OldCoder

OldCoder , 2 months ago

By board game, do you mean physical board game or 2D computer games?

If computer games are acceptable, review "Powder", the roguelike from ZincLand and not the physics simulation. The roguelike is an SDL-1 game from the 2000s and 2010s that might fit the bill.

See the attached screenshot. Note: The screenshot is Powder running in my Linux distro [Laclin]. The game's website is still online at the following link:

http://www.zincland.com/powder/

The site is dated 2018, so the binaries might be too old to work for you. However, the game has low dependencies. If the binaries don't work for you, it should be easy to build the game from source.

Another roguelike that has been popular and even beloved for decades is NetHack. That one might be better for children who are a few years older.

NetHack is unique in that the graphics are text characters. This reflects its origins about 45 years ago. "d" is a dog or canine and "D" is a dragon. Frequent players get to the point where they jump when a "D" enters the room.

Note: The Powder website uses http and not https. Your browser may therefore refuse to connect unless you authorize it as a special step. If you're not able to connect, indicate this and I'll provide the source code myself.

OldCoder , 3 months ago

I used #Slackware before the #Linux Tux mascot existed. A CD set cover featuring one of Slackware's original mascots, the platypus, is attached. The set of CDs shown is exactly 30 years old this month [October 2025].

The platypus is pleased because Slackware is [or was] loaded with features such as the latest 1.X kernels and support for ELF binaries. People from later eras should picture CD sets like this one as being like Christmas presents.

Slackware was, for my company's purposes, UNIX, pure and simple. It just worked. The distro allowed us to move off of Sun hardware with little effort.

In the end, we used Slackware on 486s and 586s for most of our primary UNIX development and went to porting centers to build binaries for the various commercial UNIX OSes that still existed at the time.

One of the managers, a gruff old-school military officer, had difficulty believing that a free OS on PCs could replace a commercial OS and hardware costing thousands of dollars. He once shook a mouse rapidly to see if this would break the desktop. It didn't and so we continued to deploy Slackware.

Over time, I wrote enough patches and scripts for Slackware that it was simpler to take the new material and turn it into a distro of my own than it was to update Slackware. That is where my own distro, Laclin, came from.

Laclin has been original since the 1990s, but there is still Slackware DNA in pieces of the boot scripts.

I met Patrick Volkerding in person once. We only spoke briefly, but he was positive enough.

OldCoder , 4 months ago

I'm not able to see the context, but I'd like to suggest LibreWolf as an option worth review.

Like Waterfox, LibreWolf is a "spoon" of #Firefox. The key differences are that #LibreWolf is focused more aggressively on privacy and security and is expected to continue support for uBlock Origin, the real one, for the long term.

To be clear, Waterfox includes some privacy and security changes as well. However, the uBlock Origin issue might be a significant differentiator.

LibreWolf won't play videos, for me at least, on some sites, but I think that that's due to the security measures.

LibreWolf home page:
https://librewolf.net/

OldCoder , 6 months ago

FWIW We graduated in the same year. The Web says that you were University of Vermont 1981 - Phi Beta Kappa. Major isn't stated. I was U.C. Berkeley 1981 - Mathematics and Computer Science, High Honors and Honors.

I worked in Palo Alto during your decade as a columnist a few miles away at SJMN. I was a code and data architect. You were a reliable commentator on what was happening there at the time. I read you for the decade.

I'd actually buy two or three newspapers a day to stay on top of things. I read both news stories and columnists. But newspapers ceased to exist, in a very real sense, right around the time that you left SJMN.

I remember that one of the editors of one of the newspapers that had gone bankrupt repeatedly, I think, ran a plea to the public for ideas to save his newspaper.

I thought of saying, "Um, death spiral, much? Stop cutting and cutting everything and perhaps focus on precisely what you've been cutting, instead."

But I didn't see the point. The Chicxulub impact had occurred and the era of the dinosaurs had ended.

Mainstream media continued to exist. However, recent events, most importantly the repeated caving to Donald Trump by the majors, suggest that even the mainstream media juggernaut as a whole has ceased to exist now in the context of independent news. It's largely just bread and circuses.

I cite Stephen Colbert's "Big Fat Bribe" segment, both the point that he was making and, as importantly, CBS's response to the segment.

You're paraphrased by LLMs as saying that journalism's role at this moment is crucial and extends well beyond its putative scope. [my interpretation]

That is true to an extent that needs to be clear to more people. It isn't unreasonable to add that the Web and the Internet in general are the last stand against the outcome that is described in the novel "1984":

"But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."

Congratulations on the 50,000 milestone. Here's to 150,000 in due course. Encourage other journalists to follow a similar path.

For multiple reasons, I don't recommend congregrating in a single Fediverse instance.

There is, for example, a Fediverse instance that is theoretically "for journalists". The history of that instance will explain one of my concerns. The short version is that a diverse group of independent writers who are free to speak as they see fit is what is needed to make a difference.

Perhaps other journalists who have travelled the path to the point of retirement and who are no longer bound by the concerns of large corporations would like to make the later stages of their lives among the most productive.

Journalists, after all, want the truth to be heard and the Fediverse is designed to be about that. Not about encouraging people to be as loud as possible.

I've been running my own Fediverse instance for 6 years. I've encountered my share of trolls. But the Fediverse doesn't reward this behavior as it's rewarded at the "bird site". It isn't a perfect system but it's the best that I see presently.

Regards, Robert (the Old Coder)

Illustration: LLM. Mainstream media executives.

OldCoder , 8 months ago

Many CLI and GUI stalwarts are already well-known.

For example, gcc and vim, which others mentioned previously, curl, dig, dosemu, evince, ffmpeg, gimp, gnumeric, gnuplot, htop, lame, libreoffice, mpv, nano, pandoc, qemu, rsync, screen, vlc, wine, all are known and respected.

However, in the FOSS world, every day is Christmas. There's always a new gift to open.

Here's a list of 50 lesser-known CLI and GUI #Linux #FOSS tools that I find useful or interesting. I'm not sure that they're all must-haves, but they shouldn't be overlooked. Note: For more tools like this, visit Fossies at:
https://fossies.org/

#01-05:
angie - A fork of nginx with more features. A must-have.
bandwhich - A simple network bandwidth monitor in Rust.
cuneiform - A venerable OCR program.
dice - Flexible dice simulator in Haskell.
dog - An alternative in Rust to dig. Woof.

#06-10:
ffmpeg-normalize - Normalizes audio streams.
gcolor2 - A GUI color chooser.
geeqie - The successor to GQview, a knight of old.
genius - A GUI math system.
gitea - A complete git hosting system in Go. Amazing.

#11-15:
guestfs - Operates on VM disk images.
G'MIC - An astonishing plug-in for The GIMP. A must-have.
handbrake - [GUI version] Makes transcoding Easy as Pie.
hexchat - Linux FOSS IRC client. Skip the non-free versions.
joe - A very old but still nice text-mode text editor.

#16-20:
lazygit - A git text-GUI aka TUI in Go.
leafpad - Similar to classic Notepad for Linux.
Mail In A Box - A complete self-hosted email system.
mediainfo - It does what it says. A must-have.
meow-cli - An ASCII cat generator in Rust.

#21-25:
mlr - Slices and dices CSV, TSV, and JSON data.
mupdf - A lightweight PDF and EPUB reader.
names - A name generator in Rust.
netpbm - Image tools with a 37-year [!] history.
notepadqq - Similar to Notepad++ for Linux.

#26-30:
notepad-next - Another Notepad++ work-alike for Linux.
optipng - The go-to CLI PNG optimizer tool.
patool - A CLI multi-format file archive tool.
pbzip2 - Speeds up bzip2 operations.
petname - Another name generator in Rust.

#31-35:
pigz - Speeds up gzip operations.
piknik - A file transfer tool in Go.
pleroma - Lightweight alternative to Mastodon.
podman - A daemon-less alternative to Docker.
polars - A CLI dataframe system in Rust.

#36-40:
rclone - A CLI cloud sync and mount tool. A must-have.
rdfind - Finds and optionally hard-links duplicate files.
remmina - Remote desktop that supports multiple protocols.
Resynthesizer - Another GIMP plug-in. A must-have.
recoll - A powerful desktop search GUI.

#41-45:
rlwrap - Forces readline mode for CLI tools. A must-have.
snowglobe - Snowflake generator in Haskell.
socat - A CLI network Swiss Army Knife.
sshuttle - The Poor Man's VPN. A must-have.
ugrep - An improved grep. A must-have.

#46-50:
upx - Compresses executables. Drawback: Slows them a bit.
uv - A successor to pip3 in Rust.
tenacity - A fork of audacity with must-have changes.
tesseract - Another OCR program.
ytop - An alternative in Rust to htop.

OldCoder , 7 months ago

This one isn't a must-have, but it's a relatively unknown #Linux #FOSS program that is nice to have.

Willem Vermin in the NL has been working on a fork of the old "xfishtank" program. His fork is significantly improved and is likely to supersede the classic version, which has become dated over the years.

It doesn't come with an ocean background yet. The attached screenshot shows my version, which adds a high-quality Creative Commons ocean background. It also shows a jellyfish that I've added as well. I'll probably incorporate a seahorse and other new sealife later on.

The home page for Willem's fork is at the link below. My changes might be merged later into that version. Or or I might distribute my version separately.

https://ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/software/xfishtank/