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WTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).

I have not tried the IDE, but I like FreePascal. The compiler is fast and it has great multiplatform and cross-compilation support. In particular for older platforms.

It feels more stable and mature than most other languages. I do not know if there are enough developers keeping it alive, but hopefully it will mostly get bug fixes and ports to new platforms. Better if they do not mess with the language or standard libraries. Those that want a programming language that keeps breaking backwards compatibility every few months have plenty to choose from already.

After installing TTD from GOG I panicked a bit, not seeing any DOSBox or DOS files. For a moment I thought it was files from an old Windows 95 version only, but there was (also) a DOS installer (INSTALL.EXE). I ran that, went through all the usual steps (select Sound Blaster IRQs and so on) and now I can run it from my virtual (git-managed) DOS disk install directory where I install all my DOS games and applications. Next to the original TT that I installed a few months ago from an old CD-ROM. For completeness.

> used to be

Looks like they are still around? https://novationmusic.com/launchpad

Also seems to be in stock locally.

The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).

What you can do is to instruct it to type out the word, in some language that you don't know at all, making it available in the context while also effectively hidden from you. Simpler than printing it to a file.

I use the assistant daily, often instead of search. The search is good, but the sad fact is searching www has been getting less interesting fast and there simply isn't much of value to find (maybe if they added an option to search in the Wayback Machine? I would pay extra for that!). Adding a LLM on top of search results and to fire off multiple searches makes it possible to sometimes squeeze a little bit of actually useful information out of the cesspool that is modern web.

Without the Assistant I would probably go back down to the lowest kagi tier.

Emacs has a built-in M-x describe-char that prints out similar information and also this useful tip:

    to input: type "C-x 8 RET 2192" or "C-x 8 RET RIGHTWARDS ARROW"

However in the case of trying to type the name of a file in a shell, that has some weird unicode character in it, just copying the character is faster than to first identify it and then use some clever trick to type it. It can be useful to know for some small number of weird symbols how to insert them, or to use C-x 8 RET (followed by TAB-completion) to find symbols, but I almost always stick to what is available on my keyboard, and often only a small ASCII subset of that, to keep things simple.

Special quotation marks sometimes end up in filenames (usually when I have saved a web page) and I hate trying to tab-complete or write globs for those. Of course it is equally annoying with other random unicode characters not present on my keyboard, but it mostly happens with quotation marks. (Yes, the solution is to copy-paste those characters in the terminal, but that is the annoying part, having to do that instead of just typing the next character).

I am not gp, but I like to have a nice collection of unread books to browse and pick from, not (to almost quote someone, from my vague memory) "shelves full of books to impress others with what I have already read".

Kind of like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary

I was happy a few years ago when I found a site selling DRM-free EPUBs on many topics I am interested in, but with no prior warning last week they sent out an email saying they no longer do that and instead you have to buy and read books through some special app.

They could at least have warned a few days in advance. I would have stocked up on several lifetimes of books to read. A bit skeptic about post-2022 books anyway.

Going back to kindle isn't very tempting unless there is some reliable way to export their books again. Looks like it will be going back to paper books and reading books from Gutenberg (as I do a lot anyway).

I do not see any reason to not believe Vince Gilligan saying coming up with Pluribus pre-AI and that it is not about AI, but it was impossible to watch that show without thinking about what a great metaphor it is for living surrounded by humans using AI to think and write for them.

Confluence used to be built on top of pretty standard plain wiki markup that could be edited without being forced into a bad visual editor, even easy to edit in an external text editor to not have to spend so much time in the web UI at all. I remember having an Emacs mode for it installed.

Looking this up now, Wikipedia says the wiki markup was abandoned already in 2011. Not that I think Confluence was ever a great wiki, but at least having pages that were backed by some resonable plaintext markup was much better than not having that.

The problem is "no one was ever fired for choosing Jira" (or Confluence). I can't imagine there is a single company that would keep using those products the moment some alternative exists that managers dare to switch to without the slightest risk of having to explain to their managers why they didn't just go with the "industry standards".

The Windows version (a legal, non-cracked, copy, even) runs well in QEMU. Pretty sure I managed to get it working in WINE as well at some point, but I prefer to have software running in QEMU as that tend to be much more install-and-forget rather than having to fiddle with settings or/and reinstall stuff every time there is an upgrade or I move to new hardware.

Animator pretty much required a mouse or tablet though and it was released late enough (1989) for PC mice to be common and certainly something someone would buy to use software like that. There is support for moving the mouse pointer using the arrow keys, but I can't imagine many were drawing much like that.

Keyboard overlays were probably even more common in the 1980's. The F-keys make a lot more sense when there is an overlay for the application you use. Memorizing what each Fn is for is no fun unless each key somehow map to something related to the number n.

I love the menus. Autodesk Animator from 1989 also has menus where the first letter is always unique. Also buttons and some other UI elements. I did not remember that UI convention from back in the day, but when I experienced it recently it made me sad modern GUI applications are never that well designed. Maybe it used to be common?

The video description only links to some clone and not to the now (since 2011 or so) also open sourced original Animator:

https://github.com/AnimatorPro

See Bedrock Platform: https://permacomputing.net/bedrock_platform/

I keep looking for more useful DOS applications. Have had a git repo for 15+ years that has my config and virtual C:. Once something is installed it will just keep working and I sync that repo to all my machines so it have the exact same things running with the exact same versions. Binaries from 40 years ago still run fine. Just wish more modern applications supported it.

I also have QEMU installations of some Windows versions and old Debian versions (I like Debian 3.0, since the entire library of packages fits neatly on a single DVD ISO... that was the last release that small). Those are also useful for having stable platforms to run offline applications on without having to be bothered by upgrades.

> The catch was that old boxed software eventually breaks on new OS versions or devices.

We have great emulators and virtual machines these days. As long as something runs offline and isn't doing anything weird you can just install it once and keep using it and it will never break.

I have paid for Aseprite, but on many machines I just install the old GPL version, usually available as a package. It is fine for most tasks, even if the latest version has many improvements.

A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.

That is pretty much what I hope will happen here.

Step 1 is to fix the time at any UTC+N. I don't particularly care what n.

Step 2 is adjust all times in society to work with whatever UTC+N we are now stuck with.

I think step 2 will sort itself out, as it has historically. Schools begin at a certain time because of whatever historical reason tied to what timezone we are in. If we change to a different timezone schools should naturally drift towards starting at some other time in the day, unless people for some unrelated reason changed their mind about what s good time for school start would be.

I really only care about fixing the clocks and stop doing the annual changes back and forth. What number should be seen on the clock for specific events during the day, like school starts, can be adjusted later.

Funny that the first Swedish translation, from 1947, also had an illustration of a huge Gollum, and Tolkien already commented on that long before Tove Jansson's did her version.

> The translation of the name 'Hobbit' to 'Hompe' was not the only thing that annoyed Tolkien about this edition. Already in 1948, he wrote to Rosemary, a young fan, that "the picture of Gollum in the Swedish edition of The Hobbit makes him look huge."

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Hompen

Overall seems like a weird edition.

It is useful for those of us always checking the comments first, to decide if the article is worth reading.

The 00's podcasts I listened to were often in 2-3 hour episodes, rarely well scripted (or scripted at all?), but a lot of fun and very amateurish. I re-listened to several entire series recently and the episode lengths were the only thing I think was worse than in newer podcasts.

On the other hand, if ads etc gets too annoying, I already have run all my downloaded podcasts through whisper to get transcripts with timestamps. Running some LLM to find ranges to delete would probably be quite easy. As a bonus I would be happy to also cut out all the filler repetitions that seem popular these days ("yes, X, I absolutely agree, [repeats everything X just said]"). Could probably cut 1 hour episodes to 20 minutes without losing any content.

I use TUIs almost daily on my android phone, either some Linux application in Termux or a DOS application in DOSBox. Both have some extra on screen controls to add special keys, and DOSBox in particular allows adding widgets to control things (including invisible buttons, that are fun to add in some cases over parts of the screen in DOS to give an old game or application touch controls).

I built a TUI application for MS-DOS (well, DOSBox) recently, just using the few functions in MSC 5.1's included graphics library (plus a few simple BIOS calls) and what a joy compared to web interfaces or any GUI library I have used. Having a fixed screen size and known, limited, character set is at least developer-friendly. Of course there existed more advanced libraries as well, but for a simple TUI just a few functions can go a long way.

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/main/v4.0/src/TOOLS...

> It’s easier to do split windows in a terminal or tmux/zellij panes than to script two separate app windows to stay locked together as a pair. Although, I’d welcome advice as to how to do it better.

Did you try some tiling window managers and decided you did not like that?

Dropbox seem to be doing the same thing. After years of whining about my 2TB above limit I recently received a mail with a deadline to delete my files or they will.

No public version control. No issues or pull requests or other social features. Like every project, more or less, before GitHub or Sourceforge.

Tiled has some mode where you can paint the tile corners or/and edges to automatically insert tiles. When using only the corners to paint (and only a single terrain type) that would be equivalent to shifting the visual grid by a half tile trick, if I understand correctly?

Adding multiple types of terrain and also making it possible to paint the edges of course will add an explosion of possible tile types that are required. Looks like there is support in Tiled for optional automatic mirroring or rotations to add missing tile variations.

https://doc.mapeditor.org/en/stable/manual/terrain/