The Packbats' Weblog

So, you might not know this about us, but until - *checks date* - two weeks ago Friday, we were using Windows 7 as our OS.

"But Packbats!", someone might exclaim. "Windows 7 hasn't been supported since 2015! Hell, as of January, you couldn't even bribe Microsoft to keep your system limping along!"

And you'd be correct! Which is why you might not have known this about us, because "oh yeah, our primary computer, our connection to a world where being a queer trans plural furry is normal and unremarked upon, is running an OS so insecure that even Mozilla has given up on supporting it" seems like an irresponsible thing to say on the public network.

That is, until the day just under two weeks ago when we weren't running Win7 any more, because our laptop had stopped functioning and we couldn't figure out how to fix it.

So yeah. We're posting this from NixOS.

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( NixOS? Odd choice for a complete Linux beginner. )

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( The revival of Evergreen, our new compy )

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So far, we have:

• Altered one config file so we could read ntfs drives.
• Used nix-shell to grab a file partition tool so we could turn our temporary Windows 7 ntfs drive (the 2 TB one) into a proper Linuxy ext4 drive.
• Used tune2fs to tell Linux that it doesn't need to save 5% of our now-storage 2 TB drive for root.
• Decided to hold off on moving home to the 2 TB drive, because it would mean messing with hardware-configuration.nix and we're tired.

We're tired. But we have a working computer.

"How to bring a language to the future" is a pretty good article about a struggle to stop technological conventions from dismantling a language and its culture.

A quote:

Part of the reason nastaʿlīq [the script used to write Urdu] ran into trouble was because the technology at the time — specifically the typewriter — was built with English in mind. Subsequently, as historian Thomas S. Mullaney notes in his book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” all other languages are seen as permutations from that norm. Hebrew is English but backward. Arabic is English backward and in cursive. Russian: English with different letters. Siamese: English with too many letters. Perhaps the only major language to escape the thumb of Latin hegemony was Chinese, a script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic, and thus had to be imagined entirely outside the box of existing technology. But nastaʿlīq, presumably not quite significant enough to send typographers back to the drawing board, remained stalled until the 1970s, its mechanical rendering nowhere close to the sweep and flourish of the handwritten script.

Y'know, I don't think it's even that we like having an easy way to listen to the radio or listen to CDs in our room - I think the biggest thing we like about it is having the option to listen to music not on headphones sometimes.

Also, listening to music we happen not to have listened to in a while.

- 🐲 💭 📻

...y'know what else?

Music playing from a device that's not right in front of us feels diegetic. If we're sitting at our computer with headphones on or lying on the couch or in bed holding our phone, the music is coming from here - this electronic universe that we are accessing.

Music playing on a boombox over to our left? It's in our physical room. There's music playing in our room. That's pretty cool.

- 🐲 🐍 💭 📻 ⚖️ 🎧

(redraft: jukebox -> boombox)

Does anyone know why, when a MacBook Core 2 Duo running 10.5.8 crashes hard - so hard that even a Vulcan nerve-pinch is ineffective - that the iTunes will keep playing until it finishes the song?

Have you ever Googled your own name? How do you feel about the results? View other answers

Geez, http://radrobin.tripod.com/ is number one?! Maybe I should just give up and start updating it again.

Other highlights from the results:

• Apparently, the other two of the top three Robin Zimmermanns are a Swedish manager last seen working near Stockholm in the hospitality business (?) and a beleaguered employee of the Oracle Corporation.
  
• My dad (^z) seems to be a major driving force of my Google rank - above Oracle-dude comes "Recent Changes Oct 2001 in ZhurnalWiki".
  
• Various entries of my livejournal (though not the best, nor the most representative) are in prominent evidence.

Hmph! I suppose I should be glad that I'm the webbiest, but I'd rather it were for a better page.