Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Trying to register for the Twitter API (for personal use and mucking around), and this is how the “accepts our terms of service” page looks:

Mind you, the “I accept” and “Submit” buttons still work very well, you just have no idea what you’re signing up for… 🤦

I’ve ranted before about Client-Side Decorations (CSD), here and elsewhere, and here’s another one – mostly as a reminder to myself about how to disable CSD on Google Chrome web application windows.

The gist is – CSDs are horrible – they make your desktop look like a mishmash of different operating systems on the same screen, where it is often not clear how to interact with the application windows. The worst case is of course the MS-Windows XP RTL reflected UI, where you had some windows with normal operation buttons (close, maximize, etc) on the right side of the title bar and some windows were in “RTL” mode, so their buttons were on the left side 🤯.

I’m starting a new thing on this (otherwise quite dead) blog, mostly as a service to myself: “Imported Rants”. Its going to be basically copies (sometimes maybe better edited) of rants I posted as comments in other places (mostly YouTube), that have grown long enough to almost be an article in and of themselves.

Today, in response to Brodie Robertson’s question – Should Linux Users Hate Apple As Much As Microsoft? here’s the rant from my comments:

Apparently, Tiktok is an essential application that everyone needs to have and cannot be removed – so said Samsung.

Most people who have been involved in Linux development/administration/advocacy already know that Linux operating systems are in the middle of a big shift (or actually, almost at the end of it) in the graphics stack used in Linux desktops – from the old and gnarly X11 protocol to the new hotness: Wayland compositing. And it sucks.

מרק אפונה הולנדי (Snert) בהשראת אנדונג – ולבקשת הקהל, עם כמויות וכשר!

הכי כדאי להתחיל בלראות את הוידאו המקושר להלן: כי (א) הוא מצחיק, (ב) הוא מסביר את המקור של המרק ו-(ג) יש לו כמה נקודות חשובות להסביר (כמו, למשל, למה שמים את המלח רק בסוף), אבל עכשיו – קדימה למתכון. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t do this:

Do this:

This is a public response to Johan Thelin’s post “The API wars – 16 years later. His blog commenting system looks a bit broken and regardless – I think its an important enough discussion to publish here. The main premise of the article is that the web APIs have won the “API war” in the context of Joel’s Spolsky’s “How Microsoft lost the API war” article from 2014 but the main winner is the globally domineering Google and we should subvert their victory by moving to the new runtime – the WebAssembly, that is better in every way.

Here’s what I had to say about that:

I often say that one of the main reasons I use KDE Plasma as my default graphical workspace is that some of the KDE specific software is the best at what it does, and specifically – as a lot of my computer time is spent using a console – the KDE terminal emulator software Konsole is the best in the world.

This is a bit of a weird script day – the script is pretty simple but the integration is interesting. I’m scratching my own itch here and also demonstrating how to:

• Use dbus-monitor to listen to D-Bus events
• Use SystemD user services to run a session service
• Update KDE configuration safely from scripts

Read the rest of this entry »