R.L. Dane

Content Warning: Discussion of fascism, modern U.S. politics, and a bible quote Background Back around 2011, there was a bible verse that was working its way through my cognitive machinery: Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the…

Image of the Cactus Cafe, taken from Wikipedia I went to a live music venue (really just a restaurant with a sizable enclosed patio and questionable sound system) with some family and friends a couple nights ago, and as we were sitting, sipping our drinks…

One day, a farmer went to load up his station wagon to take his family to visit some friends, but found that it wouldn't start.

Note: no substantive spoilers in this review If you're short on time, you can skip the preamble Preamble As you will know from my previous blog post, I've been on a bit of a reading kick lately.

I took a few days of a break from the fediverse to try to do a mini digital detox, to stop zombiescrolling youtube, and to read more.

One of my new fedifriends, Terminal Tilt recently posted: We should not call sharing "piracy."

Warning: (obviously) spoilers abound!

My current Android setup with IodéOS, KISS Launcher, and grayscale mode The other day, I was watching a Techlore video while folding laundry, and became increasingly annoyed as it went along: not at Techlore or the video, but the Wired article he was resp…

Yesterday was my grandmother's funeral.

I was reading in Ploum's excellent blog yesterday about his history with Ubuntu, when I stumbled upon a lovely screenshot of his FVWM setup circa 2003, and it brought me back to a friendly, and long-raging debate with some fedifriends on the subject of pi…

After yesterday's unhinged, painfully cathartic threnody of a post, I really wanted to post something short, light and enjoyable.

Content Warning: this post is a downer.

Professor Chidi Anagonye stirring a pot of Marshmallow-Peeps-and-M&Ms chili in class as he rants Note: Spoilers of Seasons 1-3 of The Good Place follow.

In yesterdays's article, I described the benefit of having a large supply of physical hardware to try different OSes on.

Modified image of a stack of thinkpads taken originally from https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/17xf8kl/my_thinkpad_stack/ A lot of people experience vendor lock-in and outright "ecosystem captivity" because they've plunked down several grand towa…

Ironically, this isn't intended to be a "filler" post, but more of a fill-you-in post, as I've actually decided to stop trying to do "100 Days to Offload" this year.

I debated whether or not this should be a "toot" (status update), or a proper blog post.

...to let you all know why I haven't been blogging for the past couple weeks.

Preview.app shown in NeXTStep 1.0 courtesy of infinitemac.org In yesterday's post, I talked about the things I do and don't miss about MacOS, mainly focusing on the global menubar search as the main positive from my experience with Mac OS X.

Background and disclaimer I was a Mac kid.

A few days ago, I was reading someone's blog (I don't remember who)* that was talking about the art and the "why" of blogging (or it might've been in a chat conversation, I'm not sure).

Background In yesterday's article, I went over the GUI programs that I enjoyed using over the years and remembered fondly.

Background Yesterday, I wrote about why I loved the command-line, and one of my good Fedifriends commented that while he appreciated a good command-line program, he generally preferred GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces).

I was going to post a much more serious blog post about anhedonia yesterday, but I didn't get to do so, as I was feeling... anhedonic!

Background I'd be fooling myself to think that I could be the first person on the earth to note music's incredible ability to heal and salve the tormented human soul.

Time for another little hardware review.

Disclaimer: I will be using the name/term vim in this blog post, but I actually mean any command-line editor based on or inspired by vi, or "vi-style editors."

Note: When I say "Online" in this context, I literally mean "on a computer," vs.

Just now, I was doing what all great bloggers do when they run out of (easily) actionable blog post ideas: I got around to cruising my RSS feeds!

Greetings!

Welcome to the PADDING.

There's a scene in The King's Speech at the end where he's finally giving his big, inspiring speech, and while you hear is the speech, what you see is the scribbled crib notes and the incredible mental gymnastics he has to go through to get each word and…

About two and a half months ago, I bought a Wacom digitizer to do doodles with, but I found the process of sketching with a standalone digitizer a bit dissatisfying after using an iPad in years past.

Background I've used android as my main mobile OS for about four and a half years, and used it previously for about a year and a half before then.

Content warning: This post contains some minor spoilers for Severance seasons 1 & 2, as well as a discussion of some religious and cultic themes.

Lars looking on wistfully while ingesting his sister-in-law's retort to his rant Video clip Content warning: this post unavoidably and briefly touches on some "mature" topics If you had told me six months ago that one of my favorite movies of all time wou…

I wanted to try a new-to-me compressor, lz4, but it turned into a full ADHD-fueled file compression shoot-out: Dang, lz4 is crazy fast!

Luke looking wistfully out at the dual sunset on Tatooine as The Force Theme plays hauntingly in the background, beckoning him to his grand adventure Having grown up in the 1980s, one thing random friends would often ask me (actually what family friends w…

I'm starting a new series where I recount the TV show and movies that were formative in my life.

When I was in High School, I fell madly in love with Star Trek: The Next Generation.

One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience.

Background One minor foible of the fediverse instance I'm on is that searching (for accounts or hashtags) can be quite slow.

Partially for the sake of my daily doodles, which I've been posting to the Fediverse, and also because I've been learning the Persian alphabet, I recently purchased a small USB pen digitizer, the "One by Wacom," by Wacom (great branding 😄).

I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun.

Thanks to my fedifriend Joel for nominating me for this challenge (after I had pestered him 😄).

When I was a kid, a new computer cost the equivalent of $3,000 in today's money, and a five year old computer was basically a dinosaur.

I was on a Signal video chat with my siblings today, and when I mentioned something about RC flight as an analogy for a person's health (being "three mistakes high"), my brother looked confused and then amused when I explained what I was talking about.

I keep finding more of these blog challenge questions, and I totally love them.

... ... ...

I saw this update to the "Blog Questions Challenge" format on jnv's blog, and without reading* it first (in order to not taint my own answers — I will definitely go back and read his), I thought I'd write down some of my own thoughts, for fun.