Tim Chase - Hyper

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's all the great version-control software I've used over the years or am learning. Many had their issues, and I'm only starting to learn Jujutsu now, but I love being able to jump backward in time, compare versions, bisect changes to track down issues, and see notes on why a change was made.

Tim Chase 3 days ago

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent appreciation is for some of the Free Software languages that bring me both joy and income: Python & Golang I've used Python at $DAYJOB since version 2.3 (it got woefully stuck at 2.4 for WAAAAY too long, and finally switched to 3.x some time in the last 2–3 years) and it simplified so many automation tasks there. I've used dozens of programming languages in my life for various tasks, and the hard part is rarely *writing* the code, but rather *reading* the code. And I find it a LOT easier to come back and read old Python code than just about any other language. Meanwhile, Golang saved my bacon on a short-term contracting project where TB of (simple) CSV files needed to be processed, cross-referenced. Being able to spin up a pool of multithreading Go processes, have built in locking and hash-map structures, and operate on raw input buffers of bytes shaved a 3-day manual process down to about an hour involving running a single command. I find it pretty readable too, feeling a bit like C while ditching some of the most cumbersome aspects.

Tim Chase 4 days ago

well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet. Back at the beginning of the month, I plotted all the projects on my remind(1) calendar, grouping various categories together. Two days ago, lynx¹, yesterday was Dillo², and today it was supposed to be #Firefox. Yet this week has been full of sad Firefox news, with them ignoring users' desires to keep AI rubbish out of the browser (or at least relegated to an optional plugin) The browser that I started using as Netscape, grew to be Communicator, that kinda became Phoenix, then shed the non-browser functions off to Thunderbird (already got mentioned³) and became Firefox. Despite the rise of Chromium/Chrome, I still use Firefox as my daily driver web-browser for the modern web (rather than the *pleasant* web where lynx & Dillo serve me much better). What used to be a "User Agent" has become something that no longer puts the *user* first. 😢 So in this time of wishes and gifts, I wish that the Firefox leadership team would take a strong look at what they're doing and change their course. ⸻ ¹

BSD.cafe Mastodon Portal

Tim Chase (@gumnos@bsd.cafe)

Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month,...

²

BSD.cafe Mastodon Portal

Tim Chase (@gumnos@bsd.cafe)

Following yesterday's installment of lightweight web-browsing with lynx(1), today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's the @dillo@fosstodon.org project. It...

³

BSD.cafe Mastodon Portal

Tim Chase (@gumnos@bsd.cafe)

Tim Chase 5 days ago

Following yesterday's installment of lightweight web-browsing with lynx(1), today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's the @npub13645...0gn6 project. It's pretty much everything I want from a non-JavaScript enabled browser. It's fast. It's lightweight. It runs across all the architectures I use (I can't run FF or Chromium on my macppc or i386 hardware any more due, I believe, to JIT requirements). It's customizable (I have my own preferred CSS stylesheet that tends to make everything more readable rather than the hit-or-miss partial CSS support that can cause some sites to be unreadable). I've shared the anecdote many times before, but reading the Inconsolation blog¹ a number of years ago, I used dillo and literally had over 100 tabs open, yet top(1) reported Dillo using less than 100MB of RAM. Meanwhile, opening a single blank home-page in FF or Chromium doing absolutely nothing consumed more RAM than that. 🤯 So today I'm spreading some Dillo love 🥰 ⸻ ¹

Inconsolation

Index 0-K

Here is the first half of an alphabetical list of links for software that was mentioned on this site. I’ll try to update this fairly regularl...