Minimal skills

[Donald Wilde]

On 6/4/20, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 18:27:09 -0700, Donald Wilde wrote:
>> On 6/4/20, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:54:15 -0700, Donald Wilde wrote:
>> >> On 6/4/20, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
>> >> > On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 17:08:01 -0700, Donald Wilde wrote:
>> >> >> If it's an Android phone, whatever MUA you have on it should also
>> >> >> have
>> >> >> such setting switches.
>> >> >
>> >> > Emailing on a smartphone is a terrible experience. Real people
>> >> > use a real computer for real stuff. :-)
>> >>
>> >> I'm busily re-designing smartphones in my 'spare' cycles because they
>> >> barely fit my needs for a _phone_!
>> >
>> > Smartphones are not _designed_ to be used for phone calls. :-)
>>
>> ROFL VVH! Imagine that! What are they, status symbols of the
>> poor and clueless?
>
> Depends. The more expensive they are, the more they are a status
> symbol of the rich and clueless. Primarily they are used to monitor
> and control people who don't know better because BB LOVE YOU and
> everyone needs a smartphone today. :-)

Hah, hear that. My Mom still has a flip-phone. SMS is too much for it,
but for her it works fine.

>
> Seriously, I found that conversation quality (both in the audio
> parameters and in the content) of smartphones is lower than with
> nonsmart mobile phones and regular "landline" phones; I don't

I'm 96% deaf in some freq ranges, so it is an absolute blessing that
my smartphone has Bluetooth on it. i have some really fancy (and more
expensive than my car, thank you Intel insurance!) hearing aids and a
Phonak dongle that connects everything with high fidelity
custom-tailored to my ears!

> know why. I'm old, so I will never understand what makes those
> things interesting, I find them just plain boring. I mean, you
> can't even easily program them, what kind of computers are those?
>
> Richard Feynman: "What I cannot create, I do not understand."
>
Actually, one of my long ago programming projects was an Android 1.5
Java app that allowed you to d/l multi-media 'brochures' so you could
compare the features of things, like if you wanted to compare a Ford
Raptor and a GMC whatever and you wanted to hear their engines and see
media clips.

The public Internet was woefully inadequate for that in those days,
but if the planets were in the right orientation and it was
oh-dark-thirty, it all worked.

Android Java is actually very intuitive and easy to use, unlike
OpenJDK Java and the gazillions of layers you need to do anything.
It's all FOSS too, though using C++ and the Native Development Kit
requires contortions because the Android kernel is a mostly-brain-dead
Linux GPL-licensed kernel. The modern Android IDE is very intuitive
although you might need to use a Linux VM to run it on your FreeBSD
system.
>
>> >> It sounds like the MBox format can do
>> >> that, so I'll make a transition myself in some near future.
>> >
>> > Both mbox and MailDir can be used for hierarchical storage.
>> > The main difference is that in mbox, you have _one_ file per
>> > mailbox, which can lead to big files; in MailDir, you have
>> > one file per message, which can lead to many files. Depending
>> > on filesystem parameters, one or the other can slow down
>> > message retrieval when you have millions of messages.
>>
>> Thanks for the edu experience, Polytropon! <(_ _)> :D
>>
>> Nothing can slow things down as much as Windows 10 does, out of the
>> box. I have an i7 4-core tower with 16GB of DDR4 and it's a slug that
>> I am always worried will do something Very Stupid(TM by MS) to me,
>> like reformatting my "damaged" USB key without asking.
>
> Yes, I've seen that and have successfully done excessive
> data recovery sessions with the result of such a "repair".
>
I've been fortunate. What sets it off, I think, is that I use it for
my Ubuntu backup storage and I think that's just binary BLOBs. I
haven't tried to do a 'restore' since this happened, though... :-(

I've stopped having the key (128GB!) plugged in when I switch OSen!


>> > As I mentioned, the storage mechamism doesn't actually matter
>> > as in the end, it all looks the same to the user:
>> >
>> > +-----------------------------------------------------+
>> > | [] []   [] [] [] []   [] [] [] [] [] []             |
>> > +----------+------------------------------------------+
>>
>> Dang, P! PUNCH CARDS??? <wink>
>
> No, icon bar. Punched cards have a missing corner, like this:
>
> 	 ________________________________________________
> 	///SYSIN DD * HOW DID THIS GET HERE?!            |

[snip]

My first programming was done in HS (~1973) on IBM punch-card
machines. The IBM360 ran a little interpreter called STOP that had
register-indirect pointers and other cool stuff. Opened the top of my
noggin, you might say... We sent a card deck in each class day and got
the printouts back a few days later.

> You can create them yourself with FreeBSD:
>
> 	$ echo 'your card text here' | bcd | awk '!/^\// { gsub("[1-9]", " ", $0);
> gsub("]", "#", $0); print } /^\//'
>
> Pipe that to the printer and enjoy. :-)
>
> See "man bcd" and "man ppt" for details (package "bsdgames",
> programs initially belonged to the default OS installation).
>

I love it!!! I recently saw a "Conway's Game of Life" program that was
ported from APL into Ruby, and I've been exploring doing an ncurses
front-end for it as a low-end console-friendly screen saver -- in my
copious free time, of course!

-- 
Don Wilde
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* What is the Internet of Things but a system *
* of systems including humans?                     *
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