Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

For anyone following my blog for the fanfiction reviews, I've started to build a section for brief links to stories with "Magical-Muggle Cooperation" elements at the bottom of the "Recommended “Politics in Harry Potter” fics" page, pending my having time to give the topic a proper list post of its own.

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2017/08/09/recommended-politics-in-harry-potter-fics/

You know you're nerdy when you got a hand-me-down PC and not only have you set it up headless to be accessed over SSH to take accurate benchmark measurements with Criterion.rs, you're wondering how difficult it would be to get the `beep` command to replicate PC Speaker sound effects from childhood DOS games to signal success/failure on completion.

So far, all I've managed to my own satisfaction is getting it to play the first measure of Dies Irae to signal a nonzero exit code.

If anyone wants that, here it is in shell script:

for X in 175 165 175 147 165 131 147 147; do beep -l 600 -f "$X"; done

...plus, this is definitely a "that could have gone much worse" situation.

I really need to scale back my online participation while I'm in the middle of my efforts to fix my sleep issues once and for all.

Impulsiveness and inability to recognize that I'm irritable until someone points it out are the biggest side-effects of me being tired.

Turns out that it was at least partially a "we were both feeling frustration at past experiences with other people" situation, so this is now more a description of what I intend to aim for when PCManFM for GTK+ 2.x goes away and I need to write a small patchset to fix the purely aesthetic disagreements.

(eg. I want my places sidebar to have a white background. They don't want to clutter up the preferences window for something that minor.)

Since the PCManFM developer I'm talking to seems unwilling to consider this, I might as well post it here so at least *someone* can get some insight out of it.

Random thought: Raytheon means "light of/from the gods"... apparently we didn't learn anything from the last time a light-bringer turned his mind to war.

(It began as the name of their first product, a rectifier tube for building AC power supplies for radios.)

Since I have a copy of Amiga Forever 2016, I'm also planning to make a bunch of test files for Amiga formats that can only be UNpacked on other platforms.

So far, I've made a test LZX using the LZX_Y2KF.LHA release and I just need some suggestions for other things I can make with freeware'd Amiga m68k apps to build up a repo's worth.

If anyone needs some legally clear RAR or CBR test files for their integration testing, I just put up a bunch made using the WinRAR license I bought to round out my retro hobby machine.

https://github.com/ssokolow/rar-test-files

#programming #testing

Something I was just introduced to. A twitter account that brings to light examples of past "fears of new things" to put modern ones in context.

https://twitter.com/PessimistsArc

Did you know that, in 1903, they were talking about reading print books in bed the same way people are talking about having your mobile phone near the bed now? Granted, I'd still want an OLED screen, night mode, and no social media apps, but it does put things in perspective.

Something I missed back when it was first posted.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/

Maybe one more for today. The SimCity 2000 Theme Pack that, to this day, is used on my retro-hobby PC in the franken-theme I reconstructed from childhood memories.

Originally free on the Maxis FTP site.

https://archive.org/details/sc2kthm

#retro #retrocomputing #theme

...and a utility for customizing the OEM info in the Windows 9x System control panel:

OEM Logo Master 2.0
https://archive.org/details/oem-logo-master-2.0/

#retro #retrocomputing #software

...and another. This one shows the bitrates of MP3 files in their icons and adds a property sheet which lets you edit ID3 tags and perform customizable scripted actions like automatic renaming on the files.

MP3-Info Extension v3.1b9
https://archive.org/details/mp-3-info-extension-v-3.1b-9

#retro #retrocomputing #software

...and a third free Win9x/NT4 shell extension the Internet Archive was missing:

PropertiesPlus v1.65
https://archive.org/details/properties-plus/

#retro #retrocomputing #software

...and another bit of Windows 9x freeware that didn't get any hits on the Internet Archive:

VersionEx Shell Property Page
https://archive.org/details/versionex

#retro #retrocomputing #software

The Internet Archive didn't have the Windows 98SE-compatible version of EppieDesktop, so I uploaded it. Enjoy.
https://archive.org/details/eppie-desktop-v-2.0aa/

#retro #retrocomputing #software

Funny enough, the more I think about it and discuss with someone on Imgur, the more I think the probable answer is "sloppy CG mockup", because, while the typing is animated, I don't remember it being easy to find hacks that flat-out HID the menu bar for non-Mozilla Suite programs back then.

Here's an interesting thing to ponder.

Why the heck is a prop "office computer" from the end of a 2020-season episode of Mayday/Air Crash Investigation/Air Emergency/Air Disasters running a version of Windows 9x with modded MacOS 8 titlebars and scrollbars?

...as for Rocket requiring nightly, it's important to understand the philosophy behind it.

From the beginning, Rocket's been designed around "Make the most comfortable API we can and then wait for Rust to come to us", and they only recently started finding ways to dial it back a bit. The number of different API-unstable language features it relied on from nightly was a **massive** outlier.

As someone else poking at an Actix-based hobby project, I get the impression that a lot of your troubles might have just been due to unfamiliarity with the architecture.

The solution to your problems with the Mailchimp crate was probably just to add whatever version of tokio your Actix is sitting on top of (cargo-tree helps here. 0.2 if you're on actix-web 3.3.2) to your Cargo.toml with the `blocking` feature enabled and then use `tokio::task::spawn_blocking` to invoke the sync API.