I was recently thinking that if I died and went to hell, the greatest torture that could be inflicted on me would be to show me how much productive time I wasted pulling the meat.

Mouse jiggler running for third day, volume on max to hear a potential Teams message, and I’m spending my days playing board games with the kids.

6 and 7. For now, I’ll be monitoring their activity, and we’ll see whether they’ll need any locks. Probably internet filtering on the router.

My kids are getting mini PC’s for Christmas, preinstalled with Mint. They use tablets now, but I want to introduce them to the joys of keyboards and mice (and The Secret of Monkey Island). I hope they’ll like it, so that in the future they’ll stick to PC’s and laptops, which offer far more robust control by the end user.

I don’t watch others playing games, either, but someone who likes those streams told me he didn’t see a difference between watching good gamers play games and good football players play football.

Haha, no. I was tempted to visit Paddy’s Lunch, but being in Boston I opted for clam chowder, a good burger (where you actually get to specify how you want it made), and some Italian. I was mildly amused when I walked by a pub that advertised a band called The Gobshites. Certainly won’t help to dispell Irish stereotypes.

Dublin metro was first planned in the 1980s. A definitive plan was finalized last year, and the construction was supposed to start next year, bur at the last possible moment a group of residents near one of the planned terminuses blocked it in court because the construction would “cause them undue stress”. So, if we’re lucky, the metro construction will begin within 50 years of the original plan. Ireland is thus remaining one of the very few European countries with sizable population, without a metro. Despite running such huge budget surpluses that we sometimes refuse to collect taxes from the multinationals.

In Boston, I stayed close to Alewife. The red line was decent to get me to the city centre, and I had two good bus connections to Lexington where I also had some business to attend to.

Just came back from a long weekend in Boston, and I loved it. It reminded me very much of Dublin where I live:

• Expensive as hell.
• Weather forecast is never right.
• You can understand the locals only when they are drunk.

But the food was great, and the T was lightyears ahead of the Dublin metro system.

Last weekend I found that my original floppies for Eye of the Beholder II are still perfectly usable. Now get off my lawn, you young whippersnapper.

Banned from r/worldnews for “racism” (said that the Russian elites have been committing social and moral degradation for centuries, by killing, imprisoning or exiling anyone with independent thoughts). Banned from numerous subreddits for “participating in a hate subreddit” (correcting someone once in r/KotakuInAction).

Mint, and I’ll stay with mint. Perhaps I’m not a good Linux user material, but I just want something that works and doesn’t get into the way. You know: a reliable, unobtrusive operating system.

I have two alarm clocks set up. One on mu bedside table to wake up, and one in my home office to go to bed.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I’m having UFO: Enemy Unknown flashbacks.

This is just my speculation, so take it as you will. The EU has been pushing for digital ID cards for quite a while, and this is just another attempt. The last serious attempt was the Covid vaccination passport, but so many people still opted for paper certs, and the rest deleted the app when vaccination was no longer mandatory, that it failed again. So, now the authorities are becoming smart and trying to go through the vector that has a proven record of driving technological change: porn.

As my father used to say, “The only decision you should make while angry is to stop being angry.”

I have a 486, but with MS-DOS 6.2 and Norton Commander as a UI. Haven’t booted it up for about a decade, though, but don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t work. My Win98SE computer (Pentium 100), on the other hand, is still my gaming rig. Don’t need anything better for HoMM2, Master of Orion 2, and TES: Daggerfall.

Trump’s executive order forced Microsoft to disable access for ICC’s Chief Prosecutor. So, in a sense, Trump is indeed a threat to digital sovereignty.

I remember when it didn’t have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL…

I work for a company with over 150k employees and 50B in annual revenues. My developers need a software tool, which was already identified as critical for our development. Instead of getting about 20 user licenses, each of which costs about $400 per year, and which would cover all our needs, the responsible manager, in his infinite wisdom, got one license, so that users register with it only when they need that tool. We even had a shared spreadsheet as a wait list. The software provider caught on after a few months, and cut us off. The manager got a good rating in his KPI for saving money with his initial decision, and the software provider was blamed for ending our license. Office politics as usual.