marttt

I think Netsurf renders pages closer to what they "should" look like in a mainstream browser. However, a huge bonus for Dillo is that it is really easy to switch off CSS, images, etc if the page doesn't look "good", and only render the text (IMO this is also very much encouraged by the UI). I recall having some rendering annoyances with Netsurf, but this was at least 5 years ago.

I think it is still the default browser for Tiny Core Linux.

Made my day, massive thanks! Dillo must be my all time favorite browser by far. Responsiveness, modular UI and excellent config file -- everything about it is pure joy, really.

FWIW, this game was the author's MA thesis defended last year at the Estonian Academy of Arts: https://eka.entu.ee/api2/file-65881

(OP is not related to the author in any way. I just really liked the extra dark humor of this whole project. Might indeed be a great coping mechanism in a situation like this. And executing it with such perfection is also very... Finnish. :)

Question: considering that the Mpxplay music player [1] supports native audio playback via Intel HDA on DOS (confirmed with FreeDOS), should it also work out of the box on ST-DOS?

1: https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/

This sure is a Very Finnish Project. (Definition: a completely random Finn, always carrying a barely noticeable smirk, is taking an utterly improbable or completely unnecessary project and finishing it to absolute, ridiculous perfection. Warmest greetings to all Finns from the other side of the Gulf! I love you guys forever.)

Also, there was more discussion on ST-DOS (involving the author) on the Dos Ain't Dead forum: http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20883

Many thanks for replying! I am considering text-only NetBSD setup for an old machine, so your pointers are inspiring and useful. For almost a decade, I have tailored hyper-minimalist RAM-booted systems with Tiny Core Linux [1], a distro essentially built for this kind of use. But I've always been curious whether NetBSD would offer any advantages here, or a different kind of flexibility (and it also has excellent documentation).

Would be great to have a customized Unix that boots just as quickly as e.g. FreeDOS on 10+ year old hardware (in something like two seconds).

Thanks again for sharing your setup!

1: http://tinycorelinux.net/

Just the typical thing: while adding a bookmark, when I start typing in the first letters of a tag (e.g. "hack" for "hackernews"), Pinboard is offering a drop-down menu with possible matches. Linkhut didn't have this last time I checked. It is maybe not a big issue, though -- possibly, relying on your own memory (not programmatically offered suggestions), your tagcloud may get less messy over time; you'll end up with a smaller amount of tags, which may be a good thing at times.

I think I like 'em both, Pinboard and Linkhut, though.

Offtopic, but I know from your HN comments that you're also a NetBSD user, working in text mode. Would you mind describing your NetBSD setup a bit? What kind of kernel modifications have you done, and IIRC you also use RAM disk, etc? Thanks if you take the time. I find your comments here on HN very interesting.

Have you also considered Linkhut as an alternative? [1] I like it a lot, but I'm addicted to Pinboard's autocompletion of tags, so I haven't made an ultimate switch (I'm also with Pinboard since ~2010-2011).

Would be great, indeed, to see a working instance of Webtag.

1: https://ln.ht

FWIW, according to Estonian news, this is apparently information provided by TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency.

Nope, this is new to me, thanks for the link! Seems interesting, and I will look into it.

+1 for Jaron Lanier's books.

However, regarding this in your comment: "I’m the most calm and happy I’ve been in a long time. I threw away almost all of my social media and news consumption." -- I'm a former, but trained journalist, and during some dark transition phase in life, I had a ~2 year period where I consumed very little news. The result? I did feel "happier" -- or at least I thought I do for sure. After some more time passing, I started to realize that I don't quite understand what's going on in the society any more. Couldn't follow internal affairs, didn't bother to notice changes in the cabinet of ministers, etc. (I live in a small country that ranks in the top 10 of the World Press Freedom Index [1], so our journalism is considered quite good as compared to the average of what human beings produce on planet Earth -- so balanced news sources definitely are available over here.)

In other words, while I surely did gain deeper insights in some fields of my preference (due to being very selective in what I read, and where from -- focusing on some geekier forums, etc), I slowly started to lose a kind of "general grasp" of how the society works. I was witnessing a kind of Marxian alienation [2] or smth happening with myself. I was becoming my own echo chamber.

After realizing this, I slowly started to read more news again -- preferring the most neutral venues (our Public Broadcasting is very good IMO), but also understanding the importance of media diversity. I don't have to agree with everything that e.g. some certain private media venues write, but they still produce different angles to societal problems, even if they make mistakes occasionally. Also, there is something that regular news consumers don't quite grasp (and maybe don't have to): investigative journalism is very expensive, in particular in a smaller society -- so all venues that even occasionally produce high-quality investigations produce a huge value to the society.

Long story short: would it be even possible to function well in a society in the long term when you read no news whatsoever? I actually doubt that. Newsrooms aren't perfect, but I do think human-filtered news, produced by creatures with an organic, not robotic brain, is still the best that we have, and it probably always will be. Good human-driven journalism is just as valuable as the scientific method -- despite occasional flaws, this, too, is the best we have. ("All models are wrong, but some models are useful" -- this also counts for journalism.)

I did delete all of my social media accounts just recently, though -- admittedly, being heavily influenced by the arguments of Jaron Lanier. And I do feel much better; much less internal anxiety or anger. But if one doesn't want to become alienated from their society, a moderate daily dose of high quality news is a must IMO.

After all, we do have to understand that because the world itself is not always nice, the purpose of news can also not be making you feel "happy". Good journalists try really hard to offer a balanced, well-investigated understanding of the world as it really is, or seems to be, to all of us. Let's not forget giving them the respect they deserve for this. It is really-really hard work.

1: https://rsf.org/en/index

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

I wonder how common are back or spine problems amongst dedicated high jumpers these days? E.g. chronic issues after the end of the career.

As compared to Fosbury flop, the older "straddle technique" must have been much easier on the body, or not?

Having "high jumper's genes", I nearly crossed 1.90 m in high school by simply mimicking the Fosbury style as seen on TV -- or, rather, simply by using brute force. I do, however, still remember that this jumping session caused serious back pain afterwards. I was also completely exhausted. An interesting experience, turns out you do use a surprising, immense amount of explosive power while jumping. In particular when you don't know how to jump properly. :)

Apparently he started to develop his technique already at age 16, which is seriously impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury

My grandfather was a high jumper in the former Soviet Union, and he crossed 1.85 m in the 1950s using the "straddle technique": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straddle_technique

Looking for the specialist terms in English, I found a paper with a bunch of geeky figures to compare the different techniques :) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-mechanics-of-the-c...

TC used to be my main distro for several years (I started with version 6.x). It proved to be very solid, I even used it to live-record and produce radio programs for my country's public broadcasting, on a then 13-year old Thinkpad T42. I admit having been somewhat anxious and fingers-crossed during the live recording, though -- I remember I set up a huge swap file, etc. But everything went well.

Only downside was that setting up a non-US keymap was a huge pain (iirc, in TC 10.x), at least in the console-only (Core) version of TC. Maybe this has improved by now.

Since TC by default loads everything to RAM, it is a truly great distro if you want to keep a pristine, uncluttered system. Mess something up, reboot, and you'll find yourself in your default configured state again, because nothing gets saved if you haven't set it up accordingly. The packages that boot are listed in a simple text file (iirc, it was onboot.lst), which makes the initial state also very comfy to modify.

A great distro, nice to see it going strong. Highly recommended to anybody who is into using old hardware.

> a list of all allowed accounts

Oh, this is a great find, thanks very much for pointing it out. I admit I haven't (at least not in recent years) looked into Ledger's manual, so I was not aware or had forgotten about this possibility. This one would, indeed, solve a lot of potential problems or confusion.

Overly intensive forest management is a huge problem in my country these days. Nonetheless, the general progress in wood processing technologies does feel remarkable. I remember discussions on somehow pre-processing softer wood like alder or aspen (or maybe it was still birch) to make it stronger, and then and then using it for building structures. This is interesting for sure (considering how quickly these species grow), even if one would philosophically side with the environmentalists.

Yeah, I have thought about account numbers as prefixes in the past as well (or some other syntactic hack for integrating the chart numbers into Ledger's account names) but didn't really try it.

A small shortcoming of Ledger in relation to this seems to be that it is not very comfortable to modify your initial accounts system later on, e.g. modify the hierarchy of things when you found some mistakes, etc. In the numbered chart of accounts system (which you have in a separate file, like PTA does), this seems easier.

I would also confirm that spotting accidental data entry errors is also easier in a single-line oriented journal like PTA. In Ledger, one entry consists of at least 3 lines, which is quite verbose.

Obviously, a more seasoned diy-accountant probably simply doesn't make any errors of this kind, or automates these tasks to an extent, so there's that. :)

Nonetheless, Ledger is obviously still a remarkable piece of software. I also recall some philosophically interesting blog posts by the author John Wiegley, on maths, thinking in general or something similar. He is obviously a brilliant mind.

In my country, the numbered chart of accounts [1] is considered standard. A question to other (possibly European) Ledger users: have you ever considered this a hindrance or inconsistency regarding your use of the software?

I've been using Ledger for almost a decade (tiny single-person "company"). At one point, though, I started migrating my stuff to PTA by OpenBSD dev Ingo Schwarze [2]. It is a small Perl utility and relies on the numbered accounts system in a separate file, so I do feel more on the same page with general accounting-related discussions and corner-case howtos in my country.

I also like how PTA's reliance on account numbers also allows for a single-line oriented, very compact journal format [3]. This is great for further parsing with Unix tools. There was interesting discussion on PTA vs Ledger etc involving the author [4].FWIW, PTA is also linked on the plaintextaccounting.org website

To be fair, because of little prior experience with accounting in general, I did somewhat mess up my initial system of accounts in Ledger. So the migration to PTA is also in a standstill at this point. But it is a nice system for people in countries where the numbered chart of accounts might be preferred.

My only complaint is, the author might have written it in something as tiny and easily portable like Awk instead (for us occasional Windows users). But Perl, despite being "huge" in this comparison, is included in the OpenBSD base, and it is praised for text parsing, so the preference is understandable.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_accounts

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

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

4: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430

A historian and renowned Russia expert in my country (Estonia) commented that this was probably bad timing for Putin. Now, as a martyr, Navalnyi is much more of a disturbance to Putin's regimen than he would have been as an isolated opposition leader serving a 19-year prison sentence, which rendered him not a direct threat to Putin. Like the expert put it: as a political prisoner, Navalnyi was already simply forgotten by many. [1]

Somehow this got me flipping through a book by Anna Politkovskaya, Russian journalist extraordinaire who covered the Second Chechen War and was shot dead in Moscow in 2006, on the birthday of Putin. [2]

I want to think that the age of massive online information does make at least a slight difference as to how much of the reasons behind events like these see the light of day eventually. Rest in peace, Alexei Navalnyi.

1: https://news.err.ee/1609255851/historian-navalny-s-death-wil... (Interestingly, the paragraph on Navalnyi being more of a disturbance now, after being declared dead, was not included in the English version of this news story. This is quite surprising, since ERR is actually a very well balanced source of news. All in all, that story includes interesting takes on Navalny as a politician, too, by another highly respeced Russia expert from Estonia.)

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya

My apologies, and thanks very much for the correction. On another note, has there ever been any custom OSes for the late 2000s era Nokia dumb phones, built by some stubborn hackers? Or some modification software to hand-tailor the Series 40 iterations, e.g remove features the user doesn't need. That would make these phones fun to mess with.

I'm a weirdo who has intentionally never owned a smartphone, so "using up" old dumb phones found in our family has been a fun hobby for roughly two decades. Longest streak was using a 3310 for 12-or-so years, starting when I went to gymnasium and letting it go in late 20s when I was about to become a father. Man, that was one hell of a phone (also serving as a beer bottle opener, etc for many students back in the day).

Looking back, I can't emphasize how much I loved the 3310 UI. Clean, fast, no colors, simply perfect. I'm currently using a Nokia 2600 Classic [1] with Symbian; it feels incredibly slow and cumbersome as compared to the 3310. Literally having to watch a progress bar while the phone's calculator(!) is loading.

But, that darned 2600 also refuses do die (it was already showing dead pixels, so there was some hope in the meanwhile), so I estimate being stuck with this one in the years to come also.

Another fun UI was from a Big Button Phone For Elderly People that belonged to my grandpa. I think it's a ZTE s202 [2]. Unfortunately, the microphone gave up working, so I ditched it.

That world of Old Dumb Phones is actually a lot of fun. And -- it's odd to think how much outdated-but-entirely-usable electronic waste there actually is on the planet.

Thanks, Finns, for enriching the world with the rock-solid 3310, and greetings from the other side of the gulf!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2600_classic

2: https://i.hinnavaatlus.ee/p/1200/99/43/S20220must__6ee8.jpg

React OS probably also has the Classic Windows look available. They seem to have switched their main screenshots to something resembling Windows 10, though: https://reactos.org/gallery/

Thanks for the addition, apparently I'm too young to know this. Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

This is really nice, thanks for sharing. Looking back, the obvious inspiration here, Classic Windows, was a remarkably good user interface. (Or, many people simply have a soft spot for it, because we used it for a very long time.)

I imagine Ede would play perfectly with Tiny Core Linux [1] which has FLTK/FLWM as its default desktop system.

1: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/

In my Former Soviet Country, this is a fairly common thing that (sensible) older generation intellectuals remind to Gen Y/Gen Z lefties. There was a short period of "dude, communism is quite hip" in some circles roughly a decade ago, but this seemed more like an overblown, cynical nostalgic game, because we still have Soviet era artifacts lying around everywhere.

As of today, I think Russia's idiotic invasion to Ukraine has destroyed those mind-games of a functioning society with very strong central planning. Even if it might truly include thoughtful, interesting ideas in countries that by now have a long, unbroken tradition with democracy, I guess people of the former Soviet Bloc are extra careful these days. YMMV, of course.

There is a truly wonderful children's book about Erdos, "The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos" by Deborah Heiligman and LeUyen Pham: https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Loved-Math-Improbable/dp/1596...

I think this book really shines in showing why it makes sense to accept "strange" people (or, that other kid in your kindergarten who seems "strange"). Fills me with warmth every time I happen to page it through.

Estonian log house builders building a smoke sauna with hand tools. 58 minutes of beauty and true craftsmanship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN47VMnRc-U

Another one is Teeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand

I used to be a journalist and tried to adapt it for my language (Estonian) years ago, but eventually gave up. Possibly tried it with Gregg also, which is the coolest one visually IMO. Orthic is entirely new to me, thanks a lot for this link!