only orange clowns are Twits?). But it's status updates on social media what's where advertising money comes from...

HELL YEAH! Bring in a new N900 and I'll jump at it even if the specs would suck. In fact, I still use a N900 as iToys and Android are fit for a fart app and maybe a Fecesbook status update or two, but nothing more.

N900's keymap was brain-dead (most symbols required a pull-up menu) but, as Maemo used regular sane X, it's nothing you can't fix. Once you have full ASCII available, you are set for long hacking sessions without even bothering to fire up the big computer. Yes, I do use my phone nearly exclusively for its text terminal, like a proper Unix greybeard should. And there's no need to ssh out, it can run gcc, postgres, perl or whatever you want just fine (although with 256RAM it sucks so you want ssh unless you're stuck on a family gathering in a bumfuck village with no network access).

While this was not my original reason, this article makes me smug for using a pair of old 1280x1024 monitors. I run one over DVI, one over VGA. Especially VGA ones are a dime a dozen, if you shop around you can get a high quality used one under $20. With old monitors it's random whether you get one that flickers, has a high blue/etc loss or similar flaws -- but even if you can't return, it's $20 for another try. VGA ones also require adjustment, but if you press auto-adjust over a proper test screen rather than your desktop, analog-to-digital artifacts can be almost completely eliminated.

VGA provides no way for smuggling malware, and DVI ones are way too old to be vulnerable for such tricks. As an extra bonus, you get a sane aspect ratio rather than a modern narrow strip.

I guess this will come handy then. (Spot a cat in the picture.)

I so wish Nokia would bring back the N900 line. I'm not talking about N9 (which was still better than anything Android/iOS/Windows based), but about a proper pocketable micro-laptop. As far as phone capabilities go, N900 wasn't stellar even in its heyday, but as a mobile computer there's nothing new that would even approach its usability.

An on-screen keyboard is semi-adequate for writing a SMS or maybe a Fecesbook status update. On N900, especially if you replace pull-down symbols with proper key setup you can type more conveniently than on a laptop's keyboard. I've spent many a night hacking in bed without bothering to get up and get to the big computer, so did I ssh to do some postgres or network administration when at a client. And you don't even need ssh -- gcc/perl/etc work fine (within limits of 256MB RAM and one-core ARM). N900 is a full-blown computer that fits in your pocket.

You can buy attachable keyboards for modern phones, but these are hardly usable. For heavy-duty use, the keyboard needs to be engineered in rather than an afterthought.

So go Nokia, there's your chance.

If all you type is a SMS here and there, a touchscreen keyboard might be adequate and the device ends up lighter. But for any semi-serious use... forget it.

N900 suffers from Nokia's brain-dead default layout that requires using a pull-up on screen keyboard for anything but basic letters and digits, but fixing that is trivial (here's my version that uses Shift and Fn).

Because of the setup, it's probably easiest to use/read it as a Debian package:deb http://angband.pl/debian sid main(or directly: https://angband.pl/debian/pool/main/d/dnscruft/).

The database there is grossly outdated as it's been a while since I last had an use for distributing it that way, but the scripts didn't need updates. They're straightforward to use or configure, including a tool to import hosts file type lists.

Because of the setup, it's probably easiest to use/read it as a Debian package:deb http://angband.pl/debian sid main(or directly: https://angband.pl/debian/pool/main/d/dnscruft/).

The database there is grossly outdated as it's been a while since I last had an use for distributing it that way, but the scripts didn't need updates. They're straightforward to use or configure, including a tool to import hosts file type lists.

So how would you classify phones like N900 that make shitty smartphones but wonderful mini-netbooks?

After beating some brain-dead decisions of Nokia, like a pull-down on-screen keyboard for a lot of important keys instead of using shift, you get a full-blown Unix system that's more convenient to use that quite a lot of laptops.

Here's my dissertation on winmodems. Should apply well to windisks too, I guess.

oh man, that takes me back. Sportster externals were the way to go.

Here's my dissertation on winmodems. Should apply well to windisks too, I guess.

N900 is weak as a phone but outstanding as a micro-laptop. You need to bash some parts into sanity (like, keybindings that work with shift-Fn without a pull-down list of symbols), but you get an actual usable Unix system, rather than just a phone with fart apps like iPhone or Android are.

You mean, the entire Debian is too little for you?

Some GUI programs are unusable due to assumption that the vertical resolution is much bigger than 480, and some fail badly due to quirks of Hildon widgets, but in general, you can do everything you would be able to do on a Pentium III 256MB ram 32GB disk laptop. No graphic accelerator since it has OpenGLES while most 3D games/etc expect OpenGL, but that's mostly due to bad proprietary display drivers. In the future, even that won't be a problem even if no sane drivers pop up, since SDL 1.3 and Wayland have GLES backends.

Another annoying issue against N900 is the set of default keymappings. I wonder WTF Nokia was thinking, not assigning basics like PgUp, PgDn, Esc, [, ], <, >, etc, while leaving most shifted and Fn-ed combinations unbound. Fortunately, unlike closed systems, this is trivial to fix.

I found I no longer have any use for a laptop. Laptop keyboards and monitors are unfit for prolonged work, and when on the go, it is better to have a portable rather than merely luggable device that is almost as powerful.

I admit, most of my work involves command line, text editor or at most a browser, but I'd say more RAM and a slightly bigger screen would make laptops obsolete for most other tasks as well. Just please, never, ever, force a touchscreen UI when not needed, like most of Nokia's software does. The device has a keyboard for a reason.

Here's a screenshot from an accurate emulator.

The oldest machine I had at the time I took it was a 486 (in a corner of a cellar), but it crashed the same way as the emulator did. There was some error reading the 5 1/4 installation floppies, after several tries it finally claimed success, so it might have been data corruption rather than a problem with Windows, though. Still, it had the correct colour :p

Like, n900 having gcc and perl that's tailored to working with a keyboard, which that phone has? Makes sense.

(Nokia screwed the pooch with the default keybinding -- no basics like Esc, PgUp, PgDn, [, ], <, >, {, } and the like, but if you use a better one, it's just a notch worse than a laptop. Which sucks compared to a real computer, but is usable.)

While n900 beats anything Droid in customizability, the default keymap is worse than abysmal. Please use for example mine, save it as /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51; the new assignments use Fn-Shift (or Fn where it's unused).

Having no basic symbols like |, [, ], , {, }, % or ~, or keys like PgUp, PgDn or Esc makes any Unix administration or programming a bad joke. Having to request an on-screen keyboard for those is unacceptable -- it's not an iToy! Fortunately, we can fix it.

That's why my font doesn't use a traditional 'a' but a reduced version of uppercase 'A'. This may seem weird but fixes the problem you mention.

Agree, this is not legible, especially when enlarged. And, here's my font from a good while ago which is not only slightly smaller (or would be if it was variable pitch) but also a good deal more readable. Can be enlarged without loss, too.

Hey, but the thing that makes Windows Windows was already there, even if it looked less organized than in later version.

Perhaps some machines exist where nVidia's proprietary drivers can successfully hibernate, but I have yet to see one. And I tried on three different setups.

Here's a screenshot of one.

For building software, it diverts libGL.so with its own version, and fails to properly set it up. You can correct it by hand, but out of the box, it breaks automatic compiles. Quite a few packages Build-Conflict with nvidia-glx...

Google can already follow you around the 'net using their ad network. Blogs, photos, news sites, etc., all have Google Adsense.

Since all of Google's tracking uses 3rd party servers, ypu cam trivially avoid it except for when you explicitely use one of their services. All you need to do is to get and train Adblock, do the equivalent on your Squid proxy or cut them off on your DNS and/or firewall.

For Adblock, you do know where to get it from.
For Squid, there are packages like adzapper. I'm not sure if Privoxy cuts away Google's spying, but I hope it can do it as well.
For DNS-based blocking, let me plug my own database: (no pretty page, sorry) -- on your DNS server, put deb http://angband.pl/debian sarge main into /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get install dnscruft. It should be in the official repository once I bum an upload off a DD.

Of course, the best idea is to have more than one layer of defense. This is a form of spying that can be easily thwarted, so there is no reason we shouldn't fight for ourselves and our networks.

Google can already follow you around the 'net using their ad network. Blogs, photos, news sites, etc., all have Google Adsense.

Since all of Google's tracking uses 3rd party servers, ypu cam trivially avoid it except for when you explicitely use one of their services. All you need to do is to get and train Adblock, do the equivalent on your Squid proxy or cut them off on your DNS and/or firewall.

For Adblock, you do know where to get it from.
For Squid, there are packages like adzapper. I'm not sure if Privoxy cuts away Google's spying, but I hope it can do it as well.
For DNS-based blocking, let me plug my own database: (no pretty page, sorry) -- on your DNS server, put deb http://angband.pl/debian sarge main into /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get install dnscruft. It should be in the official repository once I bum an upload off a DD.

Of course, the best idea is to have more than one layer of defense. This is a form of spying that can be easily thwarted, so there is no reason we shouldn't fight for ourselves and our networks.

Speed-wise, the browser I use most of the time beats everything trolls like him can throw its way.

And trying to claim that Opera beats FireFox feature-wise is just a pathethic piece of FUD. First, FireFox intentionally gives you the choice to use a lean bare-bones trunk, and add any features of your choice to it. Even if you count just the officially approved ones, you can choose from 1365 extensions. Without AdBlock, Opera is useless on the IntarWeb of today, where nearly every page consists mostly of ads.

Speaking of ads, let me throw in a blatant pitch for my Debian package to eliminate 18-33% of http requests at DNS lookup phase so your network will get at least a bit less clogged by users of lesser browsers: dnscruft.

Reversed? It looks fine to me...

Well, the Google Map API isn't that complex.

I've once created a simpler thing for my T2T map page -- it doesn't have zoom and uses only one image instead of a bunch dynamically fetched, but generally it works in a similar way. And I'm a complete beginner in JS.

I would say, an experienced programmer would be able to recreate the API in less than a week. It's not the complexity what is cool -- it is the idea.

Wasn't this supposed to be the whole point of the contest?

I admit, my tutorial sucks monkey balls, but it at least does exist. The winning entry looks good, but I bet that many of other top-notch submissions met the requirements while being about as good.

I did, before the gallery got removed because of slashdotting. Oh, wait... you were insulting my ingenious masterpiece, too! You bastard!

(I don't claim I can produce any usable graphics -- but considering that my thing is among two best submissions at the moment, you're really right.)

I wonder how they count it when you have different names for a single site:

<VirtualHost *>
                ServerName urukpr0n.angband.pl
                ServerAlias urukporn.angband.pl urukp0rn.angband.pl urukpron.angband.pl
[...]
(No, this site isn't what you think.)

This is especially important if you count the fact that in a lot of cases www.$SITE is a CNAME for $SITE.

You see, you can't really expect Ubuntu developers to be among the modem-using crowd. They are the kind of people for whom available ISPs can be a factor when buying/renting a home.
I still remember the day when I finally got rid of a modem.

You don't really notice an itch that doesn't personally affect you or users savvy enough to send a bug report.

Too bad, it has no networking code. And this is what we would really want. It would be possible using a hidden IFRAME. The latency would suck, though.

I happened to be reading the JS/UIX page right as the slashdotting came in. I want a JavaScript viewer for my termrec tool. My version is in very early stages, but at least it's in color :p

Too bad, it has no networking code. And this is what we would really want. It would be possible using a hidden IFRAME. The latency would suck, though.

I happened to be reading the JS/UIX page right as the slashdotting came in. I want a JavaScript viewer for my termrec tool. My version is in very early stages, but at least it's in color :p

Sure, it does. Check out a screenshot with a special twist here.

I'm using a GPLed font (Antykwa Poltawskiego) thoroughly in a proprietary program I'm doing at work. I assumed this is ok, as the font is not linked in in any way -- the lack of it in the operating system's fonts directory will just make the program's appearance different.

The program in question is developed for a single customer, and doesn't even come with an installer at all -- so, I don't have any issues at the moment. I install everything by hand, so the font isn't even explicitely distributed.

However, it's an interesting question how closely will I be allowed to bundle this font when (or if) our company will sell the program to other customers than the one whom it was developed for.
Obviously, putting both the font and the program on a single CD is ok. Otherwise, no commercial Linux distributions would be able to exist. But, can I have it as a part of a self-contained installer?

I guess you'll want to take a look at Antykwa Poltawskiego. It's a font that looks better than Bitstream Vera Serif on the FreeType renderer.

And the license is... GPL. Hmm, do we have any articles about GPLed fonts nearby?

My edits and repackaging can be found here -- don't use the original version unless you're using it on Windows. The original version looks good only on paper -- it sucks on Windows and on FreeType without "forced autohinter", my one looks good on FreeType but really, really blows on Win32.
(typing this on a Windows machine :p -- thus, I've attached no screenshots on the webpage)

The last time I checked, most "software" (that is, lacking 95% of guts) modems relied on proprietary drivers. And to make it worse, the quality of those is abysmal -- I've been through modems from three different companies, and they all cause a lot of kernel oopses/panics/what not.

Thus, I was really, really happy doing this (slow link).

Well, my registrar (home.pl) doesn't even allow non-private registrations.

Just check the whois record for angband.pl...

On the other hand, GoDaddy considers privacy to be an "extra service".

Bullshit. For a guaranteed BSOD, try printing to a network printer attached to a Win98 box. Works for me every single time.
Indeed, a random BSOD (or in the most common configuration, a reboot) is much, much less likely than on a 95/98 -- however, lesser problems with explorer.exe are at least as frequent.

On the funnier side, check out my screenshots of a really early BSOD...