Thank you!

Do you have a link? I heard about this one but haven’t found a sharable link yet

I still think material design 1 (which came out in 2014) is good, which focused on clarity with limited space. The problem started with material design 2 in 2018, which pushed for increased whitespace and homogeny in design. (And Microsoft’s Metro… shudder)

Material design 1 balanced clean and readable while maintaining depth (trying to emulate 3d space by “stacking cards of content” with shadows). But since most of MD1 was guidelines instead of, like, actual components developers could use, it was a double edged sword of forcing people to be a little creative in making their own UIs but cumbersome because you had to make it all yourself

Material design 2 tried to “fix” this by making everything simpler and shipping a ton of premade components that developers could just slap together and call it a day. Good for speeding up development, unfortunate because everything now looks the same. It’s also because of this that material design started to “break containment” and appear all over desktop applications/websites. It’s never good when a mobile design language is applied to the larger desktop space

That’s why I really don’t mind seeing material design 1 on either mobile or desktop, because it was designed to use space efficiently and interestingly. Material design 2 on the other hand favors whitespace and speed to the detriment of us all

The pinebook’s privacy switches (for WiFi/BT, camera, and microphone) operate at the firmware level, the operating system has no control over them

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Privacy_Switches

The keyboard operates on firmware independent of the operating system. It detects if one of the F10, F11 or F12 keys is pressed in combination with the Pine key for 3 seconds. Doing so disables power to the appropriate peripheral, thereby disabling it. This has the same effect as cutting off the power to each peripheral with a physical switch. This implementation is very secure, since the firmware that determines whether a peripheral gets power is not part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. So the power state value for each peripheral cannot be overridden or accessed from the operating system. The power state setting for each peripheral is stored across reboots inside the keyboard’s firmware flash memory.

Ed, man!

Not xkcd in this case

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/

I would absolutely go to this event

Ack librefm completely slipped my mind

AFAIK they’re two separate projects for the same/similar goal. I know ListenBrainz has a recommendation system, but it might still be in it’s early days

There’s ListenBrainz, the open MusicBrainz version of last.fm

The scout’s voice actor (Nathan Vetterlein) used to be super active, but a few years ago he said he’d be going on an “indefinite break” while he focused on other goals he had in life (presumably to do more than just be the “TF2 scout guy”).

His linked in currently says he’s working as a principle game designer at Wizards of the Coast

https://youtu.be/L_k9yb0kGgU?t=149

But I agree, with the other voice actors getting together and doing all these fun projects it would be awesome to see him again

Semantle is pretty fun. For every word you guess it tells you how semantically similar it is to the secret word.

You get unlimited guesses, so there’s no shame in throwing words at the wall and seeing what sticks

Well shit. That hit deep.

Thank you.

Haven’t tried it personally, but this might work: https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox

Basically, instead of creating a fedora distrobox and installing davinci resolve in there, this is a pre built image that has all the dependencies and such ready to go.

Ooo and there’s even a serious looking page “explaining” it as the first result when looking it up on Google

I’m definitely stealing this idea

I love it

Funny enough, that’s a feature of GitHub copilot: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/github-copilot#_generate-git-commit-messages

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/write-your-git-commits-with-github-copilot/

I have no idea, but that would be pretty cool

The PDF multitool I’ve been using is Stirling-pdf, which has support for adding/removing passwords

Funny enough, I also learned about this tool from a previous edition of this newsletter haha

Gyoza/potstickers/dumplings

I will inhale plates of em and the time it takes to wrap em made me both appreciate the food more and appreciate the premade ones so much more

If it has to be Christmas

With such lines as

If it has to be Christmas for you to be nice

You’re an asshole

If you think the season is the reason

You’re a piece of shit

And calling people spineless if they can only make a change for the better if it’s New Year’s and hints that so much of the holiday just appearances