Bobby Moss @trechnex@mastodon.sdf.org

Don't worry, they'll tell you.

If the developers of an application get mad at you for forking, they are only developing "open source" software.

Developers of "free software" thank you for forking their code, because you are taking control of your personal computing instead of just being a passive consumer.

It doesn't matter if the code you are using is licensed under the GPL. If users can only exercise one of the four freedoms in practise, it's just a PR exercise.

As promised, here's an article for how to make the most of remote working and preserve your mental health in the process!

http://trechnex.freeshell.org/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-remote-working.html

For background I became a remote worker in the summer of 2018, and I have spent the last two years learning from trial and error what works and what doesn't.

I hope these insights help people who have found themselves working from home for the first time because of the COVID-19 outbreak.

This is your friendly reminder to take care about how you word your content warnings.

"COVID-19" or "US pol" are good examples of explaining what your toot is about for people who are making a decision about reading it.

You can also add modifiers to the end of a CW:

+ is positive
- is negative
~ is mixed

"time to panic" and "Trump's an idiot" literally defeats the entire purpose of using a content warning in the first place, and it negatively impacts people with mental health issues.

A piste, a rabbit and a gun walk into a bath, and one of them says "I thick your auto corked is broken"

The things you discover on the Steam store page for Sid Meier's Civilization V while you're waiting for it to download... 😂

CW: There are swears

https://youtu.be/Tz06atpK9ug

That leads to the inconvenient truth that if you release an open source project nowadays, it could be used by a government/corporation/military to do bad things with.

The FOSSbro take is that any restriction on use is an attack on software freedom, and developers are not responsible for what other people use their program for.

The moderate take is that while enforceability of ethical source hasn’t been tested, the FOSSbro take is totally bananas.

In other news, it seems I *may* have revealed I’m actually in favour of “ethical source” as a concept. 😅

I think it stems from a growing awareness that current definitions were set at a time when you could store source code on a single floppy disk and governments/corporations/militaries made all their own software in-house.

Nowadays source code is too complex for most to review without a lot of time & skill, and most in-house software has been partially or fully replaced with open source.

“Ramen” is just Anime noodles.

Something that's always bothered me about Stellaris is that the loading cursor animation is technically wrong.

I'm no astrophysicist, but shouldn't the inner-most planet be orbiting faster the star than the outer-most one?

(If it's actually a planet with moons orbiting it, I retract the criticism)

In other news, this bit of gold from bird site is not bad consumer advice if you're looking for a cheap webcam. 🙂

I wasn't ready for Patrick to kill and eat Spongebob, but at least it's educational about starfish!

https://stillinthesimulation.com/untitled-comic/the-bikini-bottom-horror-chapter-1-rise-of-the-star/

I am not surprised Dominic Cummings (the PM’s chief advisor) is probably going to get away with ignoring government advice on COVID-19.

If you are still buying into the “we’re all in it together” slogan, I’m sorry to say that you haven’t been paying attention.

(If you missed it, he took his kid half way across the country to drop them off with grandparents while knowing he & his wife are infected. He was caught as neighbours saw him dancing to an ABBA song in the back garden)

The path of spiritual enlightenment requires true integrity.

Did you ever pay for WinZIP? 🤔

Decisions, decisions...

Do I sleep with the window open and struggle with hay fever, or do I sleep with the window closed and slow roast in the oven that is the top floor of the house I rent? 🤔

...I think I'll just doze off on the sofa! 😂

In other news, I went on a rant about Civilization VI that ended in pretty sound consumer advice 😅

https://twitter.com/trechnex/status/1263600407009427456

Congratulations to @gnome for beating a patent troll! 🥳

https://www.gnome.org/news/2020/05/patent-case-against-gnome-resolved/

In other news, here's a very cursed buwu version of some of Friedrich Nietzsche's material.

https://youtu.be/dGDH3meSPyk

(It's fair to say @Clipsey makes my life decidedly weirder 😂 )

I guess in many ways it’s a “good news bad news” situation for FLOSS.

The good news is that techie Windows users will be able to run Linux GUI apps without modification. More users means more contributors and resources.

The bad news is that said users would have no incentive to go through the pain of switching to Linux unless they buy into the ideology first.

(In my experience, the ideology usually follows the switch)

The headline to that joke though is that Windows 10 insider builds are going to start supporting Linux GUI apps over a graphics-accelerated version of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2.

It’ll be quite some time before it becomes a thing the wider world upgrades to, but I suspect when it does that is going to have far-reaching ramifications.

IT’S FINALLY THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP!

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263377/microsoft-windows-10-linux-gui-apps-gpu-acceleration-wsl-features

In other news, apparently the "flavour of the week" JavaScript framework is Deno.

Expect mass defections from Node, which is no longer "flavour of the week" and suddenly has a million things wrong with it in the eyes of young developers.

https://deno.land

That amusing variation on "Thought of the day" came from the gloomy thought "what was life like before the Coronavirus again?"

I literally had to go back to Christmas 😂

On Christmas Day in my native Britain, we set off small explosions at the dinner table and light desserts on fire.

The small explosions come with a bad joke, a paper hat and a small toy.