marttt

FWIW, I'm a single-person company with a tiny turnover and only a handful of expense categories. I've used ledger-cli for many years, but at one point, I started to migrate my data to pta [1]. The reason was that in my country (Europe), all reporting seems to implicitly rely on a numbered chart of accounts (something like "101 Cash", "201 Accounts payable" etc), and the journal format of ledger-cli is not built around this idea by default.

pta, however, does this numbering [2], so for filing taxes in my country, its journal format seems more straightforward in case auditors should have any interest in it. I also quite like its terseness (1 transaction = often 1 line, as compared to 3 in a ledger-cli journal -- gives a better overview and is somewhat better to parse further with sed or awk when needed [3]). Finally, it is a single Perl script, thus very portable and lightweight.

All that said, pta doesn't seem to have much of a following, as compared to ledger-cli, which, obviously, is a much more mature project.

There was also an interesting discussion regarding pta vs ledger, involving the author, OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [4] -- well worth a read regarding the general plain text accounting philosophy also. Interesting stuff.

1: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/

2: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/pta/accounts.example.en?rev=1.3&conten...

3: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=...

4: https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=202009281234...

> Bookkeeping using plain text files sounds both interesting and challenging.

It has quite a bit of a following; I personally would never switch back to some more "complete" application. I believe all the most popular implementations are listed here: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

These two older HN comments might relate to your lines of thinking. I found both of these very insightful when I got stuck with trying out all sorts of rigid systems, outliners, zettelkasten etc:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17893139

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8807252

QBasic is actually still a great first language for children, particularly non-native English speakers. In this case, the syntax is really easy to grasp, simple UPPERCASE commands with lowercase arguments. No need to wrestle with getting closures right, etc.

I had quite a bit of success digging QBasic with our son (10yo back then), using this great tutorial which I translated to our language: http://tedfelix.com/qbasic/

Eventually, though, the son dropped his QBasic explorations (I consider it "my fault", since I got burdened with other stuff and couldn't help him as much as I wanted to). And - he dropped it in order to first take up Scratch and then dig straight into - duh! - Python. There ya go. I do think he will need some time to get closures etc intuitively right; in this regard, QBasic was, IMO, indeed, easier to grasp.

I was happy to find a great children-friendly IDE for Python, though - Mu: https://codewith.mu/

Not as "immersive" as the excellent (!) QBasic IDE and its blue screen, but still great. No bloat. F5 for launching the program, etc - and our son started to notice and carefully analyze the interpreter's error messages from first try all by himself. So, all in all, really happy with Mu.

Another interesting one is LowRes NX, a contemporary project that uses BASIC: https://lowresnx.inutilis.com/

Estonians as "forest people" -- Estonian researchers tracing the roots of this myth here: https://keeljakirjandus.ee/en/archives/26316

A full-length article by the same scholars: https://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol81/remmel_jonuks.pdf

FWIW, I'm by no means trying to be cynical, especially considering that I do some (lighter) forestry work myself, have done lots of tree planting and definitely love being in the wilderness. Forest and nature do play a central role in our cultural heritage. Currently, however, other members of this same society carry out massive clear-cuttings in our forests. So... this is "us" as well, I guess. Demolishing and praising, side by side. That's why the work of these referred two scholars is really interesting, maybe even corageous in a way, considering that "forest wars" are a huge topic in Estonia these days.

Fully agreed. I have accidentally drifted into that kind of SOFA-mode, having been a highly organized, checklist-manifesting person beforehand. Currently, my personal pursuits are a considerable mess, and guess what - absolutely nothing about this feels "creative", really. It is what it is: just a mess.

Lately, I envy my better half who reads all books from start to finish, and also manages to be very consistent in teaching specific things to our children. This is Doing More With Less in practice -- in the long run, children obviously benefit more from that as compared to inconsistent creative bursts that I (currently) represent. Order is much harder to accomplish than mess; I think ultimately, good learning = keeping order, and being consistent about what not to do.

(I do remember Nassim Taleb advocating to read books "ADDHD-style", as in, swapping right away when you feel bored, though. And he is quite good with his probability stuff, so threre's that. Also, I quite like Perl and Larry Wall's views on the inherent messiness of human language -- I think he is spot-on with this. But... as a layperson, it's nonetheless way too easy to get lost inside this mindset. Managing complexity is an art, I guess. Or, as somebody once wrote on the Perlmonks forums, "freedom is hard".)

Soulseek was a goldmine for those interested in rare/unofficial recordings (including from rehearsals, smaller gigs, etc). I'm from a Small Country, so our alternative music scene has all kinds of surprising links between people. In the early 2000s, when irresponsible mp3-pirating was, like, the most obvious thing to do over here, some of those "well connected people" would put all kinds of crazy "kitchen recordings" online sometimes. Also, lots of vinyl/cassette rips that were not so easy to find. I collected a lot of gems this way, and probably spent hours and hours every week in Soulseek. And, thus, in geeky music.

It was a great environment: one where pirating (alternative) music really did almost feel like a noble cultural act -- as in, hey, we're sharing this stuff and thus help to keep these (tiny) scenes alive. It is quite possible that the fan base of many alternative groups increased somewhat thanks to Soulseek. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking by an embarrassed former pirate. :)

IIRC, the UI of Soulseek was great, too. Really simple and fast. Good times.

+1, this entire website is a fascinating find. Interestingly, in terms of formatting, all the long-form texts on the site are centered (as opposed to left align). I wonder what's the logic behind this decision (surprisingly, it is not at all annoying to read, though).

I know your website by heart, so it is low-tech-bookmarked for life :), and I check in fairly often. Your work and general views are very inspiring.

Also remembered by youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlwUFA5Sric

Born in 1966, retired in 2009, at age 42. Not that uncommon for centers even at the NBA level, but impressive nonetheless. When I was a child in Former Soviet Union, mimicking his iconic finger gesture was a beloved joke on the court -- for us, 5'5" "centers". :) RIP, Dikembe!

Ever since early adolescence, I've had interest in mind-body relations/balance -- as in, how physical actions are "mental" (=thinking), and how mental actions are "physical" (=doing). So these references are really great. I'll most probably look into the William Scott Wilson works first. Many thanks again for sharing your knowledge and experiences!

Thank you very much for such a thorough reply. I highly appreciate the book references also.

"I self-taught myself Martial Arts (JKD, Karate, Taijiquan) from books when i was young."

This is very interesting and impressive. How common would you think a complete self-study of martial arts actually is? I've always thought this cannot be done alone -- or, it would be extremely easy to get lost or head to some wrong direction, eventually harming yourself mentally or physically. Akin to how a common suggestion about yoga or meditation (I used to exercise vipassana daily for quite a while) is that the first, basic principles should be taught by a good master. Possibly due to personality type, I've always wanted to challenge this assumption, though.

While learning martial arts on your own, what did you do to overcome more serious mental blocks or standstills (provided you had any)? Did you ever feel that "books are not enough"?

Are there any alternative Windows tiling WMs that would hide the title bars altogether? More than a decade ago, there was a dwm fork for Windows [1] which did this, but no idea how well it works on W10/W11.

1: https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dwm-win32/

I think this has to do with how a child's parents inform them about the addictive nature. I've been telling this to our children early on ("games = mostly engineered for addiction, be careful"), and the youngest (11yo soon) has no problem understanding this. And I'd say he manages to regulate his gaming hours surprisingly well all by himself.

What I particularly like is that children seem to be quite interested in what it actually is that makes games addictive. So a 10yo might reason along the lines of "Dude, gaming 2 hours straight must be worse for my brain than gaming 45 minutes straight. This game's got too many flashing things, too. Don't want to get addicted. Must go out".

So, from personal experience as a parent, I'd say we adults should not underestimate the influence of educating our children about the dangers of too much gaming. Apparently, quite a bit can be done with very simple means (talking!) to keep things healthier for them. Consistency is key, as always.

A deep interview with Arvo Pärt's wife Nora (for Estonian Televison, 40 minutes, with English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zssKYgi-aHQ

Oh, and a documentary, "24 Preludes for a Fugue" by Dorian Supin. You'll maybe notice some of Arvo Pärt's quirky sense of humor there as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRwTgme1_KE

Read phpBB-based forums. Many of these 1) are still very active and lively, and 2) include a lot of users who grew up in the 90s/00s internet culture. I like how the phpBB UI encouraged free-form writing/thinking and discussions, with flexible boundaries and etiquette set by the admins or the community itself. Contemporary UIs like Facebook seem far more restricted (or: prescriptive) in this sense, IMO resulting in shorter, kind of impatient and often more aggressive replies. Ramblings on old phpBB boards seem to typically carry more intellectual depth.

Pro tip: to query only phpBB-based discussions via Google, I use the "inurl:" search operator with "viewtopic", which is a standard part of thread urls. E.g. "Windows 2000 inurl:viewtopic".

OP here. The author of this guide seems to be using XP in 2024 (Perlmonks is how I stumbled upon his setup in the first place): https://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl/%5C%22/index.htm%5C%22?no...

"I have been using Windows XP for over 20 years now. In 2024, I switched to Sparky Linux 7.3 LXQT, and I used it for about 3 months, and it was okay. However, I have noticed that I am more productive when I use Windows than Linux, so I went back to using Windows XP."

I, too, am not a coder, just a dilettante who likes to use several "outdated" apps simply because they do their one thing better than newer software. This is why I always find people like this interesting. There's a peculiar kind of intellectual freedom or decidedness in sticking with old/underpowered/etc non-mainstream setups.

And, I do like how unified e.g. the Win2k user interface felt. The interplay with apps from that era was flawless IMO (or I just don't remember the more annoying moments). FWIW, my own contemporary usage of e.g. WinXP (for audio montage software that a particular studio uses) has always been strictly offline, though.

Yeah. Great timing for this HN submission, as I've just been doing a fair bit of nostalgia reading on the Windows 2000 UI. Apparently, some nice folks have extended the Win2k kernel to make it usable in 2024 (as I understand, this should run XP era apps and also maintained community forks of Firefox/Chrome): https://w2k.phreaknet.org/

Obviously, this is "fringe" stuff from many angles. But, after 15 years of hand-tailoring that perfect Linux desktop, I've found myself seriously trying out open source DOS systems as robust, "distraction free" environments for doing basic things. The Win2k UI creates similar itches. It was a damn good, really solid UI with very good defaults and just about the right amount of configurability; ditto for classic style XP with some tweaks.

A good quote from that linked Win2k site, explaining the "whys":

"These individuals have nothing against progress, but they do against progress for progress’ sake. /.../

Planned obsolescene is a big deal today — and so is the backlash against it. Products and software are no longer made to last. They're designed to be disposable, meant to be replaced or upgraded within a few years. Today, sustainability is more important than ever and newer versions of Windows are simply not sustainable anymore with their numerous useless flashy features and high system requirements. In addition, modern versions of Windows are hyper-dependent upon and expect an Internet connection. Everything from activation to updates is designed with that in mind.

So, where do older operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 2000 come in? Simple. They have everything we really need and expect from a computer today — and nothing we don't."

Obviously, I did research on getting that XP-era compatible Win2k kernel running on our new-ish Thinkpad, too. Most of my crucial apps would be there: stuff I've done audio montages and audio editing with professionally, IrfranView (no contender for this one on Linux!), MuPDF, a terminal, apparently also busybox-w32, Notepad, etc. But... younger generation needs Windows 10 for gaming, so I might be too tired to fiddle with alternatives.

Echoing something I remember from an old HN thread also: despite being pretty much just another Geeky End-User, I, too, would gladly pay a decent price for a maintained, official Windows version without telemetry and with the Classic UI and just a handful of the most essential system applications. A blazing fast Classic Windows -- pretty sure this would make me truly loyal to Microsoft forever, despite 15-or-so years of daily Linux usage. (EDIT: So, yeah... this would be more or less that same maintained version of Win2k, with wireless and contemporary drivers.)

I feel silly asking this on HN, but as a dilettante, I can: why hasn't Microsoft actually implemented anything like this for us casual users? Desperate projects like that Win2k kernel modification or ReactOS sure must be fun to follow, but I suppose much more than a handful of people would be interested in this kind of official alternative.

"Suppose you entered a region that was labeled: "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry""

Really like this idea. In reality, though, the Estonian state forest management council seems to put more PR-efforts in showing how they also preserve wilderness, build camping trails etc. They don't seem very confident in showing "actual forestry" to the general public -- but, it is, obviously, also not an easy task these days, especially considering that e.g. clear cutting and usage of harvesters is ethically questionable to many people.

I think for these "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry" signs, the whole society would need to become more mature at first. As in, foresters should have more acceptance for wilderness preservation, and the general public should have more acceptance for the forest industry.

Yep, no grids or fences in Estonia, at least not in typical state-managed forests. These just get replanted in furrows or on "turfs" (not sure about the correct English term). Newly planted seedlings can appear really tiny at first, though -- so tiny that even seasoned forestry workers who are later mowing grass around them occasionally fail to spot all the plants in the grass.

Source: have manually planted maybe ~300 000 trees in Estonia over the years, and also done the brush cutting work afterwards. I don't think clear cutting could be avoided entirely (among other things, we're maybe too spoiled as timber consumers for that), but it does feel way too extensive over here (emphasis on the word "feel" here -- as, despite some hands-on experience, my analytical understanding of the forestry ecosystem is very superficial). In place of confier monocultures, a small society like Estonia could maybe place its focus on heavily developing mixed forests instead, for a start. Abrupt forestry policy changes would likely backfire socio-economically (e.g. unemployment rise in rural areas). But those spruce-only or pine-only forests everywhere do look kind of... sad.

Thanks for the screencast. Another +1 for bringing it back to life!

FWIW, there is a separate category for the derivates in the TextEditors Wiki: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WordStarFamily

What's so fascinating about projects like Aporee is the peculiar feeling one gets while listening to several of those field recordings in a row: here is a captured moment of reality that we will never get back. It's a moment of reality, a soundscape, that will never ever repeat in its 100% trueness or authencity. This gives an odd angle to think about the passing of time. [end of esotheric rant, hm]

A similar project is radio aporee, a huge corpus of field recordings from all over the world (see the "maps" section for searching etc): https://aporee.org/

"Most people just aren't interested in interacting with the other people around them."

Very good point, thanks for this. Might indeed be first and foremost simply a personality trait (they would have been "introverts" and reluctant to conversation also in the pre-smartphones era, or even in the 19th century).

I remember wondering whether this photo with the elderly lady was a fake: https://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20159...

I've intentionally never owned a smartphone myself. Our kids don't have it either. It is always fun to suddenly notice during train trips that we're more or less the only family here occupied with actual, real-life talking that also involves actual eye contact, lol.

That being said, maybe the communication pattern of two smartphone users sitting side by side is nonetheless still signaling the same humanly care, warmth, etc. Yes, there is a (IMO silly) technical device in between, but I'm not sure if all this would actually mean that it is "less humane" etc. It's just... different. Maybe.

I lost my dad 14 years ago. I hope you get to have as much of the remaining time together as possible.

What's odd is that I still don't feel the need to look at photos of him. Like, no need whatsoever. I don't have a photo of my late dad on the wall, even though we had a truly excellent father-son relationship with a lot of warmth. The true memory of him resides in my head; and what's more, I notice myself replicating his exact body language at times. Explicitly realizing this always feels funny, almost like I want to express gratitude to him for "inheriting" those movements to me :). I think the bonds still hold strong, and they forever will, but, oddly, there's no need whatsoever to visualize it with a photo. It's simply much deeper than that.

On another side, I often miss the ability to ask my dad "factual", practical questions. E.g. -- because he was a construction engineer -- how to do some specific thing in grandpa's house renovations; how to position a beam, etc. During the first months after his death, this was a common recurring thought: I'm stuck while building something, but "hey, I'll just ask dad tomorrow how to do it right; yeah, I'll just call him" -- following by "oh, I forgot I can't". After this, there was always an interesting feeling of emptiness or standstill -- not sadness, just a really deep understanding that, no matter what, life moves on. And I still get to live mine. I actually came to enjoy those moments of emptiness.

Thanks for sharing your story, it is very moving. Grief will have different stages; to me, it has mostly been really deep introspection. Take it easy, mate.