Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I am a professional designer with two decades of experience and I gotta admit, you’re smoking crack if you think GIMP (the project that is almost entirely held back by its stupid name) is superior to Photoshop.

It might be able to get the job done for small tasks, but it is not a serious tool for serious people. I’m sorry. I’m as pro-FLOSS as anyone can get, and even I recognize that right now there’s just no competition in the design department. Affinity is Mac-only, and comes with its own problematic aspects.

Meshtastic, baby!!

All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn’t it?

Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y’all, while it’s still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.

Google Pixel 9 Pofessional. It’s the slightly cheaper version, on account that it got a little burned at the factory.

YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”

I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p

Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.

Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.

My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.

Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.

<video> was a revolution.

Godspeed, you hero of gyros, you hoagie heroine, you rigoletto of Ruebens…

If you say so. I’m just trying to be helpful instead of offering scare quotes.

There is a cool self-hosted version of Perplexity out there now, called Perplexica. It can be configured to use Ollama (local inferencing) and your own, self-hosted SearXNG instance to do the actual search and collation.

I have been using it for a week and it really works.

Funkwhale works nice, but honestly, I am a big fan of just using mpd and piping the audio over a networked speaker, but I’m a simple boy with simple needs.

officer, promote that person

I thought that Ukulele was a pretty nice way to learn the foundations of string instruments

fun fact, the years 1999, 2000, and 2001 were actually all the same year.

oldest baby: “I was totally born in the wrong generation.”

hey, this is the plot of Children of Men…

Finally, somebody looking out for the faceless among us.