Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

I just noticed Inkscape's new context menus and I'm frustrated. How is it that GNOME devs continuously find new ways to make non-GNOME GTK applications with no viable replacements increasingly alien on non-GNOME desktops?

Put a pin in this for future sharing → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO46CNftRDs

"Actually, it's not asteroid bacteria... we discovered that bacteria managed to evolve to eat the cleaning products we use to sterilize clean rooms" is one of the most intuitive examples I've seen for why people shouldn't leap to assuming fantastic answers like UFOs or cryptids.

Tip: If you're using WinSCP's synchronize command in a script but you don't edit your script very often and your new exclusion pattern seems to be getting ignored, check if you're trying to name a directory without including the trailing slash.
#windows #winscp #scripting

Tip: If a recent Firefox update added smooth scrolling despite the checkbox still being unchecked and you don't like your scrolling being slow/laggy, try going into about:config and toggling the `general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel` pref to also be false.
#firefox

I've also been temporarily un-readonly-ing the Netatalk share and having fun with Deluxe Folder Icon Creator, Iconographer, FinderPop's "Set File Type" menu, and AppleShare's ability to remember window dimensions.

#retro #retrocomputing #macos #icons

I got back to working on the icons for my retro-hobby file share and it now has 68k Mac icons for the Windows and Mac OS 9 views (and Linux, which reuses the Win7 icon).

I still need to make the Intel Mac 68k icons and most of the OSX PPC ones though, so the preview sheet is using old screenshots there. (I don't yet have as good a workflow for those.)

...I also need to write some tooling to check which alternative icon sizes I forgot to make.

#retro #retrocomputing #windows #macos #icons

I got back to working on the icons for my retro-hobby file share and it now has 68k Mac icons for the Windows and Mac OS 9 views (and Linux, which reuses the Win7 icon).

I still need to make the Intel Mac 68k icons and most of the OSX PPC ones though, so the preview sheet is using old screenshots there. (I don't yet have as good a workflow for those.)

...I also need to write some tooling to check which alternative icon sizes I forgot to make.

#retro #retrocomputing #windows #macos #icons

I just have to give a shout-out to https://www.retrospect.com/ for anyone who needs commercial-grade backup software.

I've seen people call them "the gold standard" for classic Mac OS and, in 2024, when I asked about the possibility of licensing an ancient version for lack of something like rsync on my Mac OS 9 retro-hobby PCs, they let me use a download and license key that they keep around for when customers need to recover old backups on "but we can't provide support" terms.

Random thought inspired by "too new but too slow" mini-PCs: I wonder what the odds are of someone making a bare-metal hypervisor/emulator that lets DOS and Win3.11 run "natively" on even Intel's proposed x86S, with emulated SB16 and CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA video.

Maybe, for a rainy-day project, I'll see how far I can minimize boot time if I build a Linux install that boots into full-screen DOSBox or 86box and a BIOS POST Plymouth boot splash to hide the rest on cold boot.
#retro #retrocomputing #dos

Tip: I haven't finished minimizing the reproducer yet but, if you're using rusqlite concurrently through something like `Arc<Mutex<Connection>>` and you're getting `Foreign key constraint failed` errors that go away if you force only one thread, check if you're using `INSERT OR ...` on a table referenced by a foreign key. There's some kind of bug and manually reimplementing `OR IGNORE` client-side by `SELECT`ing first worked around it for me. #rust #sqlite