Most of my photography gear falls under “well, that money could have been spent more wisely”. But photography has been one of my major ways of dealing with depression, so I absolutely don’t regret it. I can’t really put into words how good it felt to finally get a Camera That Didn’t Suck.

(Adapted from XKCD)

There are 5 zillion hotkeys.

“5 zillion hotkeys? Ridiculous! We should add dedicated buttons for common operations.”

There are now 5 zillion hotkeys and “media buttons” nobody uses.

…

Seriously though, a lot of old keyboards in ye olde computers had dedicated buttons for a lot of things, but then people figured out software defined, remappable key commands are actually pretty neat. You don’t need a dedicated “Help” key if it’s usually mapped to F1. Moving back to dedicated keys is, ummm, sometimes unwarranted?

A turtle! 🐢

• Great lifespan
• Even better defensive skills
• No need to go to a dentist on the account of not needing teeth anymore
• Great software development skills due to Shell Access

Edit, almost forgot:

• Wider housing options (unless they, I dunno, fill the sewers with concrete or something)
• Possibility of martial arts training

reCAPTCHA is exploiting users for profit

Well duh.

reCAPTCHA started out as a clever way to improve the quality of OCRing books for Distributed Proofreaders / Project Gutenberg. You know, giving to the community, improving access to public-domain texts. Then Google acquired them. Text CAPTCHAs got phased out. No more of that stuff, just computer vision rubbish to improve Google’s own AI models and services.

If they had continued to depend on tasks that directly help community, Google would at least have had to constantly make sure the community’s concerns are met. But if they only have to answer to themselves for the quality of the data and nobody else even gets to see it, well, of course it turned into yet another mildly neglected Google project.

The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.

Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.

DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for “image library organiser”.

Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. “I’d love to try that piece of software, but if it’s not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?” Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go “Well my favourite software package doesn’t do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it’s not even a hassle.”

Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go “but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!”…

I think it’s only a good thing they’re not trying to shoehorn DAM features into their existing apps. If they made a DAM software it’d have to be an external app anyway.

I did perfectly fine with digiKam in the past, and nowadays I’m perfectly happy with ACDSee. ACDSee even shows thumbnails for Affinity Photo project files.

Hitler had a history of gastric troubles. Also 100% vegan diet - more beans, more the better. And a bucketful of weird medicine prescribed by his quack doctor. Also methamphetamine. So much meth.

So there was nothing silent about Hitler’s farts, is all I’m saying.

Also fart jokes were socially acceptable, so nobody else was silent about it either.

Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)

I prefer this version: Wikihistory