My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.
I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.
It's actually pretty boring. When I say "accent color" I mean a single pixel border around the selected container. The waybar is text, and the text is all bright green on a black background. The active desktop has a single pixel magenta stroke around it. I've thought about turning that into just magenta text as well. Every window element I can make #000000 black without making things more confusing is.
Default text in the terminal is green, and if I select it with a mouse it's magenta. It's more of a "terminal" vibe than the win 3.1 Fluorescent vibe. I said that because they share garish colors.
Also, I'm always on the lookout for even more minimalist graphics to use in my config, if anyone has hyper-minimal things they like about theirs...
I’m using cwm with no bar. Just xclock and xbatt (an icon that reflect the battery percentage) in a corner. The only decoration is a border around the windows. Keyboard driven, but some menus are accessible by clicking on the desktop.
Great read. They also talked through the podcast and made specific reference to Ernie and his use of Affinity through Lutris on the recent episode of their podcast. [0] It was a good listen.
edited to add: I am however surprised that Ernie didn't just go for VivaDesigner [1], as it does seem to be a more drop-in InDesign replacement and is Linux native...
Thanks for pointing out VivaDesigner—I’m surprised in the many obsessive searches to find something like this, it never came up! (I will note that there are a lot of pretty obscure layout programs out there. At my first newspaper, I was brought in to help with the transition to CCI, which was a full-stack publishing tool popular with newspapers of the era. As a result of this, I was introduced to their old system, by Harris, which relied on Windows NT 3.1. Fun times.)
This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.
The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.
Quick add: I tested VivaDesigner on some old InDesign docs and I found it did not handle color blend modes very well, which is kind of an essential for a risograph project like 404’s. Nonetheless, the fact that it was able to open an InDesign doc more or less intact makes it a useful tool for a switcher.
Oh my goodness! I - really did not- expect to reach the author himself! Hello sir, your work is rad and am excited to see the zine!
My partner and I run our design studio on Linux these days and so we're always on the hunt for software to better replace the PC / Mac software we walked away from, so I explored running Affinity a couple years ago and couldn't get it going properly. Then last year I had to put together a big important document, so I had extra motivation to find a replacement.
I tried almost literally everything that was Linux native over a few weeks when I was getting started. I was impressed with VivaDesigner, but decided to just use LaTeX in VSCode - ahich was both awesome and terrifying for what wound up a 390pg document. And would be a huge PITA for this purpose.
Back to your post specifically - I can imagine how insane the old system you helped replace was.
And yes, I think that the "tipping point" is an important consideration. Maybe in Germany where Viva is based they might not think twice if you bring in a live file, but it does seem like Affinity is far and away the leading challenger in the states. I'm sure it's a miniscule share and Adobe is still the 8,000 pound gorilla.
Different mod schemes (ctrl-click and such) than InDesign, but I'm sure I can get used to that, adjust the settings, or patch it. Might have worked for them though, good suggestion!
Does Scribus have the customizable bindings like GIMP, where you can download someone's helpful remapping of the Adobe keys to GIMP? I'm pretty sure you can make it even closer.
I downloaded my archive and completely ended my GPT subscription last week based on some bad computer maintenance advice. Same thing here - using other models, never touching that product again.
Oh, it was DUMB. I was dumb. I only have myself to blame here. But we all do dumb things sometimes, owning your mistakes keeps you humble, and you asked. So here goes.
I use a modeling software called Rhino on wine on Linux. In the past, there was an incident where I had to copy an obscure dll that couldn't be delivered by wine or winetricks from a working Windows installation to get something to work. I did so and it worked. (As I recall this was a temporary issue, and was patched in the next release of wine.)
I hate the wine standard file picker, it has always been a persistent issue with Rhino3d. So I keep banging my head on trying to get it to either perform better or make a replacement. Every few months I'll get fed up and have a minute to kill, so I'll see if some new approach works. This time, ChatGPT told me to copy two dll's from a working windows installation to the System folder. Having precedent that this can work, I did.
Anyway, it borked startup completely and it took like an hour to recover. What I didn't consider - and I really, really should have - was that these were dll's that were ALREADY IN the system directory, and I was overwriting the good ones with values already reflecting my system with completely foreign ones.
And that's the critical difference - the obscure dll that made the system work that one time was because of something missing. This time was overwriting extant good ones.
But the fact that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success made me very wary of the harm it could cause.
> ...using other models, never touching that product again.
> ...that the LLM even suggested (without special prompting) to do something that I should have realized was a stupid idea with a low chance of success...
Since you're using other models instead, do you believe they cannot give similarly stupid ideas?
I'm under no misimpression they can't. But I have found ChatGPT to be most confident when it f's up. And to suggest the worst ideas most often.
Until you queried I had forgotten to mention that the same day I was trying to work out a Linux system display issue and it very confidently suggested to remove a package and all its dependencies, which would have removed all my video drivers. On reading the output of the autoremove command I pointed out that it had done this, and the model spat out an "apology" and owned up to ** the damage it would have wreaked.
** It can't "apologize" for or "own up" to anything, it can just output those words. So I hope you'll excuse the anthropomorphization.
Was this with the little turle as your cursor? Seeing the "older" kids who could manipulate that program/language to make stopmotion movies might have been the moment that set me on the path of "technology enthusiast" for the rest of my life. The scene of the dimmed computer lab with a whole group gathered around someone's monitor to watch the newest creation is forever etched in my memory.
It was! I even remember it was Terrapin LOGO - which amazingly seems to still be around. [0]
None of us ever made anything as good as a stop-motion. It didn't even occur to me to do anything that cool. But I was obsessed with geometry and patterns, and benefit from a group of us being allowed up into the middle school to use the computer at lunchtime recess.
When I was older and got official "Enrichment" classes after school I tackled the same pattern and figured out how to do it with a minimum of repeated line segments. I also figured I might as well do triangular and square tilings. But those were boring, as there isn't a repeated edge problem to solve.
That’s really cool! In adulthood I’ve learned about Seymour Papert and LOGO but I was never exposed to it when I was young. We did have early 90’s Macs in grade school.
Eno has been an inspiration for my entire music listening life. U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa - both of which Eno was a partner in making - came out in my preteens. It's tough for a kid in the rural midwest to find Brian Eno, but as soon as I got to a place with cultural access I was all over his work. And once Pandora and internet radio came out I was able to go deeper and in to contemporary composition and other related genres.
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972 [0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
Weird - I also listened to ambient music for almost a decade before hearing about Tim Hecker. I have to second the recommendation, although I started in a different place - when I first heard Harmony in Ultraviolet, it was like something clicked into place. Ambient music had been missing something and I hadn't even known it.
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.
The Copilot button that comes on new laptops is the Darkest Pattern I have ever seen. UI exploitation that has jumped the software / hardware gap.
A student will be showing me something on their laptop, their thumb accidentally grazes it because it's larger than the modifier keys and positioned so this happens as often as possible. The computer stops all other activity and shifts all focus to the Copilot window. Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."
If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.
> Unprompted, the student always says something like "God, I hate that so much."
... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?)
> If it was so useful they wouldn't have to trick you into using it.
They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.
BTW, the context is that one thing I teach is 3d modeling software, so the students are following my instructions to enter keyboard commands. It's usually Rhino3d where using the spacebar to repeat the last command is common.
> ... Dare I ask how Copilot typically responds to that? (They're doing voice detection now, right?)
Just as a generalization, the dozen or so times this has happened this semester the pop-up is accompanied by an "ugh" then after the window pops up from the taskbar the student immediately clicks back into the program we're using. It seems like they're used to dealing with it already. I haven't seen any voice interaction.
I mean, the statistics say the students use AI plenty - they just seem annoyed by the interruption. Which I can agree with.
> They delude themselves that they're doing no such thing. Of course the feature is so useful that you'd want to be able to access it as easily as possible in any context.
I'm having a hard time believing any of this, and am tempted to think this might be in bad faith. It's true it's a bit ambitious on their part that they replaced the right side key, but it isn't larger than normal and it's not positioned any differently than normal keys. Working with hundreds of laptops and humans, several ham fisted, on a daily basis I've not seen this at all.
Further, a dark pattern is where you are led towards a specific outcome but are pulled insidiously towards another. This doesn't really fall into that definition.
Rhino3d [0] is one of the state-of-the-art programs (along with Alias) for the drawing of nurbs and modeling with them. The result is the industry standard "Class A" surfaces. Rhino has amazing "BlendCrv" and "BlendSrf" commands that allow you to combine curvatures between the two curves / surfaces being blended. EG, you can interactively choose G0 at one side and G3 at the other, etc.
Rhino also has really nice and performant curvature analysis tools, and a whole host of other tools for implementing Nurbs.
Alias is at least $5,000 / year per seat. Rhino is $995 for a perpetual license, with new versions coming out every 2.5 - 3 years and significant functionality upgrades each time.
McNeel also maintains OpenNurbs [1], an open source library [2] for the construction and use of Nurbs. This powers Rhino of course and is used in other software. I'm still waiting for someone to implement OpenNurbs natively and robustly on Linux. But I like the Rhino platform and McNeel as a company so much that I run it using wine.
FYI: OpenNURBS runs fine on Linux, and is actually only supposed to be an (the) open source implementation of Rhino's .3dm file format. It is stripped of much of the functionality required of a full fledged CAD kernel (the rest is proprietary and included in Rhino proper).
Fair enough - I haven't poked around in it that much, so I didn't realize that OpenNurbs was limited in that way. But as a for-profit company, I guess it makes sense that they're not going to share their entire geometry engine.
When I got back on Linux as a daily driver a year ago I knew I wanted to be on a tiling / dynamic window manager.
I started with i3 and really like the keybindings. A couple months later I found out about xmonad through general interest in the subject. I installed it, found someone's config to use i3 keybinds (which I was used to at that point) and had a lot of fun. It's definitely quick as heck and I like how compact the codebase is for edits. Plus, it gave me an excuse to learn some rudimentary Haskell.
My visual setup is always SUPER minimal, as it comes out of the box. So that was nice.
Unfortunately I had some serious trouble with X11 and an app my workflow relies on running in wine, so I switched to sway for Wayland (such as it is it fixed the issue). I know some folks from the xmonad community are trying to implement it over Wayland [0], and were it to come to fruition it would be a VERY welcome development.
My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.
I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.
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