The Packbats' Weblog

I - and us Packbats collectively - think it's a good thing when stuff that works is kept out of the trash. That's not a terribly controversial statement, I think.

Unless you're Microsoft. Our newest computer is ten years old and they think it belongs in a landfill - even Windows 10, the OS they don't sell any more and will stop supporting next year, doesn't support it. To Microsoft, our ability to have a computer at all is only permitted if we pay to give them permission to install their latest ad service and maybe also their latest AI spyware.

Or you're Apple, and you secretly push updates that shorten the battery life of old iPhones - an update which many believe was deliberate sabotage to force updates. After all, Apple has a deliberate policy of shredding old phones rather than allowing them to be repaired, which removes the option of buying used rather than new. This is also personal for us - our iPhone 6 was working perfectly fine, and then it started overheating and running dry faster and faster.

They can do this because their software is proprietary, and their hardware is proprietary, and their customers have no choice. It's put up with the abuse or run a zombie operating system for eight years as you watch more and more of the modern world cease to support your computer.

FLOSS software isn't like that.

And yeah, there's more to it than that. It's more complicated than that. There's an entire universe of philosophical, pragmatic, and political calculation going on, conversations about rights and safety and governance structures. But our 2010 laptop, a truly delightful and fast machine to live in running Windows 7, is ... still that, running Xfce in openSUSE. Because to Unix, an Intel Core i5-520M is just another amd64-compatible CPU, and 4 GB of RAM is more than enough to run a graphical desktop environment - y'know, the thing with windows and mouse and taskbar and so on, where you can double-click a PNG file to see it pop up in an image viewer. Why would it be inadequate? They aren't selling us dissatisfaction or new shinies - they're making things work, as best as they can, in a world that doesn't want your computer or ours to survive.

Everything that's annoying about FLOSS software is because FLOSS is a world where something made mostly by 11 developers with an annual budget of under US$8000 is basic infrastructure for literally millions of users. And that's not even strange here - like, there's standards designed for interoperability, and those get created and implemented by a crowd of different projects. Instead of Microsoft designing Word documents in secret to ensure no-one else's programs can open them, you have LibreOffice using the Open Document Format that anyone else, from megacorps like Google to some random single dev making a project solo, can implement. It's just how things happen here, and it means that one person can make a project for millions that mostly works.

Even when Microsoft and Apple would rather you pay for their thing. And be locked in their house. Where they can force you to give them more money.

There's more to FLOSS than that, but there doesn't have to be more to FLOSS than that for us to care. Our computer is alive. We can't not be passionate about that.

So, we were walking home one day and there was a box by the side of the road with an ergonomic keyboard and a monitor marked "Free". We haven't tried the monitor (the stand is fractured) but the keyboard works and it has a bunch of extra hotkeys - and we were really missing the play-pause button from our laptop.

But also, in a fit of ... something, we decided that as long as we're learning a new physical layout, why not learn a new software layout?

Colemak-DH is (a) a variation on QWERTY for easier learning, (b) designed to be more efficient in finger motions, and (c) the first one suggested to us on fedi when we asked about keyboard layouts for split keyboards. It makes ... enough sense, we're trying it. And trying to maintain our ability to type with QWERTY, because new layouts are fun but we're going to have to deal with QWERTY keyboards a lot and typing on an unfamiliar keyboard layout is frustrating.

On which note, wow, this is frustrating. This is hard. But also we're making progress - not a lot of speed, not nearly the 75 words per minute we used to have in QWERTY, but we're beginning to know where our fingers should be going. And only messing up a lot more than before in QWERTY now that we have other muscle memory to cross wires with. We're making progress, and it's not terrible.

And the keyboard is nice. Having an emoji key is weird but it's not like we don't use it.

Anyone else remember Spoon?

This post is nothing. Just, today we were looking for something to listen to and we remembered that Spoon exists.

(We wrote "no more turing tests" after reading "The Unperson Of 2023" by James Boyle. We wrote the following after posting "no more turing tests".)

been frustrated a lot lately

but also have been trying to try more, lately

to take chances on folks we don't know and folks we do, speak up even when we're not guaranteed to feel heard

to do new things that are hard and not just give up

so yeah

been frustrated more lately

(Apparently there's some kind of official organization of Blaugust with a Discord or something? Consider this illicit Blaugust content.)

We were talking to Manifold Mindmesh a.k.a Many (cw: 18+-only content) the other week about loading times, and since that conversation, we've started playing with the metaphor of load times as public transit.

If we want to play FTL, for example, we metaphorically hop on a bus, wait for a goodly number of seconds, and then the bus drops us off in the game, where there's basically no load times we've noticed. One bus trip, of some time.

If Many is launching a new world of Dwarf Fortress, fae has quite a formidable trip ahead of faer as the system simulates a whole history before the embarkation fae will be playing.

And if we click a Twitter link ... we have a fair few seconds of bus transit to get to the page at all, and then an additional stop on the bus line every time we scroll down or up on the page. Anything off screen was yanked away and needed to be recovered if we wanted to see it again, and we had to wait for all of that.

And yeah, a long bus trip can be frustrating, but you can at least sleep through it or listen to a podcast or whatever. An incessant series of bus transfers gives you no chance to do that.

Accidentally a poem on fedi today:

We've been mulling for a while about how to word this, but:

Identity is not a logic puzzle.
It's a story
or a poem.

There is no excluded middle
no law of noncontradiction
there are landmarks,
 memories,
  friendships,
resonant frequencies that sound in unison with selves
and victories won in the struggle for self-understanding.

They should be celebrated.

We ended up digging out our old boom box because we wanted art reference for audio cassettes - fortunately, it happened to have one in it - and we're having a little bit of fun playing with it again. We don't usually listen to music in the space around us rather than through headphones, and the last time we listened to a radio station, we were connecting to their Internet stream.

Also, thanks to the aforementioned cassette, we discovered that Los Lobos has a lot more variety of music than we were previously cognizant of. Also that roots rock is a thing.

Reminded of the existence of The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal" today.

(Content warnings include: homophobia (incl. family), alcohol use (incl. once to blackout), smoking (nicotine and marijuana), other drugs, food (specifically non-vegan), genitals and sex on-panel, someone getting punched, discussion of stressful subjects, casual ableist language of the kind that's typical basically everywhere, background 2008 Democratic primary election.)

...I feel like we must have read it circa 2012 - kind of in the middle of our heavy webcomics-reading period. As webcomics go, it's pretty gorgeous - lovely sketch-like art with occasional vistas, generally wonderful and elaborate detail - and the story is extremely solid. The emotional dynamics feel extremely real, the dialogue is fantastic, and the plot has a good arc and meaning.

Developing an appreciation of content warnings has been weird for us, because a lot of the stuff we find really comforting and nice and valuable needs very heavy ones? Bad stuff happened to these people but this story is about something better happening to them now. And about a long car trip. And about people clicking with each other really quickly. And about a lot of different kinds of music, and about conversations at restaurants, and about stopping and looking at really wonderful scenery.