Technology

The Year of Linux on the Desktop (2025!)

Well, probably not.

But I’m typing this in Linux Mint 22, awaiting the eventual 22.1 release and curious to see if the upgrade blows up my Linux install, and what I’ll do if that happens.

Until that possible outcome, I have to admit, there’s a certain kind of (I hate to use the word) vibe to using Mint. It seems a bit retro, echoing the design of Windows 7, but it also just feels…quieter, somehow. I don’t have to disable notifications, because the system isn’t constantly throwing them at me. Updates are presented quietly in the System Tray and let me choose when to install them. It never tries to sell me anything, there’s no extra clutter, cruft or unwanted apps. The file manager is fast and just works, a feat Windows 11’s File Explorer struggles with lately.

It’s just a nice experience. Game support is much improved, too, good enough that I can get by a lot on Linux alone. The real deficiency is a lack of good graphics programs. There are some decent options, especially if your needs are relatively basic, but nothing to compare to, for example, Affinity Photo. Yes, GIMP exists, but every time I try it, I scream at the interface (in my mind) because it is bad, and it should feel very bad. I won’t put up with that level of jank in this year of the future, 2025.

I also haven’t quite figured out how to make Diarium work on Linux, and the requests for a web or Linux version of the app haven’t moved the developer yet in promising something. It is the only major OS that remains unsupported. Alas.

Overall, though, Linux is looking a lot more viable as a real replacement for Windows. I am looking forward to seeing what 2025 brings. In the meantime, here is an image I made for one of my online pals who is not a fan:

The state of AI

A year ago, I set up a reminder in TickTick:

I’m late, but there have been complications, documented elsewhere.

And it turns out, the state of AI can be summed up succinctly, list-style (my favourite style):

  • VC money is still pouring in, somewhat bafflingly, because it seems clear the average person does not particularly want AI.
  • AI slop is now everywhere and flooding social media, especially anything Meta owns. Meta is investing heavily into AI. Maybe it will change its name again, from Meta to AI.
  • Apple has crawled so far up its own trillion dollar butt that they thought it would be clever to inject their brand into their AI efforts and call it Apple Intelligence. It has thus far landed with a complete thud, and works best for generating memes the likes of which we haven’t seen since the early days of autocorrect.
  • Microsoft is shoving AI into everything. No one wants it.
  • Nvidia, being the maker of shovels (AI chips) during the gold rush, is doing great. For now.

It’s all stupid, terrible and destroying the environment. I am leaning toward not a major collapse or crash, but one more akin to a slowly-leaking balloon, as companies scale back efforts over the year. There will still be layoffs, of course, because nothing boosts quarterly results like a good round of layoffs.

A look at Netflix’s “casual viewing” (that is, most of Netflix)

This article is just all-around depressing: Casual Viewing

Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

And:

Netflix’s “views” might look impressive on paper (even Sweet Girl, the TNM starring Jason Momoa as a vengeance-seeking survivalist whose MMA-trained daughter takes up his cause, was viewed 6.7 million times in the first half of 2024), but these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to autoplay, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed. All this distracted, piecemeal activity is rolled into Sweet Girl’s total viewing hours (12.3 million at last count), which the company then divides by the program’s runtime (110 minutes, or 1.83 hours) to produce those 6.7 million views. According to Netflix’s rubric, two users who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and close their laptops equal one full “view”—as do 110 users who each watch a single minute.

To compensate for reading this, here is a cat watching a TV with more attention than a typical Netflix subscriber:

File Explorer, how I hate thee

Eventually I’ll probably crash File Explorer by just opening it. It seems to crash a lot now, regardless of circumstance.

And I don’t troubleshoot it anymore, because there are so many possible reasons it might be crashing. I just live with it. Or spend more time in Linux Mint, whose file manager does not constantly crash (yet).

Has it really come to this, feeling fondness and nostalgia for Windows 95? I’m sure it was horrible in its own way, and I’ve just blocked the details, but still.

The Culling, 2024 summary

It feels like more, but the total amount of culling this year has been relatively small, though a few major sites/services are included:

  • Instagram. The platform is garbage, the company is worse, and I stopped posting more than a year ago. This one was easy.
  • LinkedIn. I barely used LinkedIn at all, so nuking it was also easy.
  • Substack. Their stance on actual Nazis made me move my newsletter (which then died of neglect) and also unsubscribe to about half a dozen newsletters, including several I paid for. The platform is also clearly working to entrap writers into their “ecosystem”. Those that stay may ultimately regret it, Nazis or not.
  • verge.com. I normally wouldn’t include a mere website, but The Verge decided to offer an optional subscription, but also decided to just arbitrarily block content at random (?), which annoyed me enough to just remove the bookmark. I’ll miss David Pierce’s gushing over every terrible tech company’s latest thing.
  • Posthaven. In my quest to find a WordPress alternative, Postahaven was a finalist. But if you don’t pay for a full year (month by month) they nuke your site, which was enough for me to give it a pass.

Dumping Substack and The Verge have saved me the most time, purging LinkedIn also provided some relief for my inbox.

What will get culled in 2025? We’ll know soon!

Experimenting with Ghost. Spooky!

UPDATE, December 22, 2024: Corrected a few things based on a reply from the person who hosts Magic.Pages!

MagicPages.co is a Ghost hosting site, and they offer both reasonable pricing, plus a 14-day free trial. Today, I signed up for the trial and created a mock version of this very blog. I tweaked the default theme a bit, made a post, then duplicated an existing post from here to see how easy it was or wasn’t, and how it looked vs. WP.

Here are my initial takes.

Pro:

  • Clean, simple interface. WP has a ton of cruft and junk I never use, and the thing I do most often–post–is not made particularly easy or accessible. Ghost streamlines everything down to a minimalist UI that makes it simple to write posts.
  • More options are always close by. It’s only a click away to do more complex formatting or access other features. Again, the UI feels honed, and focused.
  • It has a nice selection of themes, and you can create your own (though it’s not that simple).
  • No plugins needed! It has image-handling options that are much nicer than WP’s, and they’re just there.
  • If you want to have members/subscriptions, it’s easy to set up.
  • ActivityPub integration is being worked on, meaning I could blog and share easily to Mastodon, the one social media site I haven’t completely abandoned (yet).
  • I can use all emojis, to excess. Always to excess.

Con:

  • Most themes are locked behind a higher-priced tier, as are custom themes. Wrong! The head of Magic.Pages, Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, wrote to me to let me know all of Ghost’s official themes are supported in the Starter plan. The Pro plan is required for custom themes.
  • The number of fonts is limited. I’m not sure how easy it is to add more (edit: It looks like it requires haxing the backend to a degree).
  • While the UI is great, the overall level of customization seems lower overall. I love tweaking, but maybe too much, so this isn’t necessarily a con.
  • How do I turn off the copious subscribe buttons? One is enough.
  • No easy way to import my WP site, which begs the question, what would I do with the old site? I am not going to manually copy over 5,400+ posts. Probably. (Note: Ghost.org does offer importing, but only with their even-more-expensive tiers.) UPDATE: Yearly plans do get support for importing, so I was basically wrong here, too.
  • The two cards it supports are for the worst social media platforms: Facebook and X.

Overall, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I am fussy and unsure. I have about two weeks to make up my mind about this specific host, though.

The web has trained me not to click

Why? Because so much linked content (on social media, particularly, but not exclusively) is now paywalled, instantly pops-up SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER RIGHT NOW, has a cascading series of cookie warnings/options, and basically just a lot of clutter and nonsense to sift through before, possibly, getting to what you were actually interested in.

And you know what? I’m actually ok with that! By not clicking, and maybe by other people not clicking, we silently send a message, however vague, to maybe change things on the web to make them less awful, invasive, intrusive and annoying.

One can always hope.

Once again, saved by lack of information

I’ll never play this apparently addictive game!

The post, on Mastodon:

I realize the image of the game is rather small, but all you need to know is:

  • The author admits he is “annoyingly quite hooked” on it.
  • The author, other than providing a generic-looking screenshot that suggests it’s a phone app, does not in any way name or hint at what the game actually is.
  • There is no way, short of investigating the screenshot via reverse image search or something, or directly asking the author in reply, to risk getting annoyingly quite hooked on this game, because there’s no way to determine what game it actually is.

All of which to say this is one of my social media pet peeves, though to be fair, the same would apply in a non-social media setting, such as an online forum. And that pet peeve is talking about something neat/shiny/addictive/whatever, but without providing any context, so people don’t know what you’re actually talking about. I mean, sure, if you’re going to post a shot from the latest Mario game, with Mario in it and doing Mario things, people will probably be able to suss out what game it is, but something like the above? I can’t decide if people are being lazy, forgetful, or think everyone else just plays or enjoys the exact same things they do.

But, you know, it’s not like having my hair on fire (if such a thing were possible, given what currently remains), so it’s a minor complaint in the overall scheme of things.

The Culling: Instagram – update!

As of tonight, my Instagram account has been “deleted”. I put that in quotes for a few reasons:

  • I can cancel the process by logging in within the next 30 days, which could happen accidentally if I am very dumb.
  • I would not be surprised to learn that Meta does not actually delete user data, but just “hides” it while still keeping the sweet, precious bits and bytes for harvesting.
  • They say it can take up to 90 days before the account is truly gone, which means we could be on the verge of spring and it might still be hanging around in the ether.

Regardless of all that, I have purged the account and do not intend to go back.

I will never deliberately use another Meta product again. There are only a few companies I deem vile enough to warrant a total boycott, and Meta is probably #1 on the list. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg will be crying himself to sleep tonight. In his bed made entirely of money, in his giant money house.

This, of course, came into my inbox moments later:

Tom Scott on online communication, December 2024

In his current newsletter, Tom Scott talks about people playing around with Bluesky’s “fire hose of data” then ultimately comes to this conclusion:

The world’s communication seems to have moved on to group chats and Discords and other private groups; the days of “tell everything to everyone, what could go wrong” are past, and perhaps that’s for the best.

And I feel this is pretty much right. A lot of people are comparing Bluesky to early Twitter, but early Twitter was more than a decade ago and online communication has drastically changed since then–in most ways, for the worst. I think it’s great people are having fun and enjoying Bluesky, but we would all be wise to remember what has happened with bot armies, scams and the increased polarization of “open” online communities. Scott further makes the point by linking to Hank Green’s video on bots disagreeing with everything:

Reading is (now) hard

I came across this video (linked below) by Jared Henderson (BTW, he totally looks like a Jared and no, I can’t explain why, he just does. He also has a great Jared voice. I wish I had his voice. I still kind of sound like a teenager, which would be handy if I wanted to impersonate a teenager on the phone or something) in which he talks about how we’ve lost our focus. The culprits are exactly what you’d expect–first, TV, and now the internet, smartphones, TikTok and the rest.

The chief consequence of losing focus is that we can no longer engage in activities that require concentrated, sustained thought, like…reading.

A few years ago, when my book reading began to trail off, I thought it was because I’d lost my “reading time”. When I worked at Langara, I had two SkyTrain routes for my route, with the Expo Line portion being about half an hour long–a solid hour every day, five days a week, that I ended up devoting to reading books. One year I read 40 books. It almost seems surreal now. And they weren’t all short books! When I left Langara, I lost this structured reading time, and I filled it with other things–nothing in particular, just stuff. I tried reading at night, but it never stuck. Again, I thought it was just failing to find the right “time” to read. But I think this video nails the real cause: I just can’t focus like I used to. And it’s because of the internet. And I don’t even watch TikTok.

I am making some changes going forward, and one of them is to limit my “brainlessly graze the internet to passively entertain me” time. We’ll see how it goes. I’m not making an actual resolution or anything yet, but it’s an option.

Here’s the video:

Me and U

UPDATE, later that day: Somehow I managed to set the keyboard backlight to a searing white instead of the usual soothing green, and it is no longer allowing me to change the colour now. Another attempt to update the firmware failed.

I have plugged in my CTRL keyboard while I ponder what to do next. I am now sans knob and a little sad, as one who is suddenly knobless might be.

So much for fixing my U problem! (lol)

The keyboard I’m using currently is generally very nice.

As per the order placed January 9, 2022, it’s a:

Keychron Q1 QMK Custom Mechanical Keyboard Knob Version - Fully Assembled Knob / Navy Blue / Gateron G Pro Blue

The knob is handy for adjusting volume. I am too lazy to program it to do anything else. The keyboard is built like a tank and could legit kill someone as a blunt force weapon (the body is metal and weighs about four pounds). The keys are lubed, so they feel extra silky smooth. But!

There is the U key. Although you never see it in my posts or other writing, the U key often acts as if it’s been double-pressed, like so:

I see what youu did there, youu nauughty U key.

A few other keys sometimes double up, though much more intermittently. Now, in theory, this means the switch below the U key may just be wigging out and needs to be replaced. I could even do a test by swapping out the switch for another key I rarely use, like the tilde (sorry, programmers, I am not one of you! I assume programmers use the tilde key a lot).

In fact, now that I’ve type this out, I should try it…right now!

FAKE EDIT: I have done this. We’ll see if this provides a workaround for my U issue. Also, taking the switches out was harder and more nerve-wracking than anticipated. The idea of doing it for an entire keyboard makes me want to pay a 17-year-old keyboard nerd to do it for me.

Also, my keyboard:

And for future reference, since I had some issues getting the backlight working again afterwards:

Fn + Tab = backlight on/off
Fn + Q = toggle lighting effect
Fn + D = Toggle colour
Fn + F = Change to white (and get keyboard stuck, so white is all you get)
Fn + W = increase brightness
Fn + S = decrease brightness