For more than twenty years I thought I knew how to tie my shoelaces, but I didn’t.
Looking back, it’s bizarre. Because I was tying them wrong, they often came undone. I didn’t think to work out why, and nobody thought to tell me.
First timer, nice place you've got here. Just got into town, didn't even know this place existed off the main highway. Even saw a gopher on the way in.
Anyways, it's good to be out of the rain. Seems the pace here is just what I need. Think I'll settle in for the long haul and open a tab. Let's start off the night with a white russian, thanks barkeep.
For anything actually serious, I use my laptop. And even for some of the things I regularly use my phone for, it's frustrating. I remember chatting on my desktop in the 90s and early 00s, and no amount of acrobatics will convince me that a phone keyboard is in any way better, that switching back and forth between conversations on the same screen is Great, Actually.
All my coding's via my laptop: Visual Studio, emacs/fish via VM, that sort of thing. And at the end of the day, my phone's often nearly at full charge.
Crazy when you think about it. These things cost as much as actual computers and for a certain segment (me, and I suspect a lot of tech-types), their main use is as a general distraction device.
It's hard getting it in a sea of not getting it, requiring a lot of pretending not getting it while constantly on the look out for signs of getting it - ready to pursue such signs with getting-it verification questions/interactions (because hope-fueled first impressions can be quite wrong).
I went through a bunch of effort maybe half a decade ago to coerce my Android phone to take cues from a full-sized keyboard.
I don't remember the details. I think there was the usual pain having to try varieties of necessary software to eventually understand which combinations led to the best trade-offs situation. But I imagine the main problem was having to restart too many thingies to get it to work, and that leaving those things running was somehow at odds with the phone working for its usual purposes. In other words, it wasn't at all as simple as finding the right keyboard adapters to plug into where both power and USB flow, the right software detecting such and just plain fairly quickly doing the right thing, with online acknowledgement that things went well.
Let's say you have a tool that makes unsuitable noises on one of the file handles, and the fine manual is silent on how to make the noises go away. Now, some would either patch the software, or at least report an issue to upstream--maybe there could be a quiet or silent option for the tool?
[...]
Pipes are one way to wrangle this thing that should not be; standard error could be sent to some pipe, and then if the tool exits with a non-zero status word the error output can be shown. This of course assumes that the tool does actual exit with a non-zero status word, which is not always the case. In that case, there probably should be a patch or bug report to upstream?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
